Motivational Quotes

Life

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

- Shakespeare, William

Best Quotes about Life

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Forster, Edward M.

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

Horace

Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. [About Paris]

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it -- an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

Conrad, Peter

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.

Lorca, Federico Garcia

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

A life is like a tree -- if you don't make it straight when its young and green, you'll never do it when it's old and dry.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Camus, Albert

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Santayana, George

10.

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

11.

I used to trouble about what life was for -- now being alive seems sufficient reason.

Field, Joanna

12.

There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

13.

Life marches by, I suggest you get on with it.

Baluch, Joy

14.

You can have peace of mind, improved health and an ever-increasing flow of energy. Life can be full of joy and satisfaction.

Peale, Norman Vincent

15.

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

16.

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

Oppenheimer, Martin

17.

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

18.

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

Mark Hodder

19.

Life may not be beautiful, but it is interesting.

Seeley, Sir John Robert

20.

In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you're told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.

Hoggart, Simon

21.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

22.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Baudrillard, Jean

23.

If I had been present at creation, I would have given some useful hints.

Wise, Alfonso The

24.

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

Ruskin, John

25.

This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Wordsworth, William

26.

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

27.

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

28.

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

Crowley, Aleister

29.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

Pavese, Cesare

30.

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

31.

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

32.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

33.

Life is not one thing after another. It's the same damn thing over and over!

34.

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

Temple, Sir William

35.

Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel.

Mansfield, Katherine

36.

See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.

Pope John XXIII

37.

Threescore years and ten is enough; if a man can't suffer all the misery he wants in that time, he must be numb.

Billings, Josh

38.

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

May, Rollo

39.

And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour,we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.

William Shakespeare

40.

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

41.

New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it.

Simon, Neil

42.

Living Life Tomorrow's fate, though thou be wise, Thou canst not tell nor yet surmise; Pass, therefore, not today in vain, For it will never come again.

Khayyam, Omar

43.

I am sure care's an enemy to life.

William Shakespeare

44.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Drives my green age that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer.

Thomas, Dylan

45.

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

46.

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

Pirandello, Luigi

47.

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

48.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs

49.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Gauguin, Paul

50.

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