Life Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Ah, Hope! What would life be, stripped of thy encouraging smiles, that teach us to look behind the dark clouds of to-day, for the golden beams that are to gild the morrow.

Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope — a slight change, and all patterns and configurations alter.

Sharon Salzberg

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born — that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born. And the way we become leaders is by learning about leadership through life and job experiences, not with university degrees.

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

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.

The life of the community, both domestically and internationally, clearly demonstrates that respect for rights, and the guarantees that follow from them, are measures of the common good that serve to evaluate the relationship between justice and injustice, development and poverty, security and conflict.

Pope Benedict XVI

Thought means life, since those who do not think do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.

Amos Bronson Alcott

If you can react the same way to winning and losing, that's a big accomplishment. That quality is important because it stays with you the rest of your life.

Life — how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.

V. S. Pritchett

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Just about this time, when in imagination I was so great a warrior, I had good use in real life for more strength, as I was no longer taken to school by the nurse, but instead had myself to protect my brother, two years my junior.

Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.

Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, and stumble from defeat to defeat.

Ryszard Kapuściński

"Forbear to ask what tomorrow may bring" … If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.

In real life, the most practical advice for leaders is not to treat pawns like pawns, nor princes like princes, but all persons like persons.

James MacGregor Burns

Instead of looking at life as a narrowing funnel, we can see it ever widening to choose the things we want to do, to take the wisdom we've learned and create something.

Do not take life too seriously – you will never get out of it alive.

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

I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned into advertising copy.

Louis Kronenberger

This was Shakespeare's form;
Who walked in every path of human life,
Felt every passion; and to all mankind
Doth now, will ever, that experience yield
Which his own genius only could acquire.

The most characteristic mark of a great mind is to choose some one important object, and pursue it for life.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life.

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

Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,
Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.
The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow;
They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats,
And flare up bodily, wings and all. What then?
Who's sorry for a gnat.. or girl?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning