Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.

- Nabokov, Vladimir

Best Quotes about Life

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.

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

Erickson, Lou

New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.

Carson, Johnny

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

Douglas, Michael

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.

Steinbeck, John

Nobody's journey is seamless or smooth. We all stumble. We all have setbacks. It's just life's way of saying, "Time to change course."

Oprah Winfrey

10.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

Rimbaud, Arthur

11.

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

12.

The old Quaker was right: I expect to pass through life but once. If there is any kindness, or any good thing I can do to my fellow beings, let me do it now. I shall pass this way but once.

Gannett, W. C.

13.

It doesn't matter much where you live. It only matters how well you live when you're there

14.

Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.

Brooke, Rupert

15.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

16.

It is not how many years we live, but rather what we do with them.

Booth, Evangeline Cory

17.

All great art is born of the metropolis.

Pound, Ezra

18.

In real life, however, you don't react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?

Jonathan Haidt

19.

The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.

Edison, Thomas A.

20.

May God bless you to live as long as you want to; and want to as long as you live!

Proverb, Scottish

21.

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.

Pilgrim, Peace

22.

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

Menander of Athens

23.

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

Dickens, Charles

24.

Man's course begins in a garden, but it ends in a city.

Maclaren, Alexander

25.

When I hear somebody sigh that Life is hard, I am always tempted to ask, Compared to what?

Harris, Sidney J.

26.

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

Lehrer, Tom

27.

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late

Franklin, Benjamin

28.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

29.

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

Steve Jobs

30.

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

James, William

31.

Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.

Nabokov, Vladimir

32.

A life is like a tree -- if you don't make it straight when its young and green, you'll never do it when it's old and dry.

33.

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.

Miller, Henry

34.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Kant, Immanuel

35.

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

Ruskin, John

36.

Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.

Hubbard, Elbert

37.

Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal. [On Washington D. C.]

Dane, Frank

38.

Life may not be beautiful, but it is interesting.

Seeley, Sir John Robert

39.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears -- as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

40.

We Japanese enjoy the small pleasures, not extravagance. I believe a man should have a simple lifestyle -- even if he can afford more.

Ibuka, Massaru

41.

The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn't.

Mankiewicz, Joseph L.

42.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

43.

Life itself is the proper binge.

Child, Julia

44.

I used to trouble about what life was for -- now being alive seems sufficient reason.

Field, Joanna

45.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

46.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

47.

He lives who dies to win a lasting name.

Drummond, Henry

48.

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

49.

Making a life comes before making a living.

50.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Calvino, Italo