Motivational Quotes

Life

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

- Woody Allen

Best Quotes about Life

Life is a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

O'Neill, Eugene

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

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

Woolf, Virginia

We Japanese enjoy the small pleasures, not extravagance. I believe a man should have a simple lifestyle -- even if he can afford more.

Ibuka, Massaru

A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

Huxley, Aldous

Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.

Carpentier, Georges

Make your life a happy one. That is where success is possible to every man.

Powell, Robert

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

Those who live are those who fight.

Hugo, Victor

10.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

11.

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts -- That hope always triumphs over experience -- That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Fulghum, Robert

12.

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

Jordan, David Starr

13.

One should not confuse the craving for life with endorsement of it.

Canetti, Elias

14.

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

Herold, Don

15.

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

Brodsky, Joseph

16.

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.

17.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

18.

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.

Kafka, Franz

19.

Life begins when you get out of the grandstand into the game.

Debevoise, P. L.

20.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

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

22.

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

23.

A life-worshipper's philosophy is comprehensive. He is at one moment a positivist and at another a mystic: now haunted by the thought of death and now a Dionysian child of nature; now a pessimist and now, with a change of lover or liver or even the weather, an exuberant believer that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world.

Huxley, Aldous

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

Our life's journey of self-discovery is not a straight-line rise from one level of consciousness to another. Instead, it is a series of steep climbs and flat plateaus, then further climbs. Even though we all approach the journey from different directions, certain of the journey's characteristics are common to all of us.

Wilde, Stuart

26.

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

27.

When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.

Daniel Akst

28.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

29.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

Cabell, James Branch

30.

Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.

Brendan Gill

31.

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

32.

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

Burns, George

33.

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

Aristotle

34.

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living that are desired when dying.

35.

Cities force growth and make people talkative and entertaining, but they also make them artificial.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

Mills, C. Wright

37.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Aleichem, Sholom

38.

Life It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.

Shakespeare, William

39.

You can have peace of mind, improved health and an ever-increasing flow of energy. Life can be full of joy and satisfaction.

Peale, Norman Vincent

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Life is something that everyone should try at least once.

Henry J. Tillman

43.

Life is but a game and we are the playthings of the gods.

44.

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

45.

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

Lin-Chi

46.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

James, William

47.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

48.

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

Brecht, Bertolt

49.

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

50.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y