Empowering Words: A Collection of Powerful Inspirational Quotes

"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me."

- George Orwell

"The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any."

- Alice Walker

"This life is yours. Take the power to choose what you want to do and do it well. Take the power to love what you want in life and love it honestly. Take the power to walk in the forest and be a part of nature. Take the power to control your own life. No one else can do it for you. Take the power to make your life happy."

- Susan Polis Schutz

"Love yourself first and everything else falls into line."

- Lucille Ball

"Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind – even if your voice shakes."

- Maggie Kuhn

"The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace."

- Mahatma Gandhi

"When you have a dream, you've got to grab it and never let go."

- Carol Burnett

"No matter how far away from yourself you may have strayed, there is always a path back. You already know who you are and how to fulfill your destiny."

- Oprah Winfrey

"Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined."

- Toni Morrison

"You just gotta keep going and fighting for everything, and one day you’ll get to where you want."

- Naomi Osaka

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."

- Oscar Wilde

"Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own."

- Michelle Obama

"Never allow a person to tell you no who doesn’t have the power to say yes."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

"Hard things will happen to us. We will recover. We will learn from it. We will grow more resilient because of it."

- Taylor Swift

"Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity. It is the glory of Abraham Lincoln that he never abused power only on the side of mercy."

- Robert Ingersoll

"Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't."

- Margaret Thatcher

"The measure of a man is what he does with power."

- Plato

"Optimism is a happiness magnet. If you stay positive, good things and good people will be drawn to you."

- Mary Lou Retton

"The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it."

- Roseanne Barr

"Knowledge is power. Power to do evil...or power to do good. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not evil."

- Veronica Roth

"Recognizing power in another does not diminish your own."

- Joss Whedon

"Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power."

- Seneca

"When it comes to luck, you make your own."

- Bruce Springsteen

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

- Truman Capote

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist."

- Oscar Wilde

"You define beauty yourself, society doesn’t define your beauty."

- Lady Gaga

"If you prioritize yourself, you are going to save yourself."

- Gabrielle Union

"When you can’t find someone to follow, you have to find a way to lead by example."

- Roxane Gay

"It’s a toxic desire to try to be perfect. I realized later in life that the challenge is not to be perfect. It’s to be whole."

- Jane Fonda

"Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist but in the ability to start over."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

- Carl Sagan

"I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine."

- Emily Dickinson

"Patience is power. Patience is not an absence of action; rather it is 'timing' it waits on the right time to act, for the right principles and in the right way."

- Fulton J. Sheen

"O, it is excellent/To have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous/To use it like a giant."

- William Shakespeare

"The great secret of power is never to will to do more than you can accomplish."

- Henrik Ibsen

"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words."

- Ursula K. Le Guin

"Power resides only where men believe it resides. [...] A shadow on the wall, yet shadows can kill. And ofttimes a very small man can cast a very large shadow."

- George R.R. Martin

"If you're having fun, that's when the best memories are built."

- Simone Biles

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

- Robert Frost

"Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever."

- Toni Morrison

"There is no better compass than compassion."

- Amanda Gorman

"Calmness is the cradle of power."

- J.G. Holland

"A problem is a chance for you to do your best."

- Duke Ellington

"It's all mirror, mirror on the wall because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power."

- Chuck Palahniuk

"I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, 'There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?"

- Elizabeth Gilbert

"You see what power is holding someone else's fear in your hand and showing it to them."

- Amy Tan

"Power is when you have every justification to kill someone, and then you don’t."

- Oskar Schindler

"I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us."

- Veronica Roth

"When Gansey was polite, it made him powerful. When Adam was polite, he was giving power away."

- Maggie Stiefvater

"You can’t turn back the clock. But you can wind it up again."

- Bonnie Prudden