Motivational Quotes That Will Inspire You
Motivational quotes that will inspire you to achieve your goals and be your best self.
On this page, I have gathered some of my favorite motivational quotes and inspirational quotes. You can read them whenever you need a boost of energy, to refocus your attention, or to shift your perspective.
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“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice."
― Steve Jobs
“Life isn't worth living, unless it is lived for someone else.”
― Albert Einstein
“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.”
— Octavia Butler
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
― Leo Tolstoy
“It is a brave thing to have courage to be an individual; it is also, perhaps, a lonely thing. But it is better than not being an individual, which is to be nobody at all.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt
“You may live in the world as it is, but you can still work to create the world as it should be.”
― Michelle Obama
“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.”
― Benjamin Franklin
“A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe. Happiness is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person.”
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
— Kurt Vonnegut
“Work is love made visible.”
— Kahlil Gibran
“I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.”
— Maya Angelou
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The hard truth seems to be this: We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. We would prefer it to be otherwise, of course, but there is no compelling evidence for a cosmic Parent who will care for us and save us from ourselves. It is up to us.”
― Carl Sagan
“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Marukami
“I hear you say 'Why?' Always 'Why?' You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”
— George Bernard Shaw
“Ask yourself, “Who can I make smile this morning?” This is the art of creating happiness.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh
"What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
― George Eliot
“The greatest use of a life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.”
— William James
“Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.”
― Shirley Chisholm
"The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
— Howard Zinn
“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day's work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.”
— John Steinbeck
“A person doesn't have to change who he is to become better.”
— Sidney Poitier
“Your hopes, dreams and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take you airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.”
— William James
"However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at."
— Stephen Hawking
“You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?”
— Rumi
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”
— Alice Walker
“If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or,"I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . ." Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.”
— Ray Bradbury
“I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.”
— Galileo Galilei
“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”
— Helen Keller
“Difficulties are just things to overcome.”
— Ernest Shackleton
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How To Become A Wiser Person
It is possible to become a wiser person. In this article, learn the simple and essential habits that will help you to learn wisdom.
In the 1500s, one man sat down and invented a word we all take for granted: essays. In his native French, sitting in his family’s chateau, Michel de Montaigne put his pen to paper and created the first modern essay: a piece of writing that blended philosophy, stories, and the writer’s own perspective. Shocking and new at the time, it has become one of the bedrocks of writing in our modern world.
In his essays, Montaigne proposed the then-radical idea that the world was far too concerned with consuming other people’s knowledge, which he argued stifled original thought. Consuming knowledge also made us feel, quite mistakenly, that we were the wiser for having consumed it. He wrote, “It may not be difficult to store up in the mind a vast quantity of facts within a comparatively short time, but the ability to form judgments requires the severe discipline of hard work and the tempering heat of experience and maturity.” Wisdom was anything that would “help a man live happily and morally, and that we should gauge any knowledge by “its usefulness and appropriateness to our life.”
In the half-century since Montaigne lived, the production of "knowledge" has exploded, making the development of wisdom even harder to fulfill. Today, Americans spend an average of 11 hours a day consuming media — and while there are no statistics on it, I’d venture to guess that most of us spend seconds or minutes developing wisdom. We do trick ourselves into thinking our hours consuming other people’s thoughts make us wiser — but as Montaigne would remind us, that’s just knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
Developing wisdom is more important than ever right now, because it gives us a superpower: it helps us to navigate hard times and turn them into moments of growth, personal development, and benefit.
What if we chose to take this time of the pandemic, and use it to create the habit of cultivating wisdom in our daily lives? Strangely, it might be the perfect moment for it. By far, the strongest predictor of wisdom (accounting for more than 25% of the variance) is how we respond to life experiences. Wise people take whatever life hands them, and then they do something different than the rest of us: they use that life situation to help them develop wisdom. They consciously choose to make lemonade out of lemons. Wise people are able to take stressful, negative, hard situations, and use them to improve their well-being.
Imagine that you knew that any hard situation you faced could be transformed to ultimately benefit you? What a relief it would be! People who are wise are likelier to rate their lives as more meaningful. They are less affected by challenging external circumstances. And they are more compassionate.
While the research has multiple definitions for wisdom, my favorite breaks it into three parts, which support, build upon, and amplify one another:
Cognitive: developing a deep understanding of life and human nature, including the positive/negative parts of humanity and the unpredictability of life, and knowing how limited that knowledge is
Reflective: examining oneself and choosing to see things from different perspectives
Affective: accepting and empathizing with others, seeking out the positives, as well as developing a motivation towards helping others
The Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, “No man was ever wise by chance.” Unfortunately for all of us voracious knowledge-consumers, the research backs him up. Wisdom is something that has to be actively and consciously developed. But no one puts ‘become wiser’ on their to-do-list. Instead, we drown ourselves in other people's minds and lives. It's time to claim our birthright of finding our own inner treasures, heeding Montaigne's advice that "we are richer than we think, each one of us.”
Wisdom can be cultivated, one small step at a time. Here are some of my favorite research-backed practices for developing wisdom.
Cognitive Wisdom Habits
Accept the limitations of your knowledge. It is possible to not have an opinion. It is possible to not share your opinion. Add phrases like, "I don't know" or "I was wrong" or "I want to learn more before I comment" to your vocabulary. Remind yourself that you can change your views when you learn new information.
Seek out knowledge, and after consuming it, set aside a few minutes to reflect upon and integrate it. Rather than just jumping to the next article, book, podcast, or video, pause. What do you think about what you just learned? How does it challenge your existing mental models? Keep an ongoing document of your reflections, adding to it throughout the day.
Seek out different perspectives. Consciously and deliberately look outside of your personal bubble. Choose to read and engage with diverse voices, across every spectrum. Diversify your social media feed. Hunt for voices that are quieter. When you're investigating a topic, seek out information that disconfirms your point of view. Read multiple works on the same idea that approach it from different perspectives.
Do something different. When we get stuck in our standard routines and practices, we limit our chance to encounter new situations. Take a daring risk. Do something completely out of the ordinary. Respond differently to a situation than you normally would.
While consuming information, allocate a small part of your brain to analyzing the context of the work. When was it created? What are the author's biases, interests, and goals? How is that influencing you, in ways seen and unseen? This context will help you sift more effectively and with judgment through the content.
Reflective Wisdom Habits
Make a practice of taking a minute to check in with yourself for a minute after meetings, conversations, and projects. What did you learn? What did you struggle with? What created tension inside of you? How did you show up in alignment with your goals? Jotting these down will help you to ensure you're not letting important reflections pass you by.
Frequently ask for feedback to better understand your strengths and your flaws. The more self-aware you are, the more likely you are to be wise (ego-centric people are very low in wisdom!) My favorite way of asking for feedback, which ensures that you always get a piece of helpful data, is to say "What is one thing I could have done better in that situation?"
Journal. Writing for a few minutes each day will help you to notice patterns within yourself (to stimuli, people, challenges, and information) that you can then consciously address.
Meditate. Developing a meditation practice strengthens your 'attention muscle', which is what is used to label and investigate your thoughts and emotions. Meditation is essentially weight-lifting for wisdom!
Evaluate information based on your own values. As you engage with content, ask if it holds true for you and your experience, and how it aligns (or not) with your mental model, the person you want to be, and the world you want to live in.
When someone does something that upsets, confuses, or angers you, pause and ask yourself, "What am I not seeing or considering?" Our brains have a bias to judge others by their actions, and ourselves by our intents. Consciously looking for other information will help to form a more balanced picture.
Affective Wisdom Habits
Whenever you greet someone, mentally say to yourself, "This is a person like me who wants to be happy." This is one of the most powerful practices in my own life, and it engenders such deep love and empathy. From this place, you can accept people more readily and therefore, love them easily.
When someone is suffering, don't immediately try to fix it. Wisdom is knowing that what heals pain is presence and attention. While it can be uncomfortable, try instead to sit with them in their pain, and to help them to understand it more by asking questions. From this place of connection and empathy, you can help them in a wise way.
Every day, ask yourself how you can make someone else's life better. Consciously considering what you can do will help inspire greater motivation to help others. Doing it will in turn help you to learn and grow.
Practice looking for the positive. We all have a negativity bias which we need to consciously address. Choose to find things that are beautiful, loving, and true in your life, and endeavor to help others see them, too.
Why bother cultivating wisdom? In Montaigne’s view, wisdom leads to happiness. He wrote, “The most manifest sign of wisdom is a constant happiness; its state is like that of things above the moon: always serene.”
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A Secret That All Successful People Know
Truly successful people don’t spend their time focusing on other people's decisions. They spend their time focused on their own.
Over the last ten years, we have built a number of tools, now known as 'social media,' that make it very, very easy to focus on what other people are doing.
A mere click away, there's an endless scroll where you can look at the choices that other people are making. Not just the choices of the people that you know, either — but the choices of the people who you look up to, or who you envy, or who wish you knew. You see their breakfasts and outfits and career milestones and break-ups and journal entries and vacations and music recommendations.
It's not necessarily our observation that's the problem. It's the response that it creates within us.
That response is an instinct, the result of thousands of years of evolution that have taught us to constantly evaluate one another and our place in the world.
We feel inadequate: "Why is their life so much better than mine?"
We feel judgmental: "That's the completely wrong thing to do."
We feel alone: "Everyone else has it all figured out. Why don't I?"
Truly successful people don’t spend their time focusing on other people's decisions. They spend their time focused on their own.
The next time you feel tempted to devote your attention to other people’s choices, say these words to yourself:
"Those aren't my choices. That's not my business. I don't need to focus my limited energy there.
My energy belongs here, with my choices, with what is within my control.
Now, let's focus: what matters to me right now?"
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The Easiest Way To Make Your Life Better
When we think about changing our lives, we often imagine big goals and long-term changes. But, as it turns out, you can change your life in ten seconds with this science-backed strategy.
When we think about changing our lives, we often imagine big goals and long-term changes. But, as it turns out, you can change your life in ten seconds with this science-backed strategy.
“There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
These are legendary lines for a reason - this quote from Hamlet captures so much of the human experience, and one of the most frustrating paradoxes of our nature: so much of the quality of our life lies in the way that we interpret it, and yet we are not naturally inclined to interpret events in a way that serves us.
We get so caught up in life’s passage that we often forget to pause and focus on the many small, beautiful moments that bless us with their existence, in favor of the big hardship, or the next demand, or the hope of perfection.
Savoring is about pausing and appreciating what is, right now, in this moment, even if it is imperfect.
The academic definition of savoring is “the act of mindfully engaging in thoughts and behaviors that heighten the effect of positive events on positive feelings.”
That makes it sound way more complicated than it actually is: savoring is what you do naturally when you inhale the steam off of a cup of tea, when you put your hands close to the fire, when you taste a delicious meal, when you enjoy a glass of water after a hot hike.
Sometimes, when we experience emotions, we lean into them and luxuriate in them, and sometimes, we suppress those emotions if we feel if it is inappropriate. You also might have, like me, another voice in your head that tells you to move on past the moment and get on to the next one, dammit, because life is about being productive!
Research has found that savoring:
Improves the quality of our relationships
Improves our mental health
Improves our physical health
Enhance your gratitude
Facilitate greater mindfulness
Enhance your ability to get into ‘flow’ states
Inspires greater creativity
It also helps to guard us against one of our deep-seated cognitive biases that keep us from happiness: the impact bias. This is our tendency to overestimate the impact that events in the future will have upon our happiness. We believe that it is the big life events — the wedding, the new job, the new house — that will make us happy, but it is actually the small moments that have the greatest impact on our well-being.
How to Savor
There are so many different ways to savor, but here’s the quick and dirty instructions: take ten seconds and lean into your positive emotions, as though you’re bringing the picture of your life into focus. Go deep, hang onto your thoughts, and bring a deliberate quality to your thinking, drawing the positive into view. You can savor anything: the present moment, but also the future and the past.
There are four types of savoring:
Basking: being receptive to praise and congratulations
Thanksgiving: expressing gratitude
Marveling: losing yourself in the wonder of the experience
Luxuriating: engaging your senses fully
The secret to increasing your happiness is to just pause and use one of these strategies, for about 5-10 seconds, as often as you can.
Try these savoring strategies.
Savoring Strategy #1: Share with others
Seek out other people to share your experience, reminisce about a shared memory, or to collectively anticipate something in the future.
Savoring Strategy #2: Memory building
Take a moment to actively store images in your brain so that they will be fresh in the future, an activity which was delightfully called 'taking mental pictures' by the television show The Office.
Savoring Strategy #3: Self-congratulation
If you achieve something meaningful or positive, take the time to bask in your accomplishments. Tell yourself how proud you are of yourself! Each week, you can also take a moment to write down your biggest accomplishments of the week.
Savoring Strategy #4: Sensory-perceptual sharpening
Focus your senses on the specific stimuli that you want to savor, which will help you to narrow your focus. If you have ever been so immersed in a sunset so beautiful that all sound receded, all thoughts quieted, and sense of self faded away, you have experienced this type of savoring.
Savoring Strategy #5: Temporal awareness
Sometimes savoring can be bittersweet, of the bittersweetness of a beautiful moment that will inevitably pass away quickly. Reminding yourself of this truth can help you to remember to focus on where you are, right now. One study asked college seniors to bring awareness to the bittersweetness of their last few weeks at college by savoring twice a week; these students reported greater well-being than those who tried to repress the thought of the rapidly-approaching future.
Savoring Strategy #6: Count your blessings
Bring awareness to what you are grateful for in a specific moment. Acknowledge your great good fortune, especially if it is the result of the kindness of others.
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