Often many of us need some words of inspiration to get through the day. Days like this happen to anyone from time to time. One best way to fight your own battle is through thinking, hearing, and reading positive thoughts that can encourage you to never give up, be confident, never lose hope, and be positive at all times. Instead of soaking through those sad days, find a way to brighten those moments instead.
If you feed your mind with only positive thoughts throughout the day, it will help boost your mood, focus on what really matters, and motivate you to work even harder to achieve your goals. There are tons of great books you can read to inspire you daily. Even these inspiring famous quotes we compiled from some of your favorite authors, philosophers, athletes, and celebrities, can surely leave a smile on your face after you read them.
Take a look at these famous quotes, write your favorites in your notes, and whenever you feel down, read them out loud to remind you that there are still so many good things in life you should be thankful for!
Famous Quotes
1. I may be kindly, I am ordinarily gentle, but in my line of business I am obliged to will terribly what I will at all. – Catherine the Great
2. Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. – Confucius
3. We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them. – Abigail Adams
4. The best way to predict the future is to create it. – Abraham Lincoln
5. Nothing is impossible, the word itself says ‘I’m possible’. – Audrey Hepburn
6. I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn’t learn something from him. – Galileo Galilei
7. Great events make me quiet and calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves. – Queen Victoria
8. Being ignorant is not so much a shame as being unwilling to learn. – Benjamin Franklin
9. I attribute my success to this – I never gave or took any excuse. – Florence Nightingale
10. My momma always said, ‘life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get’. – Forrest, Forrest Gump
11. But it ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much can you take and keep moving forward. – Rocky, Rocky Balboa
12. Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for it. – Katharine Whitehorn
13. The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth. – Marlee Matlin
14. Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time. – Maya Angelou
15. No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man’s permission when we ask him to obey it. – Theodore Roosevelt
16. No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. – Albert Einstein
17. When a woman is talking to you, listen to what she says with her eyes. – Victor Hugo
18. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. – Robert Kennedy
19. In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. – Benjamin Franklin
20. If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way. – Napoleon Hill
21. A true friend is someone who is there for you when he’d rather be anywhere else. – Len Wein
22. There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship. – Thomas Aquinas
23. There is no love without forgiveness, and there is no forgiveness without love. – Bryant H. McGill
24. Your talent is God’s gift to you. What you do with it is your gift back to God. – Leo Buscaglia
25. There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. – Edith Wharton
26. This life is like a swimming pool. You dive into the water, but you can’t see how deep it is. – Dennis Rodman
27. You can do anything, but not everything. – David Allen
28. Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
29. The richest man is not he who has the most, but he who needs the least.
30. You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take. – Wayne Gretzky
31. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear. – Ambrose Redmoon
32. You must be the change you wish to see in the world. – Gandhi
33. When hungry, eat your rice; when tired, close your eyes. Fools may laugh at me, but wise men will know what I mean. – Lin-Chi
34. The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking. – A. A. Milne
35. To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail. – Abraham Maslow
36. We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. – Aristotle
37. A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends. – Baltasar Gracian
38. Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought. – Basho
39. Everyone is a genius at least once a year. The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together. – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
40. What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do. – John Ruskin
41. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes. – Marcel Proust
42. Work like you don’t need money, love like you’ve never been hurt, and dance like no one’s watching.
43. Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time, to figure out whether you like it or not. – Virgil Garnett Thomson
44. Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. – Will Rogers
45. People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily. – Zig Ziglar
46. Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories. – John Wilmot
46. What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left. – Oscar Levant
47. Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much. – Oscar Wilde
48. I’ve gone into hundreds of [fortune-teller’s parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her. – New York City detective
49. When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty. – Norm Crosby
50. Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand. – Kurt Vonnegut
51. Just the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. – Carl Sagan
52. My pessimism extends to the point of even suspecting the sincerity of the pessimists. – Jean Rostand
53. Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world. – Lily Tomlin
54. I quit therapy because my analyst was trying to help me behind my back. – Richard Lewis
55. We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true. – Robert Wilensky
56. I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best. – Marilyn Monroe
57. Get busy living or get busy dying. – Stephen King
58. The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself. – Mark Caine
59. When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. – Helen Keller
60. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. – Mark Twain
61. When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid. – Audre Lorde
62. Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. – Eleanor Roosevelt
63. A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him. – David Brinkley
64. Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly. – John F. Kennedy
65. I can’t give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time. – Herbert Bayard Swope
66. Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really: Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success. – Thomas J. Watson
67. It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. – Theodore Roosevelt
68. I’m a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn’t have the heart to let him down. – Abraham Lincoln
69. Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world. – Lucille Ball
70. Let us always meet each other with smile, for the smile is the beginning of love. – Mother Theresa
71. Challenges are what makes life interesting and overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. – Joshua J. Marine
72. Love is a serious mental disease. – Plato
73. Our greatest fear should not be of failure… but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. – Francis Chan
74. It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things. – Leonardo Da Vinci
75. Remember that the happiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more. – H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
76. It is our choices, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. – J. K Rowling
77. Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. – Pablo Picasso
78. If you want to be happy, be. – Leo Tolstoy
79. Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. – Thomas A. Edison
80. If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things. – Albert Einstein
81. Success is just a war of attrition. Sure, there’s an element of talent you should probably possess. But if you just stick around long enough, eventually something is going to happen. – Dax Shepard
82. The good news is that the moment you decide that what you know is more important than what you have been taught to believe, you will have shifted gears in your quest for abundance. Success comes from within, not from without. – Elie Wiesel
83. I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love. – Henry Ward Beecher
84. Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world. – Harriet Tubman
85. It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life. – Sigmund Freud
86. A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself. – Jim Morrison
87. Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world. – Harriet Tubman
88. Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game. – Babe Ruth
89. Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
90. Life is trying things to see if they work. – Ray Bradbury
91. 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
92. Life is about making an impact, not making an income. – Kevin Kruse
93. Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. – Napoleon Hill
94. Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value. – Albert Einstein
95. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. – Robert Frost
96. I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse. – Florence Nightingale
97. I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. – Michael Jordan
98. The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. – Amelia Earhart
99. Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement. – W. Clement Stone
100. Life isn’t about getting and having, it’s about giving and being. – Kevin Kruse
101. Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. – John Lennon
102. We become what we think about. – Earl Nightingale
103. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover. – Mark Twain
104. Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. – Charles Swindoll
105. The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any. – Alice Walker
106. The mind is everything. What you think you become. – Buddha
107. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. – Chinese Proverb
108. An unexamined life is not worth living. – Socrates
109. Eighty percent of success is showing up. – Woody Allen
110. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. – Steve Jobs
111. Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is. – Vince Lombardi
112. I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions. – Stephen Covey
113. Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. – Pablo Picasso
114. You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. – Christopher Columbus
115. The No. 1 reason people fail in life is because they listen to their friends, family, and neighbors. – Napoleon Hill
116. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. – Steve Jobs
117. Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom. – George S. Patton
118. You will face many defeats in life, but never let yourself be defeated. – Maya Angelou
119. May you live all the days of your life. – Jonathan Swift
120. If you just work on stuff that you like and you’re passionate about, you don’t have to have a master plan with how things will play out. – Mark Zuckerberg
121. Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else. – Sara Blakely
122. When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it. – Henry Ford
123. Fearlessness is like a muscle. I know from my own life that the more I exercise it the more natural it becomes to not let my fears run me. – Arianna Huffington
124. I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. – Steve Jobs
125. Without an open-minded mind, you can never be a great success. – Martha Stewart
126. If you’re hurt, lick your wounds and get up again. If you’ve given it your absolute best, it’s time to move forward. – Richard Branson
127. If you’re changing the world, you’re working on important things. You’re excited to get up in the morning. – Larry Page
128. If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just. – Anita Roddick
129. The best ideas come as jokes. Make your thinking as funny as possible. – David Ogilvy
130. When life gets you down do you wanna know what you’ve gotta do? Just keep swimming. – Dory, Finding Nemo
131. Do not be fooled by its commonplace appearance. Like so many things, it is not what outside, but what is inside that counts. – Aladdin
132. Some people are worth melting for. – Olaf, Frozen
133. If everybody were like everybody else, how boring it would be. The things that make me different are the things that make me, Me. – Piglet and Eeyore
134. You’re mad, bonkers, off your head! But I’ll tell you a secret: all the best people are. – Alice
135. I don’t want to survive. I want to live. – The Captain, Wall-E
136. You’re never too old to be young. – Snow White
137. The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all. – The Emperor, Mulan
138. Always let your conscience be your guide. – The Blue Fairy, Pinocchio
139. If you can dream, you can do it. – Walt Disney
140. Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. – Winston Churchill
141. Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. – Winston Churchill
142. You’re not obligated to win. You’re obligated to keep trying. To the best you can do everyday. – Jason Mraz
143. If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor. – Eleanor Roosevelt
144. If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much. – Jim Rohn
145. The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. – Ayn Rand
146. Be yourself; everyone else is already taken. – Oscar Wilde
147. Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe. – Albert Einstein
148. So many books, so little time. – Frank Zappa
149. Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind. – Bernard M. Baruch
150. You’ve gotta dance like there’s nobody watching. Love like you’ll never be hurt. Sing like there’s nobody listening. And live like it’s heaven on earth. – William W. Purkey
151. You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough. – Mae West
152. Be the change that you wish to see in the world. – Mahatma Gandhi
153. In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. – Robert Frost
154. If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals. – J.K. Rowling
155. Don’t walk in front of me. I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me. I may not lead. Walk beside me, just be my friend. – Albert Camus
156. Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. – Mahatma Gandhi
157. Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. – Rob Siltanen
