Motivational Quotes

Life

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

- Santayana, George

Best Quotes about Life

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city.

Coriolanus III

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Dane, Frank

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is trivial; for all life is a dream and all dreams are dreams.

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro

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

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

Russell, Bertrand

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

10.

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

11.

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

Camus, Albert

12.

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

Horton, Doug

13.

Life is a rollercoaster. Try to eat a light lunch.

Schmaltz, David A.

14.

Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.

Augustine, St.

15.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

Kundera, Milan

16.

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

Fuller, Thomas

17.

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

Huxtable, Ada Louise

18.

Making a life comes before making a living.

19.

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.

20.

Today's city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

Oppenheimer, Martin

21.

We don't beat the Grim Reaper by living longer, we beat the Reaper by living well and living fully, for the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what do we do between the time we are born and the time he shows up. It's too late to do all the things that you're gonna kinda get around to.

Randy Pausch

22.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

23.

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

24.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

Horace

25.

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

26.

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

Ciardi, John

27.

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

Edna St. Vincent Millay

28.

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

Gurney, Robert

29.

Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.

Lennon, John

30.

The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.

Ben Stein

31.

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.

Rivarol, Antoine

32.

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

Billings, Josh

33.

Were it offered to my choice, I should have no objection to a repetition of the same life from its beginning, only asking the advantages authors have in a second edition to correct some faults in the first.

Franklin, Benjamin

34.

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

Menander of Athens

35.

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

Nash, Ogden

36.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

37.

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Ackerman, Diane

38.

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Wolfe, Thomas

39.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

Kafka, Franz

40.

Life is a state of mind.

Warden, Jack

41.

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

Duncan, Isadora

42.

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

43.

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

Rogers, Carl

44.

Life is like wine, the longer you take to enjoy it the more chance you've got of tasting vinegar.

45.

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

Platen

46.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Frankl, Viktor E.

47.

Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.

Orben, Robert

48.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

James, William

49.

Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness. It's in our hands.

Better, Cathy

50.

Life in the Fast Lane Playing in Traffic intense stressful challenging overwhelming fulfilling demanding exciting nerve-wrecking entrepreneurial unrelenting empowered exposed: no place to hide flexible confusing results compensation sweatshop team ascendancy ego suppression flat organizations who's my boss no titles no status customer focus self-abnegation decentralized decision making chaos the end of tenure the end of security no complacency fear ongoing change burnout