Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Byron, Lord

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Wolfe, Thomas

The less routine the more life.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Isaac Asimov

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

Angelou, Maya

The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard

When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.

Daniel Akst

10.

Life is like playing the violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Butler, Samuel

11.

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

Canetti, Elias

12.

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.

Dimnet, Ernest

13.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Epictetus

14.

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

Ciardi, John

15.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

16.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Hemingway, Ernest

17.

Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.

Coallier, Steven

18.

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

19.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

20.

The cloud-capp'd towers,the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare

21.

Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

22.

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living that are desired when dying.

23.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Brodsky, Joseph

24.

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end

25.

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

Mead, Margaret

26.

Life is like eating artichokes, you have got to go through so much to get so little.

Dorgan, Thomas A.

27.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

John Lennon

28.

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

29.

Live for those who love me, For those who know me true, For the Heaven that smiles above me, And awaits my coming too; For the cause that lacks resistance, For the future and the distance, And the good that I can do.

30.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

O'Neill, Eugene

31.

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

Mark Hodder

32.

The best things in life are never rationed. Friendship, loyalty, and love. They do not require coupons.

Hewitt, George T.

33.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

Norman Thomas

34.

Life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting -- an unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified.

Redfield, James

35.

Young people talk of what they are doing; old people of what they have done; and fools of what they have a mind to do.

Proverb

36.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

Herzen, Alexander

37.

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

38.

To live is not breathing it is action.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

39.

All that man has will he give for his life.

Bible

40.

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

Wise, Alfonso The

41.

Nature has invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward. As a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life.

Louis Schwartzberg

42.

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

Simon, Neil

43.

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

44.

Life is like riding a bicycle. You don't fall off unless you stop peddling.

Pepper, Claude D.

45.

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

Russell, Lady R.

46.

Life flows on within you and without you.

Harrison, George

47.

When we speak the word life, it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

Artaud, Antonin

48.

People should always have something which they prefer to life.

Seume, Johann G.

49.

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

50.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Benjamin, Walter