It has been said that everyone says something worth hearing and passing on at least once in a lifetime. Others, of course, seem fitted to spout wisdom in every other sentence. Here’s a list of 100 inspiring quotes on various topics. Choose the ones that inspire or motivate you and use them in your writing, post them in visible places, and pass them on to others. You could even develop an action plan related to the quote.
- “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.” – Alexander Graham Bell
- “Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.” – Ray Kroc
- “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
- “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.” – Thomas Jefferson
- “Don’t let the fear of losing be greater than the excitement of winning.” – Robert Kiyosaki
- “Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest where you haven’t planted.” – David Bly
- “Please think about your legacy, because you’re writing it every day.” – Gary Vaynerchuk
- “Success is focusing the full power of all you are on what you have a burning desire to achieve.” – Wilfred Peterson
- “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in, and day-out.” – Robert Collier
- “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
- “The best revenge is massive success.” – Frank Sinatra
- “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” – Steve Jobs
- “Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
- “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.” – Mark Twain
- “Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.” – Napoleon Hill
- “Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy.” – Milton Erickson
- “Always be a first-rate version of yourself instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” – Judy Garland
- “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” – Ayn Rand
- “If A equals success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y and Z, with X being work, Y play, and Z keeping your mouth shut.” – Albert Einstein
- “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my ax.” – Abraham Lincoln
- “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill
- “People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.” – George Bernard Shaw
- “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “Go for the moon. If you don’t get it, you’ll still be heading for a star. Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of the creative effort.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- “We become what we think about most of the time, and that’s the strangest secret.” – Earl Nightingale
- “Our greatest fear should not be of failure … but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.” – Francis Chan
- “A year from now you may wish you had started today.” – Karen Lamb
- “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children… to leave the world a better place… to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.” – Richard Branson
- “An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.” – Reid Hoffman
- “We will be soldiers, so our sons may be farmers, so their sons may be artists.”- Thomas Jefferson.
- “Success is simple. Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time.” – Arnold H. Glasgow
- “Victory is sweetest when you’ve known defeat.” – Malcolm S. Forbes
- “Action is the foundational key to all success.” – Pablo Picasso
- “The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.” – Albert Ellis
- “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure which is: Try to please everybody.” – Herbert B. Swope
- “You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.” – George Lorimer
- “Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
- “If you want to make an easy job seem mighty hard, just keep putting off doing it.” – Olin Miller
- “The successful man is the one who finds out what is the matter with his business before his competitors do.” – Roy L. Smith
- “Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.” – Lucille Ball
- “Success is not measured by what you accomplish, but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.” – Orison Swett Marden
- “Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.” – George Bernard Shaw
- “I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse.” – Florence Nightingale
- “Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.” – Vincent Van Gogh
- “Follow effective actions with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.” – Peter Drucker
- “You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.” – Albert Einstein
- “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” – Stephen King
- “Things may come to those who wait, but only the things left by those who hustle.” – Abraham Lincoln
- “Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” – John R. Wooden
- “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw
- “Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.” – Erich Fromm
- “Spend eighty percent of your time focusing on the opportunities of tomorrow rather than the problems of yesterday.” – Brian Tracy
- “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” – Abraham Maslow
- “Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be.” – George Sheehan
- “Never limit yourself because of others’ limited imagination; never limit others because of your own limited imagination.” – Mae Jemison
- “The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.” – Benjamin Disraeli
- “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
- “Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.” – Napoleon Hill
- “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” Andy Dufresne, Shawshank Redemption.
- “You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.” – Clay P. Bedford
- “After every difficulty, ask yourself two questions: “What did I do right?” and “What would I do differently?” – Brian Tracy
- “Don’t brood. Get on with living and loving. You don’t have forever.” – Leo Buscaglia
- “Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.” – Oprah Winfrey
- “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” – Winston Churchill
- “Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.” – Wayne Dyer
- “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
- “In a moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing to do, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” – Theodore Roosevelt
- “For success, attitude is equally as important as ability.” – Harry F. Banks
- “Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost legendary. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Perseverance and determination alone are omnipotent.” – Calvin Coolidge
- “Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.” – Dalai Lama
- “Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.” – Buddha
- “People who succeed have momentum. The more they succeed, the more they want to succeed, and the more they find a way to succeed. Similarly, when someone is failing, the tendency is to get on a downward spiral that can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” – Tony Robbins
- “Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.” – Henry David Thoreau
- “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” – Dale Carnegie
- “Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism.” – David M. Burns
- “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” – Arthur Ashe
- “Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.” – Conrad Hilton
- “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
- “Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” – Mark Twain
- “Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.” – George S. Patton
- “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett
- “What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.” – Zig Ziglar
- “If you don’t value your time, neither will others. Stop giving away your time and talents. Value what you know and start charging for it.” – Kim Garst
- “The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.” – Bruce Lee
- “Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker
- “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- “Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value.” – Albert Einstein
- If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else. – Booker T. Washington
- “To be a champ you have to believe in yourself when no one else will.” – Sugar Ray Robinson
- “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” – Albert Einstein
- “If we did all the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.” – Thomas Edison
- “Never be ashamed! There’s some who will hold it against you, but they are not worth bothering with.” – J.K. Rowling
- “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” – Winston Churchill
- “I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.” – Stephen Covey
- “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”- Warren Buffett
- “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
- “If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.”- Katharine Hepburn
- ““We have to make the choice—every single day—to exemplify the truth, the respect, and the grace that we wish for this world.” Oprah Winfrey
Launch into 2019 with purpose and drive! Share your favorite quotes with us in the comments below.