Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

Baudelaire, Charles

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

Mead, Margaret

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. [Psalms 90:10]

Bible

Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies.

Gusoff, Adrienne

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

Brodsky, Joseph

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra

To live is not breathing it is action.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

Seneca

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

Menander of Athens

14.

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

Rimbaud, Arthur

15.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

16.

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

Lennon, John

17.

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

Calhoun, John C.

18.

Life is not one thing after another. It's the same damn thing over and over!

19.

What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

Henry, O.

20.

Those who live are those who fight.

Hugo, Victor

21.

She fights and vanquishes in me, and I live and breathe in her, and I have life and being.

Cervantes, Miguel De

22.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Temple, Sir William

23.

We dribble away our life, little by little, in small packages -- we don't throw it away all at once.

Cook, Robert A.

24.

The tragedy of life is not that a man loses, but that he almost wins.

Broun, Heywood

25.

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

26.

In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.

Spengler, Oswald

27.

Nature has invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward. As a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life.

Louis Schwartzberg

28.

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

Clark, Frank A.

29.

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

30.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

31.

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

32.

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

Maclaren, Alexander

33.

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

34.

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

Boulanger, Nadia

35.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can decide how you're going to live now.

Baez, Joan

37.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

James, William

38.

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

39.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Benjamin, Walter

40.

My kids idea of a hard life is to live in a house with only one phone.

Foreman, George

41.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Johnson, Samuel

42.

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

Baudrillard, Jean

43.

To live is to go on a journey; to die is to come back home.

44.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

Santayana, George

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.

Forster, Edward M.

48.

Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.

Dyer, Wayne

49.

What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city.

Coriolanus III