Motivational Quotes

Life

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

- Lawrence, D. H.

Best Quotes about Life

The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extra human architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.

Lorca, Federico Garcia

Life is supposed to get tough.

Grammer, Kelsey

The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.

Miller, Henry

Washington is a place where politicians don't know which way is up and taxes don't know which way is down.

Orben, Robert

If we make our goal to live a life of compassion and unconditional love, then the world will indeed become a garden where all kinds of flowers can bloom and grow.

KuBler-Ross, Elisabeth

The purpose of life is to fight maturity.

Dick Werthimer

Life is just one damned thing after another.

Elbert Hubbard

Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.

Camus, Albert

The sad souls of those who lived without blame and without praise.

Dante Alighieri

10.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria

11.

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

12.

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

Thibodeau, Robert

13.

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

Zeno

14.

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Aleichem, Sholom

15.

To live lightheartedly but not recklessly; to be gay without being boisterous; to be courageous without being bold; to show trust and cheerful resignation without fatalism -- this is the art of living.

La Fontaine, Jean De

16.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived --forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

17.

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

Hewitt, George T.

18.

This is what is sad when one contemplates human life, that so many live out their lives in quiet lostness... they live, as it were, away from themselves and vanish like shadows. Their immortal souls are blown away, and they are not disquieted by the question of its immortality, because they are already disintegrated before they die.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

19.

My kids idea of a hard life is to live in a house with only one phone.

Foreman, George

20.

Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

21.

Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

22.

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

Erickson, Lou

23.

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

Robert Heinlein

24.

Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for.

Jordan, David Starr

25.

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

Leacock, Stephen B.

26.

Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.

Reed, Lou

27.

May you live as long as you want and not want as long as you live.

Hanks, Tom

28.

Life itself is the proper binge.

Child, Julia

29.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

30.

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.

31.

I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

Ackerman, Diane

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Most people think life sucks, and then you die. Not me. I beg to differ. I think life sucks, then you get cancer, then your dog dies, your wife leaves you, the cancer goes into remission, you get a new dog, you get remarried, you owe ten million dollars in medical bills but you work hard for thirty-five years and you pay it back and then -- one day -- you have a massive stroke, your whole right side is paralyzed, you have to limp along the streets and speak out of the left side of your mouth and drool but you go into rehabilitation and regain the power to walk and the power to talk and then -- one day -- you step off a curb at Sixty-seventh Street, and BANG you get hit by a city bus and then you die. Maybe.

Leary, Denis

35.

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living that are desired when dying.

36.

I believe that life is a journey, often difficult and sometimes incredibly cruel, but we are well equipped for it if only we tap into our talents and gifts and allow them to blossom.

Brown, Les

37.

Even when I'm sick and depressed, I love life.

Rubinstein, Arthur

38.

The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.

Wilde, Oscar

39.

Towns oftener swamp one than carry one out onto the big ocean of life.

Lawrence, D. H.

40.

Your life is what your thoughts make it.

Aurelius, Marcus

41.

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

Stoppard, Tom

42.

One recipe for a longer life; Never exceed the speed limit.

43.

Life is real! Life is earnest! And death is not its goal. Dust thou art, to dust returneth, was not spoken of the soul.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

44.

May God bless you to live as long as you want to; and want to as long as you live!

Proverb, Scottish

45.

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

Lin-Chi

46.

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

Dimnet, Ernest

47.

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

Nash, Ogden

48.

Life flows on within you and without you.

Harrison, George

49.

Young people talk of what they are doing; old people of what they have done; and fools of what they have a mind to do.

Proverb

50.

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