Inspirational Quotations

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)

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)