Motivational Quotes

Life

The person who does not know how to live while they are making a living is a poorer person after their wealth is won than when they started.

- Holland, Josiah Gilbert

Best Quotes about Life

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Schweitzer, Albert

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

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

Ransom, Ralph

There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life

Kennedy, John F.

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

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

Dyer, Wayne

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

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Mumford, Lewis

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.

Dick Werthimer

10.

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

11.

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

Butler, Samuel

12.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

Woody Allen

13.

Life at the greatest and best is but a froward child, that must be humored and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care is over.

Goldsmith, Oliver

14.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

15.

Young people talk of what they are doing; old people of what they have done; and fools of what they have a mind to do.

Proverb

16.

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

17.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Calvino, Italo

18.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

19.

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

Presser, Ross

20.

Washington is a city of people doing badly what should not be done at all.

Gurney, Robert

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

John Lennon

24.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

25.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

26.

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life.

Carson, Rachel

27.

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

Brecht, Bertolt

28.

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

29.

The life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

Barrie, Sir James M.

30.

The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experiences.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

31.

My art and profession is to live.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

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.

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

Foreman, George

34.

Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.

Augustine, St.

35.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Isaac Asimov

36.

On life's journey faith is nourishment, virtuous deeds are a shelter, wisdom is the light by day and right mindfulness is the protection by night. If a man lives a pure life, nothing can destroy him.

Buddha

37.

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

38.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others

Keller, Helen

39.

Life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward, you have to give back.

Oprah Winfrey

40.

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

41.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra

42.

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

Camus, Albert

43.

Life is a continual process of remaking ourselves.

44.

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Forster, Edward M.

45.

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

Lehrer, Tom

46.

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

Frankl, Viktor E.