Motivational Quotes

Life

The game of life is a game of boomerangs. Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.

- Shinn, Florence Scovel

Best Quotes about Life

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

Dante Alighieri

The cloud-capp'd towers,the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare

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

Forster, Edward M.

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

Leary, Denis

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

Presser, Ross

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

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

You live in a deranged age, more deranged that usual, because in spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.

Percy, Walker

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

Kempton, Murray

10.

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

11.

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

Heath, David M.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig

15.

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

16.

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

17.

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard

18.

The first thing that strikes a visitor to Paris is a taxi.

Allen, Fred A.

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.

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

Aristotle

21.

Order your soul; reduce your wants; live in charity; associate in Christian community; obey the laws; trust in Providence.

Augustine, St.

22.

This is a world of action, and not for moping and droning in.

Dickens, Charles

23.

Life is a horizontal fall.

Cocteau, Jean

24.

We never live, but we hope to live; and as we are always arranging to be happy, it must be that we never are so.

Pascal, Blaise

25.

There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring, or the rustle of an insect's wings. But perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand. The clatter only seems to insult the ears.

Seattle, Chief

26.

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

Mccarthy, Mary

27.

In the morning of life, work; in the mid day give council; in the evening, pray.

Proverb, German

28.

Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.

Saroyan, William

29.

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.

30.

Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.

Nash, Ogden

31.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

32.

Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

33.

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Mumford, Lewis

34.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Shaw, George Bernard

35.

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

Lebowitz, Fran

36.

Nature has invented reproduction as a mechanism for life to move forward. As a life force that passes right through us and makes us a link in the evolution of life.

Louis Schwartzberg

37.

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

38.

It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.

Ruskin, John

39.

The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears -- as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

40.

When in Rome, do as Rome does.

Bierce, Ambrose

41.

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

42.

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

Dickens, Charles

43.

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

Horace

44.

The measure of a life, after all, is not its duration, but its donation.

Boom, Corrie Ten

45.

Walk through life eager and open to self-improvement and that which is going to best help you evolve, because that's really why were here: to evolve as human beings.

Oprah Winfrey

46.

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

47.

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

48.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

Norman Thomas

49.

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

50.

Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von