Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Proverb, Persian

Best Quotes about Life

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

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

When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.

Daniel Akst

There is a time of life somewhere between the sullen fugues of adolescence and the retrenchments of middle age when human nature becomes so absolutely absorbing one wants to be in the city constantly, even at the height of summer.

Hoagland, Edward

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Bacon, Francis

Life is something you do when you can't get to sleep.

Lebowitz, Fran

Life itself is the proper binge.

Child, Julia

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

This also -- that I live, I consider a gift of God.

Ovid

10.

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

Aristotle

11.

Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.

Walpole, Horace

12.

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

13.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

Crisp, Quentin

14.

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

Young, J. Z.

15.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.

Hemingway, Ernest

16.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

17.

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

Seneca

18.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

19.

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

Hewitt, George T.

20.

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

Camus, Albert

21.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

Mead, Margaret

22.

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.

Landers, Ann

23.

The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.

Ben Stein

24.

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

25.

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Benjamin, Walter

26.

All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

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.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Baudrillard, Jean

29.

In between goals is a thing called life, that has to be lived and enjoyed.

Caesar, Sid

30.

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

31.

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

Presser, Ross

32.

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

Herold, Don

33.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Morley, Christopher

34.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

35.

Life is a glass given to us to fill; a busy life is filling it with as much as it can hold; a hurried life has had more poured into it than it can contain.

Brown, William Adams

36.

Some people seem to go through life standing at the complaint counter.

Propp Jr., Fred

37.

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

38.

Life is not a matter of place, things or comfort; rather, it concerns the basic human rights of family, country, justice and human dignity.

Marcos, Imelda

39.

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

40.

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.

Dick Werthimer

41.

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we're really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.

Campbell, Joseph

42.

Life may not be beautiful, but it is interesting.

Seeley, Sir John Robert

43.

Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather, He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop.

Polgar, Alfred

44.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

45.

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

46.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

47.

Live this day as if it will be your last. Remember that you will only find tomorrow on the calendars of fools. Forget yesterday's defeats and ignore the problems of tomorrow. This is it. Doomsday. All you have. Make it the best day of your year. The saddest words you can ever utter are, If I had my life to live over again. Take the baton, now. Run with it! This is your day! Beginning today, treat everyone you meet, friend or foe, loved one or stranger, as if they were going to be dead at midnight. Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.

Mandino, Og

48.

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

Booth, Evangeline Cory

49.

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

50.

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

Jordan, David Starr