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

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

Giles, Henry

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Wolfe, Thomas

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

Camus, Albert

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.

Hepburn, Katharine

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)

So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. We may also have ideas about the great mystery which religions speak of, which gives our cocoon an especial sense of security: we can worship the great mystery outside of it and feel good about that. The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.

Hayward, Jeremy W.

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

Sizoo, Joseph R.

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

Herold, Don

To a wise man every day is a new life.

10.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

11.

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

12.

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

Zeno

13.

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

14.

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

Austen, Jane

15.

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

16.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

Nothing is beneath you if it is in the direction of your life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

Proverb

19.

Life is a horizontal fall.

Cocteau, Jean

20.

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.

Markham, Edwin

21.

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

22.

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

Conrad, Joseph

23.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Camus, Albert

24.

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

Ellis, Havelock

25.

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

26.

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

Propp Jr., Fred

27.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

Santayana, George

28.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

29.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

30.

All things may be bought in Rome with money.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

31.

Live for those who love me, For those who know me true, For the Heaven that smiles above me, And awaits my coming too; For the cause that lacks resistance, For the future and the distance, And the good that I can do.

32.

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

33.

And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour,we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.

William Shakespeare

34.

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

Oprah Winfrey

35.

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

Seneca

36.

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

Presser, Ross

37.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

Norman Thomas

38.

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

39.

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

Kornfield, Jack

40.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard

41.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

42.

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

Munger, Thornton T.

43.

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Lehrer, Tom

44.

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

Mead, Margaret

45.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

46.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

Kundera, Milan

47.

Life is a wilderness of twists and turns, where faith is your only compass.

Santaguida, Paul

48.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

49.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

50.

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late