Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

Live, let live, and help live

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

To live is to go on a journey; to die is to come back home.

A man's life is 20 years of having his mother ask him where he is going, 40 years of having his wife ask the same question and, at the end, perhaps having the mourners wondering too.

It is very certain that the desire of life prolongs it.

Byron, Lord

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears.

Seattle, Chief

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

Kennedy, John F.

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

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

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

Franklin, Benjamin

10.

My life is a battle.

Voltaire

11.

Life is but a moment, death also is but another.

Schuller, Robert H.

12.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Steve Jobs

13.

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

Propp Jr., Fred

14.

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

15.

This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.

Erhard, Werner

16.

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

17.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

John Lennon

18.

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

19.

Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.

Whittier, John Greenleaf

20.

The less routine the more life.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

21.

What life means to us is determined, not so much by what life brings to us as by the attitude we bring to life; not so much by what happens to us as by our reaction to what happens.

Dunnington, Lewis L

22.

Living the truth in your heart without compromise brings kindness into the world. Attempts at kindness that compromise your heart cause only sadness.

23.

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers, of families: read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life: re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

Whitman, Walt

24.

Life does not happen to us, it happens from us.

Wickett, Michael

25.

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

Norman Thomas

26.

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

27.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

28.

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

William Goldman

29.

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

Nouwen, Henri

30.

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

31.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

Reed, Lou

32.

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

William Shakespeare

33.

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

Austen, Jane

34.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

Rimbaud, Arthur

35.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

Whitman, Walt

36.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

37.

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

38.

Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.

Coallier, Steven

39.

There are three stages in a person's life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.

La Bruyere, Jean De

40.

Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.

Steinbeck, John

41.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

Stark, Freya

42.

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

Kempton, Murray

43.

The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile.

Waitley, Denis

44.

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

Brecht, Bertolt

45.

Live as you would have wished to live when you come to die.