Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

Dryden, John

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

Shields, Carol

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.

Osler, Sir William

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Delacroix, Eugene

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

10.

Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.

Allen, Fred A.

11.

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.

Proverb, Italian

12.

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

13.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

Thornton Wilder

14.

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

15.

We don't beat the Grim Reaper by living longer, we beat the Reaper by living well and living fully, for the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what do we do between the time we are born and the time he shows up. It's too late to do all the things that you're gonna kinda get around to.

Randy Pausch

16.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

17.

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

18.

You can have peace of mind, improved health and an ever-increasing flow of energy. Life can be full of joy and satisfaction.

Peale, Norman Vincent

19.

Life flows on within you and without you.

Harrison, George

20.

The less routine the more life.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

21.

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

22.

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

Sizoo, Joseph R.

23.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

24.

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

25.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

26.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

27.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

28.

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living that are desired when dying.

29.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

30.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra

31.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

32.

The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.

Edison, Thomas A.

33.

It's not how long life is but the quality of our life that is important.

Dawson, Roger

34.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

35.

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

Austen, Jane

36.

Life -- how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

Pritchett, V. S.

37.

Taken in any context, except seriously, life on earth is palatable and positively enjoyable.

38.

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.

Dimnet, Ernest

39.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought.

Havel, Vaclav

40.

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

41.

Life is like wine, the longer you take to enjoy it the more chance you've got of tasting vinegar.

42.

Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. [About Paris]

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

43.

Life. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

Bierce, Ambrose

44.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

45.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat... the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

46.

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Proverb, French

47.

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

48.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

49.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

Seneca

50.

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

Crowley, Aleister