Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

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

There are nine requisites for contented living: HEALTH enough to make work a pleasure; WEALTH enough to support your needs; STRENGTH enough to battle with difficulties and forsake them; GRACE enough to confess your sins and overcome them; PATIENCE enough to toil until some good is accomplished; CHARITY enough to see some good in your neighbor; LOVE enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others; FAITH enough to make real the things of God; HOPE enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Life is a campaign not a battle, and has its defeats as well as its victories.

Piatt, Don

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.

Aurelius, Marcus

Life is a horizontal fall.

Cocteau, Jean

One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

Wolfe, Thomas

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

10.

Life at the top is financially rewarding, spiritually draining, physically exhausting, and short.

Newman, Peter C.

11.

My kids idea of a hard life is to live in a house with only one phone.

Foreman, George

12.

Who goes to Rome a beast returns a beast.

Proverb, Italian

13.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

14.

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

15.

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure its worth watching.

16.

The continuous invention of new ways of observing is man's special secret of living.

Young, J. Z.

17.

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

Samuel Butler

18.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Aleichem, Sholom

19.

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

Cabell, James Branch

20.

Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.

Prather, Hugh

21.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

22.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

We dribble away our life, little by little, in small packages -- we don't throw it away all at once.

Cook, Robert A.

24.

Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.

Lennon, John

25.

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

26.

In the early days of the Indian Territory, there were no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough.

Rogers, Will

27.

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

28.

The major justification for a life is the happiness and reward it brings to other lives.

29.

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

Gusoff, Adrienne

30.

The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace. A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being that places harmony in one's life.

Pilgrim, Peace

31.

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

Proverb, Persian

32.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

33.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

34.

Walk through life eager and open to self-improvement and that which is going to best help you evolve, because that's really why were here: to evolve as human beings.

Oprah Winfrey

35.

The best things in life are never rationed. Friendship, loyalty, and love. They do not require coupons.

Hewitt, George T.

36.

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

37.

If our life is unhappy it is painful to bear; if it is happy it is horrible to lose, So the one is pretty equal to the other.

La Bruyere, Jean De

38.

Some people go through life trying to find out what the world holds for them only to find out too late that it's what they bring to the world that really counts. OR It's not what the world holds for you it's what you bring to it

Gables, Anne Of Green

39.

The cloud-capp'd towers,the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare

40.

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

Butler, Samuel

41.

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

Allen, Fred A.

42.

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

Kornfield, Jack

43.

People do not live nowadays. They get about 10% out of life.

Duncan, Isadora

44.

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.

45.

Youth is too tumultuous for felicity; old age too insecure for happiness. The period most favorable to enjoyment, in a vigorous, fortunate, and generous life, is that between forty and sixty.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

46.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

47.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

48.

Live, let live, and help live

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.