Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is a little gleam of time between two eternity s.

- Carlyle, Thomas

Best Quotes about Life

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

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

Pasternak, Boris

We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim -- objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Mead, Margaret

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.

Pascal, Blaise

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

We dribble away our life, little by little, in small packages -- we don't throw it away all at once.

Cook, Robert A.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Fuller, Thomas

12.

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

Camus, Albert

13.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers, of families: read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life: re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

Whitman, Walt

15.

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

Boese, Paul

16.

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

Bacon, Francis

17.

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

18.

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

19.

I am sure care's an enemy to life.

William Shakespeare

20.

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

Baluch, Joy

21.

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

Wise, Alfonso The

22.

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

23.

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

Heath, David M.

24.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

25.

Life is uncharted territory. It reveals its story one moment at a time.

Buscaglia, Leo

26.

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

27.

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

Seneca

28.

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

29.

What life means to us is determined, not so much by what life brings to us as by the attitude we bring to life; not so much by what happens to us as by our reaction to what happens.

Dunnington, Lewis L

30.

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness. but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow Up.

Morgan, Charles

31.

If you're not in New York, you're camping out.

Dewey, Thomas E.

32.

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

Thibodeau, Robert

33.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

Moses, Grandma

34.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Brodsky, Joseph

35.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

36.

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

Butler, Philip

37.

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.

Fields, W. C.

38.

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

Blackie, Professor

39.

What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

Henry, O.

40.

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

41.

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

Hayes, Helen

42.

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

43.

Every time I look into the eyes of an animal I see life; the force of life and the beauty of creation

O'Reilly, Radar

44.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

45.

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

46.

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

47.

People should always have something which they prefer to life.

Seume, Johann G.

48.

Dance like no one is watching, Love like you'll never be hurt, Sing like no one is listening, Live like it's heaven on earth.

Purkey, William

49.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

Lawrence, D. H.

50.

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