Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.

- Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

Best Quotes about Life

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

Leary, Denis

The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.

Leno, Jay

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.

Baudrillard, Jean

New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.

Carson, Johnny

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living that are desired when dying.

The less routine the more life.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts!

Stevenson, Adlai E.

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

Ruskin, John

People creep into childhood, bound into youth, sober in adulthood, and soften into old age.

Giles, Henry

10.

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

Pasternak, Boris

11.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

12.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Epictetus

13.

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

Eliot, T. S.

14.

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears.

Seattle, Chief

15.

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.

Nash, Ogden

16.

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

17.

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

Lennon, John

18.

The life of man is a journey; a journey that must be traveled, however bad the roads or the accommodation.

Goldsmith, Oliver

19.

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

20.

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth.

Einstein, Albert

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

23.

Look to the future, because that is where you'll spend the rest of your life.

Burns, George

24.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

25.

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

Ellis, Havelock

26.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Lehrer, Tom

28.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Camus, Albert

29.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

Hume, David

30.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

Making a life comes before making a living.

32.

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

William Shakespeare

33.

Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.

Osler, Sir William

34.

Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.

Clark, Frank A.

35.

One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

Austen, Jane

36.

There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.

Proverb, Persian

37.

The good life is one inspired by life and guided by knowledge.

Russell, Bertrand

38.

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

39.

Life itself is the proper binge.

Child, Julia

40.

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

41.

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late

Franklin, Benjamin

42.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

43.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

44.

Life is full of surprises and and serendipity. Being open to unexpected turns in the road is an important part of success. If you try to plan every step, you may miss those wonderful twists and turns. Just find your next adventure-do it well, enjoy it-and then, not now, think about what comes next.

Condoleeza Rice

45.

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

Dewey, Thomas E.

46.

The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority.

Calhoun, John C.

47.

We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.

Einstein, Albert

48.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.

Hemingway, Ernest

49.

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

50.

The city is recruited from the country.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo