Motivational Quotes

Life

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

- Wittgenstein, Ludwig

Best Quotes about Life

What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city.

Coriolanus III

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

Life is a little gleam of time between two eternity s.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Baudrillard, Jean

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

Sizoo, Joseph R.

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

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

Prochnow, Herbert

10.

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

Mills, C. Wright

11.

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

12.

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

Nisami

13.

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

14.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

All that man has will he give for his life.

Bible

16.

In real life, however, you don't react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?

Jonathan Haidt

17.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

Robert Heinlein

18.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

O'Neill, Eugene

19.

Life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward, you have to give back.

Oprah Winfrey

20.

Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.

Plato

21.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Stone, Robert

22.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

23.

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.

Dick Werthimer

24.

Eternal truths will be neither true nor eternal unless they have fresh meaning for every new social situation.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

25.

It is not how many years we live, but rather what we do with them.

Booth, Evangeline Cory

26.

Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

27.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Mille, Agnes De

28.

Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Byron, Lord

29.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

30.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

31.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

32.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

33.

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

34.

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

Seneca

35.

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

Temple, Sir William

36.

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

Gusoff, Adrienne

37.

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

Menander of Athens

38.

One recipe for a longer life; Never exceed the speed limit.

39.

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

40.

The mountains, rivers, earth, grasses, trees, and forests are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth.

Yuan-Sou

41.

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

42.

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

Butler, Philip

43.

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

William Shakespeare

44.

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

Santayana, George

45.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can decide how you're going to live now.

Baez, Joan

46.

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

Fields, W. C.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

50.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus