Life Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Mathematics as an expression of the human mind reflects the active will, the contemplative reason, and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Its basic elements are logic and intuition, analysis and construction, generality and individuality. Though different traditions may emphasize different aspects, it is only the interplay of these antithetic forces and the struggle for their synthesis that constitute the life, usefulness, and supreme value of mathematical science.

Richard Courant

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living.

Henri Poincaré

Faith is the first factor in a life devoted to service. Without it, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.

Mary McLeod Bethune

You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.

May we agree that private life is irrelevant? Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best – out of it we try to fashion the crystal clear, the singular, the absolute, and that is what is relevant; that is what matters.

Age is not all decay; it is the ripening,
the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husks.

George MacDonald

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.

There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Samuel Butler (novelist)

Anyone who attempts to relate his life loses himself in the immediate. One can only speak of another.

Augusto Roa Bastos

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

Words that are saturated with lies or atrocity do not easily resume life.

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

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

Ryszard Kapuściński

My darling girl, Unfortunately this earth is not a fairy-land, but a struggle for life, perfectly natural and therefore extremely harsh. All the same, or precisely for this reason, it is happiness and comfort for us men to have a precious sweetheart - and I have the most precious, the dearest and best of all!

Generally young men are regarded as radicals. This is a popular misconception. The most conservative persons I ever met are college undergraduates. The radicals are the men past middle life.

The only fruitful promise of which the life of any individual or any nation can be possessed, is a promise determined by an ideal.

Life everlasting in a state of happiness is the greatest desire of all men.

Joseph Franklin Rutherford

Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based upon excellence of performance.

James Bryant Conant

Every body and every thing conspire to make me as contented as possible in it; yet I have seen too much of the vanity of human affairs, to expect felicity from the splendid scenes of public life. I am still determined to be cheerful and to be happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learnt, from experience, that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us, in our minds, wheresoever we go.

Martha Washington

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

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Zora Neale Hurston

You never know what a fool you can be till life gives you the chance.

Eden Phillpotts

This, and this alone, is Christianity, a universal holiness in every part of life, a heavenly wisdom in all our actions, not conforming to the spirit and temper of the world but turning all worldly enjoyments into means of piety and devotion to God.

A good friend is a connection to life - a tie to the past, a road to the future, the key to sanity in a totally insane world.