Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

Hayes, Helen

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

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

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

Baudrillard, Jean

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Whitehead, Alfred North

New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.

Carson, Johnny

I once spent a year in Philadelphia, I think it was on a Sunday.

Fields, W. C.

10.

There is one thing that matters -- to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

11.

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

12.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.

William Shakespeare

13.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

Pavese, Cesare

14.

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

15.

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really merely commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the planning, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chain of events, working through generations and leading to the most outer results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

16.

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

Poe, Edgar Allan

17.

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

Rimbaud, Arthur

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

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

Coriolanus III

21.

Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

Life is like wine, the longer you take to enjoy it the more chance you've got of tasting vinegar.

23.

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

Kempton, Murray

24.

Taken in any context, except seriously, life on earth is palatable and positively enjoyable.

25.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

26.

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

27.

The finest lives in my opinion are the common model, without miracle and without extravagance.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

28.

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

29.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Eliot, T. S.

30.

In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you're told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.

Hoggart, Simon

31.

Making a life comes before making a living.

32.

Optimism and humor are the grease and glue of life. Without both of them we would never have survived our captivity.

Butler, Philip

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

Life is a dead-end street.

Mencken, H. L.

35.

Life is a video game. No matter how good you get, you are always zapped in the end

36.

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

Ben Stein

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

40.

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.

Sir Winston Churchill

41.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

42.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.

Cioran, E. M.

43.

What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

Henry, O.

44.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

Socrates

45.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

46.

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

Aristotle

47.

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

Frankl, Viktor E.

48.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

Boom, Corrie Ten

49.

There is only one way to come into this world; there are too many ways to leave it.

Harington, Donald

50.

The lessons this life has planted in my heart pertain more to caring than crops, more to Golden Rule than gold, more to the proper choice than to the popular choice.

Kirby Larson