Motivational Quotes

Life

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs...

- Epicurus

Best Quotes about Life

Optimism and humor are the grease and glue of life. Without both of them we would never have survived our captivity.

Butler, Philip

Life is a gamble at terrible odds, if it were a bet, you would not take it.

Stoppard, Tom

The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.

Ben Stein

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.

Forster, Edward M.

Not how long, but how well you have lived is the main thing.

Seneca

Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.

Lehrer, Tom

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.

Sir Winston Churchill

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

So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. We may also have ideas about the great mystery which religions speak of, which gives our cocoon an especial sense of security: we can worship the great mystery outside of it and feel good about that. The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.

Hayward, Jeremy W.

10.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

11.

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

Walpole, Horace

12.

The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.

Calvino, Italo

13.

The life of every person is like a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another.

Barrie, Sir James M.

14.

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

Kempton, Murray

15.

The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss.

Carlyle, Thomas

16.

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

Nash, Ogden

17.

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

18.

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

Propp Jr., Fred

19.

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

20.

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

Dimnet, Ernest

21.

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

Horace

22.

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

Whitehead, Alfred North

23.

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

24.

All that a city will ever allow you is an angle on it -- an oblique, indirect sample of what it contains, or what passes through it; a point of view.

Conrad, Peter

25.

It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

26.

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things

Rilke, Rainer Maria

27.

Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice.

James, William

28.

The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.

Stark, Freya

29.

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

James, William

30.

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

31.

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

Augustine, St.

32.

Life is a classroom in which each of us is being tested, tried, and passed.

Thibodeau, Robert

33.

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

34.

Life is a campaign not a battle, and has its defeats as well as its victories.

Piatt, Don

35.

Two babies were born on the same day at the same hospital. They lay there and looked at each other. Their families came and took them away. Eighty years later, by a bizarre coincidence, they lay in the same hospital, on their deathbeds, next to each other. One of them looked at the other and said,so. What did you think?

Wright, Steven

36.

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

Erickson, Lou

37.

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

38.

Life is full and overflowing with the new. But it is necessary to empty out the old to make room for the new to enter.

Caddy, Eileen

39.

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.

Roosevelt, Eleanor

40.

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

41.

Life. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay.

Bierce, Ambrose

42.

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- that myth is more potent than history. I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts -- That hope always triumphs over experience -- That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Fulghum, Robert

43.

The truest end of life, is to find the life that doesn't end.

44.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.

Twain, Mark

45.

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.

Hugo, Victor

46.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

47.

There is only one way to get ready for immortality, and that is to love this life and live it as bravely and faithfully and cheerfully as we can.

Dyke, Henry Van

48.

In childhood be modest, in youth temperate, in adulthood just, and in old age prudent.

Socrates

49.

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

50.

Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Lao-Tzu