Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Miller, Henry

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

Foreman, George

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.

Baudrillard, Jean

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

I am sure care's an enemy to life.

William Shakespeare

We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.

Pascal, Blaise

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

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

10.

On life's journey faith is nourishment, virtuous deeds are a shelter, wisdom is the light by day and right mindfulness is the protection by night. If a man lives a pure life, nothing can destroy him.

Buddha

11.

Life is like a taxi. The meter just keeps a-ticking whether you are getting somewhere or just standing still.

Erickson, Lou

12.

Life was mostly made up of things you couldn't control, full of surprises, and they weren't always good. Life wasn't what you made it. You were what life made you.

Sara Zarr

13.

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

Robert Heinlein

14.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Truman Capote

15.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Calvino, Italo

16.

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

Jordan, David Starr

17.

Man values life as a sacred jewel in such a way that he reveres him most who haughtily scorns it.

Platen

18.

The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile.

Waitley, Denis

19.

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

20.

A neighborhood is a residential area that is changing for the worse.

Ciardi, John

21.

Life itself is the proper binge.

Child, Julia

22.

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

Eliot, T. S.

23.

On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

24.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

25.

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

Hewitt, George T.

26.

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

Clark, Frank A.

27.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

28.

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

29.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

Stark, Freya

30.

Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

31.

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

Dickens, Charles

32.

Making a life comes before making a living.

33.

There is no shortcut to life. To the end of our days, life is a lesson imperfectly learned.

Salisbury, Harrison

34.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

35.

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.

Osler, Sir William

36.

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

Aristotle

37.

Life is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.

Diane Ackerman

38.

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

Boese, Paul

39.

Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.

Berenson, Bernard

40.

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

Lebowitz, Fran

41.

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

42.

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Wolfe, Thomas

43.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

Benjamin, Walter

44.

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

Camus, Albert

45.

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

Proverb, Persian

46.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

47.

What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city.