Motivational Quotes

Life

You're alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act.

- Barbara Hall

Best Quotes about Life

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Frankl, Viktor E.

This also -- that I live, I consider a gift of God.

Ovid

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

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

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

Stoppard, Tom

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Eliot, T. S.

Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.

Horace

The city is recruited from the country.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Schweitzer, Albert

10.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs, Jane

11.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

12.

We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim -- objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you're told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.

Hoggart, Simon

14.

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

Prochnow, Herbert

15.

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

Sizoo, Joseph R.

16.

My kids idea of a hard life is to live in a house with only one phone.

Foreman, George

17.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

Herzen, Alexander

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Santaguida, Paul

21.

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

Disraeli, Benjamin

22.

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

23.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

25.

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.

Lorca, Federico Garcia

26.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

27.

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.

28.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

29.

People should always have something which they prefer to life.

Seume, Johann G.

30.

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

31.

The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.

Russell, Bertrand

32.

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

Pritchett, V. S.

33.

Don't worry about your life; what you shall eat, or drink, or the clothing for your body. [Matthew 6:31]

Bible

34.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

35.

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

36.

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

Ruskin, John

37.

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

Brecht, Bertolt

38.

Life is just a bowl of pits.

Rodney Dangerfield

39.

It's better to be an authentic loser than a false success, and to die alive than to live dead.

Markiewicz, William

40.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I'm with you kid. Let's go.

Angelou, Maya

41.

There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.

Proverb, Persian

42.

Give a man a dollar and you cheer his heart. Give him a dream and you challenge his heart. Give him Christ and you change his heart. Then the dollar and the dream become meaningful to him, and to others.

Strait, C. Neil

43.

The life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

Barrie, Sir James M.

44.

The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

45.

We dribble away our life, little by little, in small packages -- we don't throw it away all at once.

Cook, Robert A.

46.

Life is just a mirror, and what you see out there, you must first see inside of you.