Motivational Quotes

Life

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

- Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

Best Quotes about Life

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Life is like a taxi. The meter just keeps a-ticking whether you are getting somewhere or just standing still.

Erickson, Lou

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

Hume, David

The good life is one inspired by life and guided by knowledge.

Russell, Bertrand

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Proverb, French

Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.

Nabokov, Vladimir

The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.

Miller, Henry

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.

Proverb, Italian

10.

Life is full of surprises and and serendipity. Being open to unexpected turns in the road is an important part of success. If you try to plan every step, you may miss those wonderful twists and turns. Just find your next adventure-do it well, enjoy it-and then, not now, think about what comes next.

Condoleeza Rice

11.

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

12.

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

13.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

Thornton Wilder

14.

Life is an earnest business, and no one every became good or great on a diet of broad grins.

Blackie, Professor

15.

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

16.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

Camus, Albert

17.

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

Connolly, Cyril

18.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

Whitman, Walt

20.

Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.

Stoppard, Tom

21.

Life is short, but it's long enough to ruin any man who wants to be ruined.

Billings, Josh

22.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

William Shakespeare

23.

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

Raban, Jonathan

24.

Life begins when you get out of the grandstand into the game.

Debevoise, P. L.

25.

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

William Goldman

26.

All that man has will he give for his life.

Bible

27.

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

28.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Rimbaud, Arthur

29.

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

Kant, Immanuel

30.

Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

31.

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

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

32.

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

Camus, Albert

33.

Live this day as if it will be your last. Remember that you will only find tomorrow on the calendars of fools. Forget yesterday's defeats and ignore the problems of tomorrow. This is it. Doomsday. All you have. Make it the best day of your year. The saddest words you can ever utter are, If I had my life to live over again. Take the baton, now. Run with it! This is your day! Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe, loved one or stranger, as if they were going to be dead at midnight. Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.

Mandino, Og

34.

Live, let live, and help live

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

Life is not so much a matter of position as of disposition

36.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Johnson, Samuel

37.

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

Erhard, Werner

38.

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic

Wilde, Oscar

39.

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

40.

To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.

Smith, Lillian

41.

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

42.

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

43.

The City attaches an exaggerated importance to the healing power of lunch.

Fieldes, Christopher

44.

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

45.

Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.

Berenson, Bernard

46.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

47.

Taken in any context, except seriously, life on earth is palatable and positively enjoyable.

48.

Man values life as a sacred jewel in such a way that he reveres him most who haughtily scorns it.

Platen

49.

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

50.

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