Motivational Quotes

Life

The tragedy of life is not that a man loses, but that he almost wins.

- Broun, Heywood

Best Quotes about Life

Life is a campaign not a battle, and has its defeats as well as its victories.

Piatt, Don

There is only one way to come into this world; there are too many ways to leave it.

Harington, Donald

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

Ransom, Ralph

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Henry David

Life is just a bowl of pits.

Rodney Dangerfield

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Brendan Gill

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

Blake, William

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.

Mead, Margaret

10.

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts -- That hope always triumphs over experience -- That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Fulghum, Robert

11.

In the early days all I hoped was to make a living out of what I did best. But, since there's no real market for masturbation I had to fall back on my bass playing abilities.

Claypool, Les

12.

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.

Hepburn, Katharine

13.

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

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

14.

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

Nouwen, Henri

15.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

You really haven't changed, you've just become more of yourself. That is really what were all trying to do: become more of ourselves.

Oprah Winfrey

22.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

Peter De Vries

23.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

24.

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.

Proverb, Italian

25.

I found Rome brick, I left it marble.

Augustus, Caesar

26.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

27.

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

28.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

29.

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

Rubinstein, Arthur

30.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

31.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

32.

The best things in life are never rationed. Friendship, loyalty, and love. They do not require coupons.

Hewitt, George T.

33.

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.

La Bruyere, Jean De

34.

I think we're here for each other.

Burnett, Carol

35.

To attain inner peace you must actually give your life, not just your possessions. When you at last give your life -- bringing into alignment your beliefs and the way you live then, and only then, can you begin to find inner peace.

Pilgrim, Peace

36.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

37.

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

38.

Live virtuously, and you cannot not die too soon, or live too long.

Russell, Lady R.

39.

Nobody's journey is seamless or smooth. We all stumble. We all have setbacks. It's just life's way of saying, "Time to change course."

Oprah Winfrey

40.

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

Stoppard, Tom

41.

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

42.

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

Raban, Jonathan

43.

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

Huxley, Aldous

44.

The continuous invention of new ways of observing is man's special secret of living.

Young, J. Z.

45.

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

46.

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

Nisami

47.

So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. We may also have ideas about the great mystery which religions speak of, which gives our cocoon an especial sense of security: we can worship the great mystery outside of it and feel good about that. The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.

Hayward, Jeremy W.

48.

What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city.

Coriolanus III

49.

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

50.

It is a good thing that life is not as serious as it seems to a waiter.

Herold, Don