Motivational Quotes

Life

When we speak the word life, it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

- Artaud, Antonin

Best Quotes about Life

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

Markham, Edwin

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

Life may not be beautiful, but it is interesting.

Seeley, Sir John Robert

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Steve Jobs

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Shaw, George Bernard

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

Woody Allen

Life is not one thing after another. It's the same damn thing over and over!

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

Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.

Stoppard, Tom

10.

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

Shields, Carol

11.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Camus, Albert

12.

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

13.

All things may be bought in Rome with money.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

14.

Life It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.

Shakespeare, William

15.

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

16.

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

17.

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

Canetti, Elias

18.

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

19.

Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.

Fran Lebowitz

20.

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

21.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

Pavese, Cesare

22.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Kennedy, John F.

23.

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

Nouwen, Henri

24.

The four stages of life are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

Linkletter, Art

25.

Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.

Buscaglia, Leo

26.

The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

27.

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

28.

Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather, He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop.

Polgar, Alfred

29.

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

Santayana, George

30.

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.

Frankl, Viktor E.

31.

If I had been present at creation, I would have given some useful hints.

Wise, Alfonso The

32.

Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Byron, Lord

33.

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

34.

The truest end of life, is to find the life that doesn't end.

35.

Not by gain our life is measured, But by what we've lost 'Tis scored; 'Tis not how much wine is drunken But how much has been outpoured. For the strength of love never standeth In the sacrifice we bear; He who has the greatest suffering Ever has the most to share.

Nee, Watchman

36.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

37.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

Huxley, Aldous

38.

Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.

Carpentier, Georges

39.

It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts!

Stevenson, Adlai E.

40.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

William Shakespeare

41.

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do -- it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.

Lawrence, D. H.

42.

Life's but a day at most.

Burns, George

43.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Epictetus

44.

We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.

Pascal, Blaise

45.

You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Percy, Walker

46.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

Lawrence, D. H.

47.

Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly, and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.

Disraeli, Benjamin

48.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

49.

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is trivial; for all life is a dream and all dreams are dreams.

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro

50.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Gauguin, Paul