Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.

- Walpole, Horace

Best Quotes about Life

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

Aristotle

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

Simon, Neil

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

Kornfield, Jack

Those who live are those who fight.

Hugo, Victor

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

Piatt, Don

What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city.

Coriolanus III

We don't beat the Grim Reaper by living longer, we beat the Reaper by living well and living fully, for the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what do we do between the time we are born and the time he shows up. It's too late to do all the things that you're gonna kinda get around to.

Randy Pausch

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

10.

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

Russell, Bertrand

11.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

12.

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

13.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

O'Neill, Eugene

14.

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

15.

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

Kempton, Murray

16.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears -- as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

17.

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

William Shakespeare

18.

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

19.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. [Psalms 90:10]

Bible

20.

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

Leary, Denis

21.

In matters of self-control as we shall see again and again, speed kills. But a little friction really can save lives.

Daniel Akst

22.

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

23.

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

Gauguin, Paul

24.

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

25.

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

Temple, Sir William

26.

I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.

Douglas, Michael

27.

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

Conrad, Joseph

28.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

29.

Life is not so much a matter of position as of disposition

30.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

Rimbaud, Arthur

31.

Life is a wilderness of twists and turns, where faith is your only compass.

Santaguida, Paul

32.

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

Larkin, Philip

33.

Life does not happen to us, it happens from us.

Wickett, Michael

34.

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

Michelangelo

35.

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

Huxtable, Ada Louise

36.

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.

Rogers, Carl

37.

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

Kant, Immanuel

38.

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

Nouwen, Henri

39.

Eternal truths will be neither true nor eternal unless they have fresh meaning for every new social situation.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

40.

Our life's journey of self-discovery is not a straight-line rise from one level of consciousness to another. Instead, it is a series of steep climbs and flat plateaus, then further climbs. Even though we all approach the journey from different directions, certain of the journey's characteristics are common to all of us.

Wilde, Stuart

41.

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Diane Ackerman

42.

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

43.

Taken in any context, except seriously, life on earth is palatable and positively enjoyable.

44.

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

Camus, Albert

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Ciardi, John

48.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

Lawrence, D. H.

49.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

50.

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