Inspirational Quotations

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.
—Samuel Johnson (British Essayist)

It is not so important to know everything as to know the exact value of everything, to appreciate what we learn, and to arrange what we know.
—Hannah More

Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? Our poets do not write about it; our artists do not try to portray this remarkable thing. The value of science remains unsung by singers: you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age.
—Richard Feynman (American Physicist)

The less routine the more life.
—Amos Bronson Alcott (American Teacher)

I have found in life that if you want a miracle you first need to do whatever it is you can do—if that’s to plant, then plant; if it is to read, then read; if it is to change, then change; if it is to study, then study; if it is to work, then work; whatever you have to do. And then you will be well on your way of doing the labor that works miracles.
—Jim Rohn (American Entrepreneur)

The clew of our destiny, wander where we will, lies at the foot of the cradle.
—Jean Paul (German Novelist)

Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body.
—Cicero (Roman Philosopher)

Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German Poet)

The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (American Poet)

I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people.
—Indira Gandhi (Indian Head of State)

Anger, which, far sweeter than trickling drops of honey, rises in the bosom of a man like smoke.
—Homer (Ancient Greek Poet)

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.
—William James (American Philosopher)

One discipline always leads to another discipline.
—Jim Rohn (American Entrepreneur)

Man… cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (German Philosopher, Scholar)

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think—rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.
—James Beattie

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past.
—Thomas Wolfe

Developing expertise or assets that are not easily copied is essential; otherwise you’re just a middleman.
—Seth Godin (American Entrepreneur)

Don’t ever slam a door, you might want to go back.
—Don Herold (American Humorist)

If you spend more time asking appropriate questions rather than giving answers or opinions, your listening skills will increase.
—Brian Koslow

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. If you approach them, they are not asleep; if you seek them, they do not hide; if you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.
—Richard de Bury

Love never reasons but profusely gives; gives, like a thoughtless prodigal, its all, and trembles lest it has done too little.
—Hannah More

To know is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.
—Confucius (Chinese Philosopher)

Your friends will know you better in the first minute they meet you than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.
—Richard Bach (American Novelist)

Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.
—Norman Cousins (American Journalist)

We should have a great many fewer disputes in the world if words were taken for what they are, the signs of our ideas only, and not for things themselves.
—John Locke (English Philosopher)

Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It wasn’t reasoned into him, and it cannot be reasoned out.
—Sydney Smith (English Anglican Writer)

The darkness of death is like the evening twilight; it makes all objects appear more lovely to the dying.
—Jean Paul (German Novelist)

The love of gain never made a painter, but it has marred many.
—Washington Allston (American Poet)

There is no royal road to anything. One thing at a time, all things in succession. That which grows fast, withers as rapidly. That which grows slowly, endures.
—Josiah Gilbert Holland (American Novelist)

Truth lives on in the midst of deception.
—Friedrich Schiller (German Poet)

Confidence: The feeling that makes one believe a man, even when one knows that one would lie in his place
—H. L. Mencken (American Journalist)

I would never have amounted to anything were it not for adversity. I was forced to come up the hard way.
—James Cash Penney (American Entrepreneur)

There is a great difference between him who is ashamed before his own self and him who is only ashamed before others.
—The Talmud (Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith)

All mankind are happier for having been happy, so that if you make them happy new, you make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it.
—Sydney Smith (English Anglican Writer)

We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.
—Cosimo de’ Medici

The problem of education is two fold: first to know, and then to utter. Everyone who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks.
—Robert Louis Stevenson (Scottish Novelist)

The long unmeasured pulse of time moves everything. There is nothing hidden that it cannot bring to light, nothing once known that may not become unknown.
—Sophocles (Ancient Greek Dramatist)

The painter who is content with the praise of the world for what does not satisfy himself, is not an artist, but an artisan; for though his reward be only praise, his pay is that of a mechanic.
—Washington Allston (American Poet)

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear.
—Dinah Craik (English Novelist)

In youth we learn; in age we understand.
—Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (Austrian Novelist)

A scholar is greater than a prophet.
—The Talmud (Sacred Text of the Jewish Faith)

The next best thing to knowing something is knowing where to find it.
—Samuel Johnson (British Essayist)

The efficient man is the man who thinks for himself.
—Charles William Eliot (American Educator)

Anything you really want, you can attain, if you really go after it.
—Wayne Dyer (American Motivational Writer)

Every time we’ve moved ahead in IBM, it was because someone was willing to take a chance, put his head on the block, and try something new.
—Thomas J. Watson (American Businessperson)

The miracle on earth are the laws of heaven.
—Jean Paul (German Novelist)

The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (English Poet)

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years, and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.
—George Bernard Shaw (Irish Playwright)

It’s not the work which kills people, it’s the worry. It’s not the revolution that destroys machinery it’s the friction.
—Henry Ward Beecher (American Protestant Clergyman)

Physical deformity, calls forth our charity. But the infinite misfortune of moral deformity calls forth nothing but hatred and vengeance.
—Clarence Darrow (American Lawyer)

Patience: A minor form of despair disguised as a virtue.
—Ambrose Bierce (American Editor)

A good goal is like a strenuous exercise—it makes you stretch.
—Mary Kay Ash (American Entrepreneur)

No one loves the man whom he fears.
—Aristotle (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

Health is the soul that animates all the enjoyments of life, which fade and are tasteless without it.
—William Temple

A timid person is frightened before a danger; a coward during the time; and a courageous person afterward.
—Jean Paul (German Novelist)

Ambition is pitiless. Any merit that it cannot use it finds despicable.
—Joseph Joubert (French Essayist)

He that has never suffered extreme adversity, knows not the full extent of his own depravation.
—Charles Caleb Colton (English Angelic Priest)

Knowledge is the antidote to fear.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (American Head of State)

The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
—Cesare Pavese

‘Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.
—Eric Hoffer (American Philosopher)

Old friends, we say, are best, when some sudden disillusionment shakes our faith in a new comrade.
—Gelett Burgess

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.
—Eleanor Roosevelt (American First Lady)

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
—George Bernard Shaw (Irish Playwright)

Your mind will be like its habitual thoughts; for the soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts. Soak it then in such trains of thoughts as, for example: Where life is possible at all, a right life is possible.
—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

A man is what he thinks about all day long.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

Unless you bear with the faults of a friend you betray your own.
—Publilius Syrus (Syrian-born Latin Writer)

It is easy to be brave when far away from danger.
—Aesop (Greek Fabulist)

In all ages, hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns upon the heads of thieves, called kings.
—Robert G. Ingersoll (American Atheist Politician)

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Swiss Philosopher)

The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness.
—James Anthony Froude (British Historian)

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
—Martin Luther King, Jr. (American Civil Rights Leader)

Men will always delight in a woman whose voice is lined with velvet.
—Brendan Behan (Irish Poet)

Our thoughts and imagination are the only real limits to our possibilities.
—Orison Swett Marden (American New Thought Writer)

There should be no enforced respect for grown-ups. We cannot prevent children from thinking us fools by merely forbidding them to utter their thoughts; in fact, they are more likely to think ill of us if they dare not say so.
—Bertrand A. Russell (British Philosopher)

Nothing is harder to direct than a man in prosperity; nothing more easily managed than one in adversity.
—Plutarch (Ancient Greek Historian)

You are your greatest investment. The more you store in that mind of yours, the more you enrich your experience, the more people you meet, the more books you read, and the more places you visit, the greater is that investment in all that you are. Everything that you add to your peace of mind, and to your outlook upon life, is added capital that no one but yourself can dissipate.
—George Matthew Adams (American Columnist)

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.
—Henri Bergson (French Philosopher)

If you look at your life one way, there is always cause for alarm.
—Elizabeth Bowen (Irish Novelist)

Science is the labor and handicraft of the mind.
—Francis Bacon (English Philosopher)

The man of genius inspires us with a boundless confidence in our own powers.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
—Thomas Mann (German Novelist)

We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.
—Epictetus (Ancient Greek Philosopher)

Everything changes but change itself. Everything flows and nothing remains the same…You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go flowing ever on.
—John F. Kennedy (American Head of State)

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.
—Tom Peters (American Management Consultant)

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
—Juvenal (Roman Poet)

There is no reality except the one contained within us.
—Hermann Hesse (German-born Swiss Poet)

An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition.
—Michael Korda

Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man.
—Mary Wollstonecraft (British Children’s Books Writer)

Proverbs are the literature of reason, or the statements of absolute truth, without qualification. Like the sacred books of each nation, they are the sanctuary of its intuitions.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

You cannot tailor-make the situations in life but you can tailor-make the attitudes to fit those situations.
—Zig Ziglar (American Author)

Success is in the details.
—Zig Ziglar (American Author)

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
—Anais Nin (French-American Essayist)

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.
—Immanuel Kant (Prussian German Philosopher)

Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
—Hannah Arendt (German Political Theorist)

Many of our prayers were not answered, and for this we are now grateful.
—William Feather (American Publisher)

Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.
—Robert Louis Stevenson (Scottish Novelist)

The rich are too indolent, the poor too weak, to bear the insupportable fatigue of thinking.
—William Cowper (English Anglican Poet)

The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (American Head of State)

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
—Winston Churchill (British Head of State)

You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call “Failure” is not the falling down, but the staying down.
—Mary Pickford

Progress is the law of life; man is not a man as yet.
—Robert Browning (English Poet)

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or our unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.
—Wilhelm von Humboldt (German Philosopher)

Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
—William Hazlitt (English Essayist)

My interest is in the future because I’m going to spend the rest of my life there.
—Charles F. Kettering (American Inventor)

A good father lives so he is a credit to his children.
—Arnold Glasow (American Businessman)

Unhappy is the man for whom his own mother has not made all other mothers venerable.
—Jean Paul (German Novelist)

We are terrified by the idea of being terrified.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (German Philosopher, Scholar)

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.
—Walt Whitman (American Poet)

I’m a little wounded, but I am not slain; I will lay me down to bleed a while. Then I’ll rise and fight again.
—John Dryden (English Poet)

Fear makes us feel our humanity.
—Benjamin Disraeli (British Head of State)

People tend to forget their duties but remember their rights.
—Indira Gandhi (Indian Head of State)

Every individual is a center for the manifestation of a certain force. This force has been stored up as the resultant of our previous works, and each one of us is born with this force at our back.
—Swami Vivekananda (Indian Hindu Mystic)

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

Learning passes for wisdom among those who want both.
—William Temple

Time bears away all things, even the mind.
—Virgil (Roman Poet)

In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable, and must be content with finding broken portions.
—William Osler (Canadian Physician)