Motivational Quotes

Life

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

- Schweitzer, Albert

Best Quotes about Life

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

Prochnow, Herbert

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Thoreau, Henry David

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

Boulanger, Nadia

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. [Psalms 90:10]

Bible

Life -- how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

Pritchett, V. S.

Any city however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.

Plato

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it's one damn thing over and over.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

Life is an earnest business, and no one every became good or great on a diet of broad grins.

Blackie, Professor

10.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat... the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

11.

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

Benet, Stephen Vincent

12.

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

Walpole, Horace

13.

Life is a classroom in which each of us is being tested, tried, and passed.

Thibodeau, Robert

14.

Only to the extent that someone is living out this self transcendence of human existence, is he truly human or does he become his true self. He becomes so, not by concerning himself with his self's actualization, but by forgetting himself and giving himself, overlooking himself and focusing outward.

Frankl, Viktor E.

15.

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

Norris, Kathleen

16.

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

17.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Proverb, Persian

21.

This life of separateness may be compared to a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.

Buddha

22.

We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.

Camus, Albert

23.

Life is supposed to get tough.

Grammer, Kelsey

24.

Life without meaning cannot be borne. We find a mission to which we're sworn

25.

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

Kierkegaard, S°ren

26.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu

27.

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.

28.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

29.

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

30.

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

Seneca

31.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

32.

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

Ciardi, John

33.

Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique and not too much imagination

Isherwood, Christopher

34.

Be glad of life because it gives you a chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at stars.

Dyke, Henry Van

35.

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.

Dimnet, Ernest

36.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Curie, Madame Marie

37.

Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don't try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.

Robbins, Anthony

38.

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it's the transparency that counts.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

39.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

Bachelard, Gaston

40.

Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal. [On Washington D. C.]

Dane, Frank

41.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

42.

Life marches by, I suggest you get on with it.

Baluch, Joy

43.

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure its worth watching.

44.

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

45.

Every morning I wake up saying, I'm still alive; a miracle. And so I keep on pushing.

Cousteau, Jacques

46.

To live is not breathing it is action.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

47.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Percy, Walker

48.

Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Samuel Butler

49.

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.

Pilgrim, Peace

50.

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

Lin-Chi