Motivational Quotes

Life

America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.

- Mills, C. Wright

Best Quotes about Life

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

When I hear somebody sigh that Life is hard, I am always tempted to ask, Compared to what?

Harris, Sidney J.

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

Movie, Forrest Gump

Only those live who do good.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost.

Kempton, Murray

We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.

Fuller, Thomas

Man values life as a sacred jewel in such a way that he reveres him most who haughtily scorns it.

Platen

So in all these little ways we spin a web, a cocoon, around ourselves. The cocoon becomes nice and snug and comfortable because it is very familiar. We know every little corner of our life; we can even write poetry about it. We may also have ideas about the great mystery which religions speak of, which gives our cocoon an especial sense of security: we can worship the great mystery outside of it and feel good about that. The cocoon is safe, bounded, claustrophobic, and a little stale. We settle into it and live our lives.

Hayward, Jeremy W.

The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.

Hayes, Helen

10.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

11.

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

Heath, David M.

12.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

Hayakawa, S. I.

13.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Brodsky, Joseph

14.

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

Rogers, Carl

15.

The cloud-capp'd towers,the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

William Shakespeare

16.

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.

Isaac Asimov

17.

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

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 very interesting if you make mistakes.

Carpentier, Georges

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Life has taught me to think, but thinking has not taught me to live.

Herzen, Alexander

23.

Today's city is the most vulnerable social structure ever conceived by man.

Oppenheimer, Martin

24.

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

25.

Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time.

Frankl, Viktor E.

26.

Life is an uphill business for the guy who's not on the level.

Welsh, John

27.

Making a life comes before making a living.

28.

Life has taught me that it is not for our faults that we are disliked and even hated, but for our qualities.

Berenson, Bernard

29.

Life is too short to learn German.

Porson, R.

30.

We have long forgotten the ritual by which the house of our life was erected. But when it is under assault and enemy bombs are already taking their toll, what enervated, perverse antiquities do they not lay bare in the foundations.

Benjamin, Walter

31.

Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor.

Albert Ellis, Michael Abrams, Lidia Dengelegi

32.

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

Connolly, Cyril

33.

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

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

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

Dane, Frank

36.

Live poor so you can die rich.

37.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Gauguin, Paul

38.

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

39.

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

40.

If I had been present at creation, I would have given some useful hints.

Wise, Alfonso The

41.

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

42.

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

Austen, Jane

43.

This is it. There are no hidden meanings. All that mystical stuff is just what's so.

Erhard, Werner

44.

After reading all that has been written, and after thinking all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment.

Poe, Edgar Allan

45.

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what preserve the heart and secure comfort.

Davy, Sir Humphrey

46.

Life is just a mirror, and what you see out there, you must first see inside of you.

Wally'Famous'Amos

47.

My art and profession is to live.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

48.

Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness. It's in our hands.

Better, Cathy

49.

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