Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- William Shakespeare

Best Quotes about Life

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

Aristotle

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.

Rivarol, Antoine

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

Presser, Ross

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

Mansfield, Katherine

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

Sir Winston Churchill

In making a living today, many no longer leave room for life.

Sizoo, Joseph R.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

10.

Can't nothing make your life work if you ain't the architect.

McMillan, Terry

11.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

12.

Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.

Goldsmith, Oliver

13.

A life is like a tree -- if you don't make it straight when its young and green, you'll never do it when it's old and dry.

14.

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

15.

There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life

Kennedy, John F.

16.

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you.

Sara Zarr

17.

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

Boese, Paul

18.

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

Norris, Kathleen

19.

The City attaches an exaggerated importance to the healing power of lunch.

Fieldes, Christopher

20.

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Santayana, George

21.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Drives my green age that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer.

Thomas, Dylan

22.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Gauguin, Paul

23.

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

24.

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

25.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

26.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

27.

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

Miller, Henry

28.

Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.

Hubbard, Elbert

29.

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

Giles, Henry

30.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

Crisp, Quentin

31.

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

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.

To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.

Smith, Lillian

34.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.

Hemingway, Ernest

35.

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

Jordan, David Starr

36.

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

Augustine, St.

37.

All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

38.

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

39.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Delacroix, Eugene

40.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Epictetus

41.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

42.

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

43.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Baudrillard, Jean

44.

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.

Lorca, Federico Garcia

45.

Life is just a journey

Diana, Princess of Wales

46.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

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

Johnson, Samuel

48.

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

49.

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

Butler, Samuel

50.

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