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Inspirational Quotes & Motivational Quotes

"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."

~ Barbara Hall

"The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want."
~ Ben Stein

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious."
~ Brendan Gill

"Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it."
~ Christopher Morley

"The purpose of life is to fight maturity."
~ Dick Werthimer

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Romania."
~ Dorothy Parker

"It's not true that life is one damn thing after another; it is one damn thing over and over."
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Life is just one damned thing after another."
~ Elbert Hubbard

"Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep."
~ Fran Lebowitz

"Life is something that everyone should try at least once."
~ Henry J. Tillman

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."
~ Isaac Asimov

"Life is a long lesson in humility."
~ James M. Barrie

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
~ John Lennon

"The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values."
~ Norman Thomas

"Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one."
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about."
~ Oscar Wilde

"Life is a zoo in a jungle."
~ Peter De Vries

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease."
~ R. D. Laing

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

~ Robert Heinlein

"Life is just a bowl of pits."

~ Rodney Dangerfield

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

~ Samuel Butler

"We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give."

~ Sir Winston Churchill

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

~ Socrates

"Life is an unbroken succession of false situations."

~ Thornton Wilder

"Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act."

~ Truman Capote

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

~ Wally 'Famous' Amos

"Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all."

~ William Goldman


"Life is as tedious as a twice-told tale vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man."

~ William Shakespeare

"Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable."

~ Woody Allen

"The goal of life is living in agreement with nature."

~ Zeno

"Just living is not enough.  One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower."

~ Hans Christian Anderson


"When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me."

~ Erma Bombeck


"The purpose of life is a life of purpose."

~ Robert Byrne


"The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth."

~ Chinese Proverb


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

~ Woody Allen

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.  This makes it hard to plan the day."

~ Elwyn Brooks White


"A life without cause is a life without effect."

~ Barbarella


"Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished.  If you're alive, it isn't."

~ Richard Bach


"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

~ Henry David Thoreau


"I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it."

~ Jack Handey


"Life is a foreign language:  all men mispronounce it."

~ Christopher Morley


"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee,
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."

~ Robert Frost


"In spite of the cost of living, it's still popular."

~ Kathy Norris


"To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."

~ Emily Dickinson


"Yes, I will try to be.  Because I believe that not being is arrogant."

~ Antonio Porchia


"My life has a superb cast but I can't figure out the plot."

~ Ashleigh Brilliant


"I say, if your knees aren't green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life."

~ Bill Watterson


"You fall out of your mother's womb, you crawl across open country under fire, and drop into your grave."

~ Quentin Crisp


"I think I've discovered the secret of life - you just hang around until you get used to it."

~ Charles Schulz


"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."

~ Arthur Miller


"Life is like a blanket too short.  You pull it up and your toes rebel, you yank it down and shivers meander about your shoulder; but cheerful folks manage to draw their knees up and pass a very comfortable night."

~ Marion Howard


"You can't escape history, or the needs and neuroses you've picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth."

~ Charles Johnson


"Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can."

~ Danny Kaye


"I have a simple philosophy:  Fill what's empty.  Empty what's full.  Scratch where it itches."

~ lice Roosevelt Longworth


"Life is like a coin.  You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once."

~ Lillian Dickson


"Life is a cement trampoline."

~ Howard Nordberg


"To preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him."

~ Jeremy Taylor


"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."

~ Friedrich Nietzsche


"Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be."

~ Grandma Moses



"Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies."

~ Erich Fromm


"My formula for living is quite simple.  I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night.  In between, I occupy myself as best I can."

~ Cary Grant


"To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach."

~ Havelock Ellis


"The great business of life is to be, to do, to do without, and to depart."

~ John, Viscount Morley


"My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn."

~ Louis Adamic


"No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence."

~ Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott

"Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire.  I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl.  Let him come out as I do, and bark."

~ Samuel Johnson


"Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told:  "I am with you kid.  Let's go.""

~ Maya Angelou


"Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself."

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery


"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."

~ George Bernard Shaw


"Puritans will never believe it, but life is full of disagreeable things that aren't even good for you."

~ Mignon McLaughlin

"'Tis all a chequer board of nights and days,
Where destiny with men for pieces plays;
Hither and thither, and mates, and slays."

~ Edward Fitzgerald


"...the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse."

~ Walt Whitman


"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living.  The world owes you nothing.  It was here first."

~ Mark Twain


"Life is the game that must be played."

~ Edwin Arlington Robinson


"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.  You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life."

~ Albert Camus


"There is no wealth but life."

~ John Ruskin


"I know what things are good:  friendship and work and conversation.  These I shall have."

~ Rupert Brooke


"Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise."

~ Jerome K. Jerome


"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."

~ Henry David Thoreau


"Eating, loving, singing and digesting are, in truth, the four acts of the comic opera known as life, and they pass like bubbles of a bottle of champagne.  Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a complete fool."

~ Gioacchino Rossini


"We mourn the transitory things and fret under the yoke of the immutable ones."

~ Paul Eldridge


"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."

~ T.S. Eliot


"Life was a damned muddle - a football game with everyone offside and the referee gotten rid of - everyone claiming the referee would have been on his side."

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald


"Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out."

~ Anton Chekhov


"Following straight lines shortens distances, and also life."

~ Antonio Porchia


"Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation."

~ W. Somerset Maugham


"I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on."

~ Robert Browning


"Life may have no meaning.  Or even worse, it may have a meaning of which I disapprove."

~ Ashleigh Brilliant


"Life is an incurable Disease."

~ Abraham Cowley


"For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life."

~ Albert Camus


"Life is not so bad if you have plenty of luck, a good physique, and not too much imagination."

~ Christopher Isherwood


"The only way to have a life is to commit to it like crazy."

~ Angelina Jolie


"Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do."

~ Bruce Crampton


"Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix."

~ Mignon McLaughlin


"In masks outrageous and austere The years go by in single file; But none has merited my fear, And none has quite escaped my smile."

~ Elinor Hoyt Wylie


"The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss."

~ Thomas Carlyle


"All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on."

~ Havelock Ellis


"We tear life out of life to use it for looking at itself."

~ Antonio Porchia


"[Psychoanalysis] is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts.  Life itself still remains a very effective therapist."

~ Karen Horney


"The tragedy of life is not that man loses, but that he almost wins."

~ Heywood Broun


"Life is a long process of getting tired."

~ Samuel Butler


"He who has nothing to die for has nothing to live for."

~ Moroccan Proverb


"But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."

~ Umberto Eco


"God asks no man whether he will accept life.  That is not the choice.  You must take it.  The only question is how."

~ Henry Ward Beecher


"Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I always think that the chances of finding out what really is going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say hang the sense of it and just keep yourself occupied."

~ Douglas Adams


"Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?"

~ George Bernard Shaw


"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life.  It goes on."

~ Robert Frost


"Life is like a ten-speed bicycle.  Most of us have gears we never use."

~ Charles Schulz


"It may be life is only worthwhile at moments.  Perhaps that is all we ought to expect."

~ Sherwood Anderson


"I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse.  I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment."

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein


"The art of life is the art of avoiding pain."

~ Thomas Jefferson


"Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man's life."

~ Vita Sackville-West


"Life is one big judgment call."

~ T. Guillemets


"The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century."

~ William Lyon Phelps


"In the book of life, the answers aren't in the back."

~ Charlie Brown


"The world is a grindstone and life is your nose."

~ Fred Allen


"Not unfortunately the universe is wild - game-flavoured as a hawk's wing."

~ B.P. Blood


"You live and learn.  At any rate, you live."

~ Douglas Adams


"Everything which is properly business we must keep carefully separate from life.  Business requires earnestness and method; life must have a freed handling."

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe


"Life is made up of constant calls to action, and we seldom have time for more than hastily contrived answers."

~ Learned Hand


"The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening.  It is a little star dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched."

~ Henry David Thoreau


"Life is the sum of all your choices."

~ Albert Camus


"Out of a hundred years a few minutes were made that stayed with me, not a hundred years."

~ Antonio Porchia


"If A equals success, then the formula is:  A = X + Y + Z, where X is work, Y is play, and Z is keep your mouth shut."

~ Albert Einstein


"I gave my life to learning how to live. Now that I have organized it all...It is just about over."

~ Sandra Hochman


"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination.  Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic."

~ Anaïs Nin


"[P]erhaps nothing 'ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late.  It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right."

~ George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)


"Only a few things are really important."

~ Marie Dressler


"We are like people with short-term leases on summer cottages; we can never seem to make our provisions come out even with our stay."

~ Mignon McLaughlin


"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."

~ Henry Miller


"Life is like eating artichokes; you have got to go through so much to get so little."

~ Thomas Aloysius Dorgan


"Life is a ticket to the greatest show on earth."

~ Martin H. Fischer


"Summing up, it is clear the future holds great opportunities.  It also holds pitfalls.  The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock."

~ Woody Allen


"Situated in some nebulous distance I do what I do so that the universal balance of which I am a part may remain a balance."

~ Antonio Porchia


"Few of us write great novels; all of us live them."

~ Mignon McLaughlin


"Life's like a novel with the end ripped out."

~ Danny Orton and Blair Daly


"If you stop struggling, then you stop life."

~ Huey Newton


"Sometimes questions are more important than answers."

~ Nancy Willard


"It is while you are patiently toiling at the little tasks of life that the meaning and shape of the great whole of life dawn on you."

~ Phillips Brooks


"There is a strange reluctance on the part of most people to admit that they enjoy life."

~ William Lyon Phelps


"Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life is the other way around."

~ David Lodge


"If a man in the morning hear the right way, he may die in the evening without regret."

~ Confucius


"Life is a sexually transmitted disease and there is a 100% mortality rate."

~ R.D. Laing


"Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas."

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


"Many of us are equal to life's emergencies who cannot bear its day-after-dayness."

~ Mignon McLaughlin


"Life is like an onion; you peel off layer after layer and then you find there is nothing in it."

~ James Gibbons Huneker


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

~ Ogden Nash


"Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars."

~ Henry Van Dyke


"Life is a long lesson in humility."

~ James M. Barrie


"Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism."

~ Anton Chekhov


"To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it."

~ Samuel Butler


"Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable."

~ Kathleen Norris


"People find it hard to be both comic and serious, though life manages it easily enough."

~ Mignon McLaughlin


"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."

~ Mark Twain


"There are people who so arrange their lives that they feed themselves only on side dishes."

~ José Ortega y Gasset


"The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination.  But the combination is locked up in the safe."

~ Peter De Vries,


"A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure."

~ Robert Louis Stevenson


"I have come one step away from everything.  And here I stay, far from everything, one step away."

~ Antonio Porchia


"Anxiety and distress, interrupted occasionally by pleasure, is the normal course of man's existence."

~ Joseph Wood Krutch


"I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean.  I might think about it a little bit, but if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else.  But I don't have to know an answer....  I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly.  It doesn't frighten me."

~ Richard Phillips Feynman


"Life is just a series of trying to make up your mind."

~ Timothy Fuller


"In life, as in restaurants, we swallow a lot of indigestible stuff just because it comes with the dinner."

~ Mignon McLaughlin


"The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it."

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge


"Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective; this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God.  We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend.  I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it.  We're looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope lens."

~ Jason Q.


"Life is little more than a loan shark:  It exacts a very high rate of interest for the few pleasures it concedes."

~ Luigi Pirandello


"Life is a shit sandwich.  But if you've got enough bread, you don't taste the shit."

~ Jonathan Winters


"There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner:  that, in the dinner, the sweets come last."

~ Robert Louis Stevenson


"The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore.  It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line."

~ H.L. Mencken


"Almost everything in life is easier to get into than out of."

~ Agnes' Law


"Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run.  The daily work - that goes on, it adds up."

~ Barbara Kingsolver


"Life is a series of collisions with the future."

~ José Ortega y Gasset


"The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing."

~ Marcus Aurelius


"Life is half spent before we know what it is."

~ George Herbert


"What is life?  It is the flash of a firefly in the night.  It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.  It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."

~ Crowfoot


"Have you noticed that life, real honest-to-goodness life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in the newspapers?"

~ Jean Anouilh


"God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny."

~ Garrison Keillor


"Every creatures stalks some other, and catches it, and is caught."

~ Mignon McLaughlin


"Look, I don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive you've got to flap your arms and legs, you've got to jump around a lot, for life is the very opposite of death, and therefore you must at very least think noisy and colorfully, or you're not alive."

~ Mel Brooks


"Unbeing dead isn't being alive."

~ e.e. cummings


"Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious."

~ Brendan Gill


"Why does a person even get up in the morning?  You have breakfast, you floss your teeth so you'll have healthy gums in your old age, and then you get in your car and drive down I-10 and die.  Life is so stupid I can't stand it."

~ Barbara Kingsolver


"When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance."

~ Thomas Merton