Motivational Quotes

Life

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

- Smith, Logan Pearsall

Best Quotes about Life

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

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

Tomlin, Lily

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

Dawson, Roger

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

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

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

Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather, He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop.

Polgar, Alfred

The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open.

William Shakespeare

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

10.

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

11.

There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life

Kennedy, John F.

12.

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

13.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

Bachelard, Gaston

14.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Kant, Immanuel

15.

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

Billings, Josh

16.

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

17.

Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.

Nabokov, Vladimir

18.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

19.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others

Keller, Helen

20.

One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

Wolfe, Thomas

21.

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

22.

The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority.

Calhoun, John C.

23.

Some people seem to go through life standing at the complaint counter.

Propp Jr., Fred

24.

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.

Dick Werthimer

25.

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

26.

Life is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you're gonna get.

Movie, Forrest Gump

27.

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

James, William

28.

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

Edna St. Vincent Millay

29.

All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

30.

It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.

Ruskin, John

31.

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

Franklin, Benjamin

32.

Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

33.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, 'Come on in, the living's fine,' and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Baker, Russell (Wayne)

34.

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

35.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

36.

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

37.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

38.

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.

Miller, Henry

39.

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

Ben Stein

40.

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

Horace

41.

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

42.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

43.

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

44.

The only reason they come to see me is that I know that life is great -- and they know I know it.

Gable, Clark

45.

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.

46.

The world has so many lessons to teach you. I consider the world, our earth, to be like a school, and our life, the classrooms. Sometimes on our planet life school, the lessons often come dressed up as detours and road blocks and sometimes as full blown crises. And the secret I've learned to getting ahead is being open to the lessons.

Oprah Winfrey

47.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

48.

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.

Kempis, Thomas

49.

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.

Fields, W. C.

50.

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