Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Life

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

Albert Ellis, Michael Abrams, Lidia Dengelegi

Lord, how the day passes! It is like a life, so quickly when we don't watch it, and so slowly if we do.

Steinbeck, John

There are four things every person has more of than they know; sins, debt, years, and foes.

Proverb, Persian

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.

Dimnet, Ernest

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

Life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting -- an unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified.

Redfield, James

May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live.

Hanks, Tom

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

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

Baluch, Joy

10.

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

Feidelson, Charles

11.

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

Mead, Margaret

12.

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

Seneca

13.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Rimbaud, Arthur

14.

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

15.

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

John Lennon

16.

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

Southey, Robert

17.

The man who says he has exhausted life generally means that life has exhausted him.

Wilde, Oscar

18.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

Robert Heinlein

19.

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

Forster, Edward M.

20.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

21.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Steve Jobs

22.

All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius

23.

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

24.

The mountains, rivers, earth, grasses, trees, and forests are always emanating a subtle, precious light, day and night, always emanating a subtle, precious sound, demonstrating and expounding to all people the unsurpassed ultimate truth.

Yuan-Sou

25.

The dream crossed twilight between birth and dying.

Eliot, T. S.

26.

To live is to go on a journey; to die is to come back home.

27.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

Camus, Albert

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Challenging the meaning of life is the truest expression of the state of being human.

Frankl, Viktor E.

31.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

Mccarthy, Mary

32.

Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain.

Horace

33.

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

Rivarol, Antoine

34.

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

35.

Life is action and passion; therefore, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of the time, at peril of being judged not to have lived.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

36.

I have never felt salvation in nature. I love cities above all.

Michelangelo

37.

Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not to be shared.

Nouwen, Henri

38.

The best things in life are never rationed. Friendship, loyalty, and love. They do not require coupons.

Hewitt, George T.

39.

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

James, William

40.

There is one thing that matters -- to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

41.

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

42.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.

Krishnamurti, Jiddu

43.

Living the truth in your heart without compromise brings kindness into the world. Attempts at kindness that compromise your heart cause only sadness.

44.

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

Cook, Robert A.

45.

It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.

Ellis, Havelock

46.

To live is not breathing it is action.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

47.

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

Aleichem, Sholom

48.

New York is an exciting town where something is happening all the time, most unsolved.

Carson, Johnny

49.

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

50.

Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.

Colton, Charles Caleb