Motivational Quotes

Life

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.

- Stevenson, Robert Louis

Best Quotes about Life

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Steve Jobs

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Byron, Lord

Life at the top is financially rewarding, spiritually draining, physically exhausting, and short.

Newman, Peter C.

Life is a campaign not a battle, and has its defeats as well as its victories.

Piatt, Don

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

10.

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

William Goldman

11.

The lessons this life has planted in my heart pertain more to caring than crops, more to Golden Rule than gold, more to the proper choice than to the popular choice.

Kirby Larson

12.

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

13.

Life loves the liver of it.

Angelou, Maya

14.

Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.

Augustine, St.

15.

What life means to us is determined, not so much by what life brings to us as by the attitude we bring to life; not so much by what happens to us as by our reaction to what happens.

Dunnington, Lewis L

16.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

17.

Life is an uphill business for the guy who's not on the level.

Welsh, John

18.

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic

Wilde, Oscar

19.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Conrad, Joseph

20.

Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

Dickens, Charles

21.

I believe that life is a journey, often difficult and sometimes incredibly cruel, but we are well equipped for it if only we tap into our talents and gifts and allow them to blossom.

Brown, Les

22.

Look to the future, because that is where you'll spend the rest of your life.

Burns, George

23.

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

24.

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

Seneca

25.

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.

Frankl, Viktor E.

26.

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.

27.

Life flows on within you and without you.

Harrison, George

28.

Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.

Plato

29.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Henry David

30.

In the early days of the Indian Territory, there were no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough.

Rogers, Will

31.

Life may not be beautiful, but it is interesting.

Seeley, Sir John Robert

32.

People need to be made more aware of the need to work at learning how to live because life is so quick and sometimes it goes away too quickly

Warhol, Andy

33.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

34.

In real life, however, you don't react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?

Jonathan Haidt

35.

May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live.

Hanks, Tom

36.

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.

Southey, Robert

37.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

38.

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

May, Rollo

39.

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

Dante Alighieri

40.

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

Seneca

41.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.

Cioran, E. M.

42.

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

43.

My kids idea of a hard life is to live in a house with only one phone.

Foreman, George

44.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

Mccarthy, Mary

45.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace. A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being that places harmony in one's life.

Pilgrim, Peace

47.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

48.

I think we're here for each other.

Burnett, Carol

49.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

50.

Not by gain our life is measured, But by what we've lost 'Tis scored; 'Tis not how much wine is drunken But how much has been outpoured. For the strength of love never standeth In the sacrifice we bear; He who has the greatest suffering Ever has the most to share.

Nee, Watchman