I love inspirational quotes. I tend to go back to them time and time again to help me remember a good day, a good thought, or to motivate me. I’m addicted to Pinterest and have a board with pinned good ones but listed below are a few of my favorites.
Avoid social interaction: always carry a book.
We are readers. Books are an essential part of our lives and of our stories. For us, reading isn’t a hobby or a pastime; it’s a lifestyle.
-I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life
If you are 22, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.
-Anthony Bourdain
Travel is not the reward for working, it’s education for living.
-Anthony Bourdain
Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks – on your body or on your heart – are beautiful. Often though, they hurt.
-Anthony Bourdain
Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.
-Anthony Bourdain
Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.
-Anthony Bourdain
There are two kinds of people in this world — those perfectly content to spend their lives exactly where they grew up and those who know they must leave, who feel in their bones the need to know what lies beyond the home place.
–Unknown
“Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people — people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.”
–E.B. White
“There’s a world of difference between insisting on someone’s doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it.”
-Fred Rogers
Good judgment comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgment.
-Arthur in The Mechanic movie
I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.
-Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges
Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.
-Ruth Bader Ginsberg
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
-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.
-Steve Jobs
I should let you know that just because I’m quiet doesn’t mean I’m grumpy.
Relationships are like glass. Sometimes it’s better to leave them broken than hurt yourself trying to put it back together.
When something bad happens you have three choices. You can let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.
You can travel inside a book!
O bother!
-Pooh
Watch the Andy Griffith show to put things in perspective.
I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.
-Stephen Covey
A smart husband knows that wooing should never stop.
Santa Claus has good years and bad years.
I can forget my very existence in a deep kiss of you.
-Byron Caldwell Smith
You shouldn’t put a marshmallow in the microwave.
A woman can stand anything except being forgotten or not being needed.
When I eat fish sticks they help me swim better.
Coca-Cola tastes better in the bottle.
I cannot live without books.
-Thomas Jefferson to John Adams 1815
You should never ask a 3-year-old to hold a tomato.
Of course, I don’t look busy. I did it right the first time.
I need to put up with two or three caterpillars if I want to get to know the butterflies.
-The Little Prince
At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.
-Alberto Manguel
Travel is fatal to bigotry, prejudice, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
-Mark Twain
I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.
-St. Augustine
The one who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The one who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been. -Albert Einstein
If you want it badly enough and are willing to make some changes in your life to cause it to happen, you too can take over the world or do anything else you really want to do. Yes, you really can have it all. The only things you’ll need to give up are assumptions, expectations, and the comfort zone that holds you back from greatness.
-Chris Guillebeau
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
I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is ending up with people who make you feel all alone.
-Bobcat Goldthwaite
Only an Aunt can give hugs like a mother, keep secrets like a sister, and share love like a friend.
-Spanish Proverb
She belongs among the wildflowers, she belongs somewhere she feels free.
-The Time Traveler’s Wife
A little library, growing larger every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of life.
-Henry Ward Beecher
The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.
-Thomas Jefferson
What’s the point of wearing your favorite rocketship underpants if nobody ever asks to see ’em?
-Calvin to Hobbes
If you haven’t got anything good to say about anybody, come sit next to me.
-Alice Roosevelt
With enough courage, you can do without a reputation.
-Rhett Butler
It has often been observed, that those who have the most time at their disposal profit by it the least. A single hour a day, steadily given to the study of some interesting subject, brings unexpected accumulations of knowledge.
-William Ellery Channing, 1780-1842, author and moralist
I’ll tell you the real secret of how to stay married. Keep the cave clean. They want the cave clean and spotless. Air-conditioned, if possible. Sharpen his spear, and stick it in his hand when he goes out in the morning to spear that bear; and when the bear chases him, console him when he comes home at night, and tell him what a big man he is, and then hide the spear so he doesn’t fall over it and stab himself.
-Jerome Joseph Chodorov Fields
Some women have a weakness for shoes…I can go barefoot if necessary. I have a weakness for books.
-Oprah Winfrey
I know this now. Every man gives his life for what he believes. Every woman gives her life for what she believes. Sometimes people believe in little or nothing yet they give their lives to that little or nothing. One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. And then it is gone. But to sacrifice what you are and live without belief, that’s more terrible than dying.
-Joan of Arc, 1412-1431, 15th-century saint and French heroine
Boy, I’ve got vision and the rest of the world is wearing bifocals.
– Butch Cassidy
The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.
-Benjamin Franklin
If I run out of books then I have run out of living.
Something you have been blessed with lots of ability to do well but cursed with no appetite for it. What do you call that? Something you are brilliant at that leaves you cold. You call that a weakness. A weakness is any activity that leaves you feeling weaker after you do it. It doesn’t matter how good you are at it or how much money you make doing it, if it drains you of energy, you’d be crazy to build your career around it. A strength is an opposite. A strength – your strengths- are any activities that make you feel strong. To discover your strengths, you must look beyond “what you’re good at” and pay really close attention to what you are feeling before, during, and after an activity. Your feelings will tell you what your strengths are.
-Marcus Buckingham
I don’t like being responsible for other people’s work. I know I am supposed to want to be a manager and get promoted, but I just don’t like being responsible for what other people do. All that really gives me a kick is being responsible for my own work.
-Marcus Buckingham
“Always treat people as you would like to be treated.” This is commonly called the Golden Rule. Break it every day. It is based on the principle that other people like to be treated the way you would like to be treated. They don’t. They want to be treated the way they like to be treated. And the way they want to be treated is not necessarily the way you do.
-Marcus Buckingham
It’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.
-Judy Blume
Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost.
-Alfred Whitney Griswold
Yes, books are dangerous. They should be dangerous — they contain ideas.
-Pete Hautman
If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.
-Benjamin Franklin
If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas…it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas.
-Graceanne A. Decandidio
Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.
-Steven Chbosky
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
-Joseph Brodsky
Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.
-Lyndon Baines Johnson
The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man’s frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.
-Max Lerner
Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.
-Mark Twain
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
-Oscar Wilde
An ambassador is a person who having failed to secure an office from the people is given an office by the Administration on condition that he leave the country.
-Ambrose Bierce
Quiet people have the loudest minds.
– Stephen Hawking
What if you love knowledge for its own sake, not necessarily as a blueprint to action? What if you wish there were more, not fewer reflective types in the world?
A good rule of thumb is that any environment that consistently leaves you feeling bad about who you are is the wrong environment.
– Laurie Helgoe
I don’t believe anything really revolutionary has ever been invented by committee. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone. Not on a committee. Not on a team.
– Steve Wozniak
Whatever kind of introvert you are, some people will find you ‘too much’ in some ways and ‘not enough’ in others.
– Laurie Helgoe
I don’t want to be alone. I want to be left alone.
– Audrey Hepburn
I’m not sure what I’ll do but – well, I want to go places and see people, I want my mind to grow, I want to live where things happen on a big scale.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
She was beautiful, but not like those girls in the magazines. She was beautiful for the way she thought. She was beautiful for the sparkle in her eyes when she talked about something she loved. She was beautiful for her ability to make other people smile, even if she was sad. No, she wasn’t beautiful for something as temporary as her looks. She was beautiful, deep down to her soul.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
For what it’s worth, it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be who you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same. There are no rules to this thing. We can make the best of it or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
There are all types of love in this world, but never the same love twice.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
He looked at her the way all women want to be looked at.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
I wish I had done everything on earth with you.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
I knew the moment I kissed her my heart would be married to her.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one that makes you think.
-Harper Lee
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.
– Charlotte Brontë
For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.
-Anne Lamott
