Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Dryden, John

Best Quotes about Life

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Mille, Agnes De

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination

Isherwood, Christopher

Life flows on within you and without you.

Harrison, George

Man values life as a sacred jewel in such a way that he reveres him most who haughtily scorns it.

Platen

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

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Fields, W. C.

Life is not a matter of place, things or comfort; rather, it concerns the basic human rights of family, country, justice and human dignity.

Marcos, Imelda

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

Anderson, Hans Christian

10.

Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.

Allen, Fred A.

11.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Search for meaning, eat, sleep. Die, search for meaning, search for meaning, search for meaning.

Horton, Doug

13.

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

14.

And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour,we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.

William Shakespeare

15.

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Mumford, Lewis

16.

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Proverb, French

17.

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

Wolfe, Thomas

22.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

Herzen, Alexander

23.

There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

24.

Man's course begins in a garden, but it ends in a city.

Maclaren, Alexander

25.

Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Byron, Lord

26.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

27.

Life is not so much a matter of position as of disposition

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Fieldes, Christopher

31.

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

Ward, William A.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

Michelangelo

35.

I have an existential map; it has you are here written all over it.

Wright, Steven

36.

One recipe for a longer life; Never exceed the speed limit.

37.

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

38.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

Santayana, George

39.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

40.

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

Giles, Henry

41.

Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Samuel Butler

42.

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

Eliot, T. S.

43.

So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. We may also have ideas about the great mystery which religions speak of, which gives our cocoon an especial sense of security: we can worship the great mystery outside of it and feel good about that. The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.

Hayward, Jeremy W.

44.

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

Lebowitz, Fran

45.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

47.

Best to live lightly, unthinkingly.

Sophocles

48.

In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you're told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.

Hoggart, Simon

49.

Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather, He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop.

Polgar, Alfred

50.

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

Welsh, John