Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Life

Some people seem to go through life standing at the complaint counter.

Propp Jr., Fred

Life without meaning cannot be borne. We find a mission to which we're sworn

The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile.

Waitley, Denis

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

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

Connolly, Cyril

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

Poe, Edgar Allan

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

Nash, Ogden

Life -- how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

Pritchett, V. S.

Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

Steve Jobs

10.

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

Nouwen, Henri

11.

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts -- That hope always triumphs over experience -- That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Fulghum, Robert

12.

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

13.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

14.

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

15.

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

Welsh, John

16.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Santayana, George

17.

Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.

Berenson, Bernard

18.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

19.

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.

Miller, Henry

20.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu

21.

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness. but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow Up.

Morgan, Charles

22.

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

Conrad, Joseph

23.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

24.

The old Quaker was right: I expect to pass through life but once. If there is any kindness, or any good thing I can do to my fellow beings, let me do it now. I shall pass this way but once.

Gannett, W. C.

25.

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

Canetti, Elias

26.

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

Thibodeau, Robert

27.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

28.

Life is not a matter of place, things or comfort; rather, it concerns the basic human rights of family, country, justice and human dignity.

Marcos, Imelda

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, 'Come on in, the living's fine,' and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Baker, Russell (Wayne)

32.

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

Mumford, Lewis

33.

We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim -- objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

William Shakespeare

35.

Washington is a city of people doing badly what should not be done at all.

Gurney, Robert

36.

Paris is the caf? of Europe.

Galiani, Ferdinando

37.

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

38.

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Proverb, French

39.

The continuous invention of new ways of observing is man's special secret of living.

Young, J. Z.

40.

Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies.

Gusoff, Adrienne

41.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

Socrates

42.

Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness. It's in our hands.

Better, Cathy

43.

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.

Frankl, Viktor E.

44.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs...

Epicurus

45.

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

46.

He who is not busy being born is busy dying.

Dylan, Bob

47.

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

48.

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.

Fields, W. C.

49.

One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: Have no anxiety about the morrow; or the words of Sir William Osler; Live in day-tight compartments.

Carnegie, Dale

50.

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