Life is an intricate mix of experiences and emotions — a journey that constantly evolves and surprises us.
It’s filled with challenges that test our resilience, moments that take our breath away, and opportunities that push us toward growth.
Philosophers, writers, and thinkers throughout history have tried to capture the essence of this journey. Their quotes about life shed light on the complexities, joys, and inevitable struggles we all face — providing wisdom that can guide us, comfort us, or simply make us think.
In this article, we’ve curated a selection of life quotes that reflect the human experience. Whether you’re seeking guidance, inspiration, or a moment of reflection — may these quotes remind you of the shared human condition.
The Best Quotes About Life
Famous Life Quotes
“Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now.”
— Audre Lorde
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
— Marie Curie
“What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others.”
— Nelson Mandela
“Life is like a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
— Albert Einstein
“No matter what happens in life, be good to people. Being good to people is a wonderful legacy to leave behind.”
— Taylor Swift
“When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’”
— Sydney J. Harris
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
— John Lennon
“For the great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.”
— Vincent van Gogh
“Your vocation in life is where your greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.”
— Frederick Buechner
“Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.”
— Emily Dickinson
“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.”
— Dalai Lama
“Life is in ourselves and not in the external.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”
— Simone de Beauvoir
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
— George Bernard Shaw
“You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.”
— Oprah Winfrey
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
— Confucius
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
— Anaïs Nin
“The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”
— Bertrand Russell
“Life has got all those twists and turns. You’ve got to hold on tight and off you go.”
— Nicole Kidman
Positive Quotes
“I believe we are here on the planet Earth to live, grow up and do what we can to make this world a better place for all people to enjoy freedom.”
— Rosa Parks
“Nothing is impossible, the word itself says ‘I’m possible.’”
— Audrey Hepburn
“Live life to the fullest, and focus on the positive.”
— Matt Cameron
“I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.”
— Anne Frank
“Keep your face always toward the sunshine and shadows will fall behind you.”
— Walt Whitman
“My purpose: to lift your spirit and to motivate you.”
— Mavis Staples
“Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you’ll start having positive results.”
— Willie Nelson
“There’s always something we can do. Whatever you did, your life is still meaningful.”
— Bryan Stevenson
“Life is full of beauty. Notice it. Notice the bumble bee, the small child, and the smiling faces. Smell the rain, and feel the wind. Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams.”
— Ashley Smith
“Today is life-the only life you are sure of. Make the most of today. Get interested in something. Shake yourself awake. Develop a hobby. Let the winds of enthusiasm sweep through you. Live today with gusto.”
— Dale Carnegie
“Positive anything is better than negative nothing.”
— Elbert Hubbard
“You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
— Stephen King
“If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.”
— Dolly Parton
“Smile in the mirror. Do that every morning and you’ll start to see a big difference in your life.”
— Yoko Ono
Deep Quotes
“Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”
— Ruth Bader Ginsburg
“Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.”
— Chief Seattle
“Lead from the heart, not the head.”
— Diana, Princess of Wales
“It’s your outlook on life that counts. If you take yourself lightly and don’t take yourself too seriously, pretty soon you can find the humor in our everyday lives. And sometimes it can be a lifesaver.”
— Betty White
“You will encounter misguided people from time to time. That’s part of life. The challenge is to educate them when you can, but always to keep your dignity and self-respect and persevere in your personal growth and development.”
— Bernice King
“One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn’t pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself.”
— Lucille Ball
“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
— George Bernard Shaw
“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
— Albert Camus
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
— Soren Kierkegaard
“Maybe that’s what life is… a wink of the eye and winking stars.”
— Jack Kerouac
“Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.”
— Ernest Holmes
“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once but don't ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.”
— Michelle Obama
“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 make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
— Winston Churchill
“I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.”
— Diane Ackerman
“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.”
— Eudora Welty
“Life is a tide; float on it. Go down with it and go up with it, but be detached. Then it is not difficult.”
— Prem Rawat
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
— Alice Walker
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”
— George Bernard Shaw
“Don’t let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.”
— Richard L. Evans
“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and, above all, confidence in ourselves. We must believe we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.”
— Marie Curie
“We do not remember days, we remember moments.”
— Cesare Pavese
“Love life. Engage in it. Give it all you’ve got. Love it with a passion because life truly does give back, many times over, what you put into it.”
— Maya Angelou
On a Happy Life
“Don’t waste a minute not being happy. If one window closes, run to the next window — or break down a door.”
— Brooke Shields
“The most important thing is to enjoy your life — to be happy — it’s all that matters.”
— Audrey Hepburn
“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.”
— Carl Jung
“Folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
— Abraham Lincoln
“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
“Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.”
— Orhan Parnuk
“The most important thing is to enjoy your life — to be happy — it’s all that matters.”
— Audrey Hepburn
“The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts.”
— Marcus Aurelius
“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
— Marcel Proust
“Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.”
— Omar Khayyam
Funny Quotes
“You know the trouble with real life? There’s no danger music.”
— Jim Carrey
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”
— Bernard Baruch
“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
— Mae West
“It is often said that before you die your life passes before your eyes. It is in fact true. It’s called living.”
— Terry Pratchett
“If my life wasn’t funny, it would just be true, and that’s unacceptable.”
— Carrie Fisher
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”
— Isaac Asimov
“People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.”
— A. A. Milne
“If I’d have done all the things I was supposed to have done, I’d be really tired.”
— Willie Nelson
“Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.”
— Elbert Hubbard
“Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.”
— Dr. Seuss
“Don’t waste so much time thinking about how much you weigh. There is no more mind-numbing, boring, idiotic, self-destructive diversion from the fun of living.”
— Meryl Streep
“Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny.”
— Stephen Hawking
“Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”
— Forrest Gump
“I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.”
— Lily Tomlin
“Life is like an onion; you peel off a layer at a time and sometimes you weep.”
— Carl Sandburg
“I’d like to live like a poor man — only with lots of money.”
— Pablo Picasso
“The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.”
— Helen Hayes
“Love is being stupid together.”
— Paul Valery
“To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone.”
— Reba McEntire
Life is Too Short
“Life is too short to work so hard.”
— Vivien Leigh
“Don’t ever doubt yourselves or waste a second of your life. It’s too short, and you’re too special.”
— Ariana Grande
“Life is too short to worry about anything. You had better enjoy it because the next day promises nothing.”
— Eric Davis
“That’s the funny thing about life. We’re rarely aware of the bullets we dodge. The just-misses. The almost-never-happeneds. We spend so much time worrying about how the future is going to play out and not nearly enough time admiring the precious perfection of the present.”
— Lauren Miller
“Be patient and understanding. Life is too short to be vengeful or malicious.”
— Phillips Brooks
“Life is too short not to enjoy it.”
— Glen Campbell
“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, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.”
— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
“Everyone should be able to express themselves in the way that best suits them — life is too short to spend it unhappy.”
— Jinkx Monsoon
Love Quotes
“The greatest pleasure of life is love.”
— Euripides
“Believing you are unworthy of love and belonging — that who you are authentically is a sin or is wrong — is deadly. Who you are is beautiful and amazing.”
— Laverne Cox
“The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.”
— Blaise Pascal
“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness — and call it love — true love.”
— Robert Fulghum
“So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.”
— Helen Keller
“To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.”
— Samuel Butler
“It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.”
— Agatha Christie
“To love one another just may be the fight of our lives.”
— Amanda Gorman
“Love can change a person the way a parent can change a baby — awkwardly, and often with a great deal of mess.”
— Lemony Snicket
“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”
— Bertrand Russell
“The story of life is quicker than the blink of an eye, the story of love is hello, goodbye.”
— Jimi Hendrix
Short Quotes
“Live a life full of humility, gratitude, intellectual curiosity, and never stop learning.”
— GZA
“A dead end is just a good place to turn around.”
— Naomi Judd
“All of us have to be committed to a life beyond our own aspirations.”
— Bernice King
“Remember when life’s path is steep to keep your mind even.”
— Horace
“Do one thing every day that scares you.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.”
— John W. Gardner
“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
— Soren Kierkegaard
“The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.”
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“To me, if life boils down to one thing, it’s movement. To live is to keep moving.”
— Jerry Seinfeld
“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
— Virginia Woolf
“The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.”
— E. E. Cummings
“The world is what it is. But the world is also what you bring to it, and who you share it with.”
— John Green
“Mistakes are part of the dues that one pays for a full life.”
— Sophia Loren
“Open your eyes, look within. Are you satisfied with the life you’re living?”
— Bob Marley
“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
— Voltaire
“Success is falling nine times and getting up ten.”
— Jon Bon Jovi
“To know nothing is the happiest life.”
— Desiderius Erasmus
“One way to get the most out of life is to look upon it as an adventure.”
— William Feather
“Life itself is the proper binge.”
— Julia Child
“No one changes the world alone and no one doesn’t change it at all. We are all exceptional, and none of us are.”
— Hank Green
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
— Thomas A. Edison
“There is no way to be perfect and no fun in being perfect.”
— Alicia Keys
“Life is a work in progress.”
— Jeff Rich
“You can’t achieve anything in life without a small amount of sacrifice.”
— Shakira
“A little credulity helps one on through life very smoothly.”
— Elizabeth Gaskell
“People are like music. Some speak the truth, and others are just noise.”
— Bill Murray
“I am an artist… I am here to live out loud.”
— Emile Zola
“A mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it is not open.”
— Frank Zappa
“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.”
— Jack London
“We can’t plan life. All we can do is be available for it.”
— Lauryn Hill
“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre
“The whole point is to live life and be — to use all the colors in the crayon box.”
— RuPaul
→ Read more short quotes
Advice on Life
“Here’s my advice: Study broadly and without fear. Learn a language if you can, because that will make your life more interesting. Read a little bit every day. But more importantly, surround yourself with people who you like and make cool stuff with them. In the end, what you do isn’t going to be nearly as interesting or important as who you do it with.”
— John Green
“Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.”
— Groucho Marx
“My only advice is to stay aware, listen carefully, and yell for help if you need it.”
— Judy Blume
“Life is so fresh, life is every day so new if we are fighting, only for the best. Sometimes I think the only real satisfaction in life is failure, failure in your endeavor to do your best.”
— Maude Adams
“The truth is you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed.”
— Eminem
“Figure out who are you separate from your family, and the man or woman you’re in a relationship with. Find who you are in this world and what you need to feel good alone. I think that’s the most important thing in life. Find a sense of self. With that, you can do anything else.”
— Angelina Jolie
“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
“I have a simple philosophy: Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches.”
— Alice Roosevelt Longworth
“I used to think that the worst thing in life was to end up alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel alone.”
— Robin Williams
More Life Quotes & Captions
“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
“Ah, how mysteriously the everyday things of life brush by us! On the surface, touched by light, of this complex human life, Time, a hesitant smile, blooms on the lips of the Mystery! How modern all this sounds, yet deep down it is so ancient, so hidden, so different from the meaning that shines out from all of this.”
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“Children — and adults — who have a growth mindset are much more successful than those who have a fixed mindset about themselves and the world.”
— Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times
“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
— Winston Churchill
“If you live long enough, you’ll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you’ll be a better person. It’s how you handle adversity, not how it affects you. The main thing is never quit, never quit, never quit.”
— Bill Clinton
“I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw some things back.”
— Maya Angelou
“When life hands you a difficult situation where you feel undervalued and disrespected, be bold and brave enough to know your worth.”
— Yai Vargas
“Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.”
— Rebecca West
“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
— Edgar Allan Poe
“Empathy begins with understanding life from another person’s perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It’s all through our own individual prisms.”
— Sterling K. Brown
“When you have balance in your life, work becomes an entirely different experience. There is a passion that moves you to a whole new level of fulfillment and gratitude, and that’s when you can do your best… for yourself and for others.”
— Cara Delevingne
“Throughout life people will make you mad, disrespect you and treat you bad. Let God deal with the things they do, cause hate in your heart will consume you too.”
— Will Smith
“The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”
— George Eliot
“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
— E. M. Forster
