Motivational Quotes

Life

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you.

- Sara Zarr

Best Quotes about Life

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Morley, Christopher

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

Santayana, George

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Schweitzer, Albert

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

Camus, Albert

Even when I'm sick and depressed, I love life.

Rubinstein, Arthur

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure its worth watching.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

Pasternak, Boris

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

Kornfield, Jack

Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.

Hubbard, Elbert

10.

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

11.

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

Menander of Athens

12.

We Japanese enjoy the small pleasures, not extravagance. I believe a man should have a simple lifestyle -- even if he can afford more.

Ibuka, Massaru

13.

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers, of families: read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life: re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

Whitman, Walt

14.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

15.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

16.

First I was dying to finish high-school and start college. Then I was dying to finish college and start working. Next, I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school, so I could return to work. Finally, I was dying to retire. And now, I am dying

17.

He who allows his day to pass by without practicing generosity and enjoying life's pleasures is like a blacksmith's bellows. He breathes, but does not live.

Proverb

18.

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears.

Seattle, Chief

19.

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

Allen, Fred A.

20.

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

21.

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

Curie, Madame Marie

22.

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

Edna St. Vincent Millay

23.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

Miller, Henry

24.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Eliot, T. S.

25.

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

26.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

27.

In the morning of life, work; in the mid day give council; in the evening, pray.

Proverb, German

28.

Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies.

Gusoff, Adrienne

29.

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Proverb, French

30.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

31.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

James, William

32.

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

33.

There is only one way to get ready for immortality, and that is to love this life and live it as bravely and faithfully and cheerfully as we can.

Dyke, Henry Van

34.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Gauguin, Paul

35.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu

36.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

37.

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.

Radner, Gilda

38.

Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more.

Robbins, Anthony

39.

The four stages of life are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

Linkletter, Art

40.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

Peter De Vries

41.

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

42.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

43.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

Stark, Freya

44.

Young people talk of what they are doing; old people of what they have done; and fools of what they have a mind to do.

Proverb

45.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

46.

Those who live are those who fight.

Hugo, Victor

47.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

48.

The life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

Barrie, Sir James M.

49.

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

50.

Either these [unsaved] people are to be evangelized, or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break you in a reign of terror such as this country has never known.

Moody, Dwight L.