Motivational Quotes

Life

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

- Cabell, James Branch

Best Quotes about Life

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

Poe, Edgar Allan

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

Herzen, Alexander

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Santayana, George

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

Shields, Carol

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

Rimbaud, Arthur

We don't beat the Grim Reaper by living longer, we beat the Reaper by living well and living fully, for the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what do we do between the time we are born and the time he shows up. It's too late to do all the things that you're gonna kinda get around to.

Randy Pausch

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.

Aurelius, Marcus

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

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

Broun, Heywood

10.

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Mumford, Lewis

11.

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

Allen, Fred A.

12.

Life marches by, I suggest you get on with it.

Baluch, Joy

13.

On life's journey faith is nourishment, virtuous deeds are a shelter, wisdom is the light by day and right mindfulness is the protection by night. If a man lives a pure life, nothing can destroy him.

Buddha

14.

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

Hayes, Helen

15.

The old Quaker was right: I expect to pass through life but once. If there is any kindness, or any good thing I can do to my fellow beings, let me do it now. I shall pass this way but once.

Gannett, W. C.

16.

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

Frankl, Viktor E.

17.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

Bachelard, Gaston

18.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

19.

Life is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you're gonna get.

Movie, Forrest Gump

20.

Life begins when you get out of the grandstand into the game.

Debevoise, P. L.

21.

Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.

Dyer, Wayne

22.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

Miller, Henry

23.

Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.

Brooke, Rupert

24.

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

25.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

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

Fuller, Thomas

27.

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you.

Sara Zarr

28.

I can't be bitter. No one has a contract on life.

Heath, David M.

29.

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

30.

Be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at stars.

Dyke, Henry Van

31.

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

32.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

33.

The lessons this life has planted in my heart pertain more to caring than crops, more to Golden Rule than gold, more to the proper choice than to the popular choice.

Kirby Larson

34.

The truest end of life, is to find the life that doesn't end.

35.

What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

Brodsky, Joseph

36.

Man values life as a sacred jewel in such a way that he reveres him most who haughtily scorns it.

Platen

37.

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

Ovid

38.

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

Blake, William

39.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

40.

Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.

Colton, Charles Caleb

41.

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

42.

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

43.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra

44.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

Boom, Corrie Ten

45.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

Kennedy, John F.

46.

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

Lin-Chi

47.

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

48.

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

Russell, Lady R.

49.

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Campbell, Joseph

50.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Benjamin, Walter