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 fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Life may not be beautiful, but it is interesting.

Seeley, Sir John Robert

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

Frankl, Viktor E.

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

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

It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

Woolf, Virginia

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

10.

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

Hanks, Tom

11.

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

Augustine, St.

12.

People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.

Duncan, Isadora

13.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Frankl, Viktor E.

14.

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

Mankiewicz, Joseph L.

15.

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.

Sir Winston Churchill

16.

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

17.

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

Lennon, John

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Life is supposed to get tough.

Grammer, Kelsey

21.

Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.

Fran Lebowitz

22.

Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters.

Presser, Ross

23.

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

24.

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

25.

You're alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act.

Barbara Hall

26.

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

Forster, Edward M.

27.

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

Dante Alighieri

28.

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.

Dick Werthimer

29.

You have to do what you love to do, not get stuck in that comfort zone of a regular job. Life is not a dress rehearsal. This is it.

Basset, Lucinda

30.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

31.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.

Mead, Margaret

32.

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

33.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

Mead, Margaret

34.

Make your life a happy one. That is where success is possible to every man.

Powell, Robert

35.

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

36.

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

Mark Hodder

37.

If you believed more in life you would fling yourself less to the moment.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

38.

Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.

Forster, Edward M.

39.

The life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

Barrie, Sir James M.

40.

Take life as you find it, but don't leave it that way

41.

Well, take your time and don't live too fast. Troubles will come and they will pass. Find a woman and you'll find love. Don't forget, son, there is someone up above.

Skynard, Lynard

42.

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

43.

There are nine requisites for contented living: HEALTH enough to make work a pleasure; WEALTH enough to support your needs; STRENGTH enough to battle with difficulties and forsake them; GRACE enough to confess your sins and overcome them; PATIENCE enough to toil until some good is accomplished; CHARITY enough to see some good in your neighbor; LOVE enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others; FAITH enough to make real the things of God; HOPE enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

Hayakawa, S. I.

45.

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

46.

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

Temple, Sir William

47.

We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.