Motivational Quotes

Life

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

- Seneca

Best Quotes about Life

My art and profession is to live.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

Ellis, Havelock

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

Miller, Henry

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Mumford, Lewis

Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.

Whittier, John Greenleaf

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

Anderson, Hans Christian

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

10.

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.

11.

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

Duncan, Isadora

12.

Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.

Allen, Woody

13.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra

14.

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

15.

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

Schuller, Robert H.

16.

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

Dorgan, Thomas A.

17.

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Mumford, Lewis

18.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

Reed, Lou

19.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.

Russell, Bertrand

21.

Man's course begins in a garden, but it ends in a city.

Maclaren, Alexander

22.

Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.

Goldsmith, Oliver

23.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

Shaw, George Bernard

24.

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

Santayana, George

25.

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.

Aurelius, Marcus

26.

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

27.

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.

Dimnet, Ernest

29.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

30.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

31.

Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.

Osler, Sir William

32.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Thoreau, Henry David

33.

To live lightheartedly but not recklessly; to be gay without being boisterous; to be courageous without being bold; to show trust and cheerful resignation without fatalism -- this is the art of living.

La Fontaine, Jean De

34.

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

Russell, Bertrand

35.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

Benjamin, Walter

36.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

37.

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

Robbins, Anthony

38.

There is one thing that matters -- to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

39.

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.

40.

This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.

Buddha

41.

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.

Huxley, Aldous

42.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

43.

To a wise man every day is a new life.

44.

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

Kornfield, Jack

45.

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

46.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Temple, Sir William

47.

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

48.

Life is fickle; the fair man doesn't invariably win.

Mark Hodder

49.

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

Michelangelo

50.

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness. but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow Up.

Morgan, Charles