Everyone has their own way of getting motivated. It might be listening to certain music, watching motivational youtube videos, or listening to a specific podcast. Whatever your method, quotes play an important role. One salient quote can inspire us to get off the couch and go after our dreams. If you’re looking to get motivated and are tired of the surface level motivation offered from the likes of Gary V and other hucksters, then look no further. We’ve compiled some of the best motivational quotes out there.
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right.”
Henry Ford
“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”
Socrates
“Most people die at 25 and aren’t buried until they’re 75.”
Benjamin Franklin
“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.”
Muhammad Ali
“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.”
Earl Nightingale
“People will kill you over time. And how they’ll kill you is with tiny, harmless phrases like be realistic.”
Dylan Moran
“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
“It’s crazy how some people feel that five to ten years being an entrepreneur is a long time to achieve a level of success and wealth but don’t feel that 40 years at a 9-5 job is a long time to stay broke.”
Unknown
“Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.”
Alexis Carrel
“Those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world usually do.”
Steve Jobs
“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
“What’s the point in being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?”
John Green
“Don’t quit your day dream.”
Unknown
“You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid…. You refuse to do it because you want to live longer…. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand. Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
“Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.”
Theodore Roosevelt
“The big secret in life is that there is no secret. Whatever is your goal, you can get there if you are willing to work.”
Oprah Winfrey
“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”
Les Brown
“There’s no talent here, this is hard work. This is an obsession. Talent does not exist, we are all equals as human beings. You could be anyone if you put in the time. You will reach the top, and that’s that. I am not talented. I am obsessed.”
Conor McGregor
“It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.”
Leonardo da Vinci
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Frederick Douglass
“I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.”
Stephen Covey
“The fishing is best where the fewest go and the collective insecurity of the world makes it easy for people to hit home runs while everyone is aiming for base hits.”
Tim Ferriss
“Balance, dare I say it, is vastly overrated. In the end, you might want to consider the benefits of imbalance, and the achievements that come with pursuing a passion with a single-minded devotion.”
Colin Cowherd
“Successful people are 100% convinced that they are masters of their own destiny, they’re not creatures of circumstance, they create circumstance, if the circumstances around them suck they change them.”
Jordan Belfort
“Don’t fear failure—not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.”
Bruce Lee
“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
Jack London
“Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.”
Homer
“We don’t have a lot of time on this earth! We weren’t meant to spend it this way. Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.”
Office Space
“We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves.”
Christopher Lasch
“It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.”
Julius Caesar
“When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: you haven’t.”
Thomas Edison
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
Viktor Frankl
“Life doesn’t happen to you, it happens for you…You could spend your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about the pathway to the future, but all there will ever be is what’s happening here in the decisions we make in this moment which are based in either love or fear. So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect so we never dared ask the universe for it.”
Jim Carrey
“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
George Bernard Shaw
“If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”
Vincent van Gogh
“The same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg. It’s about what you’re made of, not the circumstances.”
Unknown
“I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.”
Stephen Covey
“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”
Milton Berle
“Your situation isn’t unique. Your problems aren’t so different that no one understands. That’s just your ego talking. You’re not special. Someone’s had it just as bad and made it. Someone’s had it even worse and flourished.”
Unknown
“If you evade the suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”
Margaret Atwood
“One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from a horse master. He told me to go slow to go fast. I think that applies to everything in life. We live as though there aren’t enough hours in the day but if we do each thing calmly and carefully we will get it done quicker and with much less stress.”
Viggo Mortensen
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
Helen Keller
“The purpose of life is finding the largest burden that you can bear and bearing it.”
Jordan Peterson
“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”
Jessica Hische
“Enough romanticism about ‘creativity’: it’s about work, confidence, endurance, courage and appetite for suffering.”
Alain de Botton
“We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers – but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted to change you’re the one who has got to change.”
Katharine Hepburn
“What’s in it for me?” Our culture teaches us that if we want something in life, we have to “look out for number one.” It says, “Life is a game, a race, a competition, and you better win it.” Schoolmates, work colleagues, even family members are seen as competitors—the more they win, the less there is for you. Of course we try to appear generous and cheer for others’ successes, but inwardly, privately, so many of us are eating our hearts out when others achieve. Many of the great things in the history of our civilization have been achieved by the independent will of a determined soul. But the greatest opportunities and boundless accomplishments of the Knowledge Worker Age are reserved for those who master the art of ‘we.’ True greatness will be achieved through the abundant mind that works selflessly—with mutual respect, for mutual benefit.”
Stephen Covey
“People who have lost their dreams are the ones who will try to talk you out of yours.”
Darren Hardy
“Destiny is a feeling you have that you know something about yourself nobody else does. The picture you have in your own mind of what you’re about will come true. It’s a kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it’s a fragile feeling, and you put it out there, then someone will kill it. It’s best to keep that all inside.”
Bob Dylan
“I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen but as the years wasted on nothing ever did unless I caused it.”
Charles Bukowski
“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
George Bernard Shaw
“Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
Winston Churchill
“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”
Henry Ford
“We are our choices.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“The fight is won or lost far away from the witnesses, behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road; long before I dance under those lights.”
Muhammad Ali
“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.”
George Bernard Shaw
“Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.”
Jeff Bezos
“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.”
Carl Jung
“The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained in sudden flight but, they while their companions slept, they were toiling upwards in the night.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“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
“From the greatest to the smallest, happiness and usefulness are largely found in the same soul, and the joy of life is won in its deepest and truest sense only by those who have not shirked life’s burdens.”
Theodore Roosevelt
“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
“At the end of the day we are all founders, we are all meant to work for ourselves. We are meant to be individuals. We are not meant to follow. We are not meant to be in hierarchies. We are not meant to go to 9-5 jobs where we are told what to do over and over. And the sooner we get off the grid and self-actualize and become free, the better off all of humanity is.”
Naval Ravikant
“Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.”
Jean Sibelius
“If you want to look good in front of thousands then you have to outwork thousands in front of nobody.”
Damian Lillard
“Great people do things before they’re ready. They do things before they know they can do it. Doing what you’re afraid of, getting out of your comfort zone, taking risks like that- that’s what life is. You might be really good. You might find out something about yourself that’s really special and if you’re not good, who cares? You tried something. Now you know something about yourself.”
Amy Poehler
“Vitality shows not only in the ability to persist, but in the ability to start over.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.”
Jim Rohn
“The cure for pain is in the pain.”
Rumi
“Virtually every freedom you have is at the price of discipline.”
Jordan Peterson
“Rarely are opportunities presented to you in a perfect way. In a nice little box with a yellow bow on top. ‘Here, open it, it’s perfect. You’ll love it.’ Opportunities—the good ones—are messy, confusing and hard to recognize. They’re risky. They challenge you.”
Susan Wojcicki
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
Chinese Proverb
“Remember how long you’ve been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them. At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned to you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.”
Marcus Aurelius
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”
Marcus Aurelius
“You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks.”
Winston Churchill
“I have self-doubt. I have insecurity. I have fear of failure. I have nights when I show up at the arena and I’m like, ‘My back hurts, my feet hurt, my knees hurt. I don’t have it. I just want to chill.’ We all have self-doubt. You don’t deny it, but you also don’t capitulate to it. You embrace it.”
Kobe Bryant
“Mentors won’t make you rich. Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.”
Naval Ravikant
“Within every adversity is an equal or greater benefit. Within every problem is an opportunity. Even in the knocks of life, we can find great gifts.”
Napoleon Hill
“Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.”
Thomas Friedman
“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightening to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.”
Chuck Close
“The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.”
Steven Pressfield
“You owe it to all of us to get on with what you’re good at.”
W.H. Auden
“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
George Bernard Shaw
“I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference.”
Ellen Goodman
“Most people fail in life not because they aim too high and miss, but because they aim too low and hit.”
Les Brown
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