Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

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

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

Austen, Jane

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

William Goldman

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

Connolly, Cyril

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

If you believed more in life you would fling yourself less to the moment.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

10.

The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile.

Waitley, Denis

11.

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

Crowley, Aleister

12.

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

Buscaglia, Leo

13.

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

Shields, Carol

14.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

Shaw, George Bernard

15.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

16.

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

17.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

Kafka, Franz

18.

Three keys to more abundant living: caring about others, daring for others, sharing with others.

Ward, William A.

19.

To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man's journey is about, I think.

Smith, Lillian

20.

Life is a continual process of remaking ourselves.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Life is a series of little deaths out of which life always returns.

Feidelson, Charles

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.

Life is a horizontal fall.

Cocteau, Jean

26.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Camus, Albert

27.

All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

28.

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

29.

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Diane Ackerman

30.

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

Hewitt, George T.

31.

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

32.

If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form? If you don't seek, how are you different from earth, wood, or stone? You must seek without seeking.

Fo-Yan

33.

Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.

Fran Lebowitz

34.

Life. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

Bierce, Ambrose

35.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

Socrates

36.

People should always have something which they prefer to life.

Seume, Johann G.

37.

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Proverb, French

38.

There is only one way to get ready for immortality, and that is to love this life and live it as bravely and faithfully and cheerfully as we can.

Dyke, Henry Van

39.

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

40.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

41.

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

Cabell, James Branch

42.

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

43.

Living the truth in your heart without compromise brings kindness into the world. Attempts at kindness that compromise your heart cause only sadness.

44.

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

John Lennon

45.

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

Wickett, Michael

46.

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it -- an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

Conrad, Peter

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Life is like one big Mardi Gras. But instead of showing your boobs, show people your brain, and if they like what they'll, you'll have more beads than you know what to do with.

Ellen DeGeneres