Inspirational Quotations

It’s better to live as your own man than as a fool in someone else’s dream.
—Martin Landau (American Actor)

The superior man is he who develops in harmonious proportions, his moral, intellectual, and physical nature. This should be the end at which men of all classes should aim, and it is this only which constitutes real greatness.
—Douglas William Jerrold (English Dramatist)

When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.
—Shirley Chisholm (American Politician)

Like a stone That rolls down a hill, I have come to this day.
—Takuboku Ishikawa (Japanese Poet)

The magnificent and the ridiculous are so close that they touch.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (French Man of Letters)

Faith assuages, guides, restores.
—Arthur Rimbaud (French Poet)

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
—Anita Brookner (English Novelist, Art Historian)

Introspect daily, detect diligently, negate ruthlessly.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Spiritual Teacher)

Man is born to seek power, yet his actual condition makes him a slave to the power of others.
—Hans Morgenthau (American Political Scientist)

It is a poor wit who lives by borrowing the words, decisions, mien, inventions, and actions of others.
—Johann Kaspar Lavater (Swiss Theologian, Poet)

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
—Rachel Carson (American Biologist)

It is with life just as with swimming; that man is the most expert who is the most disengaged from all encumbrances.
—Apuleius (Roman Prose Writer)

Life is neither a good nor an evil, but simply the scene of good and evil.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (Roman Stoic Philosopher)

I confess that I cannot understand how we can plot, lie, cheat and commit murder abroad and remain humane, honorable, trustworthy and trusted at home.
—Archibald Cox (American Lawyer)

The will to prepare is more important that the will to win.
—LaVell Edwards (American Football Coach)

Brevity is the best recommendation of speech, whether in a senator or an orator.
—Cicero (Roman Philosopher)

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike—and I don’t think there really is a distinction between the two—are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.
—Harold Bloom (American Literary Critic, Author)

Life is one long jubilee.
—Ira Gershwin (American Lyricist)

You seldom listen to me, and when you do you don’t hear, and when you do hear you hear wrong, and even when you hear right you change it so fast that it’s never the same.
—Marjorie Kellogg (American Author)

This habit of forming opinions, and acting upon them without evidence, is one of the most immoral habits of the mind. … As our opinions are the fathers of our actions, to be indifferent about the evidence of our opinions is to be indifferent about the consequences of our actions. But the consequences of our actions are the good and evil of our fellow-creatures. The habit of the neglect of evidence, therefore, is the habit of disregarding the good and evil of our fellow-creatures.
—James Mill (Scottish Philosopher)

Suspicion is one of the morbid reactions by which an organism defends itself and seeks another equilibrium.
—Nathalie Sarraute (French Novelist)

The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth.
—Charles Kingsley (English Clergyman)

Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune, but great minds rise above it.
—Washington Irving (American Author)

One of the great penalties those of us who live our lives in full view of the public must pay is the loss of that most cherished birthright of man’s privacy.
—Mary Pickford (American-Canadian Film Actress)

For human beings, the most daunting challenge is to become fully human. For to become fully human is to become fully divine.
—Thomas Keating (American Trappist Monk)

Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.
—Alfred North Whitehead (English Mathematician, Philosopher)

Success is the child of audacity.
—Benjamin Disraeli (British Head of State)

When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself… That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life.
—Stanley Kunitz (American Poet)

Discover the centre of your being and hold fast to it; only from there can you describe the perfect circle of life rounded into its absolute fullness.
—Nolini Kanta Gupta (Indian Hindu Revolutionary)

A mind conscious of integrity scorns to say more than it means to perform.
—Robert Burns (Scottish Poet, Songwriter)

Quotations offer one kind of break in what the eye can see, the ear can hear.
—Ihab Hassan (American Literary Theorist)

Love is the total absence of fear. Love asks no questions. Its natural state is one of extension and expansion, not comparison and measurement.
—Gerald Jampolsky (American Psychiatrist)

For the man sound in body and serene of mind there is no such thing as bad weather; every sky has its beauty, and storms which whip the blood do but make it pulse more vigorously.
—George Gissing (English Novelist)

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.
—Robert Bresson (French Film Director)

The royal road to a man’s heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.
—Dale Carnegie (American Self-Help Author)

Philosophy has been called the knowledge of our knowledge; it might more truly be called the knowledge of our ignorance, or in the language of Kant, the knowledge of the limits of our knowledge.
—Max Muller (German-British Orientalist)

If food is your best friend, it’s also your worst enemy.
—Grandpa Jones (American Musician)

You cannot impress the mind of God by having a special Sabbath day set apart to tell Him what you want, and then forgetting Him the rest of the week.
—Wallace Wattles (American New Thought Author)

He who labors as he prays lifts his heart to God with his hands.
—Bernard of Clairvaux (French Catholic Religious Leader)

Truth is inner harmony.
—Walther Rathenau (German Statesman)

We shall never have more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is. No object is served in waiting until next week or even until to-morrow. Keep going day in and out. Concentrate on something useful. Having decided to achieve a task, achieve it at all costs.
—Arnold Bennett (British Novelist)

Laughter is wine for the soul—laugh soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness. Comedy and tragedy step through life together, arm in arm… Once we can laugh, we can live.
—Sean O’Casey (Irish Dramatist)

In prayer it is better to have a heart without words, than words without a heart.
—John Bunyan (English Writer, Preacher)

If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
—Don DeLillo (American Author)

Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That’s why it’s a comfort to go hand in hand.
—Emily Kimbrough (American Author, Journalist)

A guilty conscience needs no accuser.
—Philippine Proverb

Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.
—Georges Gurdjieff (Armenian Spiritual Leader)

In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue. If we have enough friends, we may go on for years, intending to leave, talking about leaving—instead of actually getting up and leaving.
—Erica Jong (American Novelist, Poet)

To play it safe is not to play.
—Robert Altman (American Film Director)

Not only do we have a right to know, we have a duty to know what our Government is doing in our name. If there’s a criticism to be made today, it’s that the press isn’t doing enough to put the pressure on the government to provide information.
—Walter Cronkite (American Television Journalist)

The proper memory for a politician is one that knows what to remember and what to forget.
—John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn (British Statesman)

If a person never contradicts himself, it must be that he says nothing.
—Miguel de Unamuno (Spanish Philosopher, Writer)

Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.
—Muriel Spark (Scottish Novelist, Poet)

We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.
—Lydia Davis (American Author)

No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy.
—Lyman Beecher (American Presbyterian Clergyman)

It has been rightly said that nothing is unimportant, nothing powerless in the universe; a single atom can dissolve everything, and save everything! What terror! There lies the eternal distinction between good and evil.
—Gerard de Nerval (French Poet, Writer)

When wars do come, they fall upon the many, the producing class, who are the sufferers.
—Ulysses S. Grant (American Head of State)

Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.
—Erik Erikson (German-born American Psychoanalyst)

Attention is our first duty whenever we want to know what is our second duty. There is no such cause of confusion and worry about what we ought to do, and how to do it, as our unwillingness to hear what God would tell us on that very point.
—Henry Clay Trumbull (American Clergyman)

Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves.
—Norman Podhoretz (American Political Activist)

Holding on to conditional beliefs about how people should behave toward you because of all you do for them will only set you up to feel disappointment, anger, and resentment to people in particular as well as disillusionment about others in general.
—Harriet B. Braiker (American Psychologist)

Listening to someone talk isn’t at all like listening to their words played over on a machine. What you hear when you have a face before you is never what you hear when you have before you a winding tape.
—Oriana Fallaci (Italian Journalist)

Even the worst artist that ever was, even a one-eyed mental deficient with the shakes in both hands who sets out to paint the chicken-house, can enjoy the first stroke. Can think, By God, look what I’ve done. A miracle. … Must be one of the keenest pleasures open to mankind. It’s certainly the greatest an artist can have. It’s also the only one. And it doesn’t last long, usually about five minutes.
—Joyce Cary (English Novelist)

Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionary’s life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.
—Angela Davis (American Political Activist)

Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three.
—Joseph Heller (American Novelist)

The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared.
—Wilkie Collins (English Novelist, Playwright)

Creative people who can’t help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane.
—R. D. Laing (British Psychiatrist)

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.
—Jean Rhys (British Novelist)

When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.
—Nora Ephron (American Filmmaker)

Satiety is a mongrel that barks at the heels of plenty.
—Minna Antrim (American Writer, Epigrammist)

By doing good deeds all the time, the mind gets purified. Such a pure mind devoid of any bad thoughts is like a temple in itself.
—Subhashita Manjari (Sanskrit Anthology of Proverbs)

The best way to fill time is to waste it.
—Marguerite Duras (French Novelist, Playwright)

The test is to recognize the mistake, admit it and correct it. To have tried to do something and failed is vastly better than to have tried to do nothing and succeeded.
—Dale Turner (American Congregational Priest)

Humor is something that thrives between man’s aspirations and his limitations. There is more logic in humor than in anything else. Because, you see, humor is truth.
—Victor Borge (Danish-American Comedian, Musician)

A person of definite character and purpose who comprehends our way of thought is sure to exert power over us. He cannot altogether be resisted; because, if he understands us, he can make us understand him, through the word, the look, or other symbol.
—Charles Cooley (American Sociologist)

A purified mind can grasp anything. It can dive deep into the subtlest subject and understand even transcendental things.
—Sivananda Saraswati (Hindu Spiritual Teacher)

If you’ve truly committed yourself to something, given it all you’ve got, and then concluded that it is not for you—move on to something else.
—Susan Jeffers (American Self-Help Author)

Love lives on. Those we love are never really lost to us. We feel them in so many special ways—through friends they always cared about and dreams they left behind, in beauty that they added to our days, in words of wisdom we still carry with us, and memories that never will be gone. Those we love are never really lost to us—for everywhere their special love lives on.
—Amanda Bradley (American Poet)

Potter is jealous of potter, and craftsman of craftsman; and the poor have a grudge against the poor, and the poet against the poet.
—Hesiod (Greek Poet)

The greater perfection a soul aspires after, the more dependent it is upon Divine Grace.
—Brother Lawrence (French Carmelite Monk)

Aim at a high mark and you will hit it. No, not the first time, nor the second, and maybe not the third. But keep on aiming and keep on shooting. Finally you’ll hit the bull’s-eye of success, for only practice will make you perfect.
—Annie Oakley (American Markswoman)

From religion comes a man’s purpose; from science, his power to achieve it. Sometimes people ask if religion and science are not opposed to one another. They are: in the sense that the thumb and fingers of my hand are opposed to one another. It is an opposition by means of which anything can be grasped.
—William Lawrence Bragg (British Physicist)

Man is an evasive beast, given to cultivating strange notions about himself.
—Upton Sinclair (American Novelist, Social Reformer)

The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.
—Henry David Thoreau (American Philosopher)

People need to learn to take everyone as they are.
—Dawn French (Welsh Comedienne, Actress)

Can you see the holiness in those things you take for granted—a paved road or a washing machine? If you concentrate on finding what is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul.
—Harold Kushner (American Jewish Religious Leader)

A kiss can be a comma, a question mark, or an exclamation point. That’s basic spelling that every woman ought to know.
—Mistinguett (French Dancer, Actress)

No nation has the right to make decisions for another nation; no people for another people.
—Julius Nyerere (Tanzanian Statesman)

To me, we must learn to spell the word RESPECT. We must respect the rights and properties of our fellowman. And then learn to play the game of life, as well as the game of athletics, according to the rules of society. If you can take that and put it into practice in the community in which you live, then, to me you have won the greatest championship.
—Jesse Owens (American Athlete)

Aging is not ‘lost youth’ but a new stage of opportunity and strength.
—Betty Friedan (American Feminist, Author)

Youth is, after all, just a moment, but it is the moment, the spark, that you always carry in your heart.
—Raisa Gorbacheva (Russian Activist)

Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious.
—Peter Ustinov (British Actor, Playwright)

Man is stark mad; he cannot make a flea, and yet he will be making gods by the dozens.
—Michel de Montaigne (French Essayist)

If you promise the moon, be able to deliver it.
—Byrd Baggett (American Self-Help Author)

Weapons are like money; no one knows the meaning of enough.
—Martin Amis (British Novelist)

Success is achievable without public recognition, and the world has many unsung heroes. The teacher who inspires you to pursue your education to your ultimate ability is a success. The parents who taught you the noblest human principles are a success. The coach who shows you the importance of teamwork is a success. The spiritual leader who instills in you spiritual values and faith is a success. The relatives, friends, and neighbors with whom you develop a reciprocal relationship of respect and support—they, too, are successes. The most menial workers can properly consider themselves successful if they perform their best and if the product of their work is of service to humanity.
—Michael DeBakey (American Surgeon)

Conflict… is a theme that has occupied the thinking of man more than any other, save only God and love.
—Anatol Rapoport (American Mathematical Psychologist)

Don’t tell a woman she’s pretty; tell her there’s no other woman like her, and all roads will open to you.
—Jules Renard (French Author, Diarist)

A population weakened and exhausted by battling against so many obstacles—whose needs are never satisfied and desires never fulfilled—is vulnerable to manipulation and regimentation. The struggle for survival is, above all, an exercise that is hugely time-consuming, absorbing and debilitating. If you create these “anti-conditions,” your rule is guaranteed for a hundred years.
—Ryszard Kapuscinski (Polish Journalist)

The fact that there is a general belief in a future life is no evidence of its truth.
—Clarence Darrow (American Lawyer)

People are never free of trying to be content.
—Murray Bookchin (American Political Thinker)

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
—Thomas Merton (American Trappist Monk)

We pass our life in deliberation, and we die upon it.
—Pasquier Quesnel (French Theologian)

You should talk to people who disagree with you and you should talk to people who are not in the same emotional situation you are.
—Daniel Kahneman (American-Israeli Psychologist, Economist)

The noble title of ‘dissident’ must be earned rather than claimed; it connotes sacrifice and risk rather than mere disagreement.
—Christopher Hitchens (Anglo-American Social Critic)

Vicissitude of fortune which spares neither man nor the proudest of his works, but buries empires and cities in a common grave.
—Edward Gibbon (English Historian)

True courage is more a matter of intellect than of feeling.
—Steve Pavlina (American Motivational Speaker)

The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint. The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.
—Georges Bataille (French Essayist, Intellectual)

He who loses money, loses much; He who loses a friend, loses much more; He who loses faith, loses all.
—Eleanor Roosevelt (American Humanitarian)

The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden. Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.
—Octave Mirbeau (French Author)

The ultimate Path is without difficulty. Just avoid picking and choosing.
—Jianzhi Sengcan (Chinese-Buddhist Monk)

Modern society will find no solution to the ecological problem unless it takes a serious look at its lifestyle.
—Pope John Paul II (Polish Catholic Religious Leader)

There is an increasing awareness of the interrelatedness of things. We are becoming less prone to accept an immediate solution without questioning its larger implications.
—Arthur Erickson (Canadian Architect)

Good timber does not grow with ease:
The stronger wind, the stronger trees.
—Douglas Malloch (American Poet, Short-story Writer)

For, although he didn’t know it, to him work was a sort of intoxication which gave him a glowing health and plenty of easy sleep.
—Mulk Raj Anand (Indian Novelist, Critic)

A few heart-whole, sincere, and energetic men and women can do more in a year than a mob in a century.
—Swami Vivekananda (Indian Hindu Monk, Mystic)

There comes with old age a time when the heart is no longer fusible or malleable, and must retain the form in which it has cooled down.
—Sheridan Le Fanu (Irish Novelist)

If the mind loves solitude, it has thereby acquired a loftier character, and it becomes still more noble when the taste is indulged in.
—Wilhelm von Humboldt (German Statesman, Scholar)

All our religion is but a false religion, and all our virtues are mere illusions and we ourselves are only hypocrites in the sight of God, if we have not that universal charity for everyone—for the good, and for the bad, for the poor and for the rich, and for all those who do us harm as much as those who do us good.
—John Vianney (French Catholic Priest)

Life is short and often stingy; feast the heart with what it craves, short of cruelty, and let the world wonder.
—Reynolds Price (American Novelist)

There are philosophies which are unendurable not because men are cowards, but because they are men.
—Ludwig Lewisohn (American Novelist, Essayist)

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken of or written of, though it would be wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.
—A. S. Byatt (English Novelist, Poet)

Gossip’s a nasty thing, but it’s sickly, and if people of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die, ninety-nine times out of a hundred.
—Booth Tarkington (American Novelist)

Ethical religion can be real only to those who are engaged in ceaseless efforts at moral improvement. By moving upward we acquire faith in an upward movement, without limit.
—Felix Adler (American Philosopher, Educator)

The most reliable way to anticipate the future is by understanding the present.
—John Naisbitt (American Trend Analyst)

There are many To-morrows, my Love, my Love, –
There is only one To-day.
—Joaquin Miller (American Poet)

This is a confusing and uncertain period, when a thousand wise words can go completely unnoticed, and one thoughtless word can provoke an utterly nonsensical furor.
—Vaclav Havel (Czech Dramatist, Statesman)

Kissin’ wears out. Cookin’ don’t.
—Pennsylvania Dutch Proverb

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base.
—George S. Patton (American Military Leader)

Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.
—Nikos Kazantzakis (Greek Novelist, Statesman)

All science requires mathematics. The knowledge of mathematical things is almost innate in us. This is the easiest of sciences, a fact which is obvious in that no one’s brain rejects it; for laymen and people who are utterly illiterate know how to count and reckon.
—Roger Bacon (English Philosopher)

It is rude to silence a fool, and cruelty to let him go on.
—Indian Proverb

Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.
—Anthony Powell (English Novelist)

Fashion is the science of appearances, and it inspires one with the desire to seem rather than to be.
—Edwin Hubbell Chapin (American Preacher, Poet)

What difference is there, do you think, between those in Plato’s cave who can only marvel at the shadows and images of various objects, provided they are content and don’t know what they miss, and the philosopher who has emerged from the cave and sees the real things?
—Desiderius Erasmus (Dutch Humanist, Scholar)

I don’t think the human mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions that can manipulate you into thinking there’s some kind of change.
—Bob Dylan (American Musician)

God has given us two hands, one to receive with and the other to give with.
—Billy Graham (American Baptist Religious Leader)

Happiness is the light on the water. The water is cold and dark and deep.
—William Keepers Maxwell Jr. (American Novelist, Editor)

To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.
—Tacitus (Roman Orator, Historian)

If you can actually count your money, then you’re not a rich man.
—J. Paul Getty (American Business Person)

How I wish we lived in a time when laws were not necessary to safeguard us from discrimination.
—Barbra Streisand (American Musician)

There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.
—Frantz Fanon (Algerian Political Theorist)