Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

- Santayana, George

Best Quotes about Life

Life is supposed to get tough.

Grammer, Kelsey

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought.

Havel, Vaclav

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

Prochnow, Herbert

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

I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.

Douglas, Michael

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Percy, Walker

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Kant, Immanuel

10.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

11.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears -- as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

12.

Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal. [On Washington D. C.]

Dane, Frank

13.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

14.

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

15.

Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters.

Presser, Ross

16.

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

17.

Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.

Allen, Woody

18.

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

Proverb, Persian

19.

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

20.

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.

Pilgrim, Peace

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

24.

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

Caesar, Sid

25.

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

Kempis, Thomas

26.

It's better to be an authentic loser than a false success, and to die alive than to live dead.

Markiewicz, William

27.

In the game of life it's a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season.

Baughan, Bill

28.

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

29.

Life is a classroom in which each of us is being tested, tried, and passed.

Thibodeau, Robert

30.

All that man has will he give for his life.

Bible

31.

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.

Fields, W. C.

32.

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

Steve Jobs

33.

Life flows on within you and without you.

Harrison, George

34.

Life is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you're gonna get.

Movie, Forrest Gump

35.

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

Angelou, Maya

36.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Camus, Albert

37.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

Thornton Wilder

38.

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

Truman Capote

39.

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things

Rilke, Rainer Maria

41.

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

Allen, Fred A.

42.

Life is a dead-end street.

Mencken, H. L.

43.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Percy, Walker

44.

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

Dickens, Charles

45.

Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's finger.

Anderson, Hans Christian

46.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

47.

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