All the best Sayings About Life and how to use them

When it comes to sayings about life they all contain some grain of wisdom that for someone becomes a pearl. Sayings about life have been around for centuries and are handed down by spoken or written word generation after generation. Many are flip, some are caustic, and some are inspirational.

The all time greatest collection of sayings about life would have to be Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. It is the oldest and most widely used collection of quotes (and sayings about life) ever. (See http://www.wikipedia.org/) From that source and dozens of other online resources, here are 100 of the sayings about life you may find most useful and most quotable.

Humorous Sayings about Life

One of the great things about humorous sayings about life is that they often take a few seconds to “get.” Some of course are very obvious, but the best humorous sayings about life make people laugh for five seconds and think for five minutes.

1. “Love is like a brick. You can build a house, or you can sink a dead body.”- Lady Gaga
2. “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” – Mark Twain
3. “By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.” – Robert Frost
4. “I hope life isn’t a big joke, because I don’t get it.” – Jack Handey
5. “I never gave anyone hell, I just told them the truth and they thought it was hell.” – Harry Truman
6. “I think I’ve discovered the secret of life – you just hang around until you get used to it.” – Charles Schulz
7. “Don’t worry about what people think, they don’t do it that often.”
8. “Civilization had too many rules for me, so I did my best to re-write them.” – Bill Cosby
9. “I say, if your knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.” -  Calvin & Hobbes
10. “The problem with being a pessimist is that even when you are right you don’t get to enjoy it.”
11. “It’s not true that life is one damn thing after another; it’s one damn thing over and over.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay
12. “A man wrapped up in himself makes a small package.” – John Ruskin
13. “If we aren’t supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?” – Tom Snyder
14. “I try to be known more for my work than for anything else.” – Charlie Sheen
15. “You can’t polish a turd.”
16. “You can’t fly like an eagle if you are surrounded by turkeys.”
17. “All I do is eat and sleep. Eat and sleep. There must be more to a cat’s life than that. But I hope not.” – Garfield
18. “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” – John Lennon
19. “Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.” – Mark Twain
20. “I have always wanted to be somebody; perhaps I should have been more specific.” – Lily Tomlin

Inspirational and Motivational Sayings about Life

Some speakers and writers fear using inspirational or motivational sayings about life because they think it will trivialize the quote. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact that we recognize sayings about life does not mean we are not moved by them.

1. “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.” – Mother Teresa
2. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” – John F. Kennedy
3. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.” – Aristotle
4. “Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford
5. “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve missed the winning shot. I’ve failed over and over again. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan
6. “You must be the change you want to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
7. “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
8. “There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.” – Dr. Denis Waitley
9. “Each person must live their life as a model for others.” – Rosa Parks
10. “Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.” – Immanuel Kant
11. “Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told: ‘I am with you kid. Let’s go.’” – Maya Angelou
12. “The only way to have a life is to commit to it like crazy.” – Angelina Jolie
13. “Enthusiasm is the yeast that makes our hopes rise to the stars.” – Henry Ford
14. “Don’t let what you can’t do interfere with what you can do.” – John Wooden
15. “Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing with the world looking on.” – Rochefoucauld
16. “One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men, but no machine can do the work of an extraordinary man.” – Elbert Hubbard
17. “Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music. “
18. “Obstacles are what you see when you take your eyes off of your goal.” – Vince Lombardi
19. “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
20. “There are two ways to live your life, one as if nothing were a miracle and another as if everything were.” – Albert Einstein

Pragmatic Sayings about Life

Being practical, realistic, and matter-of-fact does not mean that sayings about life are boring. Quite the opposite, the mere fact that sayings about life can be very straight forward makes them all the more believable.

1. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” – Albert Einstein
2. “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky
3. “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.”  - Truman Capote
4. “In any situation, the best thing you can do is the right thing; the next best thing you can do is the wrong thing; the worst thing you can do is nothing.” – Theodore Roosevelt
5. “Losers visualize the penalties of failure. Winners visualize the rewards of success. “
6. “Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” – John Wooden
7. “Sometimes you just got to give yourself what you wish someone else would give you.”  - Dr Phil
8. “In times like these it is important to remember that there have always been times like these.” – Paul Harvey
9. “Attack life, it’s going to kill you anyway.” – Steven Coallier
10. “Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day to day living that wears you out.”  - Anton Chekhov
11. “Life isn’t fair. It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.” – William Goldman
12. “We are born wet, naked, and hungry. Then things get worse. “
13. “If you stop struggling, then you stop life.” – Huey Newton
14. “Power does not corrupt, it’s fear of losing that power.” – Seth Czerepak
15. “We are drowning in information but starving for knowledge.” – John Naisbitt
16. “Old is always fifteen years older than you are now.” – Randy Voorhees
17. “If you think that education is expensive, try ignorance.” – Derek Bok
18. “The man who says that something cannot be done should not interrupt the man who is doing it.” – Chinese Proverb
19. “I’m generally a very pragmatic person: that which works, works.” –  Linus Torvalds
20. “A career is wonderful, but you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.” – Marilyn Monroe

Ironic and Pun-ish Sayings about Life

It is not true that puns are the lowest form of humor. Sayings about life that use puns are often the best of a speech. They urge the listener to think about what is being said and pay attention to the message. Ironic sayings about life are great thought starters.

1. “The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.”
2. “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”  -  Abraham Lincoln
3. “Gravity is a myth; earth sucks.”
4. “I’m on a seafood diet. Every time I see food, I eat it.”
5. “Families are like fudge. Mostly sweet with a few nuts.”
6. “Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your kids! “
7. “To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone.” – Reba McEntire
8. “Great writing is just a dictionary out of order .”
9. “Not all who wander are lost.” – Bumper sticker
10. “Once you’ve seen one shopping center you’ve seen a mall.”
11. “We were so poor when I was growing up we couldn’t even afford to pay attention. “
12. “The primary responsibility for a child’s education is apparent. “
13. “My only skill is knowing driving directions, but they tell me that’s not going to get me anywhere in life.”­
14. “Did you hear about the man who got his finger stuck in his computer? He was trying to insert his thumb drive.”
15. “I don’t mind making jokes, but I don’t want to look like one.” – Marilyn Monroe
16. “A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.” – Ellen Glasgow
17. “Certainly, it seems that there’s a good deal of irony in the world. I mean, if you live in a world full of politicians and advertising, there’s obviously a lot of deception.” – Kenneth Koch
18. “I love the irony. I’m perceived as being really young and yet I have the clinical condition of an old man.” – Michael J. Fox
19. “Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk.” – Doug Larson
20. “A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.” – David Brinkley

Sayings About Life and Relationships

Ah, what has not been said about relationships and love? Sayings about life that speak to romantic love are among the most memorable while sayings about life that speak to other relationships are often the most quotable.

1. “Life has taught us that love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
2. “Where there is love there is life.” – Indira Gandhi
3. “If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.” – A. A. Milne
4. “To live is like to love – all reason is against it and all healthy instinct for it.” – Samuel Butler
5. “Life is a quest and love a quarrel.”  – Edna St. Vincent Millay
6. “A friendship may develop into love, but rarely love into friendship.”
7. “Marriage is more about being the right person than finding the right person.”  - Seth Czerepak
8. “First marry the one you love, but then love the one you marry.”
9. “If one person ‘wins’ an argument, both people have lost it.”
10. “Don’t go out searching for the right kind of mate, become someone who will attract the kind of mate you are looking for.”  - Seth Czerepak
11. “Never ruin a good apology with excuses.” – Ben Franklin
12. “No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
13. “Love gives not based on deserving but on need.” – Chosen Potter
14. “It is better to understand a person’s motives than to criticize their actions.”
15. “People are illogical, unreasonable and self-centered; love them anyway.”
16. “It’s not the men in your life that count; it’s the life in your men.” – Mae West
17. “Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.”  - Mae West
18. “Before I met my husband, I’d never fallen in love. I’d stepped in it a few times.” – Rita Rudner
19. “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” – Lao Tzu
20. “The best proof of love is trust.” – Joyce Brothers

One nice thing about writing, there are lots of sayings about life you can steal. Well, not steal exactly; simply borrow in order to make a point. Writing a good speech, presentation, essay or article is hard work. Using pithy, emotional, motivational, or humorous sayings about life can help you, and your audience, connect with each other.

We’ve all been through those awful presentations where the speaker recites fact after fact and never gets around to saying anything pertinent to our lives. Just by using a few sayings about life, in general, or to the specific topic can make all the difference in the world. A report or article that cites either famous or anonymous quotes and sayings about life can bring home the point faster and more memorably than all the statistics ever reported.

Example 1: Let’s say you have to write a presentation about charitable giving and why it’s a good thing for people to do. As you cite statistic after statistic, interlace sayings about life like these from http://www.buzzle.com/.

• “The great use of life is to spend it for something that outlasts it.” -William James
• “You can get everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” – Zig Ziglar
• “There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.”  - Dr. Denis Waitley

Motivating your audience requires passion on your part. It is difficult for someone to follow if there is no leader. Incorporating sayings about life into everything you write helps others understand your devotion to the subject you are writing about. These don’t always have to be dramatic. They can be funny, heart warming, or even educational. The point is, using sayings about life in your writing make you – and your audience – more human.

Example 2: You’ve been asked to deliver a presentation to your company’s employees. Your goal is to motivate people to come up with ways the company can operate more efficiently and to reassure them that the company is doing everything it can to protect them. You can try these famous (and not so famous) sayings about life.

• “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”  – President John F. Kennedy
• “Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.” – Ben Franklin
• “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”  - Ralph Waldo Emerson

When you are writing virtually anything (well maybe not the grocery list), think about breaking the mold. As you move from point to point, consider yourself part of your audience. If you were reading or listening to this, how would you feel? Bored? Enlightened? Angry? The key to reaching the audience is to be the audience. Using sayings about life can bring your writing up to that level of excellence.

Example 3: You are writing a paper on aging. An inevitable fact about aging is that eventually it ends and we die. Using quotes like these takes the onus off an unpleasant topic and makes it more inspirational.

• “My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.” – Louis Adamic
• “Age is strictly a case of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”  - Jack Benny
• “The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”  -Muhammad Ali

Unless it is blatantly inappropriate, don’t be afraid to use humorous sayings about life in your writing. You can be downright hilarious or just a touch amusing. However, you should be very careful in selecting your humorous quotes. The last thing you want to do is offend someone.

Example 4: You are the incoming President of your social club and you must speak to over 100 of your peers. Here are some sayings about life quotes you might use.

• “Some days even my lucky rocket ship underpants won’t help.”
• “Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.”
• “There’s a great deal to say but I’m not going to say it tonight.”  - Jane Fonda

There are lots of good online resources on how to write, including http://www.ehow.com/. They all pretty much agree that connecting with your listeners or readers through sayings about life can make all the difference between polite acceptance and resounding approval.

If there’s one thing that can be said for sayings about life it’s that there are plenty of them. In fact, there are quotable sayings for just about every human condition and circumstance. No matter what the problem or the joy, someone, somewhere has been through exactly what you’re going through right now. And they had something to say about it. Just reading these sayings about life can turn a gray day into sunshine or make you laugh until you cry.

Things aren’t going right at work today? Feeling under appreciated, underpaid and over worked? These days there are a lot of folks on that boat. Here are some light hearted but oh-so-true sayings about life at work to put it all in perspective.

• “What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.”  - Pearl Bailey
• “Accomplishing the impossible means only that the boss will add it to your regular duties.”  -  Doug Larson
• “Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up because they’re looking for ideas.”  - Paula Poundstone
• “A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D., or Ph.D. Unfortunately, they don’t have a J.O.B.”  - “Fats” Domino
• “We pretend to work because they pretend to pay us.”

Are you just about ready to put every kid on the block up for adoption? Are yours and everyone else’s driving you bonkers – and it’s just a short putt? Whoever invented kids should have read these sayings about life.

• “Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it.”  - Harold Hulbert
• “While we try to teach our children all about life, our children teach us what life is all about.”  - Angela Schwindt
• “Children make you want to start life over.”  - Muhammad Ali
• “Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing up is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.”  - Phyllis Diller
• “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”  - Frederick Douglass

If you’re trying to convince yourself that you’re thinking when what you’re really doing is procrastinating you, my dear, are stuck – or scared. If it’s motivation you need, these sayings about life might help.

• “Courage is doing what you’re afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared.” – Eddie Rickenbacker
• “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 again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan
• “Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.”  – Mark Twain
• “There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back.”  – Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister
• “Tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week.” - Spanish Proverb

Sayings about life can be humorous or pithy, warmth from the heart or icy cold observations. For more thoughts on daily living, go to http://www.ask.com/ or http://www.wikipedia.org/.  And remember one of the best sayings about life is “The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this – Decide what you want.”

There are many sayings about life that can inspire you, touch your heart, and make for nice greeting cards. But when it comes to witty sayings about life – well – those are the ones that get you a standing ovation when you speak at a meeting and cause other drivers to wet their pants when they see them on your bumper sticker.

Alas, everyone can be witty the next day. It’s those who can be witty in the next three seconds who are doomed to success. Take James Yorke. He’s the Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Maryland. And what do most people know about him? His witty sayings about life like this response to a question regarding success:

• “The most successful people are those who are good at plan B.”

When it comes to sayings about life, that one pretty much hits the bullseye. But not everyone is naturally witty. So what does it take to become a wit? Here are five points that you should consider as you hone your skills. If you study them hard they won’t help; for that you need to practice them – for the rest of your life!

1.  True wit is often reactive. Whether it’s using sayings about life or another form of wit, the wise wit reacts with blinding speed to someone else’s remarks. To do that you have to listen very, very carefully and then turn whatever was said into something entirely different, and yet retain the kernel of truth that makes wit so intelligent. Take this example of repartee (a quick comeback based on a comment):

• Oscar Wilde (Irish writer and poet): “I wish I’d said that.”

• James Whistler (famous painter and contemporary of Wilde): “You will, Oscar, you will.” (See http://en.wikipedia.org/)

2.  Wit is often laugh-out-loud “punny”. To be witty, you need to have an excellent vocabulary and a vivid imagination. After all words are just words until you turn them into messages. You can also use sayings about life with puns in prepared speeches. Just be sure to emphasize the pun so the audience “gets it.”

• “Old plumbers never die. They just get out of the sink and go down the drain.”

• “Propaganda – a politically correct goose”

• “Get thee to a nunn’ry” -  From Shakespeare’s Hamlet becomes Get Thee to a Punnery, Richard Lederer’s collection of witticisms and puns.

3.  Wit is humorous, not cruel (unless you mean for it to be). The negative form of “wit” is “sarcasm.” Going too far, especially if your use of wit is based on some unspoken anger, can lead to hurt feelings and lost friendships. Using sayings about life can either be positive or negative; be sure you know when to employ each. (See http://www.ehow.com/)

• “Wit without discretion is a sword in the hand of a fool” – Spanish proverb

• “The art of conversation is not just saying the right thing, but also not saying the wrong thing at the tempting moment.” – Dorothy Nevill, English writer and horticulturist in the early 1900s.

4.  Wit is not long winded. If you want to tell a joke, go right ahead. But that is not wit; that’s recitation. If you want to be perceived as witty, get in and out of the comment fast. Use sayings about life that get to the point.

• “Brevity is the soul of wit”. – From Shakespeare’s Hamlet

• “You can’t hold a person down unless you stay down with them.”  - Booker T Washington

5.  If you’re too witty, your audience will not care one wit about you or what sayings about life you utter. Engaging in “oneupmanship” is just a form of showing off. Wit begets admiration and respect; showing off can get you a punch in the mouth (literally or figuratively).

• “There’s a hell of a distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.” – Dorothy Parker

As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said “Knowing is not enough; we must apply.” (From Boldwords.blogspot.com.) So whether you are already known as a wit or are striving to become one, it’s wise to examine your own attributes. Intelligence is important, but so is creativity. Being quick on your feet is absolutely necessary. Being brave enough to put yourself on the line is admirable but compassion must balance bravado. And finally, having a repertoire of sayings about life can be invaluable.

Quotes and sayings about life as well as information on using great sayings coming soon.