I adore inspiring words and have always collected quotes and truisms, scribbling them in my diary or emailing them off to friends who were searching for some solace or simply to be uplifted. There’s something about a poignant, well-articulated string of words that really makes sense of the world around us.
Motivating quotes are omnipresent these days and I don’t know about you, but I must admit I glaze over when I see the same old quotes being used repeatedly on posters or blog posts – which is why I’ve been spending time compiling the list below for the past three weeks, adding my favourites slowly but surely as they flew into my radar.
I hope some of these ignite a fire within you and help you look at life with shining eyes and love in your heart. Please feel free to spread this list around (using the social sharing buttons below) and add to it in the comments.
I understand you might not get through reading them all now but it’s my hope you’ll bookmark this post to refer back to next time you need a big kiss from someone who has been there, done that before. Enjoy lovelies! x
On Writing
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” | ERNEST HEMINGWAY
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.” | STEPHEN KING
“Writing practice brings us back to the uniqueness of our own minds and an acceptance of it. We all have wild dreams, fantasies, and ordinary thoughts. Let us to feel the texture of them and not be afraid of them. Writing is still the wildest thing I know.” | NATALIE GOLDBERG
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” | ANTON CHEKHOV
“Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.” | ANNE LAMOTT
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” | ANAIS NIN
On Love + Relationships
“And when you appear all the rivers sound in my body, bells shake the sky, and a hymn fills the world.” | PABLO NERUDA
“The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.” | RUMI
“This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.” | RAINER MARIA RILKE
“Love – not dim and blind but so far-seeing that it can glimpse around corners, around bends and twists and illusion; instead of overlooking faults love sees through them to the secret inside.” | VERA NAZARIAN
“We are not held back by the love we didn’t receive in the past, but by the love we’re not extending in the present.” | MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.” | HENRI J.M. NOUWEN
“Love brings you face to face with your self. It’s impossible to love another if you cannot love yourself.” | JOHN PIERRAKOS
“When I’m being love, I don’t get drained, and I don’t need people to behave a certain way in order to feel cared for or to share my magnificence with them. They’re automatically getting my love as a result of me being my true self.” | ANITA MORJANI
“Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us.” | MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
“There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you – of kindness and consideration and respect – not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.” | JOHN STEINBECK
“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realisation is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.” | RAINER MARIA RILKE
On Life
“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it is over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” | MARY OLIVER
“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
“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.” | RAINER MARIA RILKE
“Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.” | MARK NEPO
”Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something, and has lost something.” | H. JACKSON BROWN JR.
“Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.” | RAINER MARIA RILKE
“The bad news: there is no key to the universe. The good news: it was never locked.” | SWAMI BEYONDANANDA
“Don’t step into lives that aren’t yours, make choices that aren’t nourishing, or dance stiffly for years with the wrong partner, or parts of yourself.” | SARK
“To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go” | MARY OLIVER
On Truth, Beauty + Empowerment
“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.” | ALLEN GINSBERG
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” | MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
“The truth you believe and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.” | PEMA CHODRON
“Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.” | MARK NEPO
“I can’t stop pointing to the beauty.” | RUMI
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” | MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
“All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.” | RAINER MARIA RILKE
“Mysteriously, as elusive as it is, this moment – where the eye is what it sees, where the heart is what it feels – this moment shows us that what is real is sacred.” | MARK NEPO
“A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.” | MAHATMA GANDHI
“Everyone has this giant, luminous being that is their true self… Everyone is a sleeping giant, so to speak, waiting to hear the call, waiting to surrender to it, waiting to act on it. We’ve gotten caught up in thinking we are what we look like, the physical, the exterior. We think we’re the lamp shade. We’ve forgotten that we are the light—the electricity and the luminosity that lights up every man, woman, and child. The light is who we truly are.” | MICHAEL BERNARD BECKWITH
“Nourish your eye and spirit with inspiring things. They will bloom with your tending.” | SARK
“There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I’m going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.” | ELIZABETH GILBERT
On Falling Down… + Getting Up Again
”Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” | HENRY FORD
“Here’s what I think,” I say and my voice is stronger and thoughts are coming, thoughts that trickle into my noise like whispers of truth. “I think maybe everybody falls,” I say. “I think maybe we all do. And I don’t think that’s the asking.” I pull on her arms gently to make sure she’s listening. “I think the asking is whether we get back up again.” | PATRICK NESS
“Emotional discomfort, when accepted, rises, crests and falls in a series of waves. Each wave washes a part of us away and deposits treasures we never imagined. Out goes naivete, in comes wisdom; out goes anger, in comes discernment; out goes despair, in comes kindness. No one would call it easy, but the rhythm of emotional pain that we learn to tolerate is natural, constructive and expansive… The pain leaves you healthier than it found you.” | MARTHA BECK
On Giving + Gratitude
“There shall be an eternal summer in the grateful heart.” | CELIA THAXTER
“The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness.” | DALAI LAMA
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” | MAHATMA GANDHI
“Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who made the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows of, even, the miserable and the crotchety – best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness, to ease us with warm touching, to hold us in the great hands of light – good morning, good morning, good morning. Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.” | MARY OLIVER
“My Dear, I am writing this to remind you of your ‘essence beauty.’ This is the part of you that has nothing to do with age, occupation, weight, history, or pain. This is the soft, untouched, indelible you. You can love yourself in this moment, no matter what you have, or haven’t done or been. See past any masks, devices, or inventions that obscure your essence. Remember your true purpose, which is only Love. If you cannot see or feel love, lie down now and cry; it will cleanse your vision and free your heart. I love you; I am you.” | SARK
“In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it’s wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.” | ELIZABETH GILBERT
On Dreaming + Doing
“Man’s mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions.” | OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
“Why dream? Life is a difficult assignment. We are fragile creatures, expected to function at high rates of speed, and asked to accomplish great and small things each day. These daily activities take enormous amounts of energy. Most things are out of our control. We are surrounded by danger, frustration, grief, and insanity as well as love, hope, ecstasy, and wonder. Being fully human is an exercise in humility, suffering, grace, and great humor. Things and people all around us die, get broken, or are lost. There is no safety or guarantees. The way to accomplish the assignment of truly living is to engage fully, richly, and deeply in the living of your dreams. We are made to dream and to live those dreams.” | SARK
“Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it.” | GOETHE
“A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life.” | JAMES ALLEN
“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open doors to you. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” | JOSEPH CAMPBELL
“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” | MARY OLIVER
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” | JOSEPH CAMPBELL
“Never stop dreaming of moonbeams and fairy dust, shiny stars and the wonder of the heavens, a happier life and a better world.” | JAMES J. GORMLEY
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” | STEVE JOBS
Further words on art, alchemy + amplification:
+ 101 Inspirational Quotes to Light Up Your Life from Always Well Within
+ 75 Most Empowering, Inspirational Quotes for Sassy, Kick-Ass Women from Your Life YOUR Way
+ What’s your all-time favourite quote, or mantra you live your life by? What’s your pick from the above?
Images: All Anne He except second top image (We Heart It).
