Motivational Quotes

Life

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

- Mumford, Lewis

Best Quotes about Life

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Henry David

Young people talk of what they are doing; old people of what they have done; and fools of what they have a mind to do.

Proverb

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

Berenson, Bernard

One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

Wolfe, Thomas

There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life

Kennedy, John F.

Life is but a moment, death also is but another.

Schuller, Robert H.

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

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

Dickens, Charles

Today's city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

Oppenheimer, Martin

10.

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

11.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, 'Come on in, the living's fine,' and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Baker, Russell (Wayne)

12.

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

Proverb

13.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Camus, Albert

14.

Life. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

Bierce, Ambrose

15.

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

16.

Optimism and humor are the grease and glue of life. Without both of them we would never have survived our captivity.

Butler, Philip

17.

Life is like one big Mardi Gras. But instead of showing your boobs, show people your brain, and if they like what they'll, you'll have more beads than you know what to do with.

Ellen DeGeneres

18.

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

Herzen, Alexander

19.

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.

Aurelius, Marcus

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.

Einstein, Albert

24.

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

25.

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

Larkin, Philip

26.

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

Frankl, Viktor E.

27.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

William Shakespeare

28.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Truman Capote

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you.

Sara Zarr

32.

I can't be bitter. No one has a contract on life.

Heath, David M.

33.

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

Baluch, Joy

34.

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

Douglas, Michael

35.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Camus, Albert

36.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

Kundera, Milan

37.

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life.

Carson, Rachel

38.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Eliot, T. S.

39.

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

Aleichem, Sholom

40.

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

Fields, W. C.

41.

What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

Henry, O.

42.

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

Welsh, John

43.

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

44.

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

Burns, George

45.

Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.

Prather, Hugh

46.

In the game of life it's a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season.

Baughan, Bill

47.

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

48.

The best things in life are never rationed. Friendship, loyalty, and love. They do not require coupons.

Hewitt, George T.

49.

The city is recruited from the country.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim -- objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.

Wilde, Oscar