Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

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

Edna St. Vincent Millay

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

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

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Isaac Asimov

Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.

Stoppard, Tom

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Camus, Albert

Some people go through life trying to find out what the world holds for them only to find out too late that it's what they bring to the world that really counts. OR It's not what the world holds for you it's what you bring to it

Gables, Anne Of Green

Life's a bitch, and life's got lots of sisters.

Presser, Ross

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

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.

Live today for tomorrow it will all be history.

Proverb

12.

On life's journey faith is nourishment, virtuous deeds are a shelter, wisdom is the light by day and right mindfulness is the protection by night. If a man lives a pure life, nothing can destroy him.

Buddha

13.

Anything for the quick life, as the man said when he took the situation at the lighthouse.

Dickens, Charles

14.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Brodsky, Joseph

15.

The art of living lies not in eliminating but in growing with troubles.

Baruch, Bernard M.

16.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Calvino, Italo

17.

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

Dewey, Thomas E.

18.

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one.

Kornfield, Jack

19.

Remember, a dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream.

Fields, W. C.

20.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

Seneca

21.

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

Wise, Alfonso The

22.

Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Byron, Lord

23.

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

24.

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

Cousteau, Jacques

25.

The life of man is a journey; a journey that must be traveled, however bad the roads or the accommodation.

Goldsmith, Oliver

26.

Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead, that is where your future lies.

Landers, Ann

27.

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

Booth, Evangeline Cory

28.

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

29.

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

Frankl, Viktor E.

30.

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

Curie, Madame Marie

31.

Young people talk of what they are doing; old people of what they have done; and fools of what they have a mind to do.

Proverb

32.

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

33.

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

Heath, David M.

34.

People creep into childhood, bound into youth, sober in adulthood, and soften into old age.

Giles, Henry

35.

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

36.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

Shaw, George Bernard

37.

There are nine requisites for contented living: HEALTH enough to make work a pleasure; WEALTH enough to support your needs; STRENGTH enough to battle with difficulties and forsake them; GRACE enough to confess your sins and overcome them; PATIENCE enough to toil until some good is accomplished; CHARITY enough to see some good in your neighbor; LOVE enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others; FAITH enough to make real the things of God; HOPE enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

40.

Not only is life a bitch, but it is always having puppies.

Gusoff, Adrienne

41.

Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late

Franklin, Benjamin

42.

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

43.

To attain inner peace you must actually give your life, not just your possessions. When you at last give your life -- bringing into alignment your beliefs and the way you live then, and only then, can you begin to find inner peace.

Pilgrim, Peace

44.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Gauguin, Paul

45.

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

46.

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

Mark Hodder

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

Herold, Don