Motivational Quotes

Life

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

Best Quotes about Life

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

Mumford, Lewis

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

On life's journey faith is nourishment, virtuous deeds are a shelter, wisdom is the light by day and right mindfulness is the protection by night. If a man lives a pure life, nothing can destroy him.

Buddha

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.

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

Austen, Jane

Life is like playing the violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Butler, Samuel

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

Crowley, Aleister

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

10.

People creep into childhood, bound into youth, sober in adulthood, and soften into old age.

Giles, Henry

11.

Life is really about a spiritual unfolding that is personal and enchanting -- an unfolding that no science or philosophy or religion has yet fully clarified.

Redfield, James

12.

We don't beat the Grim Reaper by living longer, we beat the Reaper by living well and living fully, for the Reaper will come for all of us. The question is what do we do between the time we are born and the time he shows up. It's too late to do all the things that you're gonna kinda get around to.

Randy Pausch

13.

Live as if everything you do will eventually be known.

Prather, Hugh

14.

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

15.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman: if it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

Whitman, Walt

16.

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

Nash, Ogden

17.

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

Rimbaud, Arthur

18.

Life loves the liver of it.

Angelou, Maya

19.

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

Larkin, Philip

20.

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.

21.

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

Roosevelt, Eleanor

22.

In making a living today, many no longer leave room for life.

Sizoo, Joseph R.

23.

The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist -- this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul -- a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know.

Mead, Margaret

24.

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

Walpole, Horace

25.

Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions.

Camus, Albert

26.

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.

27.

Every perfect life is a parable invented by God.

Weil, Simone

28.

A life of ease is a difficult pursuit.

Cowper, William

29.

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

30.

My life is a battle.

Voltaire

31.

Accept life, take it as it is? Stupid. The means of doing otherwise? Far from our having to take it, it is life that possesses us and on occasion shuts our mouths.

Camus, Albert

32.

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

33.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Steve Jobs

34.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Woolf, Virginia

35.

Everyone is trying to accomplish something big, not realizing that life is made up of little things.

Clark, Frank A.

36.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

Buechner, Frederick

37.

Life is but a moment, death also is but another.

Schuller, Robert H.

38.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.

Hemingway, Ernest

39.

Life is a wilderness of twists and turns, where faith is your only compass.

Santaguida, Paul

40.

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

Camus, Albert

41.

Life is a means of extracting fiction.

Stone, Robert

42.

Life -- how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.