Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Kierkegaard, S°ren

Best Quotes about Life

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is trivial; for all life is a dream and all dreams are dreams.

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Wolfe, Thomas

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

Live poor so you can die rich.

He who allows his day to pass by without practicing generosity and enjoying life's pleasures is like a blacksmith's bellows. He breathes, but does not live.

Proverb

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

William Shakespeare

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

Fran Lebowitz

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

Lin-Chi

The enjoyments of this life are not equal to its evils.

Pliny The Elder

10.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

11.

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

Ciardi, John

12.

Life isn't simple. But the beauty of it is, you can always start over. It'll get easier.

Alacia Bessette

13.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Santayana, George

14.

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.

Lorca, Federico Garcia

15.

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

Oliver Wendell Holmes

16.

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

Horace

17.

Life does not happen to us, it happens from us.

Wickett, Michael

18.

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

Ben Stein

19.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

20.

Life is a state of mind.

Warden, Jack

21.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

Mccarthy, Mary

22.

Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.

Berenson, Bernard

23.

The average person living to age 70 has 613, 000 hours of life. This is too long a period not to have fun.

24.

Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

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

Forster, Edward M.

26.

There is only one way to come into this world; there are too many ways to leave it.

Harington, Donald

27.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

28.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

Kennedy, John F.

29.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

30.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

31.

Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

33.

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

Gable, Clark

34.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

35.

Look to the future, because that is where you'll spend the rest of your life.

Burns, George

36.

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

37.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Kennedy, John F.

38.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel.

Mansfield, Katherine

42.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

43.

The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.

Miller, Henry

44.

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

45.

All things may be bought in Rome with money.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

46.

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

47.

Man is born to live and not to prepare to live.

Pasternak, Boris

48.

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

49.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

50.

The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile.

Waitley, Denis