Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

Raban, Jonathan

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Wolfe, Thomas

I used to trouble about what life was for -- now being alive seems sufficient reason.

Field, Joanna

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

Ovid

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

Oprah Winfrey

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it.

Christopher Morley

The life of man is a journey; a journey that must be traveled, however bad the roads or the accommodation.

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

Paris is the caf? of Europe.

Galiani, Ferdinando

10.

I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital... not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground. The crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

Ruskin, John

11.

Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

12.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

13.

Life is like a box of chocolates: You never know what you're gonna get.

Movie, Forrest Gump

14.

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.

Robert Heinlein

15.

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

Boom, Corrie Ten

16.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Delacroix, Eugene

17.

Attack life, it's going to kill you anyway.

Coallier, Steven

18.

Life at the top is financially rewarding, spiritually draining, physically exhausting, and short.

Newman, Peter C.

19.

Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat... the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.

20.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.

Pavese, Cesare

21.

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

Heath, David M.

22.

Life comes from physical survival; but the good life comes from what we care about.

May, Rollo

23.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

24.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

Reed, Lou

25.

Not by gain our life is measured, But by what we've lost 'Tis scored; 'Tis not how much wine is drunken But how much has been outpoured. For the strength of love never standeth In the sacrifice we bear; He who has the greatest suffering Ever has the most to share.

Nee, Watchman

26.

In the early days of the Indian Territory, there were no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough.

Rogers, Will

27.

Life is like a cash register, in that every account, every thought, every deed, like every sale, is registered and recorded.

Sheen, Fulton John

28.

It is not reason which is the guide of life, but custom.

Hume, David

29.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Morley, Christopher

30.

There is one thing that matters -- to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

31.

City life is millions of people being lonesome together.

Thoreau, Henry David

32.

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

33.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

Rimbaud, Arthur

34.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Santayana, George

35.

Don't worry about your life; what you shall eat, or drink, or the clothing for your body. [Matthew 6:31]

Bible

36.

The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing; the main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unseen attack.

Aurelius, Marcus

37.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

Morley, Christopher

38.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live --moreover, the only one.

Cioran, E. M.

39.

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

It is not length of life, but depth of life.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

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

Allen, Fred A.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

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

Miller, Henry

48.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

James, William

49.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is.