Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Wolfe, Thomas

Best Quotes about Life

In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.

Spengler, Oswald

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

Pasternak, Boris

Don't brood. Get on with living and loving. You don't have forever.

Rexford, Eben Eugene

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Percy, Walker

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Eliot, T. S.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard

Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Die, search for meaning, search for meaning, search for meaning.

Horton, Doug

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Woolf, Virginia

10.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

Bachelard, Gaston

11.

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.

12.

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Miller, Henry

13.

Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

14.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Bacon, Francis

15.

On life's journey faith is nourishment, virtuous deeds are a shelter, wisdom is the light by day and right mindfulness is the protection by night. If a man lives a pure life, nothing can destroy him.

Buddha

16.

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

Boese, Paul

17.

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

18.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

24.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Calvino, Italo

25.

Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

26.

Paris is the caf? of Europe.

Galiani, Ferdinando

27.

We Japanese enjoy the small pleasures, not extravagance. I believe a man should have a simple lifestyle -- even if he can afford more.

Ibuka, Massaru

28.

Be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at stars.

Dyke, Henry Van

29.

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

30.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

31.

Life is full and overflowing with the new. But it is necessary to empty out the old to make room for the new to enter.

Caddy, Eileen

32.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

33.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

34.

There is one thing that matters -- to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

35.

Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.

Orben, Robert

36.

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

Mansfield, Katherine

37.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

38.

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

39.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

40.

The life of man is a journey; a journey that must be traveled, however bad the roads or the accommodation.

Goldsmith, Oliver

41.

He who is not busy being born is busy dying.

Dylan, Bob

42.

Reality is the crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

Tomlin, Lily

43.

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

Norman Thomas

44.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

45.

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

46.

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

47.

There is no shortcut to life. To the end of our days, life is a lesson imperfectly learned.

Salisbury, Harrison

48.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Truman Capote

49.

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

50.

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