Motivational Quotes

Life

Living, just by itself -- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting --or he'll come along and nibble your brain.

- Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

Best Quotes about Life

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

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable.

Allen, Woody

This also -- that I live, I consider a gift of God.

Ovid

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.

Benjamin, Walter

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

The enjoyments of this life are not equal to its evils.

Pliny The Elder

Threescore years and ten is enough; if a man can't suffer all the misery he wants in that time, he must be numb.

Billings, Josh

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

10.

Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.

Mumford, Lewis

11.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Temple, Sir William

12.

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Kennedy, John F.

13.

Life is like riding a bicycle. You don't fall off unless you stop peddling.

Pepper, Claude D.

14.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

15.

Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Birth, copulation and death. That's all the facts when you come to the brass tacks.

Eliot, T. S.

19.

Best to live lightly, unthinkingly.

Sophocles

20.

The person lives twice who lives the first life well.

Herrick, Robert

21.

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

Holdcroft, Thomas L.

22.

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

23.

Life is a comedy for those who think... and a tragedy for those who feel.

Walpole, Horace

24.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

25.

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

26.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Johnson, Samuel

27.

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

Aristotle

28.

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

29.

New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it.

Simon, Neil

30.

All that man has will he give for his life.

Bible

31.

Life is a continual process of remaking ourselves.

32.

The less routine the more life.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

33.

And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour,we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.

William Shakespeare

34.

Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

35.

Do not take life too seriously; you will never get out of it alive.

Hubbard, Elbert

36.

If you're not in New York, you're camping out.

Dewey, Thomas E.

37.

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

Shields, Carol

38.

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.

La Bruyere, Jean De

39.

Washington is no place for a good actor. The competition from bad actors is too great.

Allen, Fred A.

40.

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

Kempton, Murray

41.

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

Dickens, Charles

42.

It is not how many years we live, but rather what we do with them.

Booth, Evangeline Cory

43.

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

Proverb, Indian

44.

It is very certain that the desire of life prolongs it.

Byron, Lord

45.

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

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.

Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.

Baudrillard, Jean

48.

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

49.

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

Baluch, Joy

50.

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

Rilke, Rainer Maria