Motivational Quotes

Life

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

- Frankl, Viktor E.

Best Quotes about Life

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

Thoreau, Henry David

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

Hayakawa, S. I.

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

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

Nash, Ogden

Life isn't simple. But the beauty of it is, you can always start over. It'll get easier.

Alacia Bessette

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

Waitley, Denis

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

Wolfe, Thomas

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

Leno, Jay

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

14.

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

Austen, Jane

15.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

16.

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

Camus, Albert

17.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

18.

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us.

Holdcroft, Thomas L.

19.

Only those live who do good.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

20.

Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

21.

The world has so many lessons to teach you. I consider the world, our earth, to be like a school, and our life, the classrooms. Sometimes on our planet life school, the lessons often come dressed up as detours and road blocks and sometimes as full blown crises. And the secret I've learned to getting ahead is being open to the lessons.

Oprah Winfrey

22.

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

Wise, Alfonso The

23.

Live for those who love me, For those who know me true, For the Heaven that smiles above me, And awaits my coming too; For the cause that lacks resistance, For the future and the distance, And the good that I can do.

24.

When we speak the word life, it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

Artaud, Antonin

25.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

26.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

27.

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

28.

When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.

Daniel Akst

29.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

Klee, Paul

30.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

Mccarthy, Mary

31.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

Mead, Margaret

32.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Kant, Immanuel

33.

A life is like a tree -- if you don't make it straight when its young and green, you'll never do it when it's old and dry.

34.

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

35.

It is faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth looking at.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

36.

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

37.

Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters.

Presser, Ross

38.

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

Nisami

39.

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

40.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

41.

This tattered life is my only robe; the wind my only refuge.

Mountain, Marian

42.

Life is just a bowl of pits.

Rodney Dangerfield

43.

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

44.

This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.

Buddha

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

47.

Life is a continual process of remaking ourselves.

48.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

Huxley, Aldous

49.

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

50.

The old Quaker was right: I expect to pass through life but once. If there is any kindness, or any good thing I can do to my fellow beings, let me do it now. I shall pass this way but once.

Gannett, W. C.