Motivational Quotes

Life

If one had but a single glance to give the world, one should gaze on Istanbul.

- Lamartine, Alphonse De

Best Quotes about Life

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.

Rogers, Carl

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Mumford, Lewis

Life It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing.

Shakespeare, William

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Miller, Henry

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

Socrates

Life is just a bowl of pits.

Rodney Dangerfield

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

Barrie, Sir James M.

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

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

10.

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

11.

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

Nisami

12.

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

13.

Life is a foreign language: all men mispronounce it.

Morley, Christopher

14.

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

Pirandello, Luigi

15.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

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

17.

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: I'm with you kid. Let's go.

Angelou, Maya

18.

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

19.

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

Fran Lebowitz

20.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

21.

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

Field, Joanna

22.

You really haven't changed, you've just become more of yourself. That is really what were all trying to do: become more of ourselves.

Oprah Winfrey

23.

Most of us fall short much more by omission than by commission. While the world perishes we go our way: purposeless, passionless, day after day.

Pilgrim, Peace

24.

Life is always walking up to us and saying, 'Come on in, the living's fine,' and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

Baker, Russell (Wayne)

25.

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

Thibodeau, Robert

26.

One day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure its worth watching.

27.

One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

Austen, Jane

28.

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

29.

When we exercise self-control on a given occasion, we win for ourselves a little credibility we can rely on the next time around. Pretty soon we develop a reputation to ourselves that we want badly to uphold. With each test that we meet, our resolve gains momentum, fueled by the fear that we may succumb and establish a damaging precedent for our own weakness.

Daniel Akst

30.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

31.

We have penetrated far less deeply into the regularities obtaining within the realm of living things, but deeply enough nevertheless to sense at least the rule of fixed necessity... what is still lacking here is a grasp of the connections of profound generality, but not a knowledge of order itself.

Einstein, Albert

32.

Life is like one big Mardi Gras. But instead of showing your boobs, show people your brain, and if they like what they'll, you'll have more beads than you know what to do with.

Ellen DeGeneres

33.

What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city.

Coriolanus III

34.

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.

35.

You can have peace of mind, improved health and an ever-increasing flow of energy. Life can be full of joy and satisfaction.

Peale, Norman Vincent

36.

Life is very interesting if you make mistakes.

Carpentier, Georges

37.

In the early days all I hoped was to make a living out of what I did best. But, since there's no real market for masturbation I had to fall back on my bass playing abilities.

Claypool, Les

38.

To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

39.

The City attaches an exaggerated importance to the healing power of lunch.

Fieldes, Christopher

40.

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

Norman Thomas

41.

A man's life is 20 years of having his mother ask him where he is going, 40 years of having his wife ask the same question and, at the end, perhaps having the mourners wondering too.

42.

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

43.

Life is not always not always what one wants it to be., but to make the best of it as it is the only way of being happy.

Churchill, Jennie Jerome

44.

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

Edna St. Vincent Millay

45.

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

Austen, Jane

46.

The drama of life begins with a wail and ends with a sigh.

Antrim, Minna

47.

We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.

Markham, Edwin

48.

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

Epicurus

49.

We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn't matter so much as it seemed to do -- it's not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn't matter so much.

Lawrence, D. H.

50.

Feelings are really your GPS system for life. When your supposed to do something, or not supposed to do something, your emotional guidance system lets you know.

Oprah Winfrey