Motivational Quotes

Life

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

- Kierkegaard, S°ren

Best Quotes about Life

Even when I'm sick and depressed, I love life.

Rubinstein, Arthur

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

In making a living today, many no longer leave room for life.

Sizoo, Joseph R.

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

Butler, Samuel

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

Franklin, Benjamin

Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.

Coallier, Steven

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

Life is but a game and we are the playthings of the gods.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

10.

Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don't try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.

Robbins, Anthony

11.

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

12.

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

Canetti, Elias

13.

Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.

Proverb, Indian

14.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Stone, Robert

15.

Life marches by, I suggest you get on with it.

Baluch, Joy

16.

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

Leno, Jay

17.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Drives my green age that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer.

Thomas, Dylan

18.

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

19.

Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more.

Robbins, Anthony

20.

In the early days all I hoped was to make a living out of what I did best. But, since there's no real market for masturbation I had to fall back on my bass playing abilities.

Claypool, Les

21.

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

Foreman, George

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

25.

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

Samuel Butler

26.

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

27.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

28.

Life is like riding a bicycle. You don't fall off unless you stop peddling.

Pepper, Claude D.

29.

Life at the top is financially rewarding, spiritually draining, physically exhausting, and short.

Newman, Peter C.

30.

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

Fields, W. C.

31.

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said,so. What did you think?

Wright, Steven

32.

The life of man is a journey; a journey that must be traveled, however bad the roads or the accommodation.

Goldsmith, Oliver

33.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Brodsky, Joseph

34.

It's better to be an authentic loser than a false success, and to die alive than to live dead.

Markiewicz, William

35.

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

36.

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

37.

The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open.

William Shakespeare

38.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

39.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

40.

Eternal truths will be neither true nor eternal unless they have fresh meaning for every new social situation.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

41.

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

42.

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

Menander of Athens

43.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

O'Neill, Eugene

44.

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

Fran Lebowitz

45.

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

Austen, Jane

46.

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.

Miller, Henry

47.

Living, just by itself -- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting --or he'll come along and nibble your brain.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

48.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

49.

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Diane Ackerman

50.

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

Larkin, Philip