Inspirational Quotations

If you lose the power to laugh, you lose the power to think.
—Clarence Darrow (American Lawyer)

Try to do to others as you would have them do to you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better that they should fail than that you should.
—Charles Dickens (English Novelist)

Do not be afraid of mistakes, providing you do not make the same one twice.
—Eleanor Roosevelt (American First Lady)

The beginning and almost the end of all good law is that everyone shall work for their bread and receive good bread for their work.
—John Ruskin (English Art Critic)

The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment.
—Doug Larson

Share weight and woe, for misfortune falls with double force on him that stands alone.
—Baltasar Gracian

Our worries always come from our weaknesses.
—Joseph Joubert (French Essayist)

There are in life as many aspects as attitudes towards it; and aspects change with attitudes… Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a change in attitude.
—Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand-born British Author)

Our chief defect is that we are more given to talking about things than to doing them.
—Jawaharlal Nehru (Indian Head of State)

Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity.
—G. K. Chesterton (English Journalist)

We sometimes think we hate flattery, when we only hate the manner in which we have been flattered.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld

We are sure to be losers when we quarrel with ourselves; it is civil war.
—Charles Caleb Colton (English Angelic Priest)

Gray skies are just clouds passing over.
—Duke Ellington

My job is about the most fun thing I do, but I have a broad set of interests, going places, reading things, doing things.
—Bill Gates (American Businessperson)

The violence we do to ourselves in order to remain faithful to the one we love is hardly better than an act of infidelity.
—Francois de La Rochefoucauld

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
—Pearl S. Buck (American Novelist)

A reward cannot be valued if it is not understood
—Phillip C. Grant

The end of man is action.
—Thomas Carlyle (Scottish Writer)

Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole!
—McLandburgh Wilson

Happiness depends upon ourselves.
—Aristotle (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

It is not a struggle merely of economic theories, or forms of government or of military power. At issue is the true nature of man. Either man is the creature whom the psalmist described as a little lower than the angels … or man is a soulless, animated machine to be enslaved, used and consumed by the state for its own glorification. It is, therefore, a struggle which goes to the roots of the human spirit, and its shadow falls across the long sweep of man’s destiny.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (American Head of State)

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
—Henry Ward Beecher (American Protestant Clergyman)

Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.
—Jean de La Bruyere

Men strive for peace, but it is their enemies that give them strength, and I think if man no longer had enemies, he would have to invent them, for his strength only grows from struggle.
—Louis L’Amour

There is a noble manner of being poor, and who does not know it will never be rich.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (Roman Philosopher)

We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.
—John F. Kennedy (American Head of State)

My theory has always been, that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter, than the gloom of despair.
—Thomas Jefferson (American Head of State)

Truth is neither alive nor dead; it just aggravates itself all the time.
—Mark Twain (American Humorist)

To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it.
—Carl Jung (Swiss Psychologist)

Reputation is in itself only a farthing-candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.
—James Russell Lowell (American Poet)

To be thoroughly conversant with a man’s heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair.
—Edgar Allan Poe (American Poet)

Life doesn’t do anything to you. It only reveals your spirit.
—John C. Maxwell (American Christian Professional Speaker)

It is difficult, but not impossible, to conduct strictly honest business.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

We must lay before him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.
—C. S. Lewis (Irish-born British Children’s Books Writer)

The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.
—Henry David Thoreau (American Philosopher)

The best mind-altering drug is truth.
—Lily Tomlin

We see the brightness of a new page where everything yet can happen.
—Rainer Maria Rilke (Austrian Poet)

There is none who cannot teach somebody something, and there is none so excellent but he is excelled.
—Baltasar Gracian

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
—Mark Twain (American Humorist)

Act enthusiastic and you will be enthusiastic.
—Dale Carnegie (American Author)

Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
—Albert Camus (Algerian-born French Philosopher)

The fact is, you have fallen lately, Cecily, into a bad habit of thinking for yourself. You should give it up. It is not quite womanly… men don’t like it.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)

Every period of life is obliged to borrow its happiness from time to come.
—Samuel Johnson (British Essayist)

Much learning does not teach understanding.
—Heraclitus (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

Praise shames me, for I secretly beg for it.
—Rabindranath Tagore (Indian Hindu Polymath)

Let a man’s talents or virtues be what they may, he will only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied in himself.
—William Hazlitt (English Essayist)

Act so that the maxim of your act could be made the principle of a universal law.
—Immanuel Kant (Prussian German Philosopher)

I hate it in friends when they come too late to help.
—Euripides (Ancient Greek Dramatist)

Hope is a prodigal young heir, and experience is his banker, but his drafts are seldom honored since there is often a heavy balance against him, because he draws largely on a small capital and is not yet in possession.
—Charles Caleb Colton (English Angelic Priest)

We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.
—Christian Nestell Bovee

I am accustomed to sleep, and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.
—Rene Descartes (French Philosopher, Mathematician)

No one’s a leader if there are no followers.
—Malcolm Forbes (American Publisher)

Positive anything is better than negative nothing.
—Elbert Hubbard (American Writer)

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people.
—William Faulkner (American Novelist)

Hope is the most beneficial of all the affections, and doth much to the prolongation of life, if it be not too often frustrated; but entertaineth the fancy with an expectation of good.
—Francis Bacon (English Philosopher)

Surmounting difficulty is the crucible that forms character.
—Tony Robbins (American Actor Author)

Your expectations opens or closes the doors of your supply, If you expect grand things, and work honestly for them, they will come to you, your supply will correspond with your expectation.
—Orison Swett Marden (American New Thought Writer)

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.
—George Bernard Shaw (Irish Playwright)

In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.
—Charles Baudelaire (French Poet)

There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have.
—Don Herold (American Humorist)

Freedom is man’s capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.
—Rollo May (American Philosopher)

A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war: wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it might never live to regret it.
—Carlos Castaneda (Peruvian-born American Anthropologist)

No radiant pearl, which crested fortune wears, no gem, that twinkling hangs from beauty’s ears; not the bright stars, which night’s blue arch adorn; nor rising sun, that gilds the vernal morn; shine with such lustre as the tear that flows down virtue’s manly cheek for others’ woes.
—Charles Darwin (British Naturalist)

There is no witness so terrible and no accuser so powerful as conscience which dwells within us.
—Sophocles (Ancient Greek Dramatist)

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
—Iris Murdoch (English Novelist)

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (British Poet)

Joy can only be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.
—Leo Tolstoy (Russian Novelist)

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh (American Author, Aviator)

Of all the evil spirits abroad in the world, insincerity is the most dangerous.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)

The future is hidden even from those who make it.
—Anatole France (French Novelist)

It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
—George Bernard Shaw (Irish Playwright)

Just as treasures are uncovered from the earth, so virtue appears from good deeds, and wisdom appears from a pure and peaceful mind. To walk safely through the maze of human life, one needs the light of wisdom and the guidance of virtue.
—Buddhist Teaching

Leaders must encourage their organizations to dance to forms of music yet to be heard.
—Warren Bennis (American Scholar)

Doctors are always working to preserve our health and cooks to destroy it, but the latter are the more often successful.
—Denis Diderot (French Philosopher)

We cannot always oblige, but we can always speak obligingly.
—Voltaire (French Philosopher)

I’ve learned that you can’t have everything and do everything at the same time.
—Oprah Winfrey (American TV Personality)

There are certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are of pretty woman to deserve them.
—Jane Austen (English Novelist)

The object of most prayers is to wangle an advance on good intentions.
—Robert Brault

Never stop questioning.
—Albert Einstein (German-born Theoretical Physicist)

Necessity reconciles and brings men together; and this accidental connection afterwards forms itself into laws.
—Michel de Montaigne (French Philosopher)

Isn’t it fortunate how selective our recollections usually are.
—Malcolm Forbes (American Publisher)

It is not always by plugging away at a difficulty and sticking at it that one overcomes it; but, rather, often by working on the one next to it. Certain people and certain things require to be approached at an angle.
—Andre Gide (French Novelist)

Life begins on the other side of despair.
—Jean-Paul Sartre (French Philosopher)

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh (American Author, Aviator)

No one reaches a high position without daring.
—Publilius Syrus (Syrian-born Latin Writer)

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.
—Marquis de Sade (French Political leader)

Praise from the common people is generally false, and rather follows the vain than the virtuous.
—Francis Bacon (English Philosopher)

The imagination is literally the workshop wherein are fashioned all plans created by man.
—Napoleon Hill (American Author)

There is no defense against criticism except obscurity.
—Joseph Addison (English Essayist)

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
—Maya Angelou (American Poet)

Many an honest man practices on himself an amount of deceit, sufficient, if practiced on another, and in a little different way, to send him to the State prison.
—Christian Nestell Bovee

In avoiding the appearance of evil, I am not sure but I have sometimes unnecessarily deprived myself and others of innocent enjoyments.
—Rutherford B. Hayes

No man will work for your interests unless they are his.
—David Seabury

We should keep silent about those in power; to speak well of them almost implies flattery; to speak ill of them while they are alive is dangerous, and when they are dead is cowardly.
—Jean de La Bruyere

Non-violence is the article of faith.
—Mohandas K. Gandhi (Indian Hindu Political leader)

Knowledge is in the end based on acknowledgement.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (Austrian Philosopher)

It’s frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what’s going on.
—Amos Tversky

The soul who meditates on the Self is content to serve the Self and rests satisfied within the Self; there remains nothing more for him to accomplish.
—The Bhagavad Gita (Hindu Scripture)

Men always do leave off really thinking, when the last bit of wild animal dies in them.
—D. H. Lawrence (English Novelist)

The honest work of yesterday has lost its social status, its social esteem.
—Peter Drucker (Austrian-born Management Consultant)

Education comes from within; you get it by struggle and effort and thought.
—Napoleon Hill (American Author)

Ignorance is the peace of life.
—Indian Proverb

Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.
—Oscar Wilde (Irish Poet)

The fault-finder—it is his nature’s plague to spy into abuses; and oft his jealousy shapes faults that are not.
—William Shakespeare (British Playwright)

It is a great pity when the one who should be the head figure is a mere figure head.
—Charles Spurgeon (British Baptist Preacher)

What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.
—C. S. Lewis (Irish-born British Children’s Books Writer)

The person who sends out positive thoughts activates the world around him positively and draws back to himself positive results.
—Norman Vincent Peale (American Clergyman, Self-Help Author)

Ability is of little account without opportunity.
—Napoleon I (French Monarch)

Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the Gods.
—Plato (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

I don’t think that a leader can control to any great extent his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.
—Richard Nixon (American Head of State)

It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature’s gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.
—Jimmy Carter (American Head of State)

No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.
—Harry Emerson Fosdick (American Baptist Clergyman)

Your future takes precedence over your past. Focus on your future, rather than on the past.
—Gary Ryan Blair

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.
—Plato (Ancient Greek Philosopher)