Motivational Quotes

Life

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.

- Millay, Edna St. Vincent

Best Quotes about Life

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour,we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.

William Shakespeare

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.

Wilde, Oscar

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.

Huxley, Aldous

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Hemingway, Ernest

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

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

Holdcroft, Thomas L.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat... the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Miller, Henry

10.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

Huxley, Aldous

11.

The lessons this life has planted in my heart pertain more to caring than crops, more to Golden Rule than gold, more to the proper choice than to the popular choice.

Kirby Larson

12.

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

Rubinstein, Arthur

13.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

James, William

14.

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

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

15.

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

Kempis, Thomas

16.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

17.

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Lehrer, Tom

18.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

The major justification for a life is the happiness and reward it brings to other lives.

20.

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

Munger, Thornton T.

21.

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

22.

I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.

Douglas, Michael

23.

Life is a rollercoaster. Try to eat a light lunch.

Schmaltz, David A.

24.

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

Holmes, Oliver Wendell

25.

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

Dickens, Charles

26.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

Kafka, Franz

27.

Don't brood. Get on with living and loving. You don't have forever.

Rexford, Eben Eugene

28.

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

Dante Alighieri

29.

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

30.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

O'Neill, Eugene

31.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

32.

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

33.

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

Crowley, Aleister

34.

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

35.

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

Ciardi, John

36.

For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life.

Blake, William

37.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

38.

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

Michelangelo

39.

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

40.

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.

Southey, Robert

41.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

Seneca

42.

Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.

Sheen, Fulton John

43.

Either these [unsaved] people are to be evangelized, or the leaven of communism and infidelity will assume such enormous proportions that it will break you in a reign of terror such as this country has never known.

Moody, Dwight L.

44.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

Hayakawa, S. I.

45.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard

46.

Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

Steve Jobs

47.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.