Life Quotations

This is the true joy of life, the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.

- George Bernard Shaw


One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.

- Sophocles


Experience is how life catches up with us and teaches us to love and forgive each other.

- Judy Collins



What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

- Vincent van Gogh



Grace means more than gifts. In grace something is transcended, once and for all overcome. Grace happens in spite of something; it happens in spite of separateness and alienation. Grace means that life is once again united with life, self is reconciled with self. Grace means accepting the abandoned one. Grace transforms fate into a meaningful vocation. It transforms guilt to trust and courage. The word grace has something triumphant in it.

- Yrjo Kallinen


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

- Sydney J. Harris



A life lived in love will never be dull.

- Leo Buscaglia



It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth -- and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up -- that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.

- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross


Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after -- lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.

- Louise Erdrich

One must work and dare if one really wants to live.

- Vincent van Gogh

Life is meaningless only if we allow it to be. Each of us has the power to give life meaning, to make our time and our bodies and our words into instruments of love and hope.

- Tom Head


I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirm the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes



Live every act fully, as if it were your last.

- Buddha



Without some goal and some effort to reach it, no one can live.

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky


I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirm the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Friendship Quotes

A friend is one who knows you and loves you just the same.
Elbert Hubbard

A friendship can weather most things and thrive in thin soil; but it needs a little mulch of letters and phone calls and small, silly presents every so often - just to save it from drying out completely.
Pam Brown

A man's growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A single rose can be my garden... a single friend, my world.
Leo Buscaglia

A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down.
Arnold H. Glasow

An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast; a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind.
Buddha

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.
George Washington

But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.
Thomas Jefferson

Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.
Alice Duer Miller

Don't ever dare to take your college as a matter of course - because, like democracy and freedom, many people you'll never know have broken their hearts to get it for you.
Alice Duer Miller

Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends.
Shirley MacLaine

Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.
Aristotle

Friendship is one mind in two bodies.
Mencius

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis

Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness.
Dag Hammarskjold

Friendship... is not something you learn in school. But if you haven't learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven't learned anything.
Muhammad Ali

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.
Katherine Mansfield

I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.
Plutarch

I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.
Thomas A. Edison

I value the friend who for me finds time on his calendar, but I cherish the friend who for me does not consult his calendar.
Robert Brault

If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.
George MacDonald

If it's very painful for you to criticize your friends - you're safe in doing it. But if you take the slightest pleasure in it, that's the time to hold your tongue.
Alice Duer Miller

In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
Albert Schweitzer

It is important to our friends to believe that we are unreservedly frank with them, and important to friendship that we are not.
Mignon McLaughlin

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.
Epicurus

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

It takes a long time to grow an old friend.
John Leonard

It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.
Marlene Dietrich

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.
Marcel Proust

Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.
Oprah Winfrey

Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference.
Emil Ludwig

Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Mighty proud I am that I am able to have a spare bed for my friends.
Samuel Pepys

Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend.
Plautus

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
George Santayana

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.
Toni Morrison

Silences make the real conversations between friends. Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts.
Margaret Lee Runbeck

Since there is nothing so well worth having as friends, never lose a chance to make them.
Francesco Guicciardini

The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
William Blake

The friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.
Elbert Hubbard

The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
Henry David Thoreau

The most I can do for my friend is simply be his friend.
Henry David Thoreau

The only way to have a friend is to be one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The real test of friendship is: can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple?
Eugene Kennedy

There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.
Saint Thomas Aquinas

True friends stab you in the front.
Oscar Wilde

We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower that man who has lost his wife. But that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing a friend, by what name do we call him? Here every language is silent and holds its peace in impotence.
Joseph Roux

When a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it.
Edward W. Howe

When a woman like that whom I've seen so much, All of a sudden drops out of touch; Is always busy and never can, Spare you a moment, it means a man.
Alice Duer Miller

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand.
Henri Nouwen

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.
Aristotle

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of.
Sarah Orne Jewett

You can always tell a real friend: when you've made a fool of yourself he doesn't feel you've done a permanent job.
Laurence J. Peter

Work Quotes

Abraham Lincoln:

My father taught me to work; he did not teach me to love it.

Anna Garlin Spencer:

The experience of the race shows that we get our most important education not through books but through our work. We are developed by our daily task, or else demoralized by it, as by nothing else.

Anna Garlin Spencer:

No book has yet been written in praise of a woman who let her husband and children starve or suffer while she invented even the most useful things, or wrote books, or expressed herself in art, or evolved philosophic systems.

Woman's Share in Social Culture, 1912


Barbara Ehrenreich:

Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an "ethic."

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society -- more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

Christina Rossetti:

Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes; work never begun.

Colleen C. Barrett:

When it comes to getting things done, we need fewer architects and more bricklayers.

Colleen C. Barrett:

Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun.

Danilo Dolci:

It's important to know that words don't move mountains. Work, exacting work moves mountains.

Edward Kennedy:

The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dreams shall never die.

Emily Dickinson:

What is—"Paradise"—
Who live there—
Are they "Farmers"—
Do they "hoe"—
Do they know that this is "Amherst"—
And that I—am coming—too—

This entry continued ...

Francoise de Motteville:

The true way to render ourselves happy is to love our work and find in it our pleasure.

Frank Lloyd Wright:

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

Frederick Douglass:

People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.

Gloria Steinem:

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

Helen Keller:

I long to accomplish a great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.

Henri-Frederic Amiel:

Work while you have the light. You are responsible for the talent that has been entrusted to you.

Henry David Thoreau:

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

The heights by great men reached and kept / Were not attained by sudden flight, / But they, while their companions slept, / Were toiling upward in the night.

John W. Gardner:

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

Jonas Salk:

The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.

Lane Kirkland:

If hard work were such a wonderful thing, surely the rich would have kept it all to themselves.

Lena Horne:

Always be smarter than the people who hire you.

Lou Erickson:

Gardening requires lots of water -- most of it in the form of perspiration.

Lya Sorano:

When we talk about equal pay for equal work, women in the workplace are beginning to catch up. If we keep going at this current rate, we will achieve full equality in about 475 years. I don't know about you, but I can't wait that long.

Marian Wright Edelman:

Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.

Mark Twain:

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

The Roots of Violence:
Wealth without work,
Pleasure without conscience,
Knowledge without character,
Commerce without morality,
Science without humanity,
Worship without sacrifice,
Politics without principles.

Orson Scott Card:

Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden.

Pearl S. Buck:

I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.

Pearl S. Buck:

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

Phyllis McGinley:

The trouble with gardening is that it does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.

Rita Mae Brown:

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.

Rita Mae Brown:

I believe you are your work. Don't trade the stuff of your life, time, for nothing more than dollars. That's a rotten bargain.

Rudyard Kipling:

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing: -- "Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade.

Sam Donaldson:

The truth is, when I got started in this business, it wasn't because I had a full understanding of the importance of the business, but because I thought it was fun. I found it exciting. It fulfilled me, whatever it was that I was looking for.

Sara Ann Friedman:

What we do matters to us. Work may not be the most important thing in our lives or the only thing. We may work because we must, but we still want to love, to feel pride in, to respect ourselves for what we do and to make a difference.

Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn:

The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
[from "Through the Needle's Eye," 1916]

Stephen Jay Gould:

I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Theodore Roosevelt:

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

From a speech given in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1910


Thomas Alva Edison:

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Thomas Alva Edison:

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

Thomas Alva Edison:

Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas Jefferson:

I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.

Vaclav Havel:

Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

Victor Hugo:

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.

Vince Lombardi:

Dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price.

Vince Lombardi:

Leaders aren't born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.

Winston Churchill:

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

life's quotes

Quotes Collection About life

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
Charles Darwin

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James

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

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
Buddha

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

Every man dies. Not every man really lives.
William Wallace

Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
Jean-Paul Sartre

Everything in life is luck.
Donald Trump

Fortunately analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.
Karen Horney

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

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

Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.
Richard Bach

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.
E. B. White

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

I love life because what more is there.
Anthony Hopkins

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.
John Burroughs

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

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
Robert Frost

It is not length of life, but depth of life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.
Josh Billings

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

Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
Sholom Aleichem

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

Life is a series of collisions with the future; it is not the sum of what we have been, but what we yearn to be.
Jose Ortega y Gasset

Life is but thought.
Sara Teasdale

Life is half spent before we know what it is.
George Herbert

Life is never easy for those who dream.
Robert James Waller

Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.
Fran Lebowitz

Life is wasted on the living.
Douglas Adams

Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.
Karen Horney

Life loves the liver of it.
Maya Angelou

Life must be lived as play.
Plato

Life well spent is long.
Leonardo da Vinci

Like all sciences and all valuations, the psychology of women has hitherto been considered only from the point of view of men.
Karen Horney

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round.
David Lodge

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
May you live every day of your life.
Jonathan Swift

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

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

Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.
Harvey Fierstein

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

Not life, but good life, is to be chiefly valued.
Socrates

Only a few things are really important.
Marie Dressler

People living deeply have no fear of death.
Anais Nin

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.
Marcus Aurelius

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

The fear of life is the favorite disease of the 20th century.
William Lyon Phelps

The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
William James

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Henry David Thoreau

The perfect normal person is rare in our civilization.
Karen Horney

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
Henry David Thoreau

The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
Robert Byrne

There is no wealth but life.
John Ruskin

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

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
William James

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.
Emily Dickinson
Unbeing dead isn't being alive.
e. e. cummings

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

We can't plan life. All we can do is be available for it.
Lauryn Hill

What we play is life.
Louis Armstrong

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

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

While there's life, there's hope.
Marcus Tullius Cicero

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

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

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

Your life is what your thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius

Inspirational Quotes Collection

One man with courage makes a majority. - Andrew Jackson

Chance favors the prepared mind. - Louis Pasteur.

In striving tjo attain big things, the little things come easy, but in striving to attain only little things, even they become hard. - C. T. Gilbreath

When a man puts a limit on what he will do, he puts a limit on what he can do. - Anon

A good leader inspires other men with confidance in him; a great leader inspires them with confidence in themselves. - Anon

Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great. - Machiavelli.

He who would climb the tree must grasp the branches, not the blossoms. - Anon

Mind are like parachutes - they only function when open. - Anon

No man is an island, entiare of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. - John Donne

In the midst of winter. I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. - Albert Camus

I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right. - Albert Einstein