Most of us seek inspiration from a lot of things and the most common is famous quotes or sayings. They work like magic at times, at least for me. These quotes at times relate to current situations or turbulences going on in our life and work like a helping hand to pull us out of the dilemma. Here is my collection of quotes that have inspired or motivated me at some point in life and still continue to do so.
Inspirational…
- “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” – Pablo Picasso
- “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” – Thomas Alva Edison
- “Man’s mind stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
- “Without faith, nothing is possible. With it, nothing is impossible.” – Mary McLeod Bethune
- “When you know what you want, and you want it bad enough, you will find a way to get it.” – Jim Rohn
- “A man is but the product of his thoughts what he thinks, he becomes.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- “When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream.” – Paulo Coelho
- “Everything you need comes to you in perfect time, space and sequence.” – Louise Hay
- “Never give up on a dream just because of the length of time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” – H. Jackson Brown
- “If you do what you do well enough, long enough, consistently enough and fast enough, you will win the race.” – Peter Padilla
- “Genius is knowing to stay silent as others demonstrate their ignorance.” – Eric Lau
- “Stay true to yourself. Never be ashamed of doing what feels right. Decide what you think is right and stick to it.” – Unknown
- “Nothing is stronger than habit.” – Ovid
- “The key to success is for you to make a habit throughout your life of doing the things you fear.” – Vincent Van Gogh
- “A few years ago, I felt like I was stuck in a rut, so I decided to follow in the footsteps of the great American philosopher, Morgan Spurlock, and try something new for 30 days. The idea is actually pretty simple. Think about something you’ve always wanted to add to your life and try it for the next 30 days. It turns out, 30 days is just about the time to add a new habit or subtract a habit – like watching the news — from your life.” – Matt Cutts
- “Even if it’s a bit edgy, a bit out of your comfort zone, saying yes means that you will do something new, meet someone new and make a difference in your – and likely in others’ lives as well. Yes is what keeps us all young. It’s a tiny word that can do big things. Say it often.” – Eric Schmidt
Self…
- “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford
- “Confidence is the willingness to be as ridiculous, luminous, intelligent, and kind as you really are, without embarrassment.” – Susan Piver
- “You are wonderful. Valuable. Worthwhile. Lovable. Not because others think so. Self worth comes from only one place: self.” – Karen Salmansohn
- “You are who you are when nobody’s watching.” – Stephen Fry
- “In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different.” – Coco Chanel
- “Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- ”You are only destined to become one person – the person you decide to be.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “You must either modify your dreams or magnify your skills.” – Jim Rohn
- “Once you’ve accepted your flaws, no one can use them against you.” – George R. R. Martin
- “Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” – Jim Rohn
- “If you can’t convince them, confuse them.” – Harry S. Truman
- “You don’t need to be a rocket scientist. Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ.” – Warren Buffett
- “Never memorize what you can look up in a book.” – Albert Einstein
- “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” – Albert Einstein
- “If there is something to gain and nothing to lose by asking, by all means ask.” – W. Clement Stone
- “Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” – Dr. Seuss
- “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.” – Napoleon Hill
- “No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.” – Aristotle
- “The strongest single factor in acquiring abundance is self-esteem: believing you can do it, believing you deserve it, believing you will get it.” – Jerry Gillies
- “To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
- “You don’t need to know all the answers. No one is smart enough to ask you all the questions.” – Unknown
- “College has given me the confidence I need to fail.” – Jarod Kintz
- “One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he’s socially inept – because everybody’s been there – but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.” – Neal Stephenson
- “Quiet people have the loudest minds.” – Stephen Hawking
- “Let your originality – your specialness, your brand personality – come through in your online content.” – Ann Handley
- “Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection. It means never having to play it cool about how much you like something. It’s basically a license to proudly emote on a somewhat childish level rather than behave like a supposed adult. Being a geek is extremely liberating.” – Simon Pegg
- “You’re not going to get a damned thing done until you actually know what you want to get out of it. Understand exactly what you want. Understand exactly where you are. Notice the difference.” – Sonia Simone
- “The first step to getting what you want is to have the courage to get rid of what you don’t.” – Zig Ziglar
Success…
- “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Alva Edison
- “If you’re struggling that means you’re progressing.” – Mario Tomasello
- “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” – Albert Einstein
- “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
- “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” – Bill Cosby
- “The ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” – Steve Jobs
- “If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.” – Napoleon Hill
- “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” – Mike Adenuga
- “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” – Henry Ford
- “Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with big dreams is more powerful than one with all the facts.” – H. Jackson Brown Jr.
- “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
- “I never did anything by accident, nor did any of my inventions come by accident; they came by work.” – Thomas A. Edison
- “Patience is the art of hoping.” – Marquis de Vauvenargues
- “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 Schweitzer
- “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.” – Maya Angelou
- “Success is doing what you want, where you want, when you want, with whom you want and as much as you want.” – Tony Robbins
- “The single most powerful asset we have is our mind. if trained well, it can create enormous success”. – Unknown
- “When people undermine your dreams, predict your doom or criticize you, remember they’re telling you their story, not yours.” – Cynthia Occelli
- “The unhappiest people in this world, are those who care the most about what other people think.” – C. JoyBell
- “Sometimes our greatest insight comes from our failure, not from our accomplishments.” – Unkonwn
- “It’s okay to fail ’cause there’s no failure, you’re just informing the richness of your experience, and that’s – that’s the greatest gift you can possibly give yourself.” – Ben Foster
- “My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University education that I never had — everyday I’m learning something new.” – Richard Branson
- “The number one way to succeed is to make it easy for the other person to do what you want.” – James Clear
Perfection…
- “Done is better than perfect.” – Sheryl Sandberg
- “The best things we know and love started as tiny things.” – Joel Gascoigne
- “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle
- “Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives – choice, not chance, determines your destiny.” – Aristotle
- “When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.” – Steve Jobs
- “The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.” – Shana Alexander
- “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance.” – Coco Chanel
- “In whatever you do, strive to be the best at it.” – Aliko Dangote
- “One has to set high standards… I can never be happy with mediocre performance.” – Patrice Motsepe
- “Magic is easy if you put your heart into it.” – Michael Jackson
- “I’m really very self-confident when it comes to my work. When I take on a project, I believe in it 100%. I really put my soul into it. I’d die for it. That’s how I am.” – Michael Jackson
- “If writing seems hard, it’s because it is hard. It’s one of the hardest things people do.” – William Zinsser
Innovation…
- “There’s a way to do it better – find it.” – Thomas Edison
- “Innovation is the creation of the new or the re-arranging of the old in a new way.” – Michael Vance
- “Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research.” – Wilson Mizner
- “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.” – Albert Einstein
- “But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.” – Steve Jobs
- “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.” – Steve Jobs
Entrepreneurship…
- “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t so you can spend the rest of your life like most people cant.” – Unknown
- “If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.” – Steve Jobs
- “One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you.” – Jeff Bezos
- “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.” – Steve Jobs
- “Focusing on one thing without interruption is how you get meaningful work done.” – Nate Green
- “If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still get results? I think you would.” – James Clear
- “You will be amazed what you can accomplish when you have no choice.” – Beth Heinz
- “Think big, think fast, think ahead. Ideas are no one’s monopoly.” – Dhirubhai Ambani
- “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” – Warren Buffett
Startups…
- “Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.” – Warren Buffett
- “The consumer is not a moron. She is your wife.” – David Ogilvy
- “I’m here to build something for the long-term. Anything else is a distraction.” – Mark Zuckerberg
- “Don’t even try to build startups. That’s premature optimization. Just build things that seem interesting.” – Paul Graham
- “If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.” – Bill Gates
- “You can’t ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” – Steve Jobs
- “I start where the last man left off.” – Thomas Edison
Life…
- “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” – Steve Jobs
- “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.” – Steve Jobs
- “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. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs
- “That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – Steve Jobs
- “Make your life a masterpiece; imagine no limitations on what you can be, have or do.” – Brian Tracy
- “Most everything that you want is just outside your comfort zone.” – Jack Canfield
- “Life is not fair – get used to it.” – Bill Gates
- “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
- “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
- “Do not save what is left after spending, but spend what is left after saving.” – Warren Buffett
- “Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.” – Mark Twain
- “He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.” – Mark Twain
- “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
- “The harder you fall, the higher you bounce.” – Doug Horton
- “Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.” – General George S. Patton
- “Only mediocrity escapes criticism.” – John Steinbeck
- “There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” – Aristotle
- “Please don’t lie to me, unless you’re absolutely sure I’ll never find out the truth.” – Ashleigh Brilliant
- “Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for a while, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever the same.” – Flavia Weedn
- “When somebody challenges you, fight back. Be brutal, be tough.” – Donald Trump
- “Just because it’s in print doesn’t mean it’s the gospel.” – Michael Jackson
- “In the faces of men and women, I see God.” – Walt Whitman
- “Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.” – Rick Warren
- “Compassion has nothing to do with being nice and everything to do with doing the right thing for ourselves and others.” – Unknown
- “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” – Alan Kay
- “The true test of character is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don’t know what to do.” – John Holt
- “Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.” – Bertrand Russell
- “We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.” – Sam Keen
- “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” – Dr. Seuss
- “When your mind is weak, the situation is a problem. When your mind is balanced, the situation is a challenge. When your mind is strong, the situation is becomes an opportunity.” – Unknown
- “There comes a time in life where we must make a choice, and that choice can define the rest of our lives. We can either live our lives the way they are and let dreams be dreams, or we can take a bold step and try to make our dreams come true. You need to make this choice, and you need to make it sooner rather than later.” – Tom Ewer
Stay Inspired!
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