Motivational Quotes

Life

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

- Nietzsche, Friedrich

Best Quotes about Life

There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.

Proverb, Persian

The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile.

Waitley, Denis

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

Dickens, Charles

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

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

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

Life is full and overflowing with the new. But it is necessary to empty out the old to make room for the new to enter.

Caddy, Eileen

If you believed more in life you would fling yourself less to the moment.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies.

Gusoff, Adrienne

10.

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

Carson, Rachel

11.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

12.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Morley, Christopher

13.

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

14.

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

Canetti, Elias

15.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

16.

The average person living to age 70 has 613, 000 hours of life. This is too long a period not to have fun.

17.

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

18.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

Aristotle

19.

If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form? If you don't seek, how are you different from earth, wood, or stone? You must seek without seeking.

Fo-Yan

20.

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

Woolf, Virginia

21.

Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.

Forster, Edward M.

22.

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

Herold, Don

23.

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.

24.

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

Prochnow, Herbert

25.

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

26.

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Mumford, Lewis

27.

One recipe for a longer life; Never exceed the speed limit.

28.

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)

29.

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

30.

What should I say about life? That it's long and abhors transparence.

Brodsky, Joseph

31.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

Cabell, James Branch

32.

You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.

Epictetus

33.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Frankl, Viktor E.

34.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

35.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters.

Presser, Ross

37.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Brendan Gill

38.

What life means to us is determined, not so much by what life brings to us as by the attitude we bring to life; not so much by what happens to us as by our reaction to what happens.

Dunnington, Lewis L

39.

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

James, William

40.

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

41.

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

Seneca

42.

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

Kant, Immanuel

43.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

Hume, David

44.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

Benjamin, Walter

45.

The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open.

William Shakespeare

46.

Live for those who love me, For those who know me true, For the Heaven that smiles above me, And awaits my coming too; For the cause that lacks resistance, For the future and the distance, And the good that I can do.

47.

Man spends his life in reasoning on the past, in complaining of the present, in fearing future.

Rivarol, Antoine

48.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Delacroix, Eugene

49.

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

Herzen, Alexander

50.

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

Booth, Evangeline Cory