72 Life Quotes to Give You Strength and Improved Understanding

There are certain times that words carry the entire meaning of life with them. There doesn’t have to be a deep analysis, no further explanation: life’s greater lessons are sometimes taught through simple, unadorned quotes.

Authors, musicians and philosophers have shared rare moments of insight and wise thoughts about the way the human kinds spends its time on earth – and it is definitely worth listening, as a simple phrase can often contain meanings about life that even strong experiences fail to teach us. Share the best life quotations with funny, inspirational and motivational quotations by famous authors on life, love, and loving life.

Table of Contents

1. The Absolutely Best Life Quotes
2. Best Inspirational Life Quotes
3. Best Motivational Quotes about Life
4. Best Poetic Lines about Life
5. Wise Quotes About Life
6. Life Quotes on Images

The Absolutely Best Life Quotes

• It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live. J.K. Rowling
• To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. Oscar Wilde
• It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not. André Gide
• Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. George Bernard Shaw
• We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Kurt Vonnegut
• Where there is love there is life. Mahatma Gandhi
• We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be. May Sarton

• Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. Albert Camus
• As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already 3-parts dead. Bertrand Russell
• If life were predictable, it would cease to be life, and be without flavor. Eleanor Roosevelt
• If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours… Henry David Thoreau

Best Inspirational Life Quotes

• Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Søren Kierkegaard
• Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. Mark Twain
• That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet. Emily Dickinson
• Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth. Rumi
• Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. Helen Keller
• Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. Søren Kierkegaard
• We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It’s one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it’s another to think that yours is the only path. Paulo Coelho

• Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five. Benjamin Franklin
• When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love … Marcus Aurelius
• Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Steve Jobs
• Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass…It’s about learning to dance in the rain. Vivian Greene
• Happiness is not a goal…it’s a by-product of a life well lived. Eleanor Roosevelt
• The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. Mark Twain

Best Motivational Quotes about Life

• We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be. May Sarton
• I go to seek a Great Perhaps. François Rabelais
• Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. Anaïs Nin

• He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. Friedrich Nietzsche
• I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick ass. Maya Angelou
• It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. Confucius
• The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering. Ben Okri
• A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life. Charles Darwin
• This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. Alan W. Watts

Best Poetic Lines about Life

• If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain. Emily Dickinson
• I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited. Jorge Luis Borges
• Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them. Marcus Aurelius
• He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. Gabriel García Márquez
• There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it. Gustave Flaubert
• What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness. John Steinbeck
• No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man. Heraclitus
• I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. Rainer Maria Rilke

• Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “Just living is not enough,” said the butterfly, “one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower. Hans Christian Andersen
• Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened. Dr. Seuss
• Everything you can imagine is real. Pablo Picasso
• Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls. Joseph Campbell
• Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. Rainer Maria Rilke

Wise Quotes About Life

• Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like. Lao Tzu
• We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations. Anaïs Nin
• Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. Søren Kierkegaard
• Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy. Guillaume Apollinaire

• A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live. Lao Tzu
• Our life is what our thoughts make it. Marcus Aurelius
• There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes where life is not painful. Fernando Pessoa
• In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. Robert Frost
• Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. Mark Twain
• Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving. Albert Einstein
• Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring. Oscar Wilde
• I am convinced that most people do not grow up…We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as magnolias. Maya Angelou
• If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of. Bruce Lee

• I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing. Albert Camus
• To travel is to live. Hans Christian Andersen
• Art is the proper task of life.  Friedrich Nietzsche

• The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. Marcus Aurelius
• There is more to life than simply increasing its speed. Mahatma Gandhi
• 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

• All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret. Gabriel García Márquez
• Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but … life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves. Gabriel García Márquez
• You were born with potential.
  You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness.
  You were born with wings.
  You are not meant for crawling, so don’t.
  You have wings.
  Learn to use them and fly.
  Rumi

• There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life. John Lennon

Life Quotes on Images

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