Inspirational Quotations

Truth cannot be memorized. Truth has to be discovered now, from moment to moment. It is always fresh, always new, always there for the still, innocent mind that has experienced life without needing to hold on to what has gone before.
—Barry Long (Australian Spiritual Teacher)

The only questions that really matter are the ones you ask yourself.
—Ursula K. Le Guin (Science-fiction writer)

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
—Charles Mackay (Scottish Poet, Journalist)

He that spends more than he is worth spins a rope for his own neck.
—French Proverb

The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
—Groucho Marx (American Actor)

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit.
—James Madison (American Statesman, President)

Fear makes liars of us all.
—Carmen Maria Machado (American Author, Essayist)

If one asks for success and prepares for failure, he will get the situation he has prepared for.
—Florence Scovel Shinn (American Spiritual Writer)

Strong people are made by opposition like kites that go up against the wind.
—Frank Harris (Irish Writer)

Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.
—Margaret Sanger (American Social Reformer)

One can present people with opportunities. One cannot make them equal to them.
—Rosamond Lehmann (English Novelist)

The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.
—Margery Allingham (British Author)

Irony is a great help in helping to penetrate fraudulent language.
—Paul Fussell (American Historian)

In worrying about the future, I despoil the present; in my escape, I leave a true freedom behind.
—Peter Matthiessen (American Naturalist, Novelist)

I think that the consciousness of passion makes you act very differently.
—Pedro Almodovar (Spanish Filmmaker)

The only people who like rules are people who lack imagination.
—Simon Sinek (American Motivational Author)

The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.
—Nancy Friday (American Feminist Author)

In love as in sport, the amateur status must be strictly maintained.
—Robert Ranke Graves (British Writer)

Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
—Robert M. Pirsig (American Writer)

The forces of things, the beings of the Universe, interpenetrate, divide and unite themselves according to eternal laws. But the laws of Nature are, to speak after the manner of men, Thoughts of God, in which all lives, that is to say, He is.
—Heinrich Zschokke (Swiss Writer, Reformer)

If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.
—Sheryl Sandberg (American Executive, Author)

Organization can never be a substitute for initiative and for judgment.
—Louis Brandeis (American Jurist)

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!
—Mary Harris Jones (Mother Jones) (American Labor Activist)

A belief which does not spring from a conviction in the emotions is no belief at all.
—Evelyn Scott (American Novelist)

We keep going back, stronger, not weaker, because we will not allow rejection to beat us down. It will only strengthen our resolve. To be successful there is no other way.
—Earl G. Graves Sr. (American Entrepreneur, Publisher)

It will always be a battle a day between those who want maximum change and those who want to maintain the status quo.
—Gerry Adams (Northern Irish Politician)

Desire nothing for yourself, which you do not desire for others.
—Baruch Spinoza (Dutch Philosopher)

One small cat changes coming home to an empty house to coming home.
—Pam Brown (Australian Poet)

The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a man’s determination.
—Tommy Lasorda (American Baseball Player, Coach)

Our great error is that we suppose mankind more honest than they are.
—Alexander Hamilton (American Statesman)

Great control of every motion and placement is a kind of self-care. It’s self-love in the best sense. I make a contract with the dancers (not literally, of course) to keep them alive and well and progressive—doing level best to see that they’re not injured. Dancing is not normal, that only a strong, knowledgeable body can protect against damage.
—Bella Lewitzky (American Choreographer)

It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.
—Claude M. Bristol (American Self-Help Author)

If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury; but if you injure him, you will always remember.
—Kahlil Gibran (Lebanese-born American Philosopher)

He who foresees calamities suffers them twice over.
—Beilby Porteus (Bishop of London)

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
—Jean Cocteau (French Poet, Artist)

Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.
—Laozi (Chinese Philosopher)

The best plan is to profit by the folly of others.
—Pliny the Elder (Roman Scholar)

In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.
—Erich Fromm (German Social Philosopher)

As a means to success, determination has this advantage over talent—that it does not have to be recognized by others.
—Robert Brault

One original thought is worth a thousand mindless quotings.
—Diogenes Laertius (Greek Biographer)

In politics, people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.
—Cecil Parkinson (British Politician)

It’s hard enough to write a good drama, it’s much harder to write a good comedy, and it’s hardest of all to write a drama with comedy. Which is what life is.
—Jack Lemmon (American Actor)

Railway termini are our gates to the glorious and the unknown. Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them, alas! we return.
—E. M. Forster (English Novelist)

It is no proof of a man’s understanding to be able to confirm whatever he pleases; but to be able to discern that what is true is true, and that what is false is false; this is the mark and character of intelligence.
—Emanuel Swedenborg (Swedish Mystic, Theologian, Scientist)

The worst men often give the best advice.
—Philip James Bailey (English Poet)

Success and failure are greatly overrated. But failure gives you a whole lot more to talk about.
—Hildegard Knef (German Actress, Singer)

It is an unfortunate human failing that a full pocketbook often groans more loudly than an empty stomach.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (American Head of State)

Life is a corrupting process from the time a child learns to play his mother off against his father in the politics of when to go to bed; he who fears corruption fears life.
—Saul Alinsky (Community Organizer)

Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave.
—Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux (Scottish Jurist, Politician)

Most people can’t think, most of the remainder won’t think, the small fraction who do think mostly can’t do it very well. The extremely tiny fraction who think regularly, accurately, creatively, and without self-delusion—in the long run, these are the only people who count.
—Robert A. Heinlein (American Science Fiction Writer)

I think it is fair to say that it is under a great deal of stress, and if I am asking for significant changes, it is because the world is going through significant changes.
—Mohamed ElBaradei (Egyptian Diplomat)

Let us follow our destiny, ebb and flow. Whatever may happen, we master fortune by accepting it.
—Virgil (Roman Poet)

To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

I finally realized that being grateful to my body was key to giving more love to myself.
—Oprah Winfrey (American TV Personality)

You can enjoy encouragement coming from outside, but you cannot need for it to come from outside.
—Vladimir K. Zworykin (American Physicist)

The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.
—Raymond Chandler (American Novelist)

To know when to be generous and when to be firm—this is wisdom.
—Elbert Hubbard (American Writer)

The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that is the way to bet.
—Damon Runyon (American Writer, Journalist)

Nothing is so hard to understand as that there are human beings in this world besides one’s self and one’s own set.
—William Dean Howells (American Writer, Critic)

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
—Steven Weinberg (American Physicist)

Of course, the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.
—Francoise Sagan (French Novelist)

When we lack the will to see things as they really are, there is nothing so mystifying as the obvious.
—Irving Kristol (American Political Writer)

There are no failures—just experiences and your reactions to them.
—Tom Krause (Finnish Opera Singer)

Every advantage in the past is judged in the light of the final issue.
—Demosthenes (Greek Statesman, Orator)

The perfect normal person is rare in our civilization.
—Karen Horney (German Psychoanalyst)

Envy depreciates the genius of the great Homer.
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso) (Roman Poet)

It’s discouraging to make a mistake, but it’s humiliating when you find out you’re so unimportant that nobody noticed it.
—Chuck Daly (American Basketball Coach)

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
—William Arthur Ward (American Author)

The slum is the measure of civilization.
—Jacob Riis (Danish-born American Social Reformer)

You have to laugh and cry over and over again with someone before you feel comfortable.
—Joan Rivers (American Entertainer)

I am for anything in this world that keeps the problem of finding a substitute for war in people’s minds.
—Ida Tarbell (American Investigative Journalist)

People have to learn sometimes not only how much the heart, but how much the head, can bear.
—Maria Mitchell (American Astronomer)

Students must have initiative; they should not be mere imitators. They must learn to think and act for themselves—and be free.
—Cesar Chavez (American Labor Leader)

But loneliness is as delusive a belief in the pertinence of the world as is love: in choosing to feel lonely, as in choosing to love, one carves a space next to oneself to be filled by others—a friend, a lover, a toy poodle, a violinist on the radio.
—Yiyun Li (Chinese-American Writer)

Familiarity is a magician that is cruel to beauty but kind to ugliness.
—Ouida (Maria Louise Rame) (English Novelist)

The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?
—John Hersey (American Novelist, Journalist)

Here is a mental treatment guaranteed to cure every ill that flesh is heir to: sit for half an hour every night and mentally forgive everyone against whom you have any ill will or antipathy.
—Charles Fillmore (American New Thought Mystic)

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
—Rainer Maria Rilke (Austrian Poet)

The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.
—Roger Bannister (British Athlete, Neurologist)

Mean spirits under disappointment, like small beer in a thunderstorm, always turn sour.
—John Randolph (American Politician)

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.
—Fred Astaire (American Dancer, Singer)

Many regulations primarily protect the past, prop up privilege or prevent sensible economic choices.
—Jerry Brown (American Politician)

Those who love deeply never grow old; they may die of old age, but they die young.
—Arthur Wing Pinero (English Playwright)

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
—Jeannette Rankin (American Politician)

A pure style in writing results from the rejection of everything superfluous.
—Suzanne Curchod (French-Swiss Salonist, Writer)

A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer. He is a man who has signed a contract with his conscious and his sense of duty.
—Anton Chekhov (Russian Short Story Writer)

The mind of man will never be able to contemplate the being, perfections, and providence of God without meeting with inexplicable difficulties.
—Joseph Priestley (English Clergyman, Scientist)

He who sees the truth, let him proclaim it, without asking who is for it or who is against it.
—Henry George (American Economist)

One of the advantages of defeat in life—maybe the main advantage—is that it provides an excuse for change. Defeat … invariably leads to new adventures.
—James Reston

You can’t escape history, or the needs and neuroses you’ve picked up like layers and layers of tartar on your teeth.
—Charles R. Johnson (American Author)

When you fall into a man’s conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him.
—Richard Steele (Irish Writer, Journalist)

The only people who think children are carefree are the ones who’ve forgotten their own childhood.
—Orson Scott Card (American Author)

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.
—Howard Zinn (American Historian, Activist)

He who endures penance and hardships for another delights in that person’s company.
—Malik Muhammad Jayasi (Indian Poet)

Nothing is desperately important and the joy of life is just looking at it.
—Alec Guinness (English Actor)

You can tell all you need to about a society from how it treats animals and beaches.
—Frank Deford (American Sportswriter)

Faith is not simply a patience that passively suffers until the storm is past. Rather, it is a spirit that bears things—with resignations, yes, but above all, with blazing, serene hope.
—Corazon Aquino (Filipino Stateswoman)

For your own good is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction.
—Janet Frame (New Zealand writer)

We must not seek happiness in peace, but in conflict.
—Paul Claudel (French Author, Dramatist)

I can see that you have a complex problem: it has a real and an imaginary part.
—John Tukey (American Statistician)

Stick with your own perception of yourself—living in your own world—and letting your reality, not the reality presented by other people or particular situations, control your performance.
—John Eliot (American Psychologist)

There must be more to life than having everything.
—Maurice Sendak (American Writer, Illustrator)

The trouble with simple living is that, though it can be joyful, rich, and creative, it isn’t simple.
—Doris Janzen Longacre (American Author)

I have never known a trader in philanthropy who was not wrong in his head or heart, somewhere or other.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English Poet)

If you spend life trying to be good at everything you will never be great at anything.
—Tom Rath (American Consultant)

A happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.
—Ruth Graham (American Christian Author)

Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.
—Jose Saramago (Portuguese Novelist)

A successful person realizes his personal responsibility for self-motivation. He starts with himself because he possesses the key to his own ignition switch.
—Kemmons Wilson (American Entrepreneur)

Doubt is brother devil to despair.
—John Boyle O’Reilly (Irish-American Journalist)

Knowledge begets knowledge. The more I see, the more impressed I am—not with what we know—but with how tremendous the areas are as yet unexplored.
—John Glenn (American Astronaut)

Fashion should not be expected to serve in the stead of courage or character.
—Loretta Young (American Actress)

Envy is like a fly that passes all a body’s sounder parts, and dwells upon the sores.
—George Chapman (English Poet, Playwright)

This I do partly mentally and partly by talking till I correct the wrong impressions and establish the truth, and the truth is the cure. . . . A sick man is like a criminal cast into prison for disobeying some law that man has set up. I plead his case, and if I get the verdict, the criminal is set at liberty. If I fail, I lose the case. His own judgment is his judge, his feelings are his evidence. If my explanation is satisfactory to the judge, you will give me the verdict. This ends the trial, and the patient is released.
—Phineas Quimby

No battle is worth fighting except the last one.
—Enoch Powell (British Politician)

A man may fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
—John Burroughs (American Naturalist, Writer)

No beast has ever conquered the earth; and the natural world has never been conquered by muscular force.
—Liberty Hyde Bailey (American Botanist)

There is a Japanese proverb that literally goes ‘Raise the sail with your stronger hand,’ meaning you must go after the opportunities that arise in life that you are best equipped to do.
—Soichiro Honda (Japanese Inventor)

A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
—Joyce Carol Oates (American Novelist)

I shall not let a sorrow die until I find the heart of it, nor let a wordless joy go by until it talks to me a bit.
—Sara Teasdale (American Poet)

People come to Washington believing it’s the center of power. I know I did. It was only much later that I learned that Washington is a steering wheel that’s not connected to the engine.
—Richard N. Goodwin (American Writer)

Cowards falter, but danger is often overcome by those who nobly dare.
—Queen Elizabeth I (British Monarch)

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can’t think of anything else to do.
—W. H. Auden (British-born American Poet)

Each person is an idiom… an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
—Gordon Allport (American Psychologist)

Benjamin Franklin may have discovered electricity, but it was the man who invented the meter who made the money.
—Earl Wilson (American Newspaper Columnist)

A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations.
—Patricia Neal (American Actress)

Most of us are honest all the time, and all of us are honest most of the time.
—Charles Mathias (American Politician)

How satisfying it is to leave a mark on a blank surface. To make a map of my movement—no matter how temporary.
—Craig Thompson (American Artist)

There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. … When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness.
—Khaled Hosseini (Afghan-American Author)

In our dreams we are always young.
—Sarah Louise Delany (American Educator, Author)

The people that set one animal against another haven’t the guts to be bullies themselves. They’re just secondhand cowards.
—Cleveland Amory (American Animal Rights Activist)

Failure is often God’s own tool for carving some of the finest outlines in the character of his children; and, even in this life, bitter and crushing failures have often in them the germs of new and quite unimagined happiness.
—Thomas Hodgkin (English Physician)

Whoever says he knows that immortality is a fact is merely hoping that it is.
—Carl Clinton Van Doren (American Critic, Historian)

I don’t know any more than you what the future will hold. But my point of view is different. You see despair and I see cause for hope. I read the future in a way that is more agreeable than you do.
—Alain-Rene Lesage (French Novelist, Dramatist)

A splendid storehouse of integrity and freedom has been bequeathed to us by our forefathers. In this day of confusion, of peril to liberty, our high duty is to see that this storehouse is not robbed of its contents.
—Herbert Hoover (American Statesman)

The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dreams shall never die.
—Ted Kennedy (American Politician)

If a door slams shut it means that God is pointing to an open door further on down.
—Anna Delaney Peale (American Author)

Private information is practically the source of every large modern fortune.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet, Playwright)

Wind puffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools.
—Socrates (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

Mental health, contemporary psychiatrists tell us, consists of the ability to adapt to the inevitable stresses and misfortunes of life. It does not mean freedom from anxiety and depression, but only the ability to cope with these afflictions in a healthy way.
—Doris Kearns Goodwin (American Historian)

We can easily manage, if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed for it.—But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday’s burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow to the weight before we are required to bear it.
—John Newton (English Clergyman, Writer)

They made the fatal decision: they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.
—Frank Herbert (American Science-fiction Writer)

And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After death has stopped the ears.
—A. E. Housman (English Scholar, Poet)

A scientist would rather use someone else’s toothbrush than another scientist’s definitions.
—Murray Gell-Mann (American Physicist)

Man is born good by nature, only to later become a beast because of the Society.
—Luciano De Crescenzo (Italian Film Actor, Director, Engineer)

Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.
—Joko Beck (American Zen Teacher)

Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.
—Paul Hawken (American Environmentalist)

The more internal freedom you achieve, the more you want: it is more fun to be happy than sad, more enjoyable to choose your own emotions than to have them inflicted on you by mechanical glandular processes, more pleasurable to solve your problems than to be stuck with them forever.
—Robert Anton Wilson (American Polymath)

In the democratic western countries, so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of “freedom,” like a bastard brother of reform.
—Wyndham Lewis (British Artist, Writer)

Justice is better than chivalry if we cannot have both.
—Alice Stone Blackwell (American Suffragist)

Every poet depends upon generations who wrote in his native tongue; he inherits styles and forms elaborated by those who lived before him. At the same time, though, he feels that those old means of expression are not adequate to his own experience.
—Czeslaw Milosz (Polish-American Poet, Novelist)