Motivational Quotes

Life

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

- Stone, Robert

Best Quotes about Life

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

John Lennon

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

Rivarol, Antoine

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

Santayana, George

Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

Baudrillard, Jean

Only those live who do good.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

Isherwood, Christopher

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

Life at the top is financially rewarding, spiritually draining, physically exhausting, and short.

Newman, Peter C.

Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.

Brooke, Rupert

10.

Life is a series of little deaths out of which life always returns.

Feidelson, Charles

11.

The old Quaker was right: I expect to pass through life but once. If there is any kindness, or any good thing I can do to my fellow beings, let me do it now. I shall pass this way but once.

Gannett, W. C.

12.

Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.

Augustine, St.

13.

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

14.

We don't beat the Grim Reaper by living longer, we beat the Reaper by living well and living fully, for the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what do we do between the time we are born and the time he shows up. It's too late to do all the things that you're gonna kinda get around to.

Randy Pausch

15.

Life is just a bowl of pits.

Rodney Dangerfield

16.

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

17.

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

18.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

19.

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

20.

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

Proverb

21.

Life is a campaign not a battle, and has its defeats as well as its victories.

Piatt, Don

22.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

23.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Morley, Christopher

24.

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

25.

Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps on the stairway of life.

Ransom, Ralph

26.

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

27.

If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form? If you don't seek, how are you different from earth, wood, or stone? You must seek without seeking.

Fo-Yan

28.

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

29.

If I had been present at creation, I would have given some useful hints.

Wise, Alfonso The

30.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

31.

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.

Aurelius, Marcus

32.

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

Salisbury, Harrison

33.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs, Jane

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Truman Capote

37.

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

Hayes, Helen

38.

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

Zeno

39.

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

Ben Stein

40.

Life is not one thing after another. It's the same damn thing over and over!

41.

Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.

Carpentier, Georges

42.

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

43.

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

Eisenhower, Dwight D.

44.

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can decide how you're going to live now.

Baez, Joan

45.

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

Woody Allen

46.

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

Nisami

47.

Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man.

William Shakespeare

48.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.

Conrad, Joseph

49.

In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.

Spengler, Oswald

50.

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