Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Life

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

The world has so many lessons to teach you. I consider the world, our earth, to be like a school, and our life, the classrooms. Sometimes on our planet life school, the lessons often come dressed up as detours and road blocks and sometimes as full blown crises. And the secret I've learned to getting ahead is being open to the lessons.

Oprah Winfrey

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

Hume, David

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

Where the criminals cover their crimes by making them legal. [On Washington D. C.]

Dane, Frank

They that have lived a single day have lived an age.

La Bruyere, Jean De

Living the truth in your heart without compromise brings kindness into the world. Attempts at kindness that compromise your heart cause only sadness.

The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.

Baudrillard, Jean

10.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

Camus, Albert

11.

Those who live are those who fight.

Hugo, Victor

12.

The crime problem in New York is getting really serious. The other day the Statue of Liberty had both hands up.

Leno, Jay

13.

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

Nouwen, Henri

14.

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me.

Schweitzer, Albert

15.

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

Piatt, Don

16.

Three keys to more abundant living: caring about others, daring for others, sharing with others.

Ward, William A.

17.

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

18.

The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.

Edison, Thomas A.

19.

How could drops of water know themselves to be a river? Yet the river flows on.

Saint-Exupery, Antoine De

20.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

Aristotle

21.

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it.

Holmes Jr., Oliver Wendell

22.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Stone, Robert

23.

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

24.

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

James, William

25.

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

Austen, Jane

26.

Live virtuously, and you cannot not die too soon, or live too long.

Russell, Lady R.

27.

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

28.

Life loves the liver of it.

Angelou, Maya

29.

You're alive. Do something. The directive in life, the moral imperative was so uncomplicated. It could be expressed in single words, not complete sentences. It sounded like this: Look. Listen. Choose. Act.

Barbara Hall

30.

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

Sartre, Jean-Paul

31.

Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Camus, Albert

32.

We dribble away our life, little by little, in small packages -- we don't throw it away all at once.

Cook, Robert A.

33.

Living, just by itself -- what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting --or he'll come along and nibble your brain.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

34.

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

35.

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

Woody Allen

36.

There are three stages in a person's life, birth, their life and death. They are not conscious of birth submit to death and forget to live.

La Bruyere, Jean De

37.

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

38.

Life is not one thing after another. It's the same damn thing over and over!

39.

Live your life as though your every act were to become a universal law.

Kant, Immanuel

40.

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

Millay, Edna St. Vincent

41.

Life is an earnest business, and no one every became good or great on a diet of broad grins.

Blackie, Professor

42.

Walk through life eager and open to self-improvement and that which is going to best help you evolve, because that's really why were here: to evolve as human beings.

Oprah Winfrey

43.

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

44.

Difficulties come when you don't pay attention to life's whisper. Life always whispers to you first, but if you ignore the whisper, sooner or later you'll get a scream.

Oprah Winfrey

45.

It is advisable that a person know at least three things, where they are, where they are going, and what they had best do under the circumstances.

Ruskin, John

46.

Life isn't simple. But the beauty of it is, you can always start over. It'll get easier.

Alacia Bessette

47.

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.

Radner, Gilda

48.

We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.

Mccarthy, Mary

49.

A life is like a tree -- if you don't make it straight when its young and green, you'll never do it when it's old and dry.

50.

In the morning of life, work; in the mid day give council; in the evening, pray.

Proverb, German