Top Inspirational Quotes to Boost Confidence for State Testing Success

"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time."

- Thomas A. Edison

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

- Christian D. Larson

"Self-belief and hard work will always earn you success."

- Virat Kohli

"If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right."

- Henry Ford

"Trust yourself, you know more than you think you do"

- Benjamin Spock

"The focus on just thinking about standardized test scores as being synonymous with achievement for teenagers is ridiculous, right? There are so many things that kids care about, where they excel, where they try hard, where they learn important life lessons, that are not picked up by test scores."

- Angela Duckworth

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

- Teddy Roosevelt

"Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do."

- John R. Wooden

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it is stupid."

- Albert Einstein

"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."

- Thomas Edison

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

- Winston Churchill

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

- Abraham Lincoln

"Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude."

- Thomas Jefferson

"Believe in yourself, take on your challenges, dig deep within yourself to conquer fears. Never let anyone bring you down. You got to keep going."

- Chantal Sutherland

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

- Alexander Graham Bell

"If you don’t do your revision properly, you know what’ll happen? YOU SHALL NOT PASS!"

- Sir Ian McKellen, channelling Gandalf from Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”

"Keep your dreams alive. Understand to achieve anything requires faith and belief in yourself, vision, hard work, determination, and dedication. Remember all things are possible for those who believe."

- Gail Devers

"Standardized testing is at cross purposes with many of the most important purposes of public education. It doesn't measure big-picture learning, critical thinking, perseverance, problem solving, creativity or curiosity, yet those are the qualities great teaching brings out in a student."

- Randi Weingarten

"Nothing will work unless you do."

- Maya Angelou

"My biggest regret could be summed up in one word, and that’s procrastination."

- Ron Cooper

"It’s not the time to look for excuses."

- Rafael Nadal

"The real man is one who always finds excuses for others, but never excuses himself."

- Henry Ward Beecher

"You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great."

- Zig Ziglar

"My advice is, never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time."

- Charles Dickens

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started."

- Mark Twain

"Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can."

- Arthur Ashe

"It’s the job that’s never started as takes the longest to finish."

- J.R.R. Tolkien

"If we wait for the moment when absolutely everything is ready we shall never begin."

- Ivan Turgenev

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

- Confucius

"Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending."

- Maria Robinson

"Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact."

- Terry Pratchett

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."

- Albert Einstein

"Your success and happiness lie in you."

- Helen Keller

"Education not just preparation for life, but part of life itself – a continuous art."

- Henry Ford

"My advice is to never do tomorrow what you can do today. Procrastination is the thief of time."

- Charles Dickens

"The world of the future is in our making. Tomorrow is now."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

"There are two days in the year that we can not do anything, yesterday and tomorrow."

- Mahatma Gandhi

"No gains without pains."

- Benjamin Franklin

"Limitations live only in our minds. But if we use our imaginations, our possibilities become limitless."

- Jamie Paolinetti

"Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities. They vary in their desires to reach their potential."

- John Maxwell

"Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."

- Malcolm S. Forbes

"Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction."

- John F. Kennedy

"The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it."

- Henry Ford

"Life is never made unbearable by circumstance, but only by lack of meaning and purpose."

- Viktor Frankl

"Nothing is impossible. The word itself says ‘I’m Possible’."

- Audrey Hepburn

"Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask. Everything you want also wants you. But you have to take action to get it."

- Jules Renard

"I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs, but how high he bounces when he hits the bottom."

- General George S. Patton

"However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at."

- Stephen Hawking

"I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself."

- Arianna Huffington

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

- Winston Churchill

"If you are going through hell, keep going."

- Winston S. Churchill

"Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did."

- Newt Gingrich

"Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn."

- Harriet Stowe

"Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish."

- John Quincy Adams

"It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up."

- Babe Ruth

"By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail."

- Benjamin Franklin

"A woodsman was once asked, ‘What would you do if you had just five minutes to chop down a tree?’ He answered, ‘I would spend the first two and a half minutes sharpening my axe.”"

- Anonymous woodsman, popularly attributed to Abraham Lincoln

"Your life is not a simulation; it’s the real game. Play wisely."

- Richelle E. Goodrich

"You were born to win. But to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win and expect to win."

- Zig Ziglar

"Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses."

- George Washington Carver

"The only difference between success and failure is the ability to take action."

- Alexander Graham Bell

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

- William Faulkner

"If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn’t be here. I guarantee you that."

- Michelle Obama

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

- Robert Collier

"A quality education has the power to transform societies in a single generation; provide children with the protection they need from the hazards of poverty, labor exploitation and disease; and give them the knowledge, skills and confidence to reach their full potential."

- Audrey Hepburn

"Do not allow yourselves to be disheartened by any failure as long as you have done your best."

- Mother Teresa

"When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us."

- Alexander Graham Bell

"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

"I'm not saying standardized tests are the worst ever, but there's an in-between and I don't think we're there yet. That's what I mean when I say I have an issue with it. There's no way a kid can learn in a class with 40 to 45 people. I had the power to get out of that system and pursue things that I wanted to do and I did that."

- Ashley Rickards

"Education means teaching kids how to do stuff and how to think about stuff. Education is a pretty simple concept with a very clear way to measure results: you give some kind of an exam - maybe it's one of those standardized tests all kids hate, maybe it's some kind of essay, but whatever it is, it'll measure the results, and the kids will hate it."

- Mike Gallagher

"The SAT is not perfect. We all know smart, knowledgeable people who do badly on standardized tests. But neither is it useless. SAT scores do measure both specific knowledge and valuable thinking skills."

- Virginia Postrel

"Now the problem with standardized tests is that it's based on the mistake that we can simply scale up the education of children like you would scale up making carburetors. And we can't, because human beings are very different from motorcars, and they have feelings about what they do and motivations in doing it, or not."

- Ken Robinson

"Merit pay has failed repeatedly, and it's no surprise. When you base teacher pay on standardized test scores, you won't improve education; you just promote the high-stakes testing craze that's led parents, students and educators to shout 'Enough!' all across the country."

- Randi Weingarten

"If my future were determined just by my performance on a standardized test, I wouldn't be here. I guarantee you that."

- Michelle Obama

"Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground."

- Theodore Roosevelt

"Trust yourself; you know more than you think you do."

- Benjamin Spock

"I read so slow. If I have a script, I'm going to read it five times slower than any other actor, but I'll be able to tell you everything in it. It kills me that there are standardized tests geared towards just one kind of child."

- Channing Tatum

"Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works."

- Leonardo da Vinci

"I had very little going for me as a kid except for the fact that I had demanding parents and was very good at filling out bubbles on standardized tests. I went to the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins University because I did well on the SAT. I went to Exeter because I did well on the SAT."

- Andrew Yang

"If you think dealing with issues like worthiness and authenticity and vulnerability are not worthwhile because there are more pressing issues, like the bottom line or attendance or standardized test scores, you are sadly, sadly mistaken. It underpins everything."

- Brené Brown

"Standardized tests don't care if you're white or black, short or tall, or even the rate at which you learned the course material. At the end of the day, all it cares about is whether you know what you're supposed to know. It can't be cheated, bent, or bargained with."

- Steven Crowder

"People find comfort in boxes, is really what I've learned, and people found comfort in the bubbles they were filling out for standardized tests. And I don't understand it, because they made me uncomfortable."

- Rachel Zegler

"If you have 50 different plug types, appliances wouldn't be available and would be very expensive. But once an electric outlet becomes standardized, many companies can design appliances, and competition ensues, creating variety and better prices for consumers."

- Bill Gates

"The one size fits all approach of standardized testing is convenient but lazy."

- James Dyson

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

"Just believe in yourself. Even if you don’t, pretend that you do and, at some point, you will."

"The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet."

"Fear, inherently, is not meant to limit you. Fear is the brain’s way of saying that there is something important for you to overcome."

- Unknown

"Forget all the reasons it won’t work and believe the one reason that it will."

- Unknown

"Every morning you have two choices: continue to sleep with your dreams, or wake up and chase them."

- Unknown

"If you don’t sacrifice for what you want, what you want becomes the sacrifice."