Inspirational Quotations

Among well-bred people a mutual deference is affected, contempt for others is disguised; authority concealed; attention given to each in his turn; and an easy stream of conversation maintained without vehemence, without interruption, without eagerness for victory, and without any airs of superiority.
—David Hume (Scottish Philosopher, Historian)

The great difficulty is first to win a reputation; the next to keep it while you live; and the next to preserve it after you die, when affection and interest are over, and nothing but sterling excellence can preserve your name. Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.
—Benjamin Haydon (English Painter)

The road to success is not to be run upon by seven-leagued boots. Step by step, little by little, bit by bit—that is the way to wealth, that is the way to wisdom, that is the way to glory. Pounds are the sons, not of pounds, but of pence.
—Charles Buxton

When we speak evil of others, we generally condemn ourselves.
—Publilius Syrus (Syrian-born Latin Writer)

The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment; it is not in luck or chance, or the help of others; it is in yourself alone.
—Orison Swett Marden (American New Thought Writer)

In order to be a leader a man must have followers. And to have followers, a man must have their confidence. Hence, the supreme quality for a leader is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office. If a man’s associates find him guilty of being phony, if they find that he lacks forthright integrity, he will fail. His teachings and actions must square with each other. The first great need, therefore is integrity and high purpose.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (American Head of State)

A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed.
—Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian Playwright)

You’ll never succeed in idealizing hard work. Before you can dig mother earth you’ve got to take off your ideal jacket. The harder a man works, at brute labor, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind.
—D. H. Lawrence (English Novelist)

In perpetrating a revolution, there are two requirements: someone or something to revolt against and someone to actually show up and do the revolting. Dress is usually casual and both parties may be flexible about time and place, but if either faction fails to attend, the whole enterprise is likely to come off badly.
—Woody Allen (American Actor)

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
—Winston Churchill (British Head of State)

The virtuous man is driven by responsibility; the non-virtuous man is driven by profit.
—Confucius (Chinese Philosopher)

Habits are formed by the repetition of particular acts. They are strengthened by an increase in the number of repeated acts. Habits are also weakened or broken, and contrary habits are formed by the repetition of contrary acts.
—Mortimer J. Adler (American Philosopher)

Happiness comes only when we push our brains and hearts to the farthest reaches of which we are capable.
—Leo Rosten (Russian-born American Humorist)

If you can tell me who your heroes are, I can tell you how you’re going to turn out in life.
—Warren Buffett (American Investor)

Do not talk about your greatness; you are really, in essential nature, no great than those around you.
—Wallace Wattles (American New Thought Author)

The lion who breaks the enemy’s ranks is a minor hero compared to the lion who overcomes himself.
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi (Persian Muslim Mystic)

Tears are the symbol of the inability of the soul to restrain its emotion and retain its self command.
—Henri Frederic Amiel (Swiss Philosopher)

The soul refuses limits and always affirms an optimism, never a pessimism.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

All we are doing is looking at the time line, from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing the time line by reducing the non-value adding wastes.
—Taiichi Ohno (Japanese Manufacturing Engineer)

A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company.
—Charles Evans Hughes (American Elected Rep)

Marriage! Nothing else demands so much from a man!
—Henrik Ibsen (Norwegian Playwright)

When a management team with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.
—Warren Buffett (American Investor)

Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which we never voluntarily opened.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.
—James Joyce (Irish Novelist)

What is man but his passion?
—Robert Penn Warren (American Poet)

Friends and acquaintances are the surest passport to fortune.
—Arthur Schopenhauer (German Philosopher)

Skepticism becomes the mark and even the pose of the educated mind. It is no longer directed against this and that article of the older creeds but is rather a bias against any kind of far-reaching ideas, and a denial of systematic participation on the part of such ideas in the intelligent direction of affairs.
—John Dewey (American Philosopher)

We are happier in many ways when we are old than when we were young. The young sow wild oats. The old grow sage.
—Winston Churchill (British Head of State)

Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinion of himself.
—Anthony Trollope (English Novelist)

If deeply based in wisdom, even anger is allowed.
—Hans Taeger

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
—Robert Louis Stevenson (Scottish Novelist)

Knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men; wisdom, in minds attentive to their own.
—William Cowper (English Anglican Poet)

Happiness lies, first of all, in health.
—George William Curtis (American Essayist)

Solitude is painful when one is young, but delightful when one is more mature.
—Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

Experience isn’t interesting until it begins to repeat itself—in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.
—Elizabeth Bowen (Irish Novelist)

The purpose of human life is to serve and show compassion and the will to help others.
—Albert Schweitzer (French Theologian)

Treasure the memories of past misfortunes; they constitute our bank of fortitude.
—Eric Hoffer (American Philosopher)

Too often the strong, silent man is silent only because he does not know what to say, and is reputed strong only because he has remained silent.
—Winston Churchill (British Head of State)

Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)

Image is what people think we are; integrity is what we really are.
—John C. Maxwell (American Christian Professional Speaker)

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.
—D. H. Lawrence (English Novelist)

We cannot avoid using power, cannot escape the compulsion to afflict the world, so let us, cautious in diction and mighty in contradiction, love powerfully.
—Martin Buber

For you and me, today is all we have; tomorrow is a mirage that may never become reality.
—Louis L’Amour

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)