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 is not so much a matter of position as of disposition

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

Woody Allen

Even when I'm sick and depressed, I love life.

Rubinstein, Arthur

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

Seneca

Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.

Forster, Edward M.

Those who live are those who fight.

Hugo, Victor

Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

Austen, Jane

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

10.

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

Mumford, Lewis

11.

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

Cabell, James Branch

12.

Life is a state of mind.

Warden, Jack

13.

Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.

Osler, Sir William

14.

You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Percy, Walker

15.

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said,so. What did you think?

Wright, Steven

16.

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

Booth, Evangeline Cory

17.

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.

Radner, Gilda

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu

21.

Living, just by itself -- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting --or he'll come along and nibble your brain.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

22.

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Mumford, Lewis

23.

Our first ideas of life are generally taken from fiction rather than fact.

Schopenhauer, Arthur

24.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

25.

Threescore years and ten is enough; if a man can't suffer all the misery he wants in that time, he must be numb.

Billings, Josh

26.

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

27.

Life is constantly providing us with new funds, new resources, even when we are reduced to immobility. In life's ledger there is no such thing as frozen assets.

Miller, Henry

28.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Delacroix, Eugene

29.

Live virtuously, and you cannot not die too soon, or live too long.

Russell, Lady R.

30.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

31.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Rimbaud, Arthur

32.

The art of living lies not in eliminating but in growing with troubles.

Baruch, Bernard M.

33.

I can't be bitter. No one has a contract on life.

Heath, David M.

34.

Live, let live, and help live

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Truman Capote

36.

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

Allen, Fred A.

37.

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

38.

The ideals which have always shone before me and filled me with the joy of living are goodness, beauty, and truth.

Einstein, Albert

39.

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

Duncan, Isadora

40.

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

Salisbury, Harrison

41.

Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel.

Mansfield, Katherine

42.

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

Nabokov, Vladimir

43.

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

44.

In matters of self-control as we shall see again and again, speed kills. But a little friction really can save lives.

Daniel Akst

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

Life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting -- an unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified.

Redfield, James

47.

This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.

Erhard, Werner

48.

Feelings are really your GPS system for life. When your supposed to do something, or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know.

Oprah Winfrey

49.

I used to trouble about what life was for -- now being alive seems sufficient reason.

Field, Joanna

50.

Life flows on within you and without you.

Harrison, George