Inspirational Quotations

How you make sense of your childhood experiences has a profound effect on how you parent your own children.
—Dan Siegel (American Psychiatrist)

We should have learnt by now that laws and court decisions can only point the way. They can establish criteria of right and wrong. And they can provide a basis for rooting out the evils of bigotry and racism. But they cannot wipe away centuries of oppression and injustice—however much we might desire it.
—Hubert Humphrey (American Head of State)

Every person has some splendid traits and if we confine our contacts so as to bring those traits into action, there is no need of ever being bored or irritated or indignant.
—Gelett Burgess (American Humorist)

Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.
—Georges Braque (French Painter)

Be careful the environment you choose for it will shape you; be careful the friends you choose for you will become like them.
—W. Clement Stone (American Self-help Guru)

The hardest part of raising a child is teaching them to ride bicycles. A father can only ride beside the bicycle or stand yelling directions while the child falls. A shaky child on a bicycle for the first time needs both support and freedom.
—Sloan Wilson (American Author)

Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect, they mark our limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
—Jose Ortega y. Gasset (Spanish Philosopher)

If everyone howled at every injustice, every act of barbarism, every act of unkindness, then we would be taking the first step towards a real humanity.
—Nelson DeMille (American Author)

Life is a constant negotiation between what one wants to be and what circumstances allow.
—Miguel Angel Asturias (Guatemalan Poet)

Half the skill of being educated is learning what you can ignore.
—Kevin Kelly (American Editor)

No one is more unhappy than a peeping tom in a nudist camp.
—Luciano De Crescenzo (Italian Film Actor, Director, Engineer)

Knock the “t” off the “can’t”.
—George Reeves (American Actor)

Who never doubted, never half believed. Where doubt is, there truth is—it is her shadow.
—Philip James Bailey (English Poet)

A man’s most open actions have a secret side to them.
—Joseph Conrad (Polish-born British Novelist)

Journalism consists largely in saying “Lord James is dead” to people who never knew Lord James was alive.
—G. K. Chesterton (English Journalist)

Success in life is a matter not so much of talent or opportunity as of concentration and perseverance.
—Charles William Wendte (American Minister)

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.
—Joseph Campbell (American Author)

There is no intrinsic worth in money but what is alterable with the times, and whether a guinea goes for twenty pounds or for a shilling, it is the labor of the poor and not the high and low value that is set on gold or silver, which all the comforts of life must arise from.
—Bernard Mandeville (British Writer)

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.
—Ask Ann Landers (American Advice Columnist)

Courage is acting in spite of fear.
—Howard W. Hunter (American Mormon Religious Leader)

If a dog will not come to you after he has looked you in the face, you ought to go home and examine your conscience.
—Woodrow Wilson (American Head of State)

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts, it becomes an epidemic.
—Wallace Stevens (American Poet)

Markets change, tastes change, so the companies and the individuals who choose to compete in those markets must change.
—An Wang (Chinese-born American Engineer)

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.
—Henry David Thoreau (American Philosopher)

Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.
—Marquis De Condorcet (French Philosopher)

The best way to put more money in people’s wallets is to leave it there in the first place.
—Edwin Feulner (American Political Scientist)

It is hard to cement any relations with any country based on promises that may not be deliverable.
—Jim Leach (American Politician)

The vicious obey their passions as slaves do their masters.
—Diogenes Laertius (Greek Biographer)

The circumstances of the world are so variable, that an irrevocable purpose or opinion is almost synonymous with a foolish one.
—William H. Seward (American Statesman)

Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.
—Yehuda Bauer (Israeli Historian)

Disagreement is not oppression. Argument is not assault. Words—even provocative or repugnant ones—are not violence.
—Douglas Murray (British Author)

Truth is a thing immortal and perpetual, and it gives to us a beauty that fades not away in time.
—Frederick II of Prussia (Prussian King)

When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.
—Daniel Webster (American Statesman, Lawyer)

Life in the twentieth century is like a parachute jump; you have to get it right the first time.
—Margaret Mead (American Cultural Anthropologist)

Allow time and moderate delay; haste manages all things badly.
—Statius (Roman Poet)

Wicked people decry a modest person as dull, a person observing religious vows as showy, a holy person as a charlatan, a brave one as cruel, a hermit as foolish, a soft-spoken person as meek, a bright one as vain, an orator as a glib-talker and a patient person as weak. Is there any quality of the virtuous that the wicked do not condemn?
—Bhartrihari (Hindu Philosopher, Grammarian)

Real magic can never be made by offering someone else’s liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back.
—Peter S. Beagle (American Author)

To seek solitude like a wild animal. That is my only ambition.
—The 14th Dalai Lama (Tibetan Buddhist Religious Leader)

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.
—Louis Kronenberger (American Literary Critic)

Life—how curious is that habit that makes us think it is not here, but elsewhere.
—V. S. Pritchett (British Short Story Writer)

When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.
—Lois McMaster Bujold (American Writer)

Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you—you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Russian Novelist)

Heavy thoughts bring on physical maladies; when the soul is oppressed so is the body.
—Martin Luther (German Protestant Theologian)

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.
—Bertrand A. Russell (British Philosopher, Mathematician)

I believe in grumbling; it is the politest form of fighting known.
—E. W. Howe (American Novelist)

A botanist should be a man of a liberal and enlarged mind, who looks upon all the productions of nature with an eye of science, but with a heart of sensibility.
—James Edward Smith (English Botanist)

Only the brave know how to forgive… A coward never forgave; it is not in his nature.
—Laurence Sterne (Irish Anglican Novelist)

How inimitably graceful children are in general before they learn to dance!
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English Poet)

Heaven will permit no man to secure happiness by crime.
—Vittorio Alfieri (Italian Poet, Dramatist)

While all deception requires secrecy, all secrecy is not meant to deceive.
—Sissela Bok (Swedish Philosopher)

When will poets learn that a grass-blade of their own raising is worth a barrow-load of flowers from their neighbor’s garden?
—James Russell Lowell (American Poet, Critic)

Time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening at once.
—Woody Allen (American Film Actor, Director)

Yes, we must ever be friends; and of all who offer you friendship, let me be ever the first, the truest, the nearest and dearest!
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (American Poet)

Raillery is a mode of speaking in favor of one’s wit against one’s good nature.
—Montesquieu (French Political Philosopher)

Fraud and prevarication are servile vices. They sometimes grow out of the necessities, always out of the habits, of slavish and degenerate spirits. It is an erect countenance, it is a firm adherence to principle, it is a power of resisting false shame and frivolous fear, that assert our good faith and honor, and assure to us the confidence of mankind.
—Edmund Burke (British Philosopher, Statesman)

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.
—Kenneth Tynan (English Theatre Critic, Writer)

Intuition is the supra-logic that cuts out all the routine processes of thought and leaps straight from the problem to the answer.
—Robert Ranke Graves (British Writer)

The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist knows it.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer (American Physicist)

Fame is the circumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic.
—Don DeLillo (American Author)

There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.
—Simone Weil (French Philosopher, Political Activist)

Since I couldn’t actuate the things that I wanted to do, the only weapon I had was to say no.
—Sidney Poitier (American Actor, Film Director)

No rule is so general, which admits not some exception.
—Robert Burton (English Scholar, Clergyman)

Here is the secret of inspiration: Tell yourself that thousands and tens of thousands of people, not very intelligent and certainly no more intelligent than the rest of us, have mastered problems as difficult as those that now baffle you.
—William Feather (American Author, Publisher)

The hardest thing you can do is smile when you are ill, in pain, or depressed. But this no-cost remedy is a necessary first half-step if you are to start on the road to recovery.
—Allen Klein (American Author)

The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied, flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster.
—George Goodman (American Economist)

What “love” is I don’t know if it’s not the response of our deepest natures to one another.
—William Carlos Williams (American Poet, Novelist, Cultural Historian)

Finding practical answers to tough problems seems to take a backseat to ideology.
—Christopher R. Hill (American Diplomat)

The delicate and infirm go for sympathy, not to the well and buoyant, but to those who have suffered like themselves.
—Catharine Beecher ((1800–78) American Educationalist, Reformer)

You can employ men and hire hands to work for you, but you will have to win their hearts to have them work with you.
—William J. H. Boetcker (American Presbyterian Minister)

Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.
—Paul Valery (French Critic, Poet)

Towns are excrescences, gray fluxions, where men, hurrying to find one another, have lost themselves.
—E. M. Forster (English Novelist)

Nothing terrible has ever happened except in our thinking. Reality is always good, even in situations that seem like nightmares. The story we tell is the only nightmare that we have lived.
—Byron Katie (American Speaker)

It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
—Paul Auster (American Novelist, Poet)

No man is ever old enough to know better.
—Holbrook Jackson (British Journalist, Writer)

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.
—Hosea Ballou (American Theologian)

The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.
—A. J. Ayer (English Philosopher)

Half of the secular unrest and dismal, profane sadness of modern society comes from the vain ideas that every man is bound to be a critic for life.
—Henry van Dyke Jr. (American Author, Educator, Clergyman)

Where there are friends there is wealth.
—Plautus (Titus Maccius Plautus) (Roman Comic Playwright)

Sometimes when we are generous in small, barely detectable ways it can change someone else’s life forever.
—Margaret Cho (American Stand-Up Comedian)

Fears are nothing more than states of mind.
—Napoleon Hill (American Author)

Take not from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
—Thomas Jefferson (American Head of State)

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (English Novelist)

True glory consists in doing what deserves to be written; in writing what deserves to be read; and in so living as to make the world happier and better for our living in it.
—Pliny the Elder (Roman Scholar)

The lucky man is the one who arrives at everything. The unlucky is the one to whom everything happens.
—Eugene Labiche (French Dramatist)

Learning how to learn is life’s most important skill.
—Tony Buzan (British Writer, Educational Consultant)

A committee is an animal with four back legs.
—John le Carre (English Novelist)

Man’s unique agony as a species consists in his perpetual conflict between the desire to stand out and the need to blend in.
—Sydney J. Harris (American Essayist, Drama Critic)

Prudence is the virtue by which we discern what is proper to do under various circumstances in time and place.
—John Milton (English Poet)

God’s holiness is not just a moral category; it is the very essence of His ‘otherness.’ To understand the Law is to understand how a holy God can dwell among an unholy people.
—James Edward Smith (English Botanist)

Those who have employed the study of history, as they ought, for their instruction, for the regulation of their private manners, and the management of public affairs, must agree with me that it is the most pleasant school of wisdom.
—John Dryden (English Poet)

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.
—Pablo Picasso (Spanish Painter)

The men of the past had convictions, while we moderns have only opinions.
—Heinrich Heine (German Poet, Writer)

It is a very fine thing to have an open mind. But it is a fine thing only if you have the ability to make a decision after considering all sides of a question.
—James Edward Smith (English Botanist)

Speaking much is a sign of vanity, for he that is lavish in words is a niggard in deed.
—Walter Raleigh (English Explorer, Courtier)

Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.
—Nellie McClung (Canadian Suffragist, Author)

Biblical wisdom is not the pursuit of high intelligence, but the application of God’s truth to the ‘nitty-gritty’ of daily existence.
—James Edward Smith (English Botanist)

Humor does not diminish the pain – it makes the space around it get bigger.
—Allen Klein (American Author)

The worse you’re performing, the more you must work mentally and emotionally. The greatest and toughest art in golf is “playing badly well.” All the true greats have been masters at it.
—Jack Nicklaus (American Sportsperson)

Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.
—Moses Maimonides (Jewish Philosopher, Rabbinic Scholar)

That is the saving grace of humor, if you fail no one is laughing at you.
—A. Whitney Brown (American Comedian)

War is nothing but the continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.
—Carl von Clausewitz (Prussian General)

A man who trims himself to suit everybody will soon whittle himself away.
—Charles M. Schwab (American Businessperson)

You can always tell when a man is a great way from God—when he is always talking about himself, how good he is.
—Dwight L. Moody (Christian Religious Leader)

We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.
—John W. Gardner (American Activist)

In the herb of the field, as well as in the stars of heaven, the finger of God is clearly to be traced.
—James Edward Smith (English Botanist)

Too often new ideas are studied and analyzed until they are suffocated.
—C. William Pollard (American Businessman, Author)

When we are dealing with death we are constantly being dragged down by the event: Humor diverts our attention and lifts our sagging spirits.
—Allen Klein (American Author)

Hunger makes a thief of any man.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)

Who would not give a trifle to prevent what he would give a thousand worlds to cure?
—Edward Young (English Poet)

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author’s life.
—Andre Maurois (French Novelist, Biographer)

I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an “Honest Man.”
—George Washington (American Head of State)

When the flatterer pipes, then the devil dances.
—Thomas Fuller (English Cleric, Historian)

To fail is a natural consequence of trying, To succeed takes time and prolonged effort in the face of unfriendly odds. To think it will be any other way, no matter what you do, is to invite yourself to be hurt and to limit your enthusiasm for trying again.
—David Viscott (American Psychiatrist, Author)

The one word that makes a good manager—decisiveness.
—Lee Iacocca (American Businessperson)

The best teacher one can have is necessity.
—Francois de La Noue (French Huguenot)

Every theory of love, from Plato down teaches that each individual loves in the other sex what he lacks in himself.
—G. Stanley Hall (American Psychologist)

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that’s hard for a puritan to understand.
—Gunter Grass (German Novelist, Poet)

If you don’t have a dream, how are you going to make a dream come true?
—Walt Disney (American Entrepreneur)

There are two ways of meeting difficulties: you alter the difficulties or you alter yourself meeting them.
—Phyllis Bottome (British Novelist)

Opportunity rarely knocks until you are ready. And few people have ever been really ready without receiving opportunity’s call.
—Channing Pollock (American Playwright, Critic)

In a narrow circle the mind grows narrow. The more one expands, the larger their aims.
—Friedrich Schiller (German Poet)

Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.
—H. L. Mencken (American Journalist, Literary Critic)

Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed.
—George MacDonald (Scottish Poet, Novelist)

Fame is the inheritance not of the dead, but of the living. It is we who look back with lofty pride to the great names of antiquity.
—William Hazlitt (English Essayist)

A pessimist is one who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet, Playwright)

Where you see valid achievements or virtue being attacked, it’s by someone viewing them as a mirror of their own inadequacy instead of an inspiring beacon for excellence.
—Vanna Bonta (American Writer)

Man dies of cold, not of darkness.
—Miguel de Unamuno (Spanish Philosopher, Writer)