Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.

- Nash, Ogden

Best Quotes about Life

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

Prochnow, Herbert

Life is a glass given to us to fill; a busy life is filling it with as much as it can hold; a hurried life has had more poured into it than it can contain.

Brown, William Adams

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

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

Canetti, Elias

Those who live are those who fight.

Hugo, Victor

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

Havel, Vaclav

Life is a classroom in which each of us is being tested, tried, and passed.

Thibodeau, Robert

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

If you're not in New York, you're camping out.

Dewey, Thomas E.

10.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

11.

New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it.

Simon, Neil

12.

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

13.

Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

Dickens, Charles

14.

Life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward, you have to give back.

Oprah Winfrey

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Difficulties come when you don't pay attention to life's whisper. Life always whispers to you first, but if you ignore the whisper, sooner or later you'll get a scream.

Oprah Winfrey

18.

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

Pliny The Elder

19.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu

20.

The truest end of life, is to find the life that doesn't end.

21.

Life is a continual process of remaking ourselves.

22.

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

Boulanger, Nadia

23.

Take life as you find it, but don't leave it that way

24.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

25.

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

Proverb, Scottish

26.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

27.

This is what you shall do: love the earth and sun, and animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence towards the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men; go freely with the powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and mothers, of families: read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life: re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul.

Whitman, Walt

28.

Life loves the liver of it.

Angelou, Maya

29.

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

30.

To a wise man every day is a new life.

31.

This city now doth, like a garment, wear the beauty of the morning; silent bare, ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Wordsworth, William

32.

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

Butler, Philip

33.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

34.

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

35.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

36.

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

37.

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

Herold, Don

38.

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

Proverb, Indian

39.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

40.

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

Santayana, George

41.

Life is just a bowl of pits.

Rodney Dangerfield

42.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Woolf, Virginia

43.

He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance rather by the impulse of the wind than the strokes of the oar; and many fold in their passage; while they lie waiting for the gale.

Johnson, Samuel

44.

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic

Wilde, Oscar

45.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

46.

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

Steve Jobs

47.

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.

48.

There is one thing that matters -- to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

49.

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

50.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

Kierkegaard, S°ren