Motivational Quotes

Life

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is trivial; for all life is a dream and all dreams are dreams.

- Calderon de la Barca, Pedro

Best Quotes about Life

Life is a horizontal fall.

Cocteau, Jean

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.

Sir Winston Churchill

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

Anderson, Hans Christian

If God exists and we are made in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us.

Schaeffer, Francis

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

Johnson, Samuel

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

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

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Epictetus

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

Billings, Josh

10.

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

Landers, Ann

11.

New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it.

Simon, Neil

12.

Life does not happen to us, it happens from us.

Wickett, Michael

13.

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

14.

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale Vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

William Shakespeare

15.

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

16.

The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.

Shinn, Florence Scovel

17.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

18.

Live as you would have wished to live when you come to die.

Gellert

19.

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.

Rivarol, Antoine

20.

If I had been present at creation, I would have given some useful hints.

Wise, Alfonso The

21.

Those who live are those who fight.

Hugo, Victor

22.

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

Isaac Asimov

23.

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

24.

Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.

Goldsmith, Oliver

25.

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

26.

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

27.

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.

Pilgrim, Peace

28.

In matters of self-control as we shall see again and again, speed kills. But a little friction really can save lives.

Daniel Akst

29.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu

30.

Life It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.

Shakespeare, William

31.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Camus, Albert

32.

Life itself is the proper binge.

Child, Julia

33.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Curie, Madame Marie

34.

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

35.

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

36.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

37.

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

John Lennon

38.

Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters.

Presser, Ross

39.

Washington is a city of people doing badly what should not be done at all.

Gurney, Robert

40.

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

41.

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

42.

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

43.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

Stark, Freya

44.

Life is at its best when it's shaken and stirred.

Facult, F. Paul

45.

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

46.

Living, just by itself -- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting --or he'll come along and nibble your brain.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

47.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

48.

Nature has invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward. As a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life.

Louis Schwartzberg

49.

Paris is the caf? of Europe.

Galiani, Ferdinando

50.

The City attaches an exaggerated importance to the healing power of lunch.

Fieldes, Christopher