Motivational Quotes

Life

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

- Ruskin, John

Best Quotes about Life

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Mumford, Lewis

The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open.

William Shakespeare

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.

Nash, Ogden

Threescore years and ten is enough; if a man can't suffer all the misery he wants in that time, he must be numb.

Billings, Josh

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.

Wilde, Oscar

What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

Henry, O.

Life is an uphill business for the guy who's not on the level.

Welsh, John

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

10.

One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: Have no anxiety about the morrow; or the words of Sir William Osler; Live in day-tight compartments.

Carnegie, Dale

11.

Make your life a happy one. That is where success is possible to every man.

Powell, Robert

12.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Henry David

13.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Kant, Immanuel

14.

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

Mills, C. Wright

15.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Truman Capote

16.

To live is to go on a journey; to die is to come back home.

17.

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

Allen, Fred A.

18.

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

Disraeli, Benjamin

19.

Life is just a bowl of pits.

Rodney Dangerfield

20.

Well, take your time and don't live too fast. Troubles will come and they will pass. Find a woman and you'll find love. Don't forget, son, there is someone up above.

Skynard, Lynard

21.

Best to live lightly, unthinkingly.

Sophocles

22.

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

Nisami

23.

When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.

Daniel Akst

24.

Young people talk of what they are doing; old people of what they have done; and fools of what they have a mind to do.

Proverb

25.

If our life is unhappy it is painful to bear; if it is happy it is horrible to lose, So the one is pretty equal to the other.

La Bruyere, Jean De

26.

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

Crowley, Aleister

27.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

Benjamin, Walter

28.

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

Connolly, Cyril

29.

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

30.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu

31.

Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.

Forster, Edward M.

32.

This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.

Erhard, Werner

33.

Life is like eating artichokes, you have got to go through so much to get so little.

Dorgan, Thomas A.

34.

Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

J.K. Rowling

35.

All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

36.

Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.

Goldsmith, Oliver

37.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs, Jane

38.

There are three stages in a person's life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.

La Bruyere, Jean De

39.

I am sure care's an enemy to life.

William Shakespeare

40.

The life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

Barrie, Sir James M.

41.

The tragedy of life is not that a man loses, but that he almost wins.

Broun, Heywood

42.

All things may be bought in Rome with money.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

43.

The art of living lies not in eliminating but in growing with troubles.

Baruch, Bernard M.

44.

Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies.

Gusoff, Adrienne

45.

Life is a glass given to us to fill; a busy life is filling it with as much as it can hold; a hurried life has had more poured into it than it can contain.

Brown, William Adams

46.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Mille, Agnes De

47.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

Woody Allen

48.

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination

Isherwood, Christopher

49.

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

Mumford, Lewis

50.

Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.

Proverb, Indian