Inspirational Quotations

The influence of each human being on others in this life is a kind of immortality.
—John Quincy Adams (American Head of State)

Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.
—Frederick William Faber (British Hymn writer)

It must be hard to be a model, because you’d want to be like the photograph of you, and you can’t ever look that way.
—Andy Warhol (American Painter)

There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women.
—Madeleine Albright (Czech-born American Diplomat)

A man only becomes wise when he begins to calculate the approximate depth of his ignorance.
—Gian Carlo Menotti (Italian-born American Composer)

I wish I were either rich enough or poor enough to do a lot of things that are impossible in my present comfortable circumstances.
—Don Herold (American Humorist)

In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.
—Harold Bloom (American Literary Critic)

Every time you win, you’re reborn; when you lose, you die a little.
—George E. Allen (American Sportsperson)

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.
—Carl Rogers (American Psychologist)

Obscurity in writing is commonly a proof of darkness in the mind; the greatest learning is to be seen in the greatest plainness.
—John Wilkins (English Anglican Clergyman)

If I had my hand full of truth, I would take good care how I opened it.
—Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (French Essayist)

True happiness must arise from well-regulated affections, and an affection includes a duty.
—Mary Wollstonecraft (British Children’s Books Writer)

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.
—Karl Barth (Swiss Reformed Theologian)

I have condemned Khomeini’s fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie as a breach of international relations and as an assault on Islam as we know it in the era of apostasy. I believe that the wrong done by Khomeini towards Islam and the Muslims is no less than that done by the author himself. As regards freedom of expression, I have said that it must be considered sacred and that thought can only be corrected by counter-thought. During the debate, I supported the boycott of the book as a means of maintaining social peace, granted that such a decision would not be used as a pretext to constrain thought.
—Naguib Mahfouz (Egyptian Novelist)

The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.
—Martin Heidegger (German Existential Philosopher)

Dreams say what they mean, but they don’t say it in daytime language.
—Gail Godwin (American Novelist)

There is a point where you aren’t as much mom and daughter as you are adults and friends. It doesn’t happen for everyone–but it did for Mom and me.
—Jamie Lee Curtis (American Children’s Books Writer)

The real price of everything is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.
—Adam Smith (Scottish Philosopher)

Patience is also a form of action.
—Dick Sutphen

Love is an ocean of emotions entirely surrounded by expenses.
—Thomas Dewar, 1st Baron Dewar (Scottish Businessperson)

The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.
—George Goodman (American Economist)

Most ball games are lost, not won.
—Casey Stengel (American Sportsperson)

The true and solid peace of nations consists not in equality of arms, but in mutual trust alone.
—Pope John XXIII (Italian Catholic Religious Leader)

Little deeds of kindness,|little words of love,|make our earth an Eden,|like the heaven above.
—Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney (American Educator)

Love all. Serve all. Help ever. Hurt never.
—Sathya Sai Baba (Indian Hindu Religious Leader)

Power intoxicates men. When a man is intoxicated by alcohol, he can recover, but when intoxicated by power, he seldom recovers.
—Sappho (Greek Poet)

Our mistakes from the past are just that: mistakes. And they were necessary to make in order to become the wiser person we became.
—Bill Maher (American Comedian TV Personality)

Do what you fear most and you control fear.
—George Bancroft

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than “politicians” think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas… that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.
—Michel Foucault (French Philosopher)

Sow a thought, reap an act; Sow an act, reap a habit; Sow a habit, reap a character; Sow a character, reap adestiny.
—Anonymous

If you take risks, you may fail. But if you don’t take risks, you will surely fail. The greatest risk of all is to do nothing.
—Roberto Goizueta (Cuban Businessperson)

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of “work,” because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don’t always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep.
—Andy Warhol (American Painter)

As long as one keeps searching, the answers come.
—Joan Baez (American Singer)

How majestic is naturalness. I have never met a man whom I really considered a great man who was not always natural and simple. Affectation is inevitably the mark of one not sure of himself.
—Charles G. Dawes (American Head of State)

I’ve never run into a guy who could win at the top level in anything today and didn’t have the right attitude, didn’t give it everything he had, at least while he was doing it; wasn’t prepared and didn’t have the whole program worked out.
—Ted Turner (American Businessperson)

Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.
—Philip K. Dick (American Novelist)

Look before you leap; see before you go.
—Thomas Tusser

You just can’t beat the person who never gives up.
—Nancie J. Carmody

Seven days without laughter makes one weak.
—Unknown

Healthy personalities accept themselves not in any self-idolizing way, but in the sense that they see themselves as persons who are worth giving to another and worthy to receive from another.
—William Glasser (American Psychiatrist)

I couldn’t wait for success… so I went ahead without it.
—Jonathan Winters (American Comedian)

I believe that dreams transport us through the underside of our days, and that if we wish to become acquainted with the dark side of what we are, the signposts are there, waiting for us to translate them
—Gail Godwin (American Novelist)

All humans are frightened of their own solitude. But only in solitude can we learn to know ourselves, learn to handle our own eternal aloneness.
—Han Suyin (Chinese-born Eurasian Novelist)

Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.
—Vita Sackville-West (English Gardener)

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.
—Alberto Giacometti (Swiss Sculptor)

Man’s inability to communicate is a result of his failure to listen effectively.
—Carl Rogers (American Psychologist)

People go through four stages before any revolutionary development:|1. It’s nonsense, don’t waste my time.|2. It’s interesting, but not important.|3. I always said it was a good idea.|4. I thought of it first.
—Arthur C. Clarke (British Author)

There are five tests of the evidence of education—correctness and precision in the use of the mother tongue; refined and gentle manners, the result of fixed habits of thought and action; sound standards of appreciation of beauty and of worth, and a character based on those standards; power and habit of reflection; efficiency or the power to do.
—Nicholas Murray Butler (American Philosopher)

Power? It’s like a Dead Sea fruit. When you achieve it, there is nothing there.
—Harold Macmillan (British Head of State)

In long experience I find that a man who trusts nobody is apt to be the kind of man nobody trusts.
—Harold Macmillan (British Head of State)

We may not know how to forgive, and we may not want to forgive; but the very fact we say we are willing to forgive begins the healing practice.
—Louise Hay (American Author)

No one knows what they’ll do in a moment of crisis and hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.
—Joan Baez (American Singer)

I know the compassion of others is a relief at first. I don’t despise it. But it can’t quench pain, it slips through your soul as through a sieve. And when our suffering has been dragged from one pity to another, as from one mouth to another, we can no longer respect or love it.
—Georges Bernanos (French Author)

All fair in love and war.
—Francis Edward Smedley

Liberal education develops a sense of right, duty and honor; and more and more in the modern world, large business rests on rectitude and honor as well as on good judgment.
—Charles William Eliot (American Educator)

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
—Charles William Eliot (American Educator)

Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering—because you can’t take it in all at once.
—Audrey Hepburn (Belgian-born British Actor)

You know that it is only through work that you can achieve anything, either in college or in the world
—Charles William Eliot (American Educator)

You ought to be true for the sake of the folks who think you are true. You never should stoop to a deed that your folks think you would not do. If you are false to yourself, be the blemish but small, you have injured your folks; you have been false to them all.
—Edgar Guest (English-born American Poet)

The thing that is incredible is life itself. Why should we be here in this sun-illuminated universe? Why should there be green earth under our feet?
—Edwin Markham (American Poet)

If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most revolutionary reversal of his record we have ever known.
—George Marshall (American Military Leader)

The visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time.
—Colin Wilson (British Philosopher)

Laboring toward distant aims set the mind in a higher key and puts us at our best.
—Charles Henry Parkhurst (American Clergyman)

If it is your time, love will track you down like a cruise missile.
—Lynda Barry (American Cartoonist)

Give wind and tide a chance to change.
—Richard Evelyn Byrd (American Aviator)

One cannot expect to coast along and rise automatically to the top, no matter what friends you may have in the company. There may have been a time when, in large corporations, a person could rise simply because he had a stock interest or because he had friends in top management. That’s not true today. Success in business requires training and discipline and hard work. But if you’re not frightened by these things, the opportunities are just as great today as they ever were.
—David Rockefeller (American Philanthropist)

A complacent satisfaction with present knowledge is the chief bar to the pursuit of knowledge.
—B. H. Liddell Hart (English Historian)

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production, and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.
—Adam Smith (Scottish Philosopher)

To sleep is an act of faith
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (American Journalist)

By going over your day in imagination before you begin it, you can begin acting successfully at any moment.
—Dorothea Brande (American Writer)

If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women.
—Abigail Adams (American First Lady)

I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think.
—Anne Sullivan Macy (American Educator)

There should be no inferiors and no superiors for true world friendship.
—Carlos P. Romulo (Philippine Diplomat)

Women are never stronger than when they arm themselves with their weakness.
—Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand (French Socialite)

The best way to secure future happiness is to be as happy as is rightfully possible today.
—Charles William Eliot (American Educator)

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
—Philip K. Dick (American Novelist)

It often happens that I wake at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope.
—Pope John XXIII (Italian Catholic Religious Leader)

After some time passed in studying – and even imitating – the works of others, I would recommend the student to endeavour to be original, and to remember that originality should not be undiscovered plagiarism.
—Henry Peach Robinson

A rich man, of cultivated tastes, with every right to gratify them, knowing enough of sorrow to humble his heart toward God, and soften it toward his neighbor—gifted with not only the power but will to do good, and having lived long enough to reap the fruits of an honorable youth in a calm old age—such a man, in spite of his riches, is not unlikely to enter the kingdom of heaven.
—Dinah Craik (English Novelist)

The prosperous man is never sure that he is loved for himself.
—Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus)

It is not truth, justice, liberty, that men seek; they seek only themselves. — And oh, that they knew how to seek themselves aright!
—Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (German Philosopher)

Enthusiasm is a vital element toward the individual success of every man or woman.
—Conrad Hilton (American Business Person)

Love is the great miracle cure. Loving ourselves works miracles in our lives.
—Louise Hay (American Author)

Dignity is like a perfume; those who use it are scarcely conscious of it
—Christina, Queen of Sweden (Swedish Monarch)

Work is the greatest thing in the world, so we should always save some of it for tomorrow.
—Don Herold (American Humorist)

Focus on your potential instead of your limitations.
—Joe Dimaggio

In charity to all mankind, bearing no malice or ill-will to any human being, and even compassionating those who hold in bondage their fellow-men, not knowing what they do.
—John Quincy Adams (American Head of State)

The best perfection of a religious man is to do common things in a perfect manner.
—Bonaventure (Italian Christian Scholar)

When a man steals your wife, there is no better revenge than to let him keep her.
—Sacha Guitry (French Theater Personality)

We can be negative and cynical or we can be charged and hot wored to find a way through it, over it, around it under it.
—Laura Schlessinger (American Children’s Books Writer)

Where fear is, happiness is not.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (Roman Philosopher)

Time turns the old days to derision, our loves into corpses or wives; and marriage and death and division make barren our lives.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne (English Poet)

Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
—Diane Ackerman (American Children’s Books Writer)

Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.
—Elizabeth Bibesco (English Poet)

Vigilance in watching opportunity; tact and daring in seizing upon opportunity; force and persistence in crowding opportunity to its utmost of possible achievement—these are the martial virtues which must command success.
—Austin Phelps (American Presbyterian Clergyman)

You begin by always expecting good things to happen.
—Tom Hopkins (English Sportsperson)

Success is the satisfaction of feeling that one is realizing one’s ideal.
—Anna Pavlova (Russian Dancer)

I have been true to the principles of nonviolence, developing a stronger and stronger aversion to the ideologies of both the far right and the far left and a deeper sense of rage and sorrow over the suffering they continue to produce all over the world.
—Joan Baez (American Singer)

After a certain point, money is meaningless. It ceases to be the goal. The game is what counts.
—Aristotle Onassis (Greek Businessperson)

Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the stiff-necked adversary of thought.
—Martin Heidegger (German Existential Philosopher)

First health, then wealth, then pleasure, and do not owe anything to anybody.
—Catherine II of Russia (Russian Empress)

All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties.
—Charles William Eliot (American Educator)

Your best teacher is your last mistake.
—Ralph Nader (American Activist)

My idea of education is to unsettle the minds of the young and inflame their intellects.
—Robert Maynard Hutchins (American Educator)

Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.
—Sam Walton (American Entrepreneur)

A man doesn’t begin to attain wisdom until he recognizes he is no longer indispensable.
—Richard Evelyn Byrd (American Aviator)