Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Presser, Ross

Best Quotes about Life

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

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim -- objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.

Frankl, Viktor E.

All of life is a foreign country.

Kerouac, Jack

Life is an uphill business for the guy who's not on the level.

Welsh, John

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Lehrer, Tom

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

10.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Drives my green age that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer.

Thomas, Dylan

11.

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

12.

Life is a wilderness of twists and turns, where faith is your only compass.

Santaguida, Paul

13.

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

14.

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination

Isherwood, Christopher

15.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

Bachelard, Gaston

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

18.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

19.

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

Mills, C. Wright

20.

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

Hewitt, George T.

21.

Maxim for life: You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.

Dyer, Wayne

22.

Life is an earnest business, and no one every became good or great on a diet of broad grins.

Blackie, Professor

23.

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

24.

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

Dickens, Charles

25.

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Forster, Edward M.

26.

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

Gusoff, Adrienne

27.

One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: Have no anxiety about the morrow; or the words of Sir William Osler; Live in day-tight compartments.

Carnegie, Dale

28.

We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.

Einstein, Albert

29.

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

Booth, Evangeline Cory

30.

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

31.

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

32.

First I was dying to finish high-school and start college. Then I was dying to finish college and start working. Next, I was dying for my children to grow old enough for school, so I could return to work. Finally, I was dying to retire. And now, I am dying

33.

To live is not breathing it is action.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

34.

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

Kennedy, John F.

35.

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

James, William

36.

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

Norris, Kathleen

37.

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

38.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Temple, Sir William

39.

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Proverb, French

40.

If I shall sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I'm sure that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for.

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

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.

42.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

Robert Heinlein

43.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

44.

The surrender of life is nothing to sinking down into acknowledgment of inferiority.

Calhoun, John C.

45.

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

46.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

Klee, Paul

47.

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

48.

All things may be bought in Rome with money.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

49.

To attain inner peace you must actually give your life, not just your possessions. When you at last give your life -- bringing into alignment your beliefs and the way you live then, and only then, can you begin to find inner peace.

Pilgrim, Peace

50.

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

Aleichem, Sholom