Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

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.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

Mead, Margaret

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

Nisami

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

Jordan, David Starr

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

Young, J. Z.

People should always have something which they prefer to life.

Seume, Johann G.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.

Mumford, Lewis

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, the tissue of every day and hour.

Leacock, Stephen B.

10.

Some people seem to go through life standing at the complaint counter.

Propp Jr., Fred

11.

There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.

Gandhi, Mahatma

12.

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

13.

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life.

Carson, Rachel

14.

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

James, William

15.

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

Camus, Albert

16.

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

Larkin, Philip

17.

Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

18.

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

19.

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.

Kempis, Thomas

20.

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

21.

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

Camus, Albert

22.

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

John Lennon

23.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

24.

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

Kornfield, Jack

25.

Life is something you do when you can't get to sleep.

Lebowitz, Fran

26.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

27.

The life of man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long.

Russell, Bertrand

28.

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

29.

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

30.

In matters of self-control as we shall see again and again, speed kills. But a little friction really can save lives.

Daniel Akst

31.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

Aristotle

32.

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

33.

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

Hanks, Tom

34.

Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.

Miller, Henry

35.

Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe.

Whitehead, Alfred North

36.

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Miller, Henry

37.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

38.

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

39.

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

40.

Life's enchanted cup sparkles near the brim.

Byron, Lord

41.

There is only one way to come into this world; there are too many ways to leave it.

Harington, Donald

42.

In the game of life it's a good idea to have a few early losses, which relieves you of the pressure of trying to maintain an undefeated season.

Baughan, Bill

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.

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.

Sartre, Jean-Paul

45.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

46.

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

47.

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.

Boulanger, Nadia

48.

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

49.

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

Butler, Samuel

50.

Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds us down or polishes us up depends on us.

Holdcroft, Thomas L.