Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Kierkegaard, S°ren

Best Quotes about Life

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

Seneca

Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.

Fields, W. C.

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

Proverb, Indian

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

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Shaw, George Bernard

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

10.

Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.

Stoppard, Tom

11.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu

12.

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

Allen, Fred A.

13.

The deeper the experience of an absence of meaning -- in other words, of absurdity --the more energetically meaning is sought.

Havel, Vaclav

14.

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

Dickens, Charles

15.

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

16.

So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. We may also have ideas about the great mystery which religions speak of, which gives our cocoon an especial sense of security: we can worship the great mystery outside of it and feel good about that. The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.

Hayward, Jeremy W.

17.

Life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting -- an unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified.

Redfield, James

18.

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

19.

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. [Psalms 90:10]

Bible

20.

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

Eliot, T. S.

21.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

22.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

Pavese, Cesare

23.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Percy, Walker

24.

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

25.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

26.

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

Markiewicz, William

27.

Life is just a journey

Diana, Princess of Wales

28.

Not by gain our life is measured, But by what we've lost 'Tis scored; 'Tis not how much wine is drunken But how much has been outpoured. For the strength of love never standeth In the sacrifice we bear; He who has the greatest suffering Ever has the most to share.

Nee, Watchman

29.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Aleichem, Sholom

30.

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

William Shakespeare

31.

Life is a dead-end street.

Mencken, H. L.

32.

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

Norris, Kathleen

33.

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

34.

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

Baudrillard, Jean

35.

Every man's life is a fairy tale written by God's finger.

Anderson, Hans Christian

36.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

Moses, Grandma

37.

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

Larkin, Philip

38.

Life is an uphill business for the guy who's not on the level.

Welsh, John

39.

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

Alacia Bessette

40.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

41.

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

Mccarthy, Mary

42.

One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: Have no anxiety about the morrow; or the words of Sir William Osler; Live in day-tight compartments.

Carnegie, Dale

43.

For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. [James 4:14]

Bible

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

Boulanger, Nadia

46.

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

47.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

48.

Be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at stars.

Dyke, Henry Van

49.

The less routine the more life.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

50.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.

Twain, Mark