Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

The major justification for a life is the happiness and reward it brings to other lives.

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

Cook, Robert A.

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

Frankl, Viktor E.

Only those live who do good.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

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

Life is like eating artichokes, you have got to go through so much to get so little.

Dorgan, Thomas A.

Variability is the law of life, and as no two faces are the same, so no two bodies are alike, and no two individuals react alike and behave alike under the abnormal conditions which we know as disease.

Osler, Sir William

He who allows his day to pass by without practicing generosity and enjoying life's pleasures is like a blacksmith's bellows. He breathes, but does not live.

Proverb

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.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

Reed, Lou

11.

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

Baluch, Joy

12.

Not where I breathe, but where I love, I live; Not where I love, but where I am, I die.

Southey, Robert

13.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

14.

Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living more do we really live.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

15.

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

Lennon, John

16.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

17.

Life is an onion and one cries while peeling it.

Proverb, French

18.

The less routine the more life.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

19.

We quaff the cup of life with eager haste without draining it, instead of which it only overflows the brim -- objects press around us, filling the mind with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that we have no room for the thoughts of death.

Wilde, Oscar

20.

There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war, and some men are wounded, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life

Kennedy, John F.

21.

There are chapters in every life which are seldom read and certainly not aloud.

Shields, Carol

22.

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Mumford, Lewis

23.

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

Dane, Frank

24.

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

Prochnow, Herbert

25.

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

26.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

27.

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

Proverb, Indian

28.

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

29.

What else can you expect from a town that's shut off from the world by the ocean on one side and New Jersey on the other?

Henry, O.

30.

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

31.

Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.

Allen, Woody

32.

Life is just a mirror, and what you see out there, you must first see inside of you.

Wally'Famous'Amos

33.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I'm with you kid. Let's go.

Angelou, Maya

34.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Woolf, Virginia

35.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, 'Come on in, the living's fine,' and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Baker, Russell (Wayne)

36.

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Wolfe, Thomas

37.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Stone, Robert

38.

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

If our life is unhappy it is painful to bear; if it is happy it is horrible to lose, So the one is pretty equal to the other.

La Bruyere, Jean De

41.

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

42.

What is life? A frenzy. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction. And the greatest good is trivial; for all life is a dream and all dreams are dreams.

Calderon de la Barca, Pedro

43.

Man values life as a sacred jewel in such a way that he reveres him most who haughtily scorns it.

Platen

44.

The continuous invention of new ways of observing is man's special secret of living.

Young, J. Z.

45.

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

46.

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

Markiewicz, William

47.

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

Schopenhauer, Arthur

48.

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

49.

Life -- No, I've nothing to teach you about it for the moment. May be writing about it another week.

Forster, Edward M.

50.

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