Motivational Quotes

Life

The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.

- Russell, Bertrand

Best Quotes about Life

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Benjamin, Walter

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

Albert Ellis, Michael Abrams, Lidia Dengelegi

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.

Rogers, Carl

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form? If you don't seek, how are you different from earth, wood, or stone? You must seek without seeking.

Fo-Yan

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.

Kempis, Thomas

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Steve Jobs

10.

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

Kant, Immanuel

11.

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.

La Bruyere, Jean De

12.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

13.

Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.

Steinbeck, John

14.

Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

Steve Jobs

15.

Man's course begins in a garden, but it ends in a city.

Maclaren, Alexander

16.

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

17.

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

Dante Alighieri

18.

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

Mead, Margaret

19.

The major justification for a life is the happiness and reward it brings to other lives.

20.

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.

Frankl, Viktor E.

21.

Washington is a city of people doing badly what should not be done at all.

Gurney, Robert

22.

All things may be bought in Rome with money.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

23.

Life is a little gleam of time between two eternity s.

Carlyle, Thomas

24.

There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life

Kennedy, John F.

25.

The cloud-capp'd towers,the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare

26.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

27.

Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

Life flows on within you and without you.

Harrison, George

29.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I'm with you kid. Let's go.

Angelou, Maya

30.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs

31.

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

Pirandello, Luigi

32.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

33.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Stone, Robert

34.

If you're not in New York, you're camping out.

Dewey, Thomas E.

35.

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

Dorgan, Thomas A.

36.

There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.

Proverb, Persian

37.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

38.

All that man has will he give for his life.

Bible

39.

Life is but a game and we are the playthings of the gods.

40.

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Mumford, Lewis

41.

What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

Brodsky, Joseph

42.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Woolf, Virginia

43.

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

Erhard, Werner

44.

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Diane Ackerman

45.

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

Munger, Thornton T.

46.

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Whitehead, Alfred North

47.

Making a life comes before making a living.

48.

Living, just by itself -- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting --or he'll come along and nibble your brain.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

49.

Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Die, search for meaning, search for meaning, search for meaning.

Horton, Doug

50.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Isaac Asimov