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

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.

Radner, Gilda

See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.

Pope John XXIII

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

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

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

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

Gauguin, Paul

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

James, William

10.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

Miller, Henry

11.

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

12.

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

Ransom, Ralph

13.

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

Forster, Edward M.

14.

Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

Dickens, Charles

15.

Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Byron, Lord

16.

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

17.

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

18.

To live lightheartedly but not recklessly; to be gay without being boisterous; to be courageous without being bold; to show trust and cheerful resignation without fatalism -- this is the art of living.

La Fontaine, Jean De

19.

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.

Leacock, Stephen B.

20.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

James, William

21.

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

Duncan, Isadora

22.

Life loves the liver of it.

Angelou, Maya

23.

Life is a dead-end street.

Mencken, H. L.

24.

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

Rubinstein, Arthur

25.

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

26.

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.

27.

Only those live who do good.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

28.

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

Raban, Jonathan

29.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

Boom, Corrie Ten

30.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

31.

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

32.

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.

Pilgrim, Peace

33.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

34.

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

Fran Lebowitz

35.

When I hear somebody sigh that Life is hard, I am always tempted to ask, Compared to what?

Harris, Sidney J.

36.

We come into this world head first and go out feet first; in between, it is all a matter of balance.

Boese, Paul

37.

Optimism and humor are the grease and glue of life. Without both of them we would never have survived our captivity.

Butler, Philip

38.

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

39.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things

Rilke, Rainer Maria

40.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Johnson, Samuel

41.

Life at the top is financially rewarding, spiritually draining, physically exhausting, and short.

Newman, Peter C.

42.

The average person living to age 70 has 613, 000 hours of life. This is too long a period not to have fun.

43.

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

44.

The city is recruited from the country.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.

Osler, Sir William

46.

The truest end of life, is to find the life that doesn't end.

47.

Life is like a taxi. The meter just keeps a-ticking whether you are getting somewhere or just standing still.

Erickson, Lou

48.

Life. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

Bierce, Ambrose

49.

A man's life is 20 years of having his mother ask him where he is going, 40 years of having his wife ask the same question and, at the end, perhaps having the mourners wondering too.

50.

People creep into childhood, bound into youth, sober in adulthood, and soften into old age.

Giles, Henry