Motivational Quotes

Life

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

- Pirandello, Luigi

Best Quotes about Life

Life is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you're gonna get.

Movie, Forrest Gump

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things

Rilke, Rainer Maria

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

There is only one way to come into this world; there are too many ways to leave it.

Harington, Donald

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.

Prather, Hugh

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

Life is like playing the violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Butler, Samuel

Our life's journey of self-discovery is not a straight-line rise from one level of consciousness to another. Instead, it is a series of steep climbs and flat plateaus, then further climbs. Even though we all approach the journey from different directions, certain of the journey's characteristics are common to all of us.

Wilde, Stuart

10.

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

11.

Pirandello, Luigi

12.

Washington is an endless series of mock palaces clearly built for clerks.

Huxtable, Ada Louise

13.

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

14.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

Horace

15.

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

Canetti, Elias

16.

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

Brendan Gill

17.

Life is given for wisdom, and yet we are not wise; for goodness, and we are not good; for overcoming evil, and evil remains; for patience and sympathy and love, and yet we are fretful and hard and weak and selfish. We are keyed not to attainment, but to the struggle toward it.

Munger, Thornton T.

18.

When we speak the word life, it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

Artaud, Antonin

19.

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.

20.

Life is just a journey

Diana, Princess of Wales

21.

You have to do what you love to do, not get stuck in that comfort zone of a regular job. Life is not a dress rehearsal. This is it.

Basset, Lucinda

22.

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

23.

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

Pliny The Elder

24.

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

25.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Kennedy, John F.

26.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

27.

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it -- an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

Conrad, Peter

28.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

29.

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

James, William

30.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Eliot, T. S.

31.

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

32.

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

Simon, Neil

33.

Life is like riding a bicycle. You don't fall off unless you stop peddling.

Pepper, Claude D.

34.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Tremain, Rose

35.

Life is a dead-end street.

Mencken, H. L.

36.

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

May, Rollo

37.

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

38.

Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.

Clark, Frank A.

39.

The lessons this life has planted in my heart pertain more to caring than crops, more to Golden Rule than gold, more to the proper choice than to the popular choice.

Kirby Larson

40.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Schweitzer, Albert

41.

Life is a rollercoaster. Try to eat a light lunch.

Schmaltz, David A.

42.

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us.

Holdcroft, Thomas L.

43.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs, Jane

44.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Camus, Albert

45.

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

Mead, Margaret

46.

If God exists and we are made in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us.

Schaeffer, Francis

47.

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Whitehead, Alfred North

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The only reason they come to see me is that I know that life is great -- and they know I know it.

Gable, Clark