Famous Life Quotations

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"If you had your life to live over again, do it overseas."
by Henny Youngman
"During the war an Italian girl saved my life. She hid me in her basement in Cleveland."
by Henny Youngman
"A doctor says to a man, 'You want to improve your love life? You need to get some exercise. Run ten miles a day.' Two weeks later, the man called the doctor. The doctor says, 'How is your love life since you have been running?' 'I don't know, I'm 140 mile"
by Henny Youngman
"'Don't take life too seriously, no one gets out alive.'"
by Anonymous
"'Don't take life too seriously; No one gets out alive.'"
by Anonymous
"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."
by Henry David Thoreau
"I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived."
by Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."
by George Santayana
"Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art."
by Kenneth Tynan
"Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued."
by Socrates
"No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death."
by Plato
"Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage."
by Benjamin Disraeli
"It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this."
by Bertrand Russell
"Isn't life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?"
by Andy Warhol
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me; give me liberty or give me death!"
by Patrick Henry
"In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth."
by Mahatma Gandhi
"It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction."
by Pablo Picasso
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor."
by Henry David Thoreau
"I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me."
by Dudley Field Malone
"Holding on to anger, resentment and hurt only gives you tense muscles, a headache and a sore jaw from clenching your teeth. Forgiveness gives you back the laughter and the lightness in your life."
by Joan Lunden
"Man, being reasonable, must get drunk; the best of life is but intoxication."
by Lord Byron
"Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life."
by Eric Hoffer
"Married life requires shared mystery even when all the facts are known."
by Richard Ford
"If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius."
by Joseph Addison
"If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it."
by Arthur Schopenhauer
"Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life."
by George Bernard Shaw
"A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one."
by Thomas Carlyle
"A tough lesson in life that one has to learn is that not everybody wishes you well."
by Dan Rather
"The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything."
by Robert Frost
"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."
by Henry Miller
"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading."
by Logan Pearsall Smith
"There is, indeed, nothing that so much seduces reason from vigilance, as the thought of passing life with an amiable woman."
by Samuel Johnson
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead."
by Aldous Huxley
"For them that think death's honesty Won't fall upon them naturally Life sometimes Must get lonely."
by Bob Dylan
"Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death."
by Thomas Carlyle
"To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life."
by Robert Louis Stevenson
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."
by Bertrand Russell
"A man writes to throw off the poison which he has accumulated because of his false way of life. He is trying to recapture his innocence, yet all he succeeds in doing (by writing) is to inoculate the world with a virus of his disillusionment. No man would set a word down on paper if he had the courage to live out what he believed in."
by Henry Miller
"A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life."
by James Allen
"A man either lives life as it happens to him, meets it head-on and licks it, or he turns his back on it and starts to wither away."
by Gene Roddenberry
"A man can be as great as he wants to be. If you believe in yourself and have the courage, the determination, the dedication, the competitive drive and if you are willing to sacrifice the little things in life and pay the price for the things that are worthwhile, it can be done."
by Anonymous
"A great secret of success is to go through life as a man who never gets used up."
by Albert Schweitzer
"A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art."
by Benjamin Disraeli
"A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one."
by Aristotle
"A different language is a different vision of life."
by Federico Fellini
"The best things in life aren't things."
by Art Buchwald
"The best thing to do with the best things in life is to give them up."
by Dorothy Day
"A woman's whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world: it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul on the traffic of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless -- for it is a bankruptcy of the heart."
by Anonymous
"A pro-life advocate sees abortion as a sin against God who infuses life at the moment of conception. A pro-choice advocate sees abortion as a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life, as we know it, occurs."
by Stanley Fish
"A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke."
by Anonymous
"A human being is only breath and shadow."
by Sophocles
"The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway."
by Bernard Avishai
"The cure for all ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows and the crimes of humanity, all lie in the one word 'love.' It is the divine vitality that everywhere produces and restores life."
by Lydia Maria Child
"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."
by Henry David Thoreau
"The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society."
by J. G. Ballard
"The capacity for hope is the most significant fact of life. It provides human beings with a sense of destination and the energy to get started."
by Norman Cousins
"Adversity is a fact of life. It can't be controlled. What we can control is how we react to it."
by Source Unknown
"Adults who still derive childlike pleasure from hanging gifts of a ready-made education on the Christmas tree of a child waiting outside the door to life do not realize how unreceptive they are making the children to everything that constitutes the true surprise of life."
by Karl Kraus
"A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599"
by James Shapiro
"The essence of life is seeked through polarities such as , health and illness, happiness and suffering, wealth and poverty and so on."
by Master Kwon
"The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society."
by James Froude
"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy."
by Steven Weinberg
"The difficulty in life is the choice."
by George Moore
"The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself."
by Eric Hoffer
"The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount."
by Joseph Addison
"The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful must take himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable, renascent errors."
by Charles Peguy
"The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing."
by Thomas Aquinas
"The hero is one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by."
by Felix Adler
"The hardest thing in life is to know which bridge to cross and which to burn."
by David Russell
"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature."
by Marcus Aurelius
"The happiest part of a man's life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning."
by Samuel Johnson
"The greatest sweetener of human life is Friendship. To raise this to the highest pitch of enjoyment, is a secret which but few discover."
by Joseph Addison
"The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life."
by Jean Giraudoux
"The first thing which I can record concerning myself is, that I was born. These are wonderful words. This life, to which neither time nor eternity can bring diminution -- this everlasting living soul, began. My mind loses itself in these depths."
by Margaret Oliphant
"The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical."
by Eugenio Montale
"The life of ease is a difficult pursuit."
by William Cowper
"The life of a man consists not in seeing visions and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service"
by Anonymous
"The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not the remembrance of beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life."
by Mark Rothko
"The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty. From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now."
by Charlotte Gillman
"The most satisfying thing in life is to have been able to give a large part of one's self to others."
by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"The more highly public life is organized the lower does its morality sink."
by E. M. Forster
"The purpose of life is a life of purpose."
by Robert Byrne
"The point about it is that if you're pointed toward some kind of goodness, some kind of light, something positive, you find your way through these trials and tribulations, ... I've basically dedicated my whole lyrical life to people's ability to cope with the struggle because I do believe there is a struggle. And I don't mean it in a negative sense. I just mean it in a realistic sense. Nothing is greater than staying right on the positive, but sometimes life can have a way of just pulling you back and dragging you a bit."
by Gavin Rossdale
"The only questions worth asking today are whether humans are going to have any emotions tomorrow, and what the quality of life will be if the answer is no."
by Lester Bangs
"The opportunity I had at Sandwich would have changed my life if I'd played well enough. It was an unfortunate thing but you abide by the rules."
by Mark Roe
"The only mistake in life is the lesson not learned."
by Anonymous
"The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them."
by Samuel Butler
"The secret of teaching is to appear to have known all your life what you just learned this morning."
by Source Unknown
"The secret of life is in art."
by Anonymous
"The real difficulty, the difficulty which has baffled the sages of all times, is rather this: how can we make our teaching so potent in the motional life of man, that its influence should withstand the pressure of the elemental psychic forces in the individual?"
by Anonymous
"The question is not whether we will die, but how we will live."
by Joan Borysenko
"The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important."
by Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor."
by Vince Lombardi
"The time I am most powerful and in control of my life is when I drive my car. Whatever lonely feelings I have from the lack of communication with my husband disappear in no time flat. When the windows and the top are open with my favorite jazz station on the radio playing, nothing and nobody can touch me. Then I go home to the same relentless battle. Life can be a pisser"
by Source Unknown
"The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life."
by Theodore Roosevelt
"The thing we're happy about is that there wasn't as much loss of life or property damage as there might have been, ... This is still a dangerous situation."
by James McIntyre
"The style of life is a unity because it has grown out of the difficulties of early life and out of the striving for a goal."
by Anonymous
"The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life."
by Oscar Wilde
"The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere."
by Michel de Montaigne
"The sacrifice which causes sorrow to the doer of the sacrifice is no sacrifice. Real sacrifice lightens the mind of the doer and gives him a sense of peace and joy. The Buddha gave up the pleasures of life because they had become painful to him."
by Mahatma Gandhi


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