Inspirational Quotations

The spirit is smothered, as it were, by ignorance, but so soon as ignorance is destroyed, spirit shine forth, like the sun when released from clouds.
—Adi Shankaracharya (Indian Hindu Philosopher)

Those who are going to be in business tomorrow are those who understand that the future, as always, belongs to the brave.
—William Bernbach (American Advertising Executive)

The future of architecture does not lie so much in continuing to fill up the landscape as in bringing back life and order to our cities and towns.
—Gottfried Bohm (German Architect)

Stealing to eat ain’t criminal-stealing to be rich is.
—Andrew Vachss (American Attorney, Author)

Life is given to use, we earn it by giving it.
—Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali Poet, Polymath)

Among the instrumentalities of love and peace, surely there can be no sweeter, softer, more effective voice than that of gentle peace-breathing music.
—Elihu Burritt (American Pacifist)

The more you practice what you know, the more shall you know what to practice.
—William Jenkyn (English Clergyman)

How helpless we are, like netted birds, when we are caught by desire!
—Belva Plain (American Novelist)

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.
—Meg Greenfield (American Journalist, Socialite)

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
—Guy de Maupassant (French Short-story Writer)

Ever notice that people never say “It’s only a game” when they’re winning?
—Ivern Ball (American Writer, Aphorist)

Smart is an elusive concept. There’s a certain sharpness, an ability to absorb new facts. To ask an insightful question. To relate to domains that may not seem connected at first. A certain creativity that allows people to be effective.
—Bill Gates (American Businessperson)

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: “Is there someone new?”
—Edna O’Brien (Irish Author)

No war is inevitable until it breaks out.
—A. J. P. Taylor (English Historian)

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
—Ralph Ellison (American Novelist)

Isn’t it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?
—John Loengard (American Photographer)

The simplest things give me ideas.
—Joan Miro (Spanish Artist)

Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.
—C. William Pollard (American Businessman, Author)

The opinions which we hold of one another, our relations with friends and kinfolk are in no sense permanent, save in appearance, but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
—Marcel Proust (French Novelist)

Wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up all by itself.
—Tom Wilson (American Cartoonist)

Nothing is too high for a man to reach, but he must climb with care and confidence.
—Hans Christian Andersen (Danish Author)

It is difficult to divest one’s self of vanity; because impossible to divest one’s self of self-love.
—Hugh Walpole (English Novelist)

Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-ight drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.
—John le Carre (English Novelist)

The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.
—Terry Pratchett (English Fantasy Writer)

It’s very important in life to know when to shut up. You should not be afraid of silence.
—Alex Trebek (American TV Personality)

Before you are five and twenty you must establish a character that will serve you all your life.
—Cuthbert Collingwood, 1st Baron Collingwood (English Naval Commander)

A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved. He inspires the power and energy to get it done.
—Ralph Lauren (American Businessman)

A sharp sense of the ironic can be the equivalent of the faith that moves mountains. Far more quickly than reason or logic, irony can penetrate rage and puncture self-pity.
—Moss Hart (American Playwright)

Poetry is life distilled.
—Gwendolyn Brooks (American Poet, Educator)

When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt.
—Henry J. Kaiser (American Industrialist)

Don’t abuse your friends and expect them to consider it criticism.
—Elizabeth Taylor (American Actress)

You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.
—Yann Martel (Canadian Novelist)

He travels best that knows when to return.
—Thomas Middleton (English Dramatist)

It’s essential to distinguish between events that are really beyond your control and events you caused yourself.
—Barbara Sher (American Career Coach)

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.
—Hugh Miller (Scottish Geologist, Writer)

The person who talks most of his own virtue is often the least virtuous.
—Jawaharlal Nehru (Indian Head of State)

Water is the one substance from which the earth can conceal nothing; it sucks out its innermost secrets and brings them to our very lips.
—Jean Giraudoux (French Novelist, Playwright)

Living in an age of extraordinary events and revolutions, I have learned, from thence this truth, which I desire might be communicated to posterity: that all is vanity which is not honest, and that there is no solid wisdom but in real piety.
—John Evelyn (English Restoration Diarist)

In a way, this diversity is very exciting, but one has at some point to ask: are these real beginnings, or so many false starts?
—Juliet Mitchell (British Feminist, Writer)

Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake.
—Richard Rorty (American Philosopher)

There is no Truth. There is only the truth within each moment.
—Ramana Maharshi (Indian Hindu Mystic)

The great advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness.
—Nancy Mitford (English Novelist, Biographer)

Nothing that is really good and God-like dies.
—Ernst Moritz Arndt (German Writer)

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
—L. P. Hartley (British Writer, Critic)

One thing I never want to be accused of is not working.
—Don Shula (American Football Coach)

You don’t concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done.
—Chuck Yeager (American Aviator)

No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are made. Destiny is made known silently.
—Agnes de Mille (American Dancer)

You only have power over people so long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything he’s no longer in your power—he’s free again.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Russian Novelist)

If the track is tough and the hill is rough, THINKING you can just ain’t enough!
—Shel Silverstein (American Cartoonist, Author)

Always be smarter than the people who hire you.
—Lena Horne (American Singer, Actress)

The feeble tremble before opinion, the foolish defy it, the wise judge it, the skillful direct it.
—Madame Roland (French Revolutionary)

Life is a gathering to which only a limited number are invited at a time, and the invitation is never repeated.
—Hans Carossa (German Novelist)

We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.
—Roderick Thorp (American Novelist)

The voice you hear when you read to yourself is the clearest voice: you speak it speaking to you.
—Thomas Lux (American Poet)

Like an old gold-panning prospector, you must resign yourself to digging up a lot of sand from which you will later patiently wash out a few minute particles of gold ore.
—Dorothy Bryant (American Novelist)

Hollywood never knew there was a Vietnam War until they made the movie.
—Jerry Stiller (American Actor, Comedian)

Don’t let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.
—Mae Jemison (American Physician, Astronaut)

The body has to be utilized for service to others. More bliss can be got from serving others than from merely serving oneself.
—Sathya Sai Baba (Indian Hindu Religious Leader)

A man always has two reasons for what he does good one, and the real one.
—J. P. Morgan (American Financier, Philanthropist)

The mind is like a richly woven tapestry in which the colors are distilled from the experiences of the senses, and the design drawn from the convolutions of the intellect.
—Carson McCullers (American Novelist)

You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish.
—Anita Brookner (English Novelist, Art Historian)

Shelving hard decisions is the least ethical course.
—Adrian Cadbury (British Businessman)

Each department of knowledge passes through three stages. The theoretic stage; the theological stage and the metaphysical or abstract stage.
—Auguste Comte (French Philosopher)

If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains.
—Alain de Botton (Swiss-born British Philosopher)

You do not become a “dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.
—Vaclav Havel (Czech Dramatist, Statesman)

If you can’t take a good kicking, you shouldn’t parade how much luckier you are than other people.
—Charles Saatchi (British Businessman, Art Collector)

Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it.
—John Naisbitt (American Trend Analyst)

A good scientist is a person in whom the childhood quality of perennial curiosity lingers on. Once he gets an answer, he has other questions.
—Frederick Seitz (American Physicist)

Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing, through the overtaking and possessing of a wish discovers the folly of the chase.
—William Congreve (English Dramatist)

The desire to reach for the sky runs deep in our human psyche.
—Cesar Pelli (Argentinean-American Architect)

The two women exchanged the kind of glance women use when no knife is handy.
—Ellery Queen (American Crime Fiction Authors)

While there are practical and sometimes moral reasons for the decomposition of the family, it coincides neither with what most people in society say they desire nor, especially in the case of children, with their best interests.
—Robert Neelly Bellah (American Sociologist)

A Realist is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been purified. A skeptic is an idealist who has gone through the fire and been burned.
—Warren W. Wiersbe (American Pastor, Biblical Scholar)

He who believes in nobody knows that he himself is not to be trusted.
—Berthold Auerbach (German Novelist)

Problems arise in that one has to find a balance between what people need from you and what you need for yourself.
—Jessye Norman (American Soprano)

An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more. I have always been fascinated by blood. Pain can be vitalizing; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don’t suffer, how do we know that we live?
—Sebastian Horsley (English Painters, Author)

I’m struck by how laughter connects you with people. It’s almost impossible to maintain any kind of distance or any sense of social hierarchy when you’re just howling with laughter. Laughter is a force for democracy.
—John Cleese (British Comic Actor, Writer)

We’re constantly being told what other people think we are, and that’s why it is so important to know yourself.
—Sarah McLachlan (Canadian Musician)

A wise person should never divulge the loss of his wealth, distress in his mind, malpractices at his home or that he has been cheated or insulted.
—The Hitopadesha (Indian Collection of Fables)

It’s a dangerous thing to think we know everything.
—Jack Kuehler (American Businessman)

Opinion often consists of a kind of criticism. But criticism can come out of love.
—Robert Frank (Swiss-American Photographer)

Indolence and stupidity are first cousins.
—Antoine de Rivarol (French Writer)

Where the heart is full of kindness which seeks no injury to another, either in act or thought or wish, this full love creates an atmosphere of harmony, whose benign power touches with healing all who come within its influence. Peace in the heart radiates peace to other hearts, even more surely than contention breeds contention.
—Patanjali (Indian Hindu Philosopher)

What is here is also there; what is there, is also here. Who sees multiplicity but not the one indivisible Self must wander on and on from death to death.
—The Upanishads (Sacred Books of Hinduism)

Ideas are the real substance of human life. Ideas guide our actions and even control our movements. It is just as well to put them in order first and then to display their anatomy.
—Jonathan Miller (English Stage Director)

Children read to learn—even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries: it is all new to them.
—Joan Aiken (British Fantasy Writer)

On the neck of a young man sparkles no gem so gracious as enterprise.
—Hafez (Persian Poet)

The most popular labor-saving device is still money.
—Phyllis George (American Sportscaster)

Disease is the tax which the soul pays for the body, as the tenant pays house-rent for the use of the house.
—Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (Indian Hindu Philosopher)

A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary.
—Yasunari Kawabata (Japanese Novelist, Short Story Writer)

Egotism is the art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.
—George V. Higgins (American Novelist)

If you are not willing to take pain to live by your principles, there is no point in having principles.
—Marvin Bower (American Business Consultant)

Applause that comes thundering with such force you might think the audience merely suffers the music as an excuse for its ovations.
—Greil Marcus (American Music Journalist)

Only those who are asleep make no mistakes.
—Ingvar Kamprad (Swedish Businessman)

I must confess I am a fop in my heart; ill customs influence my very senses, and I have been so used to affectation that without the help of the air of the court what is natural cannot touch me.
—George Etherege (English Dramatist)

I had no ambition to make a fortune. Mere money-making has never been my goal; I had an ambition to build.
—John D. Rockefeller (American Industrialist, Philanthropist)

It is a sad day when one looks back and sees that his largest regrets have become some of the most integral elements of his dreams.
—John Knowles (American Novelist)

The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men’s apples and head their cabbages.
—Cyrano de Bergerac (French Writer, Duelist.)

The effectiveness of our memory banks is determined not by the total number of facts we take in, but the number we wish to reject.
—Jon Wynne-Tyson (British Publisher, Activist)

After hard work, the biggest determinant is being in the right place at the right time.
—Michael Bloomberg (American Businessperson)

Tidy fees are the most effective remedy, both for the doctor and the patient.
—Dario Fo (Italian Playwright)

Arguably the only goods people need these days are food and happiness.
—Terence Conran (British Designer, Entrepreneur)

Whatever your discipline, become a student of excellence in all things. Take every opportunity to observe people who manifest the qualities of mastery. These models of excellence will inspire you and guide you toward the fulfillment of your highest potential.
—Tony Buzan (British Writer, Educational Consultant)

It ought to make us feel ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.
—Raymond Carver (American Author)

There is a spirit and a need and a man at
the beginning of every great human advance.
Each of these must be right for that particular
moment in history, or nothing happens.
—Coretta Scott King (American Civil Rights Leader)

Knowledge is a weapon. I intend to be formidably armed.
—Terry Goodkind (American Author)

We seldom call anybody lazy, but such as we reckon inferior to us, and of whom we expect some service.
—Bernard Mandeville (British Writer)

Change hurts. It makes people insecure, confused, and angry. People want things to be the same as they’ve always been, because that makes life easier. But, if you’re a leader, you can’t let your people hang on to the past.
—Richard Marcinko (American Navy Officer)

The secret is to always let the other man have your way.
—Claiborne Pell (American Politician)

Fashion, which elevates the bad to the level of the good, subsequently turns its back on bad and good alike.
—Eric Bentley (British-American Drama Critic)

Economy, prudence, and a simple life are the sure masters of need, and will often accomplish that which, their opposites, with a fortune at hand, will fail to do.
—Clara Barton (American Humanitarian)

Goal setting has traditionally been based on past performance. This practice has tended to perpetuate the sins of the past.
—Joseph Juran (American Quality Scholar)

More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.
—Uta Hagen (American Actress)

Basically, the only thing we need is a hand that rests on our own, that wishes it well, that sometimes guides us.
—Hector Bianciotti (French Novelist)

Power doesn’t corrupt people, people corrupt power.
—William Gaddis (American Novelist)

I rate enthusiasm even above professional skill.
—Edward Victor Appleton (English Physicist)

Whatever you can do, do it today and then old age will be a delicious fruit.
—Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese Buddhist Religious Leader)

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.
—Allen Ginsberg (American Poet)

For every finish-line tape a runner breaks—complete with the cheers of the crowd and the clicking of hundreds of cameras—there are the hours of hard and often lonely work that rarely gets talked about.
—Grete Waitz (Norwegian Athlete)

Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes.
—Etty Hillesum (Jewish Diarist)

A vision without action is called a daydream.
—James LeVoy Sorenson (American Businessman)

If you’re successful in what you do over a period of time, you’ll start approaching records, but that’s not what you’re playing for. You’re playing to challenge and be challenged.
—Lou Brock (American Baseball Player)

Try in thine own experience, each; that he speak not for one whole day unkindly of any… and see what such a day would bring to you.
—Edgar Cayce (American Faith Healer)

I think of the telephone as a spiritual thing. Your bodies don’t have to unite you, but your spirits can unite.
—Joan Walsh Anglund (American Poet, Children’s Book Author)

Life is very hard. The only people who really live are those who are harder than life itself.
—Nawal El Saadawi (Egyptian Writer, Activist)

Immortality is not a gift, Immortality is an achievement; And only those who strive mightily Shall possess it.
—Edgar Lee Masters (American Poet, Novelist)

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.
—Peregrine Worsthorne (British Journalist, Author)

Balance is the enemy of art.
—Richard Eyre (British Director)

You can’t achieve anything without getting in someone’s way. You can’t be detached and effective.
—Abba Eban (Israeli Statesman)

If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you’re not going to get very far. You simply won’t. The journey has been incredible from its beginning. So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.
—Sidney Poitier (American Actor, Film Director)

We simply do not understand our place in the universe and have not the courage to admit it
—Barry Lopez (American Essayist, Fiction Writer)

Courage is as often the outcome of despair as of hope; in the one case we have nothing to lose, in the other everything to gain.
—Diane de Poitiers (French Noble)

The person who has earned love the least needs it the most.
—F. Enzio Busche (Mormon Church Leader)