Inspirational Quotations

Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.
—Benjamin Franklin (American Political leader)

We set up harsh and unkind rules against ourselves. No one is born without faults. That man is best who has fewest.
—Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (Roman Poet)

A mantra to cure procrastinators: It needn’t be perfect; it needn’t be fun; it just has to get done.
—Marty Nemko (American Career Coach, Author)

He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper; but he is more excellent who can suit his temper to any circumstances.
—David Hume (Scottish Philosopher, Historian)

The easiest period in a crisis situation is actually the battle itself. The most difficult is the period of indecision—whether to fight or run away. And the most dangerous period is the aftermath. It is then, with all his resources spent and his guard down, that an individual must watch out for dulled reactions and faulty judgment.
—Richard Nixon (American Head of State)

Don’t criticize what you don’t understand, son. You never walked in that man’s shoes.
—Elvis Presley (American Musician)

Let us think of education as the means of developing our greatest abilities, because in each of us there is a private hope and dream which, fulfilled, can be translated into benefit for everyone and greater strength for our nation.
—John F. Kennedy (American Head of State)

Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

Old hands soil, it seems, whatever they caress, but they too have their beauty when they are joined in prayer. Young hands were made for caresses and the sheathing of love. It is a pity to make them join too soon.
—Andre Gide (French Novelist)

Earning trust is not easy, nor is it cheap, nor does it happen quickly. Earning trust is hard and demanding work. Trust comes only with genuine effort, never with a lick and a promise.
—Max De Pree (American Businessman)

Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures as this will only fill your mind with grief, regret and depression. Do not repeat them in the future.
—Sivananda Saraswati

Wisdom is not in words; Wisdom is meaning within words.
—Khalil Gibran (Lebanese-born American Philosopher)

When you introduce a moral lesson, let it be brief.
—Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (Roman Poet)

Study the past, if you would define the future.
—Confucius (Chinese Philosopher)

Learn a little here and a little there, and you will increase in knowledge.
—The Talmud (Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith)

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
—William Wordsworth (English Poet)

People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.
—Brian Tracy (American Author)

Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults—a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.
—Henri Frederic Amiel (Swiss Philosopher)

Education is the transmission of civilization.
—William C. Durant (American Entrepreneur)

Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves.
—William Ellery Channing

There are but two roads that lead to an important goal and to the doing of great things: strength and perseverance. Strength is the lot of but a few privileged men; but austere perseverance, harsh and continuous, may be employed by the smallest of us and rarely fails of its purpose, for its silent power grows irresistibly greater with time.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German Poet)

Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

The wisdom of nations lies in their proverbs, which are brief and pithy. Collect and learn them; they are notable measures of directions for human life; you have much in little; they save time in speaking; and upon occasion may be the fullest and safest answers.
—William Penn (American Entrepreneur)

If you give people tools, [and they use] their natural ability and their curiosity, they will develop things in ways that will surprise you very much beyond what you might have expected.
—Bill Gates (American Businessperson)

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
—William C. Durant (American Entrepreneur)

The winner persistently programs his pluses; the loser mournfully magnifies his minuses.
—William Arthur Ward (American Author)

When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike you, do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (American Head of State)

Time is the wisest of all counselors.
—Plutarch (Ancient Greek Historian)

We may affirm absolutely that nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better.
—Martin Luther King, Jr. (American Civil Rights Leader)

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.
—Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.
—W. H. Auden (British-born American Poet)

Before you agree to do anything that might add even the smallest amount of stress to your life, ask yourself: “What is my truest intention?” Give yourself time to let a yes resound within you. When it’s right, I guarantee that your entire body will feel it.
—Oprah Winfrey (American TV Personality)

One of the reasons mature people stop learning is that they become less and less willing to risk failure.
—John W. Gardner (American Government Official)

When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.
—Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)

There is more to life than increasing its speed.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

I have feelings too. I am still human. All I want is to be loved, for myself and for my talent.
—Marilyn Monroe (American Actor)

To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it, is the key to happiness.
—John Dewey (American Philosopher)

Probably no man ever had a friend he did not dislike a little; we are all so constituted by nature that no one can possibly entirely approve of us.
—E. W. Howe (American Novelist)

A man has generally the good or ill qualities which he attributes to mankind.
—William Shenstone (English Poet)

You can always tell a real friend; when you’ve made a fool of yourself he doesn’t feel you’ve done a permanent job.
—Laurence J. Peter (Canadian-born American Educator)

A budget tells us what we can’t afford, but it doesn’t keep us from buying it.
—William Feather (American Publisher)

When we judge or criticize another person, it says nothing about that person; it merely says something about our own need to be critical.
—Anonymous

It is vanity to desire a long life and to take no heed of a good life.
—Thomas A Kempis

It is said an eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him with the words, ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!
—Abraham Lincoln (American Head of State)

When the thief has no opportunity to steal he considers himself an honest man.
—The Talmud (Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith)

History teaches us that the great revolutions aren’t started by people who are utterly down and out, without hope and vision. They take place when people begin to live a little better—and when they see how much yet remains to be achieved.
—Hubert Humphrey (American Head of State)

Just as you have the instinctive natural desire to be happy and overcome suffering, so do all sentient beings; just as you have the right to fulfill this innate aspiration, so do all sentient beings. So on what exact grounds do you discriminate?
—The 14th Dalai Lama (Tibetan Buddhist Religious Leader)

When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.
—W. Somerset Maugham (French Playwright)

Faith is kept alive in us, and gathers strength, more from practice than from speculations.
—Joseph Addison (English Essayist)

Success is a matter of understanding and religiously practicing specific, simple habits that always lead to success.
—Robert Ringer (American Entrepreneur)

Women, like men, ought to have their youth so glutted with freedom they hate the very idea of freedom.
—Vita Sackville-West (English Gardener)

In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.
—Lee Iacocca (American Businessperson)

Faith is a function of the heart. It must be enforced by reason. The two are not antagonistic as some think. The more intense one’s faith is, the more it whet’s one’s reason. When faith becomes blind it dies.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

If we put the emphasis upon the right things, if we live the life that is worth while and then fail, we will survive all disasters, we will out-live all misfortune. We should be so well balanced and symmetrical, that nothing which could ever happen could throw us off our center, so that no matter what misfortune should overtake us, there would still be a whole magnificent man or woman left after being stripped of everything else.
—Orison Swett Marden (American New Thought Writer)

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.
—Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (American Head of State)

To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals—that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
—Honore de Balzac (French Novelist)

Knowledge cultivates your seeds and does not sow in you seeds.
—Khalil Gibran (Lebanese-born American Philosopher)

The underdog often starts the fight, and occasionally the upper dog deserves to win.
—E. W. Howe (American Novelist)

Love is the strongest force the world possesses, and yet it is the humblest imaginable.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.
—Jim Bishop (American Journalist)

In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.
—Leo Tolstoy (Russian Novelist)

A little neglect may breed great mischief. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, the horse was lost; and for want of a horse, the rider was lost; being overtaken, and slain by the enemy. All for want of care about a horse-shoe nail.
—Benjamin Franklin (American Political leader)

Waste no more time talking about great souls and how they should be. Become one yourself!
—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

Experience is the only prophecy of wise men.
—Alphonse de Lamartine (French Writer)

Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.
—William Shakespeare (British Playwright)

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (English Aristocrat)

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?
—Don Marquis (American Humorist)

Boredom is the deadliest poison.
—William F. Buckley, Jr. (American TV Personality)

It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh (American Author, Aviator)

The money men make lives after them.
—Samuel Butler

I am searching for that which every man seeks—peace and rest.
—Dante Alighieri (Italian Political leader)

The minute a man ceases to grow, no matter what his years, that minute he begins to be old.
—William James (American Philosopher)

One mustn’t criticize other people on grounds where he can’t stand perpendicular himself.
—Mark Twain (American Humorist)

The average man never really thinks from end to end of his life. The mental activity of such people is only a mouthing of cliches.
—H. L. Mencken (American Journalist)

We may make mistakes—but they must never be mistakes which result from faintness of heart or abandonment of moral principles.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (American Head of State)

Consciousness is a phase of mental life which arises in connection with the formation of new habits. When habit is formed, consciousness only interferes to spoil our performance.
—William Ralph Inge (English Anglican Clergyman)

Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may from a raw recruit, and its methods differ from those of common sense, only as the guardsman’s cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.
—Thomas Henry Huxley (English Biologist)

Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.
—Mignon McLaughlin (American Journalist)

Censure is often useful, praise often deceitful.
—Winston Churchill (British Head of State)

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.
—Benjamin Disraeli (British Head of State)

We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.
—Charles Cooley (American Sociologist)

Defeat is simply a signal to press onward.
—Helen Keller (American Author)

There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized peace.
—Woodrow Wilson (American Head of State)

Manner is everything with some people, and something with everybody.
—Conyers Middleton (English Clergyman)

I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.
—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
—Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
—Rollo May (American Philosopher)

It is indolence… Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.
—Jane Austen (English Novelist)

Most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it.
—Seth Godin (American Entrepreneur)

It takes vision and courage to create; it takes faith and courage to prove.
—Owen D. Young (American Businessperson)

Reading is essential for those who seek to rise above the ordinary. We must not permit anything to stand between us and the book that could change our lives.
—Jim Rohn (American Entrepreneur)

Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.
—Andrew Grove (Hungarian-born American Businessperson)

If we judge ourselves only by our aspirations and everyone else only by their conduct, we shall soon reach a very false conclusion.
—Calvin Coolidge (American Head of State)

Desire, ignorance, and inequality—this is the trinity of bondage.
—Swami Vivekananda (Indian Hindu Mystic)

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.
—G. K. Chesterton (English Journalist)

When a king asked Euclid, whether he could not explain his art to him in a more compendious manner, he was answered, that there was no royal way to geometry. Other things may be seized by might, or purchased with money, but knowledge is to be gained only by study, and study to be prosecuted only in retirement.
—Samuel Johnson (British Essayist)

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.
—John Ruskin (English Art Critic)

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is, to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (American Novelist)

Economy is the art of making the most of life. The love of economy is the root of all virtue.
—George Bernard Shaw (Irish Playwright)

Though men pride themselves on their great actions, often they are not the result of any great design, but of chance.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
—Nelson Mandela (South African Political leader)

It is the cheerful mind that is persevering. It is the strong mind that hews its way through a thousand difficulties.
—Swami Vivekananda (Indian Hindu Mystic)

Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous.
—Voltaire (French Philosopher)

I reject any religious doctrine that does not appeal to reason and is in conflict with morality.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

All the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insolvable. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
—Carl Jung (Swiss Psychologist)

Every man who rises above the common level has received two educations: the first from his teachers; the second, more personal and important, from himself.
—Edward Gibbon (English Historian)

No man is happy unless he believes he is.
—Publilius Syrus (Syrian-born Latin Writer)

A man’s value to the community primarily depends on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows.
—Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

If a person gets his attitude toward money straight, it will help straighten out almost every other area in his life.
—Billy Graham (American Baptist Religious Leader)

Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour.
—Stephen Leacock

No one can be a great thinker who does not recognize that as a thinker it is his first duty to follow his intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.
—John Stuart Mill (English Philosopher, Economist)

There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way.
—Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese Buddhist Religious Leader)

Many of us spend our lives searching for success when it is usually so close that we can reach out and touch it.
—Russell Conwell (American Baptist Minister)

We have a tendency to romanticize independence. Most business literature still views autonomy as a virtue, as though communication, teamwork, and cooperation were lesser values.
—Keith Ferrazzi (American Author)

If you’ve been beaten up in Rounds 1-9, it’s hard to come out for Round 10.
—Marty Nemko (American Career Coach, Author)

Every organization should tolerate rebels who tell the emperor he has no clothes.
—Colin Powell (American Military Leader)

If you believe that you can damage, then believe that you can fix.
—Nachman of Breslov (Ukrainian Jewish Religions Leader)

Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
—Alan Watts (British Buddhist Philosopher)

The greedy man is incontinent with a whole world set before him.
—Sa’Di (Musharrif Od-Din Muslih Od-Din) (Persian Poet)

There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
—May Sarton (American Children’s Books Writer)

Better is a handful of quietness than both hands full, together with toil and grasping for the wind.
—The Holy Bible (Scripture in the Christian Faith)

A friend is a person who knows all about you but likes you anyway.
—Unknown

Life is what we make it, and the world is what we make it. The eyes of the cheerful and of the melancholy man are fixed upon the same creation; but very different are the aspects which it bears to them.
—Albert Pike (American Military Leader)

One’s true character is most transparent when placed in a position of power.
—Anonymous

The highest form of Grace is silence.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Teacher)

A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
—Fred Allen (American Humorist)

He who is aware of his folly is wise.
—Yiddish Proverb

Sometimes the best deals are the ones you don’t make.
—Bill Veeck (American Sportsperson)

It is inevitable that some defeat will enter even the most victorious life. The human spirit is never finished when it is defeated… it is finished when it surrenders.
—Ben Stein (American Lawyer)

You will get all you want in life, if you help enough other people get what they want.
—Zig Ziglar (American Author)

Appreciative words are the most powerful force for good on earth!
—George W. Crane (American Psychologist)

Love has a way of finding you when you stop seeking it and start being it.
—Mastin Kipp

As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, those wrongs would last forever.
—Clarence Darrow (American Lawyer)

For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.
—Viktor Frankl (Austrian Physician)

Trouble shared is trouble halved.
—Dorothy L. Sayers (British Novelist)

What a grand thing it is to be clever and have common sense.
—Terence (Ancient Roman Playwright)

A good conversationalist is not one who remembers what was said, but says what someone wants to remember.
—John Mason Brown (American Columnist)

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.
—Martin Amis (American Novelist)

There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.
—Nelson Mandela (South African Political leader)

What I cannot create, I do not understand.
—Richard Feynman (American Physicist)

The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.
—Thich Nhat Hanh (Vietnamese Buddhist Religious Leader)

In all your gettings, get wisdom.
—Anonymous

To be a critic is easier than to be an author.
—Hebrew Proverb

Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence.
—Vince Lombardi (American Sportsperson)