230+ Famous Quotes Inspiration: Timeless Words to Elevate Your Life

"It always seems impossible until it's done."

- Nelson Mandela

"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."

- Wayne Gretzky

"The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."

- Oliver Goldsmith

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts."

- Winston Churchill

"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better."

- Maya Angelou

"Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What's important is the action. You don't have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow."

- Carrie Fisher

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress."

- Frederick Douglass

"Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending."

- Carl Bard

"People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."

- Rob Siltanen

"Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today."

- Malcolm X

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."

- Nelson Mandela

"One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world."

- Malala Yousafzai

"I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it."

- Thomas Jefferson

"Failure is not the opposite of success; it is a stepping stone towards it."

- Sundar Pichai

"Every strike brings me closer to the next home run."

- Babe Ruth

"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 the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

- H. Jackson Brown Jr.

"When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you… never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn."

- Harriet Beecher Stowe

"It is never too late to be who you might have been."

- George Eliot

"I hope you realise that every day is a fresh start for you. That every sunrise is a new chapter in your life waiting to be written."

- Juansen Dizon

"Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go. They merely determine where you start."

- Nido Qubein

"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream."

- C.S. Lewis

"What a wonderful thought it is that some of the best days of our lives haven't even happened yet."

- Anne Frank

"You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Believe you can and you're halfway there."

- Theodore Roosevelt

"Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle."

- Christian D. Larson

"The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity."

- Amelia Earhart

"Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear."

- George Addair

"You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try."

- Beverly Sills

"It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop."

- Confucius

"Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears."

- Les Brown

"I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear."

- Rosa Parks

"You will face many defeats in life, but never let yourself be defeated."

- Maya Angelou

"Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game."

- Babe Ruth

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined."

- Henry David Thoreau

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up."

- Thomas Edison

"The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing."

- Walt Disney

"Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes but they don't quit."

- Conrad Hilton

"There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure."

- Colin Powell

"I failed my way to success."

- Thomas Edison

"Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."

- Winston Churchill

"The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary."

- Vidal Sassoon

"Tough times never last, but tough people do."

- Robert Schuller

"There is always light. If only we're brave enough to see it. If only we're brave enough to be it."

- Amanda Gorman

"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born... and the day you find out why."

- Mark Twain

"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self."

- Ernest Hemingway

"One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again."

- Abraham Maslow

"We can't become what we need to be by remaining what we are."

- Oprah Winfrey

"Sometimes good things fall apart so better things could fall together."

- Marilyn Monroe

"Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you have power over instead of craving control over what you don't."

- Steve Maraboli

"I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept."

- Angela Davis

"What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make."

- Jane Goodall

"Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."

- John F. Kennedy

"An investment in knowledge pays the best interest."

- Benjamin Franklin

"Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value."

- Albert Einstein

"The swiftest way to triple your success is to double your investment in personal development."

- Robin Sharma

"Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago."

- Warren Buffett

"Always work hard and have fun in what you do because I think that's when you're more successful. You have to choose to do it."

- Simone Biles

"When someone tells me 'no,' it doesn't mean I can't do it, it simply means I can't do it with them."

- Karen E. Quinones Miller

"Success isn't about the end result, it's about what you learn along the way."

- Vera Wang

"We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it."

- Rick Warren

"You can waste your lives drawing lines. Or you can live your life crossing them."

- Shonda Rhimes

"You are the one that possesses the keys to your being. You carry the passport to your own happiness."

- Diane von Furstenberg

"Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is you who will get you where you want to go, no one else."

- Les Brown

"Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experiences that reveals the human spirit."

- E.E. Cummings

"If you don't make the time to work on creating the life you want, you're eventually going to be forced to spend a lot of time dealing with a life you don't want."

- Kevin Ngo

"The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."

- Dolly Parton

"It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves."

- William Shakespeare

"Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one."

- Brad Paisley

"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy; not on fighting the old, but on building the new."

- Dan Millman

"If you're brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello."

- Paulo Coelho

"Never underestimate the power you have to take your life in a new direction."

- Germany Kent

"Year-End Note to Self: It's not too late. You are not behind. You are where you need to be."

- Marc & Angel Chernoff

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."

- Ayn Rand

"I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples."

- Mother Teresa

"You become what you believe."

- Oprah Winfrey

"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world."

- Anne Frank

"Dream big and dare to fail."

- Norman Vaughan

"Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny."

- C.S. Lewis

"I didn't fail the test. I just found 100 ways to do it wrong."

- Benjamin Franklin

"I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse."

- Florence Nightingale

"Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve."

- Napoleon Hill

"Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it."

- Charles Swindoll

"In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years."

- Abraham Lincoln

"If you look at what you have in life, you'll always have more. If you look at what you don't have in life, you'll never have enough."

- Oprah Winfrey

"The only impossible journey is the one you never begin."

- Anthony Robbins

"In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love."

- Mother Teresa

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."

- Mae West

"Do not let making a living prevent you from making a life."

- John Wooden

"Keep smiling, because life is a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about."

- Marilyn Monroe

"Love the life you live. Live the life you love."

- Bob Marley

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all."

- Helen Keller

"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose."

- Dr. Seuss

"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."

- George Bernard Shaw

"The secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well."

- John D. Rockefeller Jr.

"Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it."

- Henry David Thoreau

"The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere."

- Barack Obama

"The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today."

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."

- Herman Melville

"If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success."

- James Cameron

"If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time."

- Steve Jobs

"A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him."

- David Brinkley

"Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out."

- John Wooden

"Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great."

- John D. Rockefeller

"Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other one thing."

- Abraham Lincoln

"You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job and not be paid for it."

- Oprah Winfrey

"If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary."

- Jim Rohn

"Before anything else, preparation is the key to success."

- Alexander Graham Bell

"You never achieve real success unless you like what you're doing."

- Dale Carnegie

"Your attitude is either the lock on or key to your door of success."

- Denis Waitley

"If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else."

- Booker T. Washington

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving."

- Albert Einstein

"It isn't where you came from. It's where you're going that counts."

- Ella Fitzgerald

"One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals."

- Michelle Obama

"You define your own life. Don't let other people write your script."

- Oprah Winfrey

"What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals."

- Zig Ziglar

"We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us."

- Joseph Campbell

"Keep your face always toward the sunshine —and shadows will fall behind you."

- Walt Whitman

"It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light."

- Aristotle

"No matter what you're going through, there's a light at the end of the tunnel."

- Demi Lovato

"Remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it."

- Henry Ford

"My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive."

- Maya Angelou

"When you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it."

- Theodore Roosevelt

"Life is tough, darling. Life is hard. And we better laugh at everything, otherwise, we're going down the tube."

- Joan Rivers

"To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone."

- Reba McEntire

"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live."

- Norman Cousins

"Permit yourself to change your mind when something is no longer working for you."

- Nedra Glover Tawwab

"Change brings opportunity."

- Nido Qubein

"Recognizing that you are not where you want to be is a starting point to begin changing your life."

- Deborah Day

"Change is made of choices, and choices are made of character."

- Amanda Gorman

"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."

- John Dewey

"Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't."

- Bill Nye

"The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows."

- Sydney J. Harris

"I would like to think that all of my successes in life are really just the fruit of my failures."

- Yvie Oddly

"Winning is not a sometime thing; it's an all the time thing."

- Vince Lombardi

"If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat! Just get on."

- Sheryl Sandberg

"I would rather die of passion than of boredom."

- Vincent van Gogh

"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."

- Helen Keller

"Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile."

- Albert Einstein

"Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans."

- John Lennon

"Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated."

- Confucius

"Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved."

- D. H. Lawrence

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on."

- Robert Frost

"Don't be distracted by criticism. Remember—the only taste of success some people get is to take a bite out of you."

- Zig Ziglar

"The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same."

- Colin R. Davis

"If you genuinely want something, don't wait for it—teach yourself to be impatient."

- Gurbaksh Chahal

"Success is a matter of sticking to a set of common-sense principles anyone can master."

- Earl Nightingale

"Unless you're continually improving your skills, you're quickly becoming irrelevant."

- Stephen Covey

"Try to be a rainbow in someone else's cloud."

- Maya Angelou

"We can't help everyone, but everyone can help someone."

- Ronald Reagan

"It has always been easy to hate and destroy. To build and to cherish is much more difficult."

- Queen Elizabeth II

"You don't always need a plan. Sometimes you just need to breathe, trust, let go and see what happens."

- Mandy Hale

"Life changes very quickly, in a very positive way, if you let it."

- Lindsey Vonn

"A dead-end street is a good place to turn around."

- Naomi Judd

"The most wasted of days is one without laughter."

- E.E. Cummings

"Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment, until it becomes a memory."

- Dr. Seuss

"The road to success is always under construction."

- Lily Tomlin

"Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it."

- Katharine Whitehorn

"Be like a postage stamp; stick to one thing until you get there."

- Josh Billings

"The difference between try and triumph is just a little umph!"

- Marvin Phillips

"Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive."

- Elbert Hubbard

"When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I am always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?"

- Sydney J. Harris

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."

- Mark Twain

"It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement."

- Abraham Maslow

"When we're growing up, there are all sorts of people telling us what to do when really what we need is space to work out who to be."

- Elliot Page

"A well-educated mind will always have more questions than answers."

- Helen Keller

"You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read."

- Cesar Chavez

"The unexamined life is not worth living."

- Socrates

"If life were predictable, it would cease to be life and be without flavor."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

"Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale."

- Hans Christian Andersen

"Life is a long lesson in humility."

- J.M. Barrie

"Life is trying things to see if they work."

- Ray Bradbury

"The key to success is to develop a winning edge."

- Brian Tracy

"You can't rely on how you look to sustain you, what sustains us, what is fundamentally beautiful is compassion; for yourself and your those around you."

- Lupita Nyong'o

"It's no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then."

- Alice

"You make a choice: continue living your life feeling muddled in this abyss of self-misunderstanding, or you find your identity independent of it. You draw your own box."

- Meghan Markle

"Life has got all those twists and turns. You've got to hold on tight and off you go."

- Nicole Kidman

"Don't save your best for when you think the material calls for it. Always bring your full potential to every take, and be on top of your job, or they will replace you."

- Gabrielle Union

"We do not fall in love with the package of the person; we fall in love with the inside of a person."

- Anne Heche

"Limit your 'always' and your 'nevers."

- Amy Poehler

"Confidence is 10% hard work and 90% delusion."

- Tina Fey

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

- Douglas Adams

"By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be boss and work 12 hours a day."

- Robert Frost

"Some people see things that are and ask, 'Why?' Some people dream of things that never were and ask, 'Why not?' Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that."

- George Carlin

"If hard work is the key to success, most people would rather pick the lock."

- Claude MacDonald

"Hard work spotlights the character of people: some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, some don't turn up at all."

- Sam Ewing

"Life is hard. After all, it kills you."

- Katharine Hepburn

"I believe that if life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade, and try to find somebody whose life has given them vodka, and have a party."

- Ron White

"Follow your passion. Stay true to yourself. Never follow anyone else's path unless you're in the woods and you're lost and you see a path. Then, by all means, follow that path."

- Ellen DeGeneres

"I have noticed that even people who claim everything is predetermined and that we can do nothing to change it look before they cross the road."

- Stephen Hawking

"My favorite thing to do on this planet is to play games. And if you don't enjoy games, then you're really missing the point of what this life is."

- RuPaul

"I take my fundamental cue from John Coltrane that says there must be a priority of integrity, honesty, decency, and mastery of craft."

- Cornel West

"Tradition is nothing but ancestral peer pressure."

- Indya Moore

"Our greatest natural resource is the minds of our children."

- Walt Disney

"Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not."

- Oscar Wilde

"Life is made of ever so many partings welded together."

- Charles Dickens

"I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific."

- Lily Tomlin

"My least favorite phrase in the English language is 'I don't care."

- James Caan

"Hard work never killed anybody, but why take a chance?"

- Edward Bergen

"Oh, you hate your job? Why didn't you say so? There's a support group for that. It's called everybody, and they meet at the bar."

- Drew Carey

"There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full."

- Henry Kissinger

"Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work."

- Robert Orben

"No man goes before his time—unless the boss leaves early."

- Groucho Marx

"Whatever you do, always give 100% — unless you're donating blood."

- Bill Murray

"Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he's supposed to be doing at that moment."

- Robert Benchley

"Work is the greatest thing in the world, so we should always save some of it for tomorrow."

- Don Herold

"My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far I've finished two bags of M&Ms and a chocolate cake. I feel better already."

- Dave Barry

"The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly and lie about your age."

- Lucille Ball

"What I don't like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day."

- Phyllis Diller

"A good rule to remember for life is that when it comes to plastic surgery and sushi, never be attracted by a bargain."

- Graham Norton

"I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have."

"Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don't wish it were easier; wish you were better."

"Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."

"The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus."

"Hustle until your haters ask if you're hiring."

- Unknown