Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

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

Norman Thomas

For what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. [James 4:14]

Bible

We Japanese enjoy the small pleasures, not extravagance. I believe a man should have a simple lifestyle -- even if he can afford more.

Ibuka, Massaru

The world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open.

William Shakespeare

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

Hewitt, George T.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

Life is like a taxi. The meter just keeps a-ticking whether you are getting somewhere or just standing still.

Erickson, Lou

There is no solitude in the world like that of the big city.

Norris, Kathleen

Life may not be beautiful, but it is interesting.

Seeley, Sir John Robert

10.

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

Life is a glass given to us to fill; a busy life is filling it with as much as it can hold; a hurried life has had more poured into it than it can contain.

Brown, William Adams

13.

Life itself is the proper binge.

Child, Julia

14.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

Cabell, James Branch

16.

Life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward, you have to give back.

Oprah Winfrey

17.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

18.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life... I wanted to live so sturdily and so Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life... to drive life into a corner to know it by experience and be able to give an account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau, Henry David

19.

Life too near paralyses art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

Platen

21.

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

Seneca

22.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs, Jane

23.

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

24.

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

Augustine, St.

25.

The real being, with no status, is always going in and out through the doors of your face.

Lin-Chi

26.

No one knows when they are well off.

Punch

27.

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

28.

Life is like wine, the longer you take to enjoy it the more chance you've got of tasting vinegar.

29.

The less routine the more life.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

30.

The tragedy of life is not that a man loses, but that he almost wins.

Broun, Heywood

31.

Half my life is an act of revision.

Irving, John

32.

Life never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel.

Mansfield, Katherine

33.

He who is not busy being born is busy dying.

Dylan, Bob

34.

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

35.

The trouble with life is that there are so many beautiful women and so little time.

Barrymore, John

36.

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

37.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

Truman Capote

38.

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

Amiel, Henri Frederic

39.

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

Lennon, John

40.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always a sketch. No sketch is not quite the right word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch of nothing, an outline with no picture.

Kundera, Milan

41.

Real life seems to have no plots.

Burnett, Ivy Compton

42.

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around.

Hepburn, Katharine

43.

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

Camus, Albert

44.

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

45.

Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

Jefferson, Thomas

46.

Life, an age to the miserable, and a moment to the happy.

Bacon, Francis

47.

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

Nouwen, Henri

48.

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

49.

Life is a rollercoaster. Try to eat a light lunch.

Schmaltz, David A.

50.

If God exists and we are made in his image we can have real meaning, and we can have real knowledge through what he has communicated to us.

Schaeffer, Francis