100 Great Quotes About Life And Living

Over the last few months, I’ve gotten in the habit of putting up a new quote in the tagline of my chat client every day. I miss a few days here and there, but generally I like to take a few minutes each day to put up something that catches my eye. Sometimes it’s a quote from a column or book, a song lyric, or a quote from a particular author or on a particular topic that seems profound. It’s a small thing, but I feel like taking the time to find that quote helps me grow as a human being just a bit each day. Happily for you, instead of growing a bit each day, you can read all these quotations in one big gulp. Enjoy!

1) “Is it so small a thing, to have enjoy’d the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done…” — Matthew Arnold

2) The sluggard says, “There is a lion in the road, a fierce lion roaming the streets!” — Proverbs 26:13

3) “I am hurt, but I am not slain;
I’ll lay me down and bleed a while,
And then I’ll rise and fight again.” — The Ballad of Sir Andrew Barton

4) “Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” — Anais Nin

5) “It comes back to what Chief Jay Strongbow told us years ago, ‘In this business you can make friends or you can make money’. And I remember lookin at Kev and X-Pac and going, I already got some friends, I’d like the money.” — Scott Hall

6) “If it’s true that men are such beasts, this must account for the fact that most women are animal lovers.” — Doris Day

7) “True strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself.” — Henry Miller

8) “One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.” — Gustave Flaubert

9) “The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It’s the age-old struggle: the roar of the crowd on the one side, and the voice of your conscience on the other.” — Douglas MacArthur

10) “Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.” — Lamartine

11) “Patience and perseverance have a magical affect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.” — John Quincy Adams

12) “In order to excel, you must be completely dedicated…. You must also be prepared to work hard and be willing to accept constructive criticism. Without one-hundred percent dedication, you won’t be able to do this.” — Willie Mays

13) “An old man wandering around the Olympic Games looking for a seat was jeered at by the crowd until he reached the seats of the Spartans, whereupon every Spartan younger than him, and some that were older, stood up and offered him their seat. The crowd applauded and the old man turned to them with a sigh, saying ‘All Greeks know what is right, but only the Spartans do it.'”

14) “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’ — Oscar Wilde

15) “But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.” — George Eliot

16) “Forward, as occasion offers. Never look round to see whether any shall note it… Be satisfied with success in even the smallest matter, and think that even such a result is no trifle.” — Marcus Aurelius

17) “Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions hitherto unexplored.” — Abraham Lincoln

18) “In life you need either inspiration or desperation.” — Tony Robbins

19) “Are you upset little friend? Have you been lying awake worrying? Well, don’t worry…I’m here. The flood waters will recede, the famine will end, the sun will shine tomorrow, and I will always be here to take care of you.” –Charlie Brown to Snoopy

20) “No one has a right to consume happiness without producing it.” — Helen Keller

21) “Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use.” — Earl Nightingale

22) “We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.” — Chuck Palahniuk

23) “Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself. You may be surprised at how easily this happens. Your doubts are not as powerful as your desires, unless you make them so.” — Marcia Wieder

24) “In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.” — Henry David Thoreau

25) “The creative person is willing to live with ambiguity. He doesn’t need problems solved immediately and can afford to wait for the right ideas.” — Abe Tannenbaum

26) “Like the wind crying endlessly through the universe, Time carries away the names and the deeds of conquerors and commoners alike. And all that we are, all that remains, is in the memories of those who cared we came this way for a brief moment.” — Harlan Ellison

27) “If you wait for the perfect moment when all is safe and assured, it may never arrive. Mountains will not be climbed, races won, or lasting happiness achieved.” — Maurice Chevalier

28) “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved.” — Helen Keller

29) “Loyalty to a petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul.” — Mark Twain

30) “One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.” — Morris West

31) “Girl you are a beauty. Well, I am a beast. They must have been trippin to let me off the leash.” — Jeremih

32) “Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” — Leo Buscaglia

33) “People who fail to achieve their goals usually get stopped by frustration. They allow frustration to keep them from taking the necessary actions that would support them in achieving their desire. You get through this roadblock by plowing through frustration, taking each setback as feedback you can learn from, and pushing ahead. I doubt you’ll find many successful people who have not experienced this. All successful people learn that success is buried on the other side of frustration.” — Anthony Robbins

34) “Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.” — Helen Keller

35) “I do think the heart can balance out the mind, if your heart is in a good place it can give you the strength to do the right thing and behave the right way and overcome the mind.” — Alexis Arguello

36) “The most successful businessman is the man who holds onto the old just as long as it is good, and grabs the new just as soon as it is better.” — Lee Iacocca

37) “Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character.” — Emile Durkheim

38) “Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good.” — Buddha

39) “We imagine that we want to escape our selfish and commonplace existence, but we cling desperately to our chains.” — Anne Sullivan Macy

40) “Life’s most urgent question is: what are you doing for others?” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

41) “Consult not your fears but your hopes and your dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do.” — Pope John XXIII

42) “The last of human freedoms – the ability to chose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.” — Viktor E. Frankl

43) “Maturity is achieved when a person accepts life as full of tension.” — Joshua L. Liebman

44) “Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.” — Gilbert K. Chesterton

45) “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” — Carl Jung

46) “If there hadn’t been women we’d still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.” — Orson Welles

47) “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.” — C.S. Lewis

48) “We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” — C. S. Lewis

49) “Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.” — Francis Bacon

50) “Free, like a river raging.
Strong as the wind I’m facing.
Chasing dreams and racing father time.
Deep like the grandest canyon,
Wild like an untamed stallion.
If you can’t see my heart you must be blind.

You can knock me down and watch me bleed
But you can’t keep no chains on me.

I was born free!” — Kid Rock

51) “I never have been sick. I don’t even know what it means to be sick. I hear other players say they have a cold. I just don’t know what it would feel like to have a cold – I never had one.” — Honus Wagner

52) “We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.” — George Eliot

53) “The ‘what should be’ never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no ‘what should be,’ there is only what is.” — Lenny Bruce

54) “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of conflict and controversy.” — Martin Luther King

55) “If you don’t know what you want, you end up with a lot you don’t.” — Chuck Palahniuk

56) “A learned blockhead is a greater blockhead than an ignorant one.” — Benjamin Franklin

57) “For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, It might have been.” — John Greenleaf Whittier

58) “Hold fast to your dreams, for without them life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.” — Langston Hughes

59) “At the age of 20, we don’t care what the world thinks of us; at 30, we worry about what it is thinking of us; at 40, we discover that it wasn’t thinking of us at all.”

60) “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” — John Wooden

61) “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” — Robert Howard

62) “People who enjoy meetings should not be in charge of anything.” — Thomas Sowell

63) “If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.” — Epictetus

64) “You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.” — John Buchan

65) “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” — Michael Jordan

66) “Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

67) “If you want to double your success ratio, you have to double your failure ratio.” — Harvey Mackay

68) “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” — C. S. Lewis

69) “Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.” — Baltasar Gracian

70) “I have to be careful not to be too proud in life, because there is always room for improvement.” — Sylvia Kristel

71) “Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower

72) “It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.” — Aristotle

73) “The truth is never the problem; The problem is always the problem.” — Jeff Vanvonderen

74) “Die when I may, I want it said by those who knew me best that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.” — Abraham Lincoln

75) “Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent.” — Napoleon Bonaparte

76) “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” — Vince Lombardi

77) “A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.” — Robert A. Heinlein

78) “Of course it’s the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.” — Margaret Thatcher

79) “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

80) “The value of an idea lies in the using of it.” — Thomas Edison

81) “The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.” — Arnold J. Toynbee

82) “A dog is not considered a good dog because he is a good barker. A man is not considered a good man because he is a good talker.” — Buddha

83) “The final test of a gentleman is his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him.” — William Lyon Phelps

84) “The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident which everybody had decided not to see.” — Ayn Rand

85) “One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.” — George Santayana

86) “There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” — Bruce Lee

87) “When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.” — Napoleon

88) “Plain women know more about men than beautiful women do.” — Katharine Hepburn

89) “A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights.” — Napoleon Bonaparte

90) “Everyone lives by selling SOMETHING.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

91) “Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts; not amid joy.” — Arthur Helps quotes

92) “I tremble for my country when I hear of confidence expressed in me. I know too well my weakness, that our only hope is in God.” — Robert E. Lee

93) “The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.” — Muhammad Ali

94) “Success demands singleness of purpose.” — Vince Lombardi

95) “I can live for two months on a good compliment.” — Mark Twain

96) “Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

97) “History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics.” — B. R. Ambedkar

98) “Fast is fine, but accuracy is everything.” — Wyatt Earp

99) “All that really belongs to us is time; even he who has nothing else has that.” — Baltasar Gracian

100) “Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.” — Confucius

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