Motivational Quotes

Life

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

- Seneca

Best Quotes about Life

Life is but a game and we are the playthings of the gods.

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

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

Michelangelo

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth.

Einstein, Albert

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

It's not how long life is but the quality of our life that is important.

Dawson, Roger

I can't be bitter. No one has a contract on life.

Heath, David M.

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

Jordan, David Starr

Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.

Horace

10.

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

Proverb

11.

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

William Shakespeare

12.

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

13.

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.

Leacock, Stephen B.

17.

Life is but a moment, death also is but another.

Schuller, Robert H.

18.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

Cabell, James Branch

19.

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do -- it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.

Lawrence, D. H.

20.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

Leary, Denis

24.

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

25.

Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.

Coallier, Steven

26.

Life is like playing the violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Butler, Samuel

27.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

28.

Well, take your time and don't live too fast. Troubles will come and they will pass. Find a woman and you'll find love. Don't forget, son, there is someone up above.

Skynard, Lynard

29.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

O'Neill, Eugene

30.

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I'm sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

Thoreau, Henry David

31.

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

32.

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Diane Ackerman

33.

I have an existential map; it has you are here written all over it.

Wright, Steven

34.

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

Billings, Josh

35.

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

Camus, Albert

36.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Baudrillard, Jean

37.

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

38.

Make your life a happy one. That is where success is possible to every man.

Powell, Robert

39.

Life is a dead-end street.

Mencken, H. L.

40.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat... the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

41.

Don't worry about your life; what you shall eat, or drink, or the clothing for your body. [Matthew 6:31]

Bible

42.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

43.

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

44.

There are nine requisites for contented living: HEALTH enough to make work a pleasure; WEALTH enough to support your needs; STRENGTH enough to battle with difficulties and forsake them; GRACE enough to confess your sins and overcome them; PATIENCE enough to toil until some good is accomplished; CHARITY enough to see some good in your neighbor; LOVE enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others; FAITH enough to make real the things of God; HOPE enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

The less routine the more life.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

46.

Reality is the crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

Tomlin, Lily

47.

Best to live lightly, unthinkingly.

Sophocles

48.

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Campbell, Joseph

49.

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

50.

So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. We may also have ideas about the great mystery which religions speak of, which gives our cocoon an especial sense of security: we can worship the great mystery outside of it and feel good about that. The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.

Hayward, Jeremy W.