Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Kierkegaard, S°ren

Best Quotes about Life

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

Life is full and overflowing with the new. But it is necessary to empty out the old to make room for the new to enter.

Caddy, Eileen

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

Lin-Chi

Life is fickle; the fair man doesn't invariably win.

Mark Hodder

Life is a state of mind.

Warden, Jack

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

It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.

Ruskin, John

Life is an earnest business, and no one every became good or great on a diet of broad grins.

Blackie, Professor

10.

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.

Mead, Margaret

11.

Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

12.

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure its worth watching.

13.

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

Samuel Butler

14.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

15.

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears.

Seattle, Chief

16.

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end

17.

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

Woody Allen

18.

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

19.

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

Frankl, Viktor E.

20.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra

22.

Life is just a bowl of pits.

Rodney Dangerfield

23.

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

Epicurus

24.

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.

Kempis, Thomas

25.

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

26.

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.

Frankl, Viktor E.

27.

Life's but a day at most.

Burns, George

28.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu

29.

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

30.

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

Lebowitz, Fran

31.

All that man has will he give for his life.

Bible

32.

Life is like a taxi. The meter just keeps a-ticking whether you are getting somewhere or just standing still.

Erickson, Lou

33.

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

William Shakespeare

34.

Taken in any context, except seriously, life on earth is palatable and positively enjoyable.

35.

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.

Landers, Ann

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.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Baudrillard, Jean

38.

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

Kornfield, Jack

39.

Live, let live, and help live

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

Dickens, Charles

41.

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

Dorgan, Thomas A.

42.

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

Sizoo, Joseph R.

43.

The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.

Ben Stein

44.

To attain inner peace you must actually give your life, not just your possessions. When you at last give your life -- bringing into alignment your beliefs and the way you live then, and only then, can you begin to find inner peace.

Pilgrim, Peace

45.

Life loves the liver of it.

Angelou, Maya

46.

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

William Shakespeare

47.

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

48.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

49.

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

50.

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