Inspirational Quotations

Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long enough.
—Groucho Marx (American Actor)

He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,–in those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred will cease.
—The Dhammapada (Buddhist Anthology of Verses)

Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.
—Vince Lombardi (American Sportsperson)

The guilty think all talk is of themselves.
—Geoffrey Chaucer (English Poet)

There are compensations for growing older. One is the realization that to be sporting isn’t at all necessary. It is a great relief to reach this stage of wisdom.
—Cornelia Otis Skinner (American Dramatist)

You can never get enough of the things you don’t need, because the things you don’t need can never satisfy.
—Marvin J. Ashton (American Mormon Religious Leader)

All paths are present, always… and we can but choose among them.
—Jacqueline Carey (American Novelist)

Man is the creature of circumstances.
—Robert Owen (British Social Reformer)

Be tough where you must be, kind where you can be.
—Marty Nemko (American Career Coach, Author)

Spirituality is neither the privilege of the poor nor the luxury of the rich. It is the choice of the wise man.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Teacher)

Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience.
—Hyman G. Rickover (American Military Leader)

That is true wisdom, to know how to alter one’s mind when occasion demands it.
—Terence (Ancient Roman Playwright)

A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart.
—Robertson Davies (Canada Journalist)

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.
—Hosea Ballou (American Universalist Clergyman)

The more specific and measurable your goal, the more quickly you will be able to identify, locate, create, and implement the use of the necessary resources for its achievement.
—Charles J. Givens (American Self-Help Writer)

We never make a decision. When the time is right, the decision makes itself.
—Byron Katie (American Speaker)

By correcting our mistakes, we get wisdom. By defending our faults, we betray an unsound mind.
—Buddhist Teaching

The rich add riches to riches; the poor add years to years.
—Chinese Proverb

He who wants a rose must respect the thorn.
—Persian Proverb

The tests of life are not meant to break you, but to make you.
—Norman Vincent Peale (American Clergyman, Self-Help Author)

Look before you leap.
—Common Proverb

Perfect happiness is the absence of striving for happiness.
—Zhuang Zhou (Chinese Philosopher)

Is any man free except the one who can pass his life as he pleases?
—Persius (Roman Poet)

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.
—Richard Feynman (American Physicist)

The true battlefield is within.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

The desire for more and more wealth is dangerous. Cultivate the good sense to give up your desires. Wealth is the result of past deeds. Therefore be content with what you have.
—Adi Shankaracharya (Indian Hindu Philosopher)

The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.
—Vince Lombardi, Jr.

Suffering cheerfully endured, ceases to be|suffering and is transmuted into an ineffable joy.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

When you think you can nail someone with your argument, take a breath & see if you can phrase it as a face-saving question.
—Marty Nemko (American Career Coach, Author)

If we divine a discrepancy between a man’s words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.
—Charles Cooley (American Sociologist)

The laughter of girls is, and ever was, among the delightful sounds of earth.
—Thomas de Quincey (English Essayist)

Every man who has become great owes his achievement to incessant toil.
—Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya (Indian Engineer)

Self-understanding, like happiness, is never fully achieved. It’s an on-going pursuit and sometimes excessive explicit focus hurts the cause.
—Ben Casnocha (American Entrepreneur, Investor)

Where your heart is, there your heart be.
—The Holy Bible (Scripture in the Christian Faith)

New ideas are one of the most overrated concepts of our time. Most of the important ideas that we live with aren’t new at all.
—Andy Rooney (American Writer)

Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is.
—Vince Lombardi (American Sportsperson)

The fool knows after he’s suffered.
—Hesiod (Greek Poet)

All you have shall some day be given; therefore give now, that the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors.
—Khalil Gibran (Lebanese-born American Philosopher)

Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.
—Felix Frankfurter (American Judge)

Often you just have to rely on your intuition.
—Bill Gates (American Businessperson)

No one person can possibly combine all the elements supposed to make up what everyone means by friendship.
—Francis Marion Crawford (Italian-born American Novelist)

Conscience serves us especially to judge of the actions of others.
—Jean Antoine Petit-Senn (Swiss Poet)

Humans seek happiness as an end in itself, not as a means to something else.
—Aristotle (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

Occasionally, a man must rise above principles.
—Warren Buffett (American Investor)

A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he’s not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.
—Georges Clemenceau (French Head of State)

Children should be led into the right paths, not by severity, but by persuasion.
—Terence (Ancient Roman Playwright)

The essence of life is finding something you really love and then making the daily experience worthwhile.
—Denis Waitley (American Motivational Speaker)

What has once happened, will invariably happen again, when the same circumstances which combined to produce it, shall again combine in the same way.
—Abraham Lincoln (American Head of State)

There is no man in any rank who is always at liberty to act as he would incline. In some quarter or other he is limited by circumstances.
—Hugh Blair (Scottish Clergyman)

The measure of our rationality determines the degree of vividness with which we appreciate the needs of other life, the extent to which we become conscious of the real character of our own motives and impulses, the ability to harmonize conflicting impulses in our own life and in society, and the capacity to choose adequate means for approved ends.
—Reinhold Niebuhr (American Protestant Theologian)

You can never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
—Buckminster Fuller (American Inventor, Philosopher)

Life is brief–a flash of lightning, a snap of eternity’s fingers.
—Dan Millman (American Children’s Books Writer)

It matters not what a person is born, but who they choose to be.
—J. K. Rowling (British Children’s Books Writer)

So much of writing is not writing the sentences themselves but organizing the sentences and paragraphs in a way that makes sense.
—Ben Casnocha (American Entrepreneur, Investor)

The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts.
—Baruch Spinoza (Dutch Philosopher)

Anger itself does more harm than the condition which aroused anger.
—David O. McKay (American Mormon Religious Leader)

Better to stumble with the toe than with the tongue.
—African Proverb

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
—Margaret Drabble (English Novelist)

Correcting oneself is correcting the whole world. The sun is simply bright. It does not correct anyone. Because it shines, the whole world is full of light. Transforming yourself is a means of giving light to the whole world.
—Ramana Maharshi (Indian Hindu Mystic)

Irrigators guide the water. Fletchers shape the arrow shaft. Carpenters shape the wood. The wise control themselves.
—The Dhammapada (Buddhist Anthology of Verses)

Let no man ever look for what is pleasant, or what is unpleasant. Not to see what is pleasant is pain, and it is pain to see what is unpleasant.
—The Dhammapada (Buddhist Anthology of Verses)

It is much easier to ride a horse in the direction it’s going.
—Abraham Lincoln (American Head of State)

An insult is either sustained or destroyed, not by the disposition of those who insult, but by the disposition of those who bear it.
—John Chrysostom (Greek Christian Saint)

People universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough. But that’s not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes travel the around the world looking for it. … Once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.
—Elizabeth Gilbert (American Novelist)

We must dare to think ‘unthinkable’ thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about ‘unthinkable things’ because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.
—J. William Fulbright (American Political leader)

The things we fear most in organizations—fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances—are the primary sources of creativity.
—Margaret J. Wheatley (American Management Consultant)

The question is not to know the meaning of life, but what meaning I can give to my life.
—The 14th Dalai Lama (Tibetan Buddhist Religious Leader)

When you say that you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.
—Otto von Bismarck (Prussian German- Political leader)

Like breeds like.
—Common Proverb

Nothing should be prized more highly than the value of each day.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German Poet)

There is no destiny beyond and above ourselves; we are ourselves the architects of our future.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Teacher)

There is no great achievement that is not the result of patient working and waiting.
—Josiah Gilbert Holland (American Novelist)

The truth is that all of us attain the greatest success and happiness possible in this life whenever we use our native capacities to their greatest extent.
—Smiley Blanton

Bad salespeople talk your ear off. Good salespeople know to shut up and listen.
—Ben Casnocha (American Entrepreneur, Investor)

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
—Socrates (Anceient Greek Philosopher)

Close scrutiny will show that most “crisis situations” are opportunities to either advance, or stay where you are.
—Maxwell Maltz (American Surgeon)

No one can persuade another to change. Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.
—Marilyn Ferguson (American Author)

It takes a great man to make a good listener.
—Arthur Helps (English Dramatist)

If we spend the time we waste in sighing for the perfect golden fruit in fulfilling the conditions of its growth, happiness will come, must come. It is guaranteed in the very laws of the universe. If it involves some chastening and renunciation, well, the fruit will be all the sweeter for this touch of holiness.
—Helen Keller (American Author)

Pity the leader caught between unloving critics and uncritical lovers.
—John W. Gardner (American Government Official)

We must interpret a bad temper as a sign of inferiority.
—Alfred Adler (Austrian Psychologist)

Every dog has his day.
—Common Proverb

If you have a strong mind,|and plant in it a firm resolve,|you can change your destiny.
—Unknown

The exception proves the rule.
—Common Proverb

When playing Russian roulette the fact that the first shot got off safely is little comfort for the next.
—Richard Feynman (American Physicist)

Intelligent people have a remarkable ability to rationalize irrational actions, to re-tell history to fit their preferred, comfortable narrative.
—Ben Casnocha (American Entrepreneur, Investor)

Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred.
—William O. Douglas (American Judge)

You are successful and creative only when you see an opportunity in every difficulty.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Teacher)

Unless I accept my faults, I will most certainly doubt my virtues.
—Hugh Prather (American Christian Author)

If you make listening and observation your occupation you will gain much more than you can by talk.
—Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell (British Military Leader)

Fear must be entirely banished. The purified soul will fear nothing.
—Plotinus (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

Brood less, smile more and serve all.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Teacher)

To give love is true freedom; to demand love is pure slavery.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Teacher)

The more of wisdom we know, the more we may earn. That man who seeks to learn more of his craft shall be richly rewarded.
—George Samuel Clason (American Businessperson)

Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.
—James A. Michener (American Novelist)

Humanity’s greatest advances are not in its discoveries—but in how those discoveries are applied to reduce inequity.
—Bill Gates (American Businessperson)

Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.
—Alphonse de Lamartine (French Writer)

If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.
—Thomas Merton (French-born American Clergyman)

Everybody exists. It is only the few who live.|To live, you should have an ideal.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Teacher)

But he who has cleansed himself from sin, is well grounded in all virtues, and regards also temperance and truth, he is indeed worthy of the yellow dress.
—The Dhammapada (Buddhist Anthology of Verses)

I’m not convinced that the world is in any worse shape than it ever was. It’s just that in this age of almost instantaneous communication, we bear the weight of problems our forefathers only read about after they were solved.
—Burton Hillis (William E. Vaughan) (American Columnist)

To all that come to this happy place, welcome. Disneyland is your land. Here age relives fond memories of the past, and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future. Disneyland is dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America… with hope that it will be a source of joy and inspiration to all the world.
—Walt Disney (American Entrepreneur)

With each success your faith in the law will grow stronger, until you reach the point of total conviction. Then you will be invincible.
—Roger McDonald (Australian Novelist)

Perfection can be achieved only through devotion, for devotion is the basis of all success.
—Chanakya Neeti

Never compromise yourself, it’s all you’ve got.
—Janis Joplin

Happiness depends on what you can give, Not on what you can get.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Teacher)

Life does not reward us for effort expended.
—Anonymous

Do as you would be done by.
—Common Proverb

The human spirit needs to accomplish, to achieve, to triumph to be happy.
—Ben Stein (American Lawyer)

Integrate what you believe in every single area of your life. Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody else, too.
—Meryl Streep (American Actor)

Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.
—Erik Erikson (German-born American Psychologist)

Let go of the idea that your problem is permanent. Few troubles last forever. And those that cannot be solved can usually be managed.
—Unknown

It is the individual who knows how little they know about themselves who stands the most reasonable chance of finding out something about themselves before they die.
—S. I. Hayakawa (Canadian-born American Academic)

No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they’d die for.
—Martin Luther King, Jr. (American Civil Rights Leader)

The real men of achievement are people|who have the heroism to fuel more and more enthusiasm in their work,|when they face more and more difficulties.
—Swami Chinmayananda (Indian Hindu Teacher)

Some people are nice as a way of compensating for their not being good.
—Marty Nemko (American Career Coach, Author)

Do not appease thy fellow in his hour of anger; do not comfort him while the dead is still laid out before him; do not question him in the hour of his vow; and do not strive to see him in his hour of misfortune.
—The Talmud (Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith)

A true friend is not like the rain which pours and goes away. A true friend is like the air, sometimes silent but always around you.
—Anonymous

The chief condition on which, life, health and vigor depend on, is action. It is by action that an organism develops its faculties, increases its energy, and attains the fulfillment of its destiny.
—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (French Politician)

It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.
—Ram Dass (American Hindu Teacher)

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
—Baruch Spinoza (Dutch Philosopher)

Your goal must not be to impress but to accomplish. That usually demands bringing out the best in others.
—Marty Nemko (American Career Coach, Author)

Private and public life are subject to the same rules; and truth and manliness are two qualities that will carry you through this world much better than policy, or tact, or expediency, or any other word that was ever devised to conceal or mystify a deviation from the straight line.
—Robert E. Lee (American Military Leader)

A rich man is not one who has the most,|but one who needs the least.
—Unknown

Perhaps nobody ever accomplishes all that he feels lies in him to do but nearly every one who tries his power touches the walls of his being occasionally, and learns about how far to attempt to spring.
—Charles Dudley Warner (American Essayist)

The secret of living a life of excellence is merely a matter of thinking thoughts of excellence. Really, it’s a matter of programming our minds with the kind of information that will set us free.
—Chuck Swindoll (American Christian Pastor)

If we are to find our way across toubled waters, we are better served by the company of those who have built bridges, who have moved beyond despair and inertia.
—Marilyn Ferguson (American Author)

If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do… how would I be? What would I do?
—Buckminster Fuller (American Inventor, Philosopher)

The function of values is to give us the illusion of purpose in life.
—Dero A. Saunders (American Journalist)

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one’s rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
—Georges Bataille (French Philosopher)

The path of sound credence is through the thick forest of skepticism.
—George Jean Nathan (American Drama Critic)

Our background and circumstances may influence who we are, but we are responsible for who we become.
—Unknown