100+ Inspirational Quotes for Guys: Wisdom to Motivate and Empower

"The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand."

- Vince Lombardi

"Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice and most of all, love of what you are doing or learning to do."

- Pele

"Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen."

- Michael Jordan

"The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will."

- Vince Lombardi

"Try not to become a man of success, but rather become a man of value."

- Albert Einstein

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

- Winston S. Churchill

"Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value."

- Albert Einstein

"I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed."

- Michael Jordan

"Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one."

- Marcus Aurelius

""He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.""

- Muhammad Ali

"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

"Whether you think you can or you think you can’t – you're right."

- Henry Ford

"I’ve missed more than 9,000 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

"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. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice."

- Steve Jobs

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

- Wayne Gretzky

"I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’"

- Muhammad Ali

"The future rewards those who press on. I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain. I’m going to press on."

- Barack Obama

"Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the Universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up."

- Stephen Hawking

"A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with — a man is what he makes of himself."

- Alexander Graham Bell

"When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on."

- FDR

"Do not pray for easy lives, pray to be stronger men."

- John F. Kennedy

"There is no passion to be found playing small—in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living."

- Nelson Mandela

"If you want to be the best, you have to do things other people aren’t willing to do."

- Michael Phelps

"The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself — the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us—that’s where it’s at."

- Jesse Owens

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

- Babe Ruth

"Winning isn’t everything, but wanting to win is."

- Vince Lombardi

"I'm not afraid of dying, I’m afraid of not trying."

- Jay-Z

"You pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud, too. That's part of it."

- Denzel Washington

"Strength does not come from winning. Your struggles develop your strengths. When you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength."

- Arnold Schwarzenegger

"Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we’re going to make it happen. As God as my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work."

- Elon Musk

"Work like there is someone working 24 hours a day to take it away from you."

- Mark Cuban

"The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting."

- Walt Disney

"Don’t let the fear of losing be greater than the excitement of winning."

- Robert Kiyosaki

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."

- Will Durant

"I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination."

- Jimmy Dean

""You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.""

- Dr. Seuss

"One man with courage makes a majority."

- Andrew Jackson

"One secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes."

- Benjamin Disraeli

"The successful man will profit from his mistakes and try again in a different way."

- Dale Carnegie

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

- David Brinkley

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

- Mark Twain

"First, forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice."

- Octavia Butler

"The best way out is always through."

- Robert Frost

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

- Frederick Douglass

"Achievement seems to be connected with action. Successful men and women keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit."

- Conrad Hilton

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

- Walt Disney

"The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it."

- John Ruskin

"Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful."

- Albert Pujols

"When you see a successful person you do not envy them, but rather you feel inspired to be like them."

- Shannon L. Alder

"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."

- Beverly Sills

"To be successful you must accept all challenges that come your way with determination and enthusiasm."

- Walter Payton

"Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."

- Winston Churchill

"You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore."

- Christopher Columbus

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

- Vidal Sassoon

"The best revenge is massive success."

- Frank Sinatra

"Success is the best revenge."

- Kanye West

""Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.""

- Albert Camus

""Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.""

- Bruce Lee

""I speak to everyone in the same way, whether he is the garbage man or the president of the university.""

- Albert Einstein

""The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.""

- Socrates

""Men are respectable only as they respect.""

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

""You cannot swim for new horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.""

- William Faulkner

""Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.""

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

""Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.""

- President Barack Obama

""If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.""

- Banksy

""Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.""

- Robert Louis Stevenson

""The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.""

- Confucius

""Things do not change; we change.""

- Henry David Thoreau

""When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.""

- Paulo Coelho

""Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail.""

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

""The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.""

- Amelia Earhart

"He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior."

- Confucius

""Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.""

- Robert Frost

""Your talent determines what you can do. Your motivation determines how much you’re willing to do. Your attitude determines how well you do it.""

- Lou Holtz

""Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting; in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard, reaching for the highest that is in us, becoming all that we can be.""

- Zig Ziglar

""I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.""

- Estée Lauder

""We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.""

- Arianna Huffington

""Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable.""

- John Wooden

""To be successful, you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish. Stay reachable. Stay in touch. Don’t isolate.""

- Michael Jordan

""Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.""

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

""Picture yourself in your mind’s eye as having already achieved this goal. See yourself doing the things you’ll be doing when you’ve reached your goal.""

- Earl Nightingale

""I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.""

- Stephen Covey

"If we all did the things we are really capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves."

- Thomas A. Edison

"There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed."

- Ray Goforth

"If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself."

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

"A man may conquer a million men in battle but one who conquers himself is, indeed, the greatest of conquerors."

- Buddha

"No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child."

- Abraham Lincoln

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

- Ernest Hemingway

"It takes more courage to reveal insecurities than to hide them, more strength to relate to people than to dominate them, more ‘manhood’ to abide by thought-out principles rather than blind reflex. Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles and an immature mind."

- Alex Karras

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places."

- Ernest Hemingway

"I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be."

- Roald Dahl

"You’ll never get bored when you try something new. There’s really no limit to what you can do."

- Dr. Seuss

"If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one."

- Dolly Parton

"If it makes you nervous, you’re doing it right."

- Childish Gambino

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

- Jane Goodall

"I choose to make the rest of my life the best of my life."

- Louise Hay

"A surplus of effort could overcome a deficit of confidence."

- Sonia Sotomayor

"Doubt is a killer. You just have to know who you are and what you stand for."

- Jennifer Lopez

"No one changes the world who isn’t obsessed."

- Billie Jean King

"I learned a long time ago that there is something worse than missing the goal, and that’s not pulling the trigger."

- Mia Hamm

"The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark."

- Michelangelo Buonarroti

"I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work."

- Thomas Edison

"Overnight success takes about fifteen years."

- Arnold Schwarzenegger

"If you perform the sacrifice of doing your duty, you do not have to do anything else. Devoted to duty, man attains perfection."

- Bhagavad Gita

"He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has."

- Epictetus

"If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you’ll achieve the same results."

- Tony Robbins

"I don't like work— no man does— but I like what is in the work— the chance to find yourself."

- Joseph Conrad

"First find the man in yourself if you will inspire manliness in others."

- Amos-Bronson-Alcott

"Relentlessly prune bullshit, don’t wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That’s what you do when life is short."

- Paul Graham

"The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself—the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us—that’s where it’s at."

- Jesse Owens

"Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it by use."

- Ruth Gordon

""We do not stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.""

- George Bernard Shaw

"Don’t wait for extraordinary opportunities; prepare ordinary ones instead!"

- Jean-Luc Picard

"We should rejoice in the success of others, not be envious of it."

- Benjamin Franklin

"The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear."

- Socrates

"Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself."

- Joseph Campbell

"If you want to be happy, be."

- Leo Tolstoy

"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together."

- Vincent van Gogh

"We can see through others only when we can see through ourselves."

- Bruce Lee

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

- Colin R. Davis

"Someone will declare, ‘I am the leader!’ and expect everyone to get in line and follow him or her to the gates of heaven or hell. My experience is that it doesn’t happen that way. Others follow you based on the quality of your actions rather than the magnitude of your declarations."

- Bill Walsh

"A man who has committed a mistake and doesn’t correct it is committing another mistake."

- Confucius Kongzi

"Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden."

- Cormac McCarthy

"I think it’s intoxicating when somebody is so unapologetically who they are."

- Don Cheadle

"You can never leave footprints that last if you are always walking on tiptoe."

- Leymah Gbowee

"You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water."

- Rabindranath Tagore

"If you’re going to be thinking, you may as well think big."

- Donald Trump

"An overnight success is ten years in the making."

- Stephen King

"In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different."

- Coco Chanel

"Successful people make money because they say no to almost everything; unsuccessful people say yes to almost everything and go broke."

- Tony Robbins

"Life is so damn short. For f***’s sake, just do what makes you happy."

- Bill Murray

"Try to turn every disaster into an opportunity."

- John D. Rockefeller

"I like criticism. It makes you strong."

- LeBron James

"Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose."

- Bill Gates

"All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle."

- Nikola Tesla

"Celebrate your successes. Find some humour in your failures."

- Sam Walton

"It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness."

- Herman Melville

"There are no traffic jams along the extra mile."

- Roger Staubach

"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

"In life, you’ll have your back up against the wall many times. You might as well get used to it."

- Paul "Bear" Bryant

"Either you run the day, or the day runs you."

- Jim Rohn

"If you absolutely can’t tolerate critics, then don’t do anything new or interesting."

- Jeff Bezos

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does."

- William James

"My general attitude to life is to enjoy every minute of every day. I never do anything with a feeling of, ‘Oh God, I've got to do this today.’"

- Richard Branson

"Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone."

- Pablo Picasso

"Don't worry about failure; you only have to be right once."

- Drew Houston

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

- Vincent van Gogh

"There is nothing impossible to him who will try."

- Alexander the Great

"A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between, he does what he wants to do."

- Bob Dylan

"You are remembered for the rules you break."

- Phil Knight

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

- Warren Buffett

"Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it."

- Salvador Dali

"Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art."

- Andy Warhol

"I intend to live forever, or die trying."

- Groucho Marx

"Only those who are asleep make no mistakes."

- Ingvar Kamprad

"I have no education. I have inspiration. If I was educated, I would be a damn fool."

- Bob Marley

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

- Oscar Wilde

"The important thing is not to stop questioning. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day."

- Albert Einstein

"We don’t know what the next second will bring and what a fantastic thing this is. This can get easily forgotten in the routine of life, and that’s something I’m trying to bring to my attention at all times. Don’t forget you’re alive. We’re not dead, you know. This is the greatest thing."

- Joe Strummer

"There’s no better way to get even with someone than by being happy!"

- Al Franken

"Revenge is sweet, but it will fill you up with negative energy not positive energy. Think about what the real lessons are to take away from your situation."

- Steve Maraboli

"We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing!"

- George Bernard Shaw

"You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there’s still going to be somebody who hates peaches."

- Dita von Teese

"I don’t believe in overnight success. You can’t be successful all at once, unless you are a news flash on CNN or the Queen of England."

- Meg Cabot

"The heart of man is very much like the sea; it has its storms, it has its tides, and in its depths, it has its pearls too."

- Vincent van Gogh

"Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know."

- Pema Chodron

"Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor."

- Truman Capote

"Be happy for those who are happy, and weep for those who weep; such is your duty."

- Albert Schweitzer

"I have found that if you love life, life will love you back."

- Arthur Rubinstein

"Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"People’s passion and desire for authenticity is strong."

- Constance Wu

"If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever."

- Thomas Aquinas

"You will never be happy if you are jealous of other people’s success."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

"When somebody hurts you, just say 'thank you' and move on."

- Madonna Ciccone

"More is lost by indecision than wrong decision."

- Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Promise me you will not spend so much time treading water and trying to keep your head above the waves that you forget, truly forget, how much you have always loved to swim."

- Tyler Knott Gregson

"Envy - The desire of one, to possess the good which is possessed by another."

- Thomas Aquinas

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

"If you want something you’ve never had before, then you have to do something you’ve never done before!"

- Anonymous

"Success is not a destination, it’s a journey."

- Anonymous

"Success is achieved by those who try and keep trying until they succeed!"

- Anonymous

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power."

"Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in and day-out."

"If you want to achieve greatness stop asking for permission."

"Millionaire success starts with little goals, which become big goals."

- Anonymous

"You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks."

"Never be jealous of someone who is successful. Be inspired by them."

- Anonymous

"Envy is a waste of time and energy, a negative emotion that has no real value."

- Anonymous

"Jealousy will never end well; if you feel jealous of others, simply remember that feeling envious towards them will only make you unhappy as well!"

- Anonymous