Best Quotes of All Time

Ambition

Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.

-Will Rogers

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.

-Zig Ziglar

Ambition is not what a man would do, but what a man does, for ambition without action is fantasy.
-Bryant H. McGill

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.
-Mark Twain

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you will land amongst the stars.
Les Brown

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
Robert F. Kennedy

Beauty

A soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.
-Johann von Goethe

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.
-Helen Keller

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting — a wayside sacrament.   Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not beauty that endears, it’s love that makes us see beauty.
-Tolstoy

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
-Kahlil Gibran

Change

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

-Gandhi

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.

-Basho

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.

-Marcel Proust

I can be changed by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it.
– Maya Angelou

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.
– Benjamin Franklin

Children

Always kiss your children goodnight – even if they’re already asleep.
-H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Each day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children.
-Charles R. Swindoll

If you want children to keep their feet on the ground, put some responsibility on their shoulders.
-Abigail Van Buren

Love is the chain whereby to bind a child to its parents.
-Abraham Lincoln

Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven.
– Henry Ward Beecher

Courage

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.

-Ambrose Redmoon

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
Albert Einstein

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
-Winston Churchill

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
-Mark Twain

Courage is a kind of salvation.
-Plato

Family

Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories.

-John Wilmot

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
-George Burns

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
-John Bowring

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.
-Alex Haley

Fear

Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time, to figure out whether you like it or not.

-Virgil Garnett Thomson

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave.”

-Mark Twain

Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it.
-Bill Cosby

Thinking will not overcome fear but action will.

-W. Clement Stone

Friendship

The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

We take care of our health, we lay up money, we make our roof tight and our clothing sufficient, but who provides wisely that he shall not be wanting in the best property of all–friends?
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship.
-Francis Bacon

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
-George Eliot

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
– Mohandas K. Gandhi

Happiness

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
– E E. Cummings

The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes to do, but in liking what one has to do.
– James Barrie

The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise.  It is not that we seize them, but they seize us.
– Ashley Montagu

Enjoy your life without comparing it to others.
– Condobcet

Home

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs, and returns home to find it.
-George Moore

The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
-Maya Angelou

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
-Benjamin Franklin

He is the happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A hundred men may make an encampment, but it takes a woman to make a home.
-Chinese Proverb

Humor

What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.

-Oscar Levant

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.

-Oscar Wilde

When you go into court you are putting your fate into the hands of twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.

-Norm Crosby

Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand.

-Kurt Vonnegut

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I’m beginning to believe it.

-Clarence Darrow

There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.

-Cyril Connolly

I am patient with stupidity but not with those who are proud of it.

-Edith Sitwell

Life

Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

-Lao-Tze

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.

-John Ruskin

The person who reads too much and uses his brain too little will fall into lazy habits of thinking.

-Albert Einstein

God loved the birds and invented trees. Man loved the birds and invented cages.
-Jacques Deval

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.
-Voltaire

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
-Harold Whitman

Love

We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.
– Sam Keen, from To Love and Be Loved

We cannot do great things on this Earth, only small things with great love.
– Mother Teresa

Love is the only freedom in the world because it so elevates the spirit that the laws of humanity and the phenomena of nature do not alter its course. ~
-Kahlil Gibran

Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.
-Helen Keller

For every beauty there is an eye somewhere to see it. For every truth there is an ear somewhere to hear it. For every love there is a heart somewhere to receive it.
-Ivan Panin

Love has the power of making you believe what you would normally treat with the deepest suspicion.
-Mirabeau

Peace

A smile is the beginning of peace.
– Mother Teresa

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends.  You talk to your enemies.
–Moshe Dayan

If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.
– Mohandas Gandhi

Success

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.

-Wayne Gretzky

It is better to fail in a cause that will ultimately succeed than to succeed in a cause that will ultimately fail.
-Peter Marshall

The most important single ingredient in the formula for success is knowing how to get along with people.
-Theodore Roosevelt

We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

-Aristotle

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
-Oscar Wilde

In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity.
-Albert Einstein

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
-Winston Churchill

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
-Thomas Jefferson

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Truth

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
– Adlai Stevenson

A lie has speed, but truth has endurance.
-Edgar J. Mohn

Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to tell it.
-Emily Dickinson

The truth is more important than the facts.
– Frank Lloyd Wright

Wisdom

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

—A. A. Milne

A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.

—Baltasar Gracian

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

—Aristotle

“The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.”
-Mark Twain

Other

To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.

—Abraham Maslow

Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t.

—Erica Jong

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
-Albert Einstein

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.
-Abraham Lincoln

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