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 does not happen to us, it happens from us.

Wickett, Michael

Man's course begins in a garden, but it ends in a city.

Maclaren, Alexander

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

Dryden, John

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

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

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

Dickens, Charles

Live as you would have wished to live when you come to die.

Gellert

If you're not in New York, you're camping out.

Dewey, Thomas E.

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

Larkin, Philip

10.

To live lightheartedly but not recklessly; to be gay without being boisterous; to be courageous without being bold; to show trust and cheerful resignation without fatalism -- this is the art of living.

La Fontaine, Jean De

11.

There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

12.

He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world.

Horace

13.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

Kundera, Milan

14.

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Mumford, Lewis

15.

Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.

Brooke, Rupert

16.

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.

Markham, Edwin

17.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

Whitman, Walt

18.

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

Cabell, James Branch

19.

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

Clark, Frank A.

20.

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

Osler, Sir William

21.

Life may not be beautiful, but it is interesting.

Seeley, Sir John Robert

22.

Live for those who love me, For those who know me true, For the Heaven that smiles above me, And awaits my coming too; For the cause that lacks resistance, For the future and the distance, And the good that I can do.

23.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

24.

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

Heath, David M.

25.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Shaw, George Bernard

26.

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

Calhoun, John C.

27.

I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.

Franklin, Benjamin

28.

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

29.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

30.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

31.

Life is not always not always what one wants it to be., but to make the best of it as it is the only way of being happy.

Churchill, Jennie Jerome

32.

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

Woody Allen

33.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

34.

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

John Lennon

35.

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

36.

Life is not a dress rehearsal.

Tremain, Rose

37.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

38.

Life is fickle; the fair man doesn't invariably win.

Mark Hodder

39.

Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.

Steinbeck, John

40.

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

Caesar, Sid

41.

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

O'Neill, Eugene

42.

We live, not as we wish to, but as we can.

Menander of Athens

43.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Morley, Christopher

44.

The city is recruited from the country.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Mumford, Lewis

46.

Life is like one big Mardi Gras. But instead of showing your boobs, show people your brain, and if they like what they'll, you'll have more beads than you know what to do with.

Ellen DeGeneres

47.

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

48.

Paris, a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four-fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. [About Paris]

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

49.

The enjoyments of this life are not equal to its evils.

Pliny The Elder

50.

Life! Life! Don't let us go to life for our fulfillment or our experience. It is a thing narrowed by circumstances, incoherent in its utterance, and without that fine correspondence of form and spirit which is the only thing that can satisfy the artistic

Wilde, Oscar