Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Best Quotes about Life

See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.

Pope John XXIII

In matters of self-control as we shall see again and again, speed kills. But a little friction really can save lives.

Daniel Akst

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

Be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at stars.

Dyke, Henry Van

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

James, William

Life loves the liver of it.

Angelou, Maya

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

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

Brendan Gill

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Santayana, George

10.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

Kennedy, John F.

11.

Make your life a happy one. That is where success is possible to every man.

Powell, Robert

12.

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

Ransom, Ralph

13.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

James, William

14.

Life is like eating artichokes, you have got to go through so much to get so little.

Dorgan, Thomas A.

15.

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

Camus, Albert

16.

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

Seneca

17.

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

Aristotle

18.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

Santayana, George

19.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

21.

We come into this world head first and go out feet first; in between, it is all a matter of balance.

Boese, Paul

22.

Life is a series of little deaths out of which life always returns.

Feidelson, Charles

23.

Life is but a game and we are the playthings of the gods.

24.

Give a man a dollar and you cheer his heart. Give him a dream and you challenge his heart. Give him Christ and you change his heart. Then the dollar and the dream become meaningful to him, and to others.

Strait, C. Neil

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

Reed, Lou

28.

Washington is a city of people doing badly what should not be done at all.

Gurney, Robert

29.

The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.

Shinn, Florence Scovel

30.

Not by gain our life is measured, But by what we've lost 'Tis scored; 'Tis not how much wine is drunken But how much has been outpoured. For the strength of love never standeth In the sacrifice we bear; He who has the greatest suffering Ever has the most to share.

Nee, Watchman

31.

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

32.

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

Dryden, John

33.

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the nonsense out of a man.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

35.

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.

Fields, W. C.

36.

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

37.

Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Byron, Lord

38.

I think we're here for each other.

Burnett, Carol

39.

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

Edna St. Vincent Millay

40.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

41.

Life is a zoo in a jungle.

Peter De Vries

42.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can decide how you're going to live now.

Baez, Joan

43.

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Saroyan, William

44.

Life is just a bowl of pits.

Rodney Dangerfield

45.

Life is fickle; the fair man doesn't invariably win.

Mark Hodder

46.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

47.

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

Poe, Edgar Allan

48.

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

Leary, Denis

49.

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

50.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.

Cioran, E. M.