Motivational Quotes

Life

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Drives my green age that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer.

- Thomas, Dylan

Best Quotes about Life

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

She fights and vanquishes in me, and I live and breathe in her, and I have life and being.

Cervantes, Miguel De

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

Dewey, Thomas E.

Walk through life eager and open to self-improvement and that which is going to best help you evolve, because that's really why were here: to evolve as human beings.

Oprah Winfrey

Reality is the crutch for people who can't cope with drugs.

Tomlin, Lily

We dribble away our life, little by little, in small packages -- we don't throw it away all at once.

Cook, Robert A.

Through this broad street, restless ever, ebbs and flows a human tide, wave on wave a living river; wealth and fashion side by side; Toiler, idler, slave and master, in the same quick current glide.

Whittier, John Greenleaf

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

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

10.

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.

Wilde, Oscar

11.

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

Bachelard, Gaston

12.

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

13.

The four stages of life are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.

Linkletter, Art

14.

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

Samuel Butler

15.

Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

Moses, Grandma

16.

It's better to be an authentic loser than a false success, and to die alive than to live dead.

Markiewicz, William

17.

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

Frankl, Viktor E.

18.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

19.

Life is hardly more than a fraction of a second. Such a little time to prepare oneself for eternity!

Gauguin, Paul

20.

Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all.

William Goldman

21.

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

Booth, Evangeline Cory

22.

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.

Lorca, Federico Garcia

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

25.

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

26.

Life is a state of mind.

Warden, Jack

27.

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

Osler, Sir William

28.

Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.

Proverb, Indian

29.

It is a good thing that life is not as serious as it seems to a waiter.

Herold, Don

30.

As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

Camus, Albert

31.

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

James, William

32.

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

Leary, Denis

33.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Hemingway, Ernest

34.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

35.

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

Truman Capote

36.

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

37.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.

Twain, Mark

38.

Every time I look into the eyes of an animal I see life; the force of life and the beauty of creation

O'Reilly, Radar

39.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

40.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

41.

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

42.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

43.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Henry David

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.

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

46.

Look to the future, because that is where you'll spend the rest of your life.

Burns, George

47.

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

48.

Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.

Brecht, Bertolt

49.

In real life, however, you don't react to what someone did; you react only to what you think she did, and the gap between action and perception is bridged by the art of impression management. If life itself is but what you deem it, then why not focus your efforts on persuading others to believe that you are a virtuous and trustworthy cooperator?

Jonathan Haidt

50.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard