Motivational Quotes

Life

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

- Santayana, George

Best Quotes about Life

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

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

Boulanger, Nadia

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

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

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.

Clark, Frank A.

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

William Shakespeare

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

Rimbaud, Arthur

We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.

Fuller, Thomas

10.

Look to the future, because that is where you'll spend the rest of your life.

Burns, George

11.

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

Johnson, Samuel

12.

Life itself is the proper binge.

Child, Julia

13.

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

Broun, Heywood

14.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Camus, Albert

15.

The truest end of life, is to find the life that doesn't end.

16.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Camus, Albert

17.

Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather, He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop.

Polgar, Alfred

18.

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.

Landers, Ann

19.

In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed.

Caesar, Sid

20.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Tremain, Rose

21.

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

22.

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

Camus, Albert

23.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

24.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard

26.

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

Camus, Albert

27.

People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.

Duncan, Isadora

28.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Delacroix, Eugene

29.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

Aristotle

30.

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it -- an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

Conrad, Peter

31.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

32.

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

Jordan, David Starr

33.

Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.

Sheen, Fulton John

34.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

35.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Curie, Madame Marie

36.

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

Dorgan, Thomas A.

37.

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

38.

People creep into childhood, bound into youth, sober in adulthood, and soften into old age.

Giles, Henry

39.

Take life as you find it, but don't leave it that way

40.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.

Twain, Mark

41.

I used to trouble about what life was for -- now being alive seems sufficient reason.

Field, Joanna

42.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

43.

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

44.

Nature has invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward. As a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life.

Louis Schwartzberg

45.

In the early days of the Indian Territory, there were no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough.

Rogers, Will

46.

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

47.

To live is not breathing it is action.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

48.

People should always have something which they prefer to life.

Seume, Johann G.

49.

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

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