Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

- Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

Best Quotes about Life

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

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs...

Epicurus

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.

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

Kornfield, Jack

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

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Santayana, George

Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.

Orben, Robert

10.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears -- as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

11.

The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.

Edison, Thomas A.

12.

The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness.

Yogi, Maharishi Mahesh

13.

Feelings are really your GPS system for life. When your supposed to do something, or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know.

Oprah Winfrey

14.

The art of living lies not in eliminating but in growing with troubles.

Baruch, Bernard M.

15.

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

16.

The only reason they come to see me is that I know that life is great -- and they know I know it.

Gable, Clark

17.

Threescore years and ten is enough; if a man can't suffer all the misery he wants in that time, he must be numb.

Billings, Josh

18.

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

Mills, C. Wright

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Live, let live, and help live

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

Make your life a happy one. That is where success is possible to every man.

Powell, Robert

23.

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

Boulanger, Nadia

24.

Life begins when you get out of the grandstand into the game.

Debevoise, P. L.

25.

This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Wordsworth, William

26.

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

Holdcroft, Thomas L.

27.

Live virtuously, and you cannot not die too soon, or live too long.

Russell, Lady R.

28.

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

Hoagland, Edward

29.

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

30.

Simply the thing I am shall make me live.

Shakespeare, William

31.

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

Clark, Frank A.

32.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

Whitman, Walt

33.

When I hear somebody sigh that Life is hard, I am always tempted to ask, Compared to what?

Harris, Sidney J.

34.

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

Austen, Jane

35.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

Horace

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Live poor so you can die rich.

39.

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

Austen, Jane

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Stone, Robert

43.

Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.

Nabokov, Vladimir

44.

Life is like eating artichokes, you have got to go through so much to get so little.

Dorgan, Thomas A.

45.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, 'Come on in, the living's fine,' and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Baker, Russell (Wayne)

46.

All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

47.

Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.

Plato

48.

There are three stages in a person's life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.

La Bruyere, Jean De

49.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Delacroix, Eugene

50.

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