Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is short, but it's long enough to ruin any man who wants to be ruined.

- Billings, Josh

Best Quotes about Life

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.

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

In the game of life it's a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season.

Baughan, Bill

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

Baudrillard, Jean

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

Franklin, Benjamin

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.

Frankl, Viktor E.

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

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 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

10.

The major justification for a life is the happiness and reward it brings to other lives.

11.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

Camus, Albert

12.

Live for those who love me, For those who know me true, For the Heaven that smiles above me, And awaits my coming too; For the cause that lacks resistance, For the future and the distance, And the good that I can do.

13.

Life is a glass given to us to fill; a busy life is filling it with as much as it can hold; a hurried life has had more poured into it than it can contain.

Brown, William Adams

14.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs...

Epicurus

15.

All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

16.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

17.

We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.

Fuller, Thomas

18.

One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: Have no anxiety about the morrow; or the words of Sir William Osler; Live in day-tight compartments.

Carnegie, Dale

19.

We come into this world head first and go out feet first; in between, it is all a matter of balance.

Boese, Paul

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Even when I'm sick and depressed, I love life.

Rubinstein, Arthur

23.

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

24.

Life is an earnest business, and no one every became good or great on a diet of broad grins.

Blackie, Professor

25.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

26.

I believe that life is a journey, often difficult and sometimes incredibly cruel, but we are well equipped for it if only we tap into our talents and gifts and allow them to blossom.

Brown, Les

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.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

Horace

29.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

Pasternak, Boris

30.

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

Landers, Ann

31.

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

Osler, Sir William

32.

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.

33.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

34.

My art and profession is to live.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

35.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

Aristotle

36.

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

Ciardi, John

37.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Bacon, Francis

38.

Life's but a day at most.

Burns, George

39.

Life is an uphill business for the guy who's not on the level.

Welsh, John

40.

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

41.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Carlyle, Thomas

43.

It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.

Ruskin, John

44.

Life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting -- an unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified.

Redfield, James

45.

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

Hoagland, Edward

46.

The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.

Wilde, Oscar

47.

Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.

Orben, Robert

48.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

49.

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