Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Carlyle, Thomas

Best Quotes about Life

Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Live this day as if it will be your last. Remember that you will only find tomorrow on the calendars of fools. Forget yesterday's defeats and ignore the problems of tomorrow. This is it. Doomsday. All you have. Make it the best day of your year. The saddest words you can ever utter are, If I had my life to live over again. Take the baton, now. Run with it! This is your day! Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe, loved one or stranger, as if they were going to be dead at midnight. Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.

Mandino, Og

Only those live who do good.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic

Wilde, Oscar

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Shakespeare, William

Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.

Radner, Gilda

10.

Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.

Carpentier, Georges

11.

Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.

Prather, Hugh

12.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

13.

Live poor so you can die rich.

14.

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

Pirandello, Luigi

15.

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

16.

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

Mills, C. Wright

17.

The enjoyments of this life are not equal to its evils.

Pliny The Elder

18.

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

Wilde, Oscar

19.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Rimbaud, Arthur

20.

Life is but a game and we are the playthings of the gods.

21.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

22.

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

Pasternak, Boris

23.

The person who does not know how to live while they are making a living is a poorer person after their wealth is won than when they started.

Holland, Josiah Gilbert

24.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Aleichem, Sholom

25.

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

Allen, Fred A.

26.

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Saroyan, William

27.

You're alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act.

Barbara Hall

28.

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

Dryden, John

29.

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

30.

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

Ciardi, John

31.

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

32.

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

33.

If our life is unhappy it is painful to bear; if it is happy it is horrible to lose, So the one is pretty equal to the other.

La Bruyere, Jean De

34.

The four stages of life are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

Linkletter, Art

35.

The less routine the more life.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

36.

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

Boulanger, Nadia

37.

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

38.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

39.

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

Curie, Madame Marie

40.

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

Kempton, Murray

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Welsh, John

44.

Life without meaning cannot be borne. We find a mission to which we're sworn

45.

I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.

Douglas, Michael

46.

Life is but a moment, death also is but another.

Schuller, Robert H.

47.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

48.

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

49.

May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live.

Hanks, Tom

50.

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