Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

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

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

Optimism and humor are the grease and glue of life. Without both of them we would never have survived our captivity.

Butler, Philip

Life isn't simple. But the beauty of it is, you can always start over. It'll get easier.

Alacia Bessette

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

Kornfield, Jack

Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness. It's in our hands.

Better, Cathy

Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's finger.

Anderson, Hans Christian

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

10.

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Proverb, French

11.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

12.

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Forster, Edward M.

13.

Life is a classroom in which each of us is being tested, tried, and passed.

Thibodeau, Robert

14.

In the early days of the Indian Territory, there were no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough.

Rogers, Will

15.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

Mead, Margaret

16.

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

17.

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

Zeno

18.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Camus, Albert

19.

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Saroyan, William

20.

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.

Daniel Akst

22.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Isaac Asimov

23.

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure its worth watching.

24.

Life is difficult and complicated and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

J.K. Rowling

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more.

Robbins, Anthony

27.

The mountains, rivers, earth, grasses, trees, and forests are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth.

Yuan-Sou

28.

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.

Miller, Henry

29.

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

Mankiewicz, Joseph L.

30.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. [Psalms 90:10]

Bible

31.

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.

Landers, Ann

32.

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

33.

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

Albert Ellis, Michael Abrams, Lidia Dengelegi

34.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

35.

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

Seneca

36.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Kant, Immanuel

37.

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us.

Holdcroft, Thomas L.

38.

Young people talk of what they are doing; old people of what they have done; and fools of what they have a mind to do.

Proverb

39.

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

40.

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said,so. What did you think?

Wright, Steven

41.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Temple, Sir William

42.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Eliot, T. S.

43.

New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.

Carson, Johnny

44.

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

45.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

Peter De Vries

46.

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

Havel, Vaclav

47.

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

48.

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Mumford, Lewis

49.

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

Delacroix, Eugene

50.

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

May, Rollo