Uplifting Quotes to Inspire You

By: Beth McHugh 2008

We all need some inspiration from time to time and who better to get us thinking than the great thinkers of the world? Here are some inspirational, thought-provoking and life-enhancing thoughts for those who have given life some thought:

Great things are not done by impulse but by a series of small things brought together.
Vincent van Gogh

Plant the seeds of expectation in your mind; cultivate thoughts that anticipate achievement. Believe in yourself as being capable of overcoming all obstacles and weaknesses.
Norman Vincent Peale

If a man does his best, what else is there?
General George S. Patton

Things do not happen; things are made to happen.
John F. Kennedy

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. The likes of Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart settled down day after day to the job at hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures. They didn’t waste time waiting for inspiration.
E. Newman

Believe you will succeed. Believe it firmly, and then do what is necessary to bring success about.
Dale Carnegie

Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.
Don Herold

To experience happiness, we must train ourselves to live in the moment, to savor it for what it is, not running ahead in anticipation of some future date not lagging behind in the paralysis of the past.
Luci Swindoll

If you don’t have the power to change yourself, then nothing will change around you.
Anwar Sadat

The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste the experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
Eleanor Roosevelt

If we don’t change, we don’t grow. If we don’t grow, we are not really living. Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.
Gail Sheehy

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.
Katharine Hepburn

Learning new things won’t help a person who isn’t using what he already knows.
Anon

Have patience with all things but first with yourself. Never confuse your mistakes wit your value as a human being. You’re a perfectly valuable, creative, worthwhile person simply because you exist. And no amount of triumphs and tribulations can ever change that. Unconditional self-acceptance is the core of a peaceful mind.
St. Francis de Sales

Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly.
Steven Covey

If you find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t lead anywhere.
Frank A. Clark

If you want to move your greatest obstacle, realize that the obstacle is yourself, and that the time to act is now!
Nido Qubein

The golden opportunity you a re seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment; it is not luck or chance, it is in yourself alone.
Orison Swett Marden

Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
Sun Tzu

Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.
Edmund Burke

The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You don’t blame them on your mother, the ecology or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.
Albert Ellis

The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.
Dolly Parton

Good timber does not grow with ease; the stronger the wind, the stronger the tree.
J. Willard Marrion

A happy person is not a person in a set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.
Hugh Downs

Nothing can stop a man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
W.W. Ziege

Change is the law of life, and those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
John F. Kennedy

Be like a postage stamp. Stick to something until you get there.
Josh Billings

Ever since I was a little by, I dreamed I would do something important in aviation.
Neil Armstrong

We act as though comfort and luxury are the chief requirements of life, when all we really need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
Charles Kingsley

Don’t be discouraged by failure. Failure, in a sense, is the highway to success because every discovery of what is false leads us to seek after what is true. And every fresh experience points out an error which we shall, afterwards, carefully avoid.
John Keats

Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.
Henry Ford

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