Are you looking for quotes which will help you make sense of life, or are you on the quest for words with will inspire you to take actions throughout your whole life?
From our collection of life quotes in pictures to our selected short quotes, we hope you find motivation and inspiration all the time, and by reading these life quotes, you will be able to share and inspire others.
Top Quotations
I have very strong feelings about how you lead your life. You always look ahead, you never look back.
Ann Richards
Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.
Theodore Roosevelt
Speakers who talk about what life has taught them never fail to keep the attention of their listeners.
When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world.
George Washington Carver
So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter.
Gordon W. Allport
There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.
Henry David Thoreau
You will find as you grow older that courage is the rarest of all qualities to be found in public life.
There is no short cut to achievement. Life requires thorough preparation – veneer isn’t worth anything.
George Washington Carver
I thank fate for having made me born poor. Poverty taught me the true value of the gifts useful to life.
Anatole France
For a writer, life is always too short to write. I will just try my best during what remains of my life.
Cao Yu
To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
Gaston Bachelard
You must take action now that will move you towards your goals. Develop a sense of urgency in your life.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Life is a succession of crises and moments when we have to rediscover who we are and what we really want.
Jean Vanier
Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.
John Buchan
We would like to ease the life of the Palestinians. I prepared a new plan that we call a positive agenda.
Silvan Shalom
Freedom and order are not incompatible… truth is strength… free discussion is the very life of truth.
Thomas Huxley
Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery.
Wayne Dyer
The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.
Anatole France
I have good anticipation, and good reaction to the the ball because I’ve played so many matches in my life.
Martina Hingis
All my pupils are the creme de la creme. Give me a girl of an impressionable age, and she is mine for life.
Muriel Spark
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le Guin
As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
Charles Baudelaire
Sometimes in life one experiences an emotion which is so strong that it is difficult to think, or to reason.
Eric Cantona
Read more quotes on life:
Top 20 Funny Quotes About Life
20 Great Quotes About Life
It is to the Riddle of the Sphinx that I have devoted fifty years of professional life as an anthropologist.
Gregory Bateson
I would be remiss if I left the impression that my life has been totally preoccupied with scholarly research.
Douglass North
Plots and character don’t make life. Life is here and now, anytime you say the word, anytime you let her rip.
Henry Miller
When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.
Muriel Spark
The three great moments of my life had to be the concerts of Ellington in 1938, Dizzy in ’48, and Ella in ’52.
Boris Vian
As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.
Fran Lebowitz
I ask you to stand by my side in the next five years. We shall live a good life in a Romania of all Romanians.
Traian Basescu
We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.
Barbara Ehrenreich
The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.
James Truslow Adams
A life lived of choice is a life of conscious action. A life lived of chance is a life of unconscious creation.
Neale Donald Walsch
At some stages of your life you will deal with things and at others you are overwhelmed with misery and anxiety.
Nigella Lawson
When a noble life has prepared for old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.
Anne Louise Germaine de Stael
You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.
Paulo Coelho
Without the way, there is no going; without the truth, there is no knowing; without the life, there is no living.
Thomas Kempis
To go from mortal to Buddha, you have to put an end to karma, nurture your awareness, and accept what life brings.
Bodhidharma
Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance.
James Bryant Conant
Life can’t be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
You know, I hate to give advice because my life has been so odd that almost nothing that’s happened to me can apply.
William Joyce
Never part without loving words to think of during your absence. It may be that you will not meet again in this life.
Jean Paul
One we discover how to appreciate the timeless values in our daily experiences, we can enjoy the best things in life.
Jerome K. Jerome
One of life’s most painful moments comes when we must admit that we didn’t do our homework, that we are not prepared.
Merlin Olsen
The domination of western values, beliefs and way of life has angered many from the east and in developing countries.
Silvia Cartwright
Youth is to all the glad season of life; but often only by what it hopes, not by what it attains, or what it escapes.
Thomas Carlyle
I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance, Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.
Ogden Nash
The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.
Robert Frost
Americans want our leaders to defend our values, our culture, our legacy of liberty and our way of life, not apologize.
Christine O’Donnell
Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you.
Fran Lebowitz
In my own case, who have spent my whole life in the practice of virtue, right conduct from habitual has become natural.
Sallust
It is a truth universally acknowledged that as soon as one part of your life starts looking up, another falls to pieces.
Helen Fielding
There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.
A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction.
Rita Mae Brown
The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.
Walter Benjamin
We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.
Edmond de Goncourt
Nine times out of ten, in the arts as in life, there is actually no truth to be discovered; there is only error to be exposed.
H. L. Mencken
Proteins are the machinery of living tissue that builds the structures and carries out the chemical reactions necessary for life.
Michael Behe
The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.
Susan Sontag
What is life, after all, but a challenge? And what better challenge can there be than the one between the pitcher and the hitter.
Warren Spahn
One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.
Blaise Pascal
We can always choose to perceive things differently. You can focus on what’s wrong in your life, or you can focus on what’s right.
Marianne Williamson
The moment seemed right to me for a full and, if possible, authoritative portrait of the life and character of the Prince of Wales.
Jonathan Dimbleby
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David Thoreau
We want to assert the very principle that truth is absolute, truth is supreme, truth is never disposable in national political life.
John Howard
The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.
Soren Kierkegaard
Consider any individual at any period of his life, and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his comfort.
Alexis de Tocqueville
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
Rene Descartes
I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along.
Doug Coupland
One must marry one’s feelings to one’s beliefs and ideas. That is probably the only way to achieve a measure of harmony in one’s life.
Napoleon Hill
And no book gives a deeper insight into the inner life of the Negro, his struggles and his aspirations, than, The Souls of Black Folk.
Ray Stannard Baker
Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.
Mary Catherine Bateson
Courage is what preserves our liberty, safety, life, and our homes and parents, our country and children. Courage comprises all things.
Plautus
When I can look life in the eyes, grown calm and very coldly wise, life will have given me the truth, and taken in exchange – my youth.
Sara Teasdale
We must recognize that we’re all part of a web of life around the world. Anytime you extinguish a species, the consequences are serious.
Gaylord Nelson
It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor. Live bravely and present a brave front to adversity.
Horace
We believe that civilization has been created under the pressure of the exigencies of life at the cost of satisfaction of the instincts.
Sigmund Freud
These then are my last words to you. Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Is it possible to covet a much longer life for one’s self and be as devoted to the well-being of the next generation? It’s a long argument.
Leon Kass
For there is a price ticket on everything that puts a whizz into life, and adventure follows the rule. It’s distressing, but there you are.
Leslie Charteris
I look upon another’s insistence on the merits of his or her life – duties, intellect, accomplishment – and see that most of it is nonsense.
Harold Brodkey
Life is the most versatile thing under the sun; and in the pursuit of life and character the author who works in a groove works in blinkers.
Laurence Housman
In real life, the most practical advice for leaders is not to treat pawns like pawns, nor princes like princes, but all persons like persons.
James MacGregor Burns
Although you may spend your life killing, You will not exhaust all your foes. But if you quell your own anger, your real enemy will be slain.
Nagarjuna
My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.
Harry S. Truman
The most important thing to strive for in life is some kind of personal and professional achievement. Not as a man or a woman, but as a person.
Candace Bushnell
It would be unthinkable in Canadian public life today for the public inauguration of our supreme political figures to be accompanied by prayer.
Stockwell Day
My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.
Your life will be no better than the plans you make and the action you take. You are the architect and builder of your own life, fortune, destiny.
Alfred A. Montapert
A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.
Bertrand Russell
The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don’t do it unless you’re willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.
Jim Harrison
Our lives are not determined by what happens to us but how we react to what happens, not by what life brings us but the attitude we bring to life.
Wade Boggs
Suffering! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.
Anatole France
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
Henry David Thoreau
Everybody thinks they’ll never get married at your age. You think you can go on all your life being single, but you suddenly find out that you can’t.
Alan Sillitoe
As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.
Anthony Trollope
I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too damn short.
Armistead Maupin
It’s essential to tell the truth at all times. This will reduce life’s pain. Lying distorts reality. All forms of distorted thinking must be corrected.
John Bradshaw
We do not yet have the solutions to these questions, but the awareness that we live in an endangered world is present in more and more life situations.
Ulrich Beck
Living Life Tomorrow’s fate, though thou be wise, Thou canst not tell nor yet surmise; Pass, therefore, not today in vain, For it will never come again.
Omar Khayyam
For decades, the journalistic norm had been that the private lives of public officials remained private unless that life impinged on public performance.
Roger Mudd
I have always held those political opinions which point to the universal brotherhood of man, no matter in what rank of life he may have taken his origin.
Alexander Mackenzie
We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.
Raymond Queneau
We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.
Hannah Arendt
The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.
John F. Kennedy
If man limits himself to a satisfied animal existence, and asks from life only what such an existence can give, the higher values of life at once disappear.
Christopher Dawson
Learning should be a joy and full of excitement. It is life’s greatest adventure; it is an illustrated excursion into the minds of the noble and the learned.
Taylor Caldwell
None of my own experiences ever finds its way into my work. However, the stages of my life – motherhood, middle age, etc. – often influence my subject matter.
Anne Tyler
To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.
Raoul Vaneigem
The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The character of Rosie is based on a woman who used to live in the same apartment building I lived in many years ago. She’s taken on a life of her own, of course.
Sue Grafton
We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
John Le Carre
Always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. Walt Disney Every decision you make is a mistake.
Edward Dahlberg
I am responsible. Although I may not be able to prevent the worst from happening, I am responsible for my attitude toward the inevitable misfortunes that darken life.
Walter Anderson
Roosevelt’s magic lay in one facet of his personality: He knew how to take the risk. No other man in public life I knew could so readily take the challenge of the new.
Emanuel Celler
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?
Henry James
Conservatism clings to what has been established, fearing that, once we begin to question the beliefs that we have inherited, all the values of life will be destroyed.
Morris Raphael Cohen
Not a living thing was to be seen and the cottages that sat huddled close to the ground remained fast shut; the smoke from the chimneys alone still gave a sign of life.
Stijn Streuvels
By shading off, as I have done, the portion of the area of the diagram according to the individual age, every one may see how much of life is consumed, and what is left.
Warren De la Rue
It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.
Epicurus
Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.
Jeffrey Archer
In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
John Kenneth Galbraith
We should not be so taken up in the search for truth, as to neglect the needful duties of active life; for it is only action that gives a true value and commendation to virtue.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
No matter what Aristotle and the Philosophers say, nothing is equal to tobacco; it’s the passion of the well-bred, and he who lives without tobacco lives a life not worth living.
Moliere
It is, therefore, a fact that anybody who wants to realise Truth or who wants to be humane, must follow non-violent ways of life, otherwise he will not be able to reach the Truth.
Morarji Desai
I just don’t deal with the negativity. I can’t get involved in that side of it. I don’t understand it, and you can’t let it take away from your life and what you are trying to do.
Rick Pitino
Socialism is good when it comes to wages, but it tells me nothing when it comes to other questions in life that are more private and painful, for which I must seek answers elsewhere.
Karel Capek
There is an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for.
Saul Bellow
Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.
Khalil Gibran
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’
Although farming of any sort was almost as impossible in the plains as in the dry regions of winter rains farther west, the abundance of buffaloes made life much easier in many respects.
Ellsworth Huntington
A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing.
Georges Bataille
Deep within man dwell those slumbering powers; powers that would astonish him, that he never dreamed of possessing; forces that would revolutionize his life if aroused and put into action.
Orison Swett Marden
There is no finer sensations in life that which comes with victory over one’s self. Go forward to a goal of inward achievement, brushing aside all your old internal enemies as you advance.
Vash Young
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
Anais Nin
Coping with the demands of everyday life would be exceedingly trying if one could arrive at solutions to problems only by actually performing possible options and suffering the consequences.
Albert Bandura
I believe in the separation of church and state, absolutely. But I don’t believe in the separation of public life from our values, our basic values, and for many of us, our religious values.
Jim Wallis
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to know what was left.
Henry James
The universe is asymmetric and I am persuaded that life, as it is known to us, is a direct result of the asymmetry of the universe or of its indirect consequences. The universe is asymmetric.
Louis Pasteur
Say not that honor is the child of boldness, nor believe thou that the hazard of life alone can pay the price of it: it is not to the action that it is due, but to the manner of performing it.
Akhenaton
I never doubted my ability, but when you hear all your life you’re inferior, it makes you wonder if the other guys have something you’ve never seen before. If they do, I’m still looking for it.
Hank Aaron
Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.
Mary Wollstonecraft
I had such a wonderful life before drugs and alcohol abuse. I’ve got that life back now and plan to keep it. Maybe I had to go through what I did to get to this point, to appreciate this life more.
Harvey Martin
The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.
Arthur Miller
The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.
J. M. Coetzee
The most interesting thing in the world is another human being who wonders, suffers and raises the questions that have bothered him to the last day of his life, knowing he will never get the answers.
I don’t believe in an afterlife, so I don’t have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.
Isaac Asimov
If you are given a chance to be a role model, I think you should always take it because you can influence a person’s life in a positive light, and that’s what I want to do. That’s what it’s all about.
Tiger Woods
Of all the Beauties, it is that which attracts the most lasting Admiration, gives the greatest Charm to every thing we say or do, and renders us amiable in every Station, and thro’ every Stage of Life.
Eliza Haywood
The longer we listen to one another – with real attention – the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.
Barbara Deming
The biggest thing we get out of it is seeing the kids smile. And hopefully we will also see that the lessons we’re teaching – not only the fundamentals of hockey, but also the life values – are sinking in.
Bobby Orr
The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding school or an operative with the CIA posted abroad. I could write a book about all the things I was sure about.
Tucker Carlson
The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.
Alfred Jarry
I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That’s the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about.
Chuck Palahniuk
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.
Luigi Pirandello
And we know there has been horrendous loss of life and suffering and we know that there is anger. Anyone who came anywhere near the general election in constituencies with a substantial Muslim population knows that.
Clare Short
I am sensible of the velocity of the moments, and entering that part of my head alert to the motion of the world I am aware that life was never perfect, never absolute. This bestows contentment, even a fearlessness.
Harold Brodkey
My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it for so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too damn short.
Armistead Maupin
Well I travelled quite a lot in the east, and one of the things that impressed me greatly was the buddhist notion of the continuity of things, the wheel of life which is what we’re talking about, the ever turning wheel.
Morris West
With honesty of purpose, balance, a respect for tradition, courage, and, above all, a philosophy of life, any young person who embraces the historical profession will find it rich in rewards and durable in satisfaction.
Samuel E. Morison
Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend.
Albert Szent Gyorgyi
In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. The young they keep out of mischief; to the old they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life they incite to noble deeds.
Aristotle
I understand the harsh feelings and sentiments from my opponents and their supporters because I myself have been defeated twice in my political life in the past and I understand very well it is hard to accept your own failure.
Chen Shui-bian
Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.
Barack Obama
There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.
Marcel Proust
The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.
Asa Gray
We can consciously end our life almost anytime we choose. This ability is an endowment, like laughing and blushing, given to no other animal… in any given moment, by not exercising the option of suicide, we are choosing to live.
Peter McWilliams
Choice of attention – to pay attention to this and ignore that – is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
W. H. Auden
The place of my birth, and residence for nearly sixteen years, in the early part of my life, became endeared to my feelings and affections; and more especially so after I had quitted it for an unknown place, and to associate with strangers.
John Britton
The important thing isn’t the house. It’s the ability to make it. You carry that in your brains and in your hands, wherever you go… It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.
Barbara Kingsolver
I am sure that the sad days and happenings were rare, and that I lived the joyous and careless life of other children; but just because the happy days were so habitual to me they made no impression upon my mind, and I can no longer recall them.
Pierre Loti
He was scarcely then a year old, and knew so little of herding that he had never turned a sheep in his life; but as soon as he discovered it was his duty to do so I can never forget with what anxiety and eagerness he learned his different evolutions.
James Hogg
Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.
Louis Aragon
What if you gave someone a gift, and they neglected to thank you for it – would you be likely to give them another? Life is the same way. In order to attract more of the blessings that life has to offer, you must truly appreciate what you already have.
Ralph Marston
The moral and social aspiration proper to American life is, of course, the aspiration vaguely described by the word democratic; and the actual achievement of the American nation points towards an adequate and fruitful definition of the democratic ideal.
Herbert Croly
Acceptance of one’s life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.
Paul Tournier
Don’t Make Assumptions. Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. With just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life.
Miguel Angel Ruiz
An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth – in short, materialism – does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.
Charles Edwards
We also learn that this country and the Western world have no monopoly of goodness and truth and scholarship, we begin to appreciate the ingredients that are indispensable to making a better world. In a life of learning that is, perhaps, the greatest lesson of all.
John Hope Franklin
I can no more think of my own life without thinking of wine and wines and where they grew for me and why I drank them when I did and why I picked the grapes and where I opened the oldest procurable bottles, and all that, than I can remember living before I breathed.
M. F. K. Fisher
Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.
John Rawls
It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Let me say that the path I did take for a brief period of my life was not of reckless drug use, hurting others, but it was a path of quiet rebellion, of a little experimentation of a darker side of my confusion in a confusing world, lost in the midst of finding my identity.
Jennifer Capriati
A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.
Christopher Hampton
Obama does not represent America. Nor does he represent anything what our forefathers stood for. This country is basically built on an attitude. It’s a way of life. It’s not because you’re born here. It’s not that you’re supposed to take from those who have and give to those who haven’t. That kills a country. It killed Russia.
Luke Scott
Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life.
Irwin Shaw
This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
William James
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
His life was one long extravaganza, like living inside a Faberge egg.
John Lahr
Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.
Samuel Butler
Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living.
Soren Kierkegaard
The most decisive actions of life are most often unconsidered actions.
Andre Gide
The crest and crowning of all good, life’s final star, is Brotherhood.
Edwin Markham
The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.
Pearl S. Buck
Our emotional symptoms are precious sources of life and individuality.
Thomas More
Your birth is a mistake you’ll spend your whole life trying to correct.
Chuck Palahniuk
Thy fate is the common fate of all; Into each life some rain must fall.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Hopefully everybody will just let me get on with my life. I’m going to.
Paul Gascoigne
One way to get the most out of life is to look upon it as an adventure.
William Feather
It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
Adlai E. Stevenson
Everything takes me longer than I expect. It’s the sad truth about life.
Donna Tartt
Give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with its necessaries.
John Lothrop Motley
That’s life. Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you.
Martin Goldsmith
Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.
Wilma Rudolph
The wise man knows how to run his life so that contemplation is Possible.
Gabriel Marcel
Life belongs to the living, and he who lives must be prepared for changes.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Quotes
Every life is march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.
Lyman Abbott
Wallow too much in sensitivity and you can’t deal with life, or the truth.
Neal Boortz
One makes mistakes; that is life. But it is never a mistake to have loved.
Romain Rolland
Not so the scientist. The very essence of his life is the service of truth.
Franz Boas
From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life.
Arthur Ashe
Where wise actions are the fruit of life, wise discourse is the pollination.
Bryant H. McGill
Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.
G. M. Trevelyan
Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.
Lyman Abbott
The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.
William James
Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
I made my own assessment of my life, and I began to live it. That was freedom.
Fernando Flores
The years from about eight to twelve constitute a unique period of human life.
G. Stanley Hall
Life is a series of sensations connected to different states of consciousness.
Remy de Gourmont
There are many sham diamonds in this life which pass for real, and vice versa.
William Makepeace Thackeray
There is nothing so strong or safe in an emergency of life as the simple truth.
Charles Dickens
So long as we do not blow our brains out, we have decided life is worth living.
Philipus Aureolus Paracelsus
Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
How many inner resources one needs to tolerate a life of leisure without fatigue.
Natalie Clifford Barney
Satisfaction consists in freedom from pain, which is the positive element of life.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.
Samuel Butler
When I select a topic, it’s usually a commitment of two to three years of my life.
Tracy Kidder
To be able to look life in the face: that’s worth living in a garret for, isn’t it?
Edith Wharton
May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.
Immanuel Kant
If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.
Meister Eckhart
One doesn’t recognize the really important moments in one’s life until it’s too late.
Agatha Christie
Have all the hopes of ages come to naught? Is life no more with noble meaning fraught?
Ada Cambridge
The greatest mistake you can make in life is continually fearing that you’ll make one.
Elbert Hubbard
There are some moments in life, some feelings; one can only point to them and pass by.
Ivan Turgenev
When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.
John Drinkwater
Human life is full of the play of samskaras – tendencies developed by repeated actions.
Vinoba Bhave
I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it.
Carl Sandburg
It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth.
Brooks Atkinson
If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.
Emile Zola
The trouble with life isn’t that there is no answer, it’s that there are so many answers.
Ruth Benedict
The best argument I know for an immortal life is the existence of a man who deserves one.
William James
Livable neighborhoods with a vibrant street life will stimulate our economic life as well.
Gavin Newsom
Truth is absolute, truth is supreme, truth is never disposable in national political life.
John Howard
I may have had a lot of luck in my life, but I still need to find a challenge in the game.
Zinedine Zidane
What a miserable thing life is: you’re living in clover, only the clover isn’t good enough.
Bertolt Brecht
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author’s own life into them.
Samuel Butler
An authentic life is the most personal form of worship. Everyday life has become my prayer.
Sarah Ban Breathnach
Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I am a Senator against my wishes and feelings, which I regret more than any other of my life.
Andrew Jackson
To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one’s own in the midst of abundance.
The essence of life is the smile of round female bottoms, under the shadow of cosmic boredom.
Guy de Maupassant
I lived my life one way for 35 years, for me. And then the focus came in on what I really was.
Pete Maravich
The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
Carl Jung
Show me a character whose life arouses my curiosity, and my flesh begins crawling with suspense.
Fawn M. Brodie
Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward.
Morrie Schwartz
The way you think, the way you behave, the way you eat, can influence your life by 30 to 50 years.
Deepak Chopra
If you think somebody cares about you and believes your life is worth saving, how can you give up?
Geraldine Ferraro
Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?
Mohandas Gandhi
Books are only the shadow and life the real thing. I believe this as strongly as any belief I hold.
Esther Forbes
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life IS worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
James Truslow Adams
You wait for fate to bring about the changes in life which you should be bringing about by yourself.
Doug Coupland
Our obligation is to give meaning to life and in doing so to overcome the passive, indifferent life.
Elie Wiesel
The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
Henry James
For the Absolute, as we now know, all life is individual, but is individual as expressing a meaning.
Josiah Royce
Part of life is to live it, and enjoy it, and seize the moments that you find particularly pleasing.
Robert M. Parker, Jr.