Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

Baudrillard, Jean

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

Russell, Bertrand

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.

In the morning of life, work; in the mid day give council; in the evening, pray.

Proverb, German

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

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

Nobody's journey is seamless or smooth. We all stumble. We all have setbacks. It's just life's way of saying, "Time to change course."

Oprah Winfrey

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

Hoagland, Edward

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Mille, Agnes De

10.

Even when I'm sick and depressed, I love life.

Rubinstein, Arthur

11.

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

Horace

12.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs, Jane

13.

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

Seneca

14.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

15.

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

16.

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.

Nash, Ogden

17.

Give a man a dollar and you cheer his heart. Give him a dream and you challenge his heart. Give him Christ and you change his heart. Then the dollar and the dream become meaningful to him, and to others.

Strait, C. Neil

18.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Calvino, Italo

19.

Life is at its best when it's shaken and stirred.

Facult, F. Paul

20.

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

Foreman, George

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Edna St. Vincent Millay

24.

Life is a series of little deaths out of which life always returns.

Feidelson, Charles

25.

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

Albert Ellis, Michael Abrams, Lidia Dengelegi

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

Peter De Vries

30.

Live virtuously, and you cannot not die too soon, or live too long.

Russell, Lady R.

31.

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

Forster, Edward M.

32.

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.

La Bruyere, Jean De

33.

Life is a state of mind.

Warden, Jack

34.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

35.

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

36.

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

Ciardi, John

37.

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

38.

Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don't try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.

Robbins, Anthony

39.

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

40.

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

William Shakespeare

41.

The art of living lies not in eliminating but in growing with troubles.

Baruch, Bernard M.

42.

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

43.

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

Canetti, Elias

44.

Life is a classroom in which each of us is being tested, tried, and passed.

Thibodeau, Robert

45.

Three keys to more abundant living: caring about others, daring for others, sharing with others.

Ward, William A.

46.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I'm with you kid. Let's go.

Angelou, Maya

47.

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

Kant, Immanuel

48.

Life is just a journey

Diana, Princess of Wales

49.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

Baudelaire, Charles

50.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry