922 Motivation Quotes

Courage is poorly housed that dwells in numbers; the lion never counts the herd that are about him, nor weighs how many flocks he has to scatter.

A man, as a general rule, owes very little to what he is born with - a man is what he makes of himself.

There will be certain things in a man that have to be won, not forced; inspired, not compelled.

To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.

Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.

If you do not believe you can do it then you have no chance at all.

Try to be the best of what you are, even if what you are is no good.

I'm not yet desperate enough to do anything about the conditions that are making me desperate.

If I can survive death, I can probably survive anything.

More books have resulted from somebody's need to write than from anybody's need to read.

We are made of emotions. We are all looking for emotions, basically. It's only a question of finding the way to experience them.

Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.

What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive.

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

People often become actresses because of something they dislike about themselves: They pretend they are someone else.

This has always been a motto of mine: Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.

As long as I can remember I feel I have had this great creative and spiritual force within me that is greater than faith, greater than ambition, greater than confidence, greater than determination, greater than vision. It is all these combined. My brain becomes magnetized with this dominating force which I hold in my hand.

When you have a dream, you've got to grab it and never let go.

I doubt if one ever accepts a belief until one urgently needs it.

It is said that desire is a product of the will, but the converse is in fact true: will is a product of desire.

You have to make it happen.

Winners take time to relish their work, knowing that scaling the mountain is what makes the view from the top so exhilarating.

There is a sort of enthusiasm in all projectors, absolutely necessary for their affairs, which makes them proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults; and, what is severer than all, the presumptuous judgement of the ignorant upon their designs.

He had no failings which were not owing to a noble cause; to an ardent, generous, perhaps an immoderate passion for fame; a passion which is the instinct of all great souls.

Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.

Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it.

People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.

When you come to analyze the love of money which was the general impulse to effort in your day, you find that the dread of want and desire of luxury was but one of several motives which the pursuit of money represented; the others, and with many the more influential, being desire of power, of social position, and reputation for ability and success.

Ambition! powerful source of good and ill!

Tomorrow is the day when idlers work, and fools reform.

The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or in defeat. Let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment.

'The roughest road often leads to the top.'

In spite of warnings, nothing much happens until the status quo becomes more painful than change.

I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not - they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.

Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.

It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.

I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on.

A ship should not ride on a single anchor, nor life on a single hope.

From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.

He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times.

Remember you come here having already understood the necessity of struggling with yourself - only with yourself. Therefore thank everyone who gives you the opportunity.

Anybody who picks up a guitar and tells you that there's some inner message that they're trying to convey . . . it's nonsense. They're not being honest. The reason they're doing this is they wanna get lots of chicks and they don't want to work for a living.

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle.

In idle wishes fools supinely stay; Be there a will, and wisdom finds a way.

'Capitalists are motivated not chiefly by the desire to consume wealth or indulge their appetites, but by the freedom and power to consummate their entrepreneurial ideas.'

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States.

Writers only think they are interested in politics, they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics.

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

Men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion.

For I've finally realized, that I could be infinitely better than before, definitely stronger. I'll face whatever comes my way, I'll savor each moment of the day, Love as many people as I can along the way. Help someone who's given up, even if it's just to raise my eyes and pray.

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.

I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goals.

From almost the first day they got into office, they (President Bush and Vice President Cheney) were trying to figure out how to get rid of Saddam Hussein. I'm not a psychiatrist - I don't know all of the reasons behind their concern, some might say their obsession.

Nil sine magno vita labore dedit mortalibus.

No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself.

A professional is a man who can do his job when he doesn't feel like it; an amateur is one who can't when he does feel like it.

If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.

The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads - in the end - to the best within us.

With the power of soul anything is possible.

A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest, as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man.

Young people are threatened... by the evil use of advertising techniques that stimulate the natural inclination to avoid hard work by promising the immediate satisfaction of every desire.

Glories, like glowworms, afar off shine bright, But looked to near have neither heat nor light.

My freshman year (at Columbia) was the longest break I'd had from acting since I was six years old. When I was a teenager I loved acting, but I really just loved it for myself. I didn't like the fact that anyone else saw the work I was doing. When I moved to New York, I started to realize that I wanted people to see the stuff that I was doing, and I wanted it to mean something to them. A lot of people have told me Mysterious Skin meant something to them. And that meant the world to me.

'I don't want to do anything that I'm not passionate about.'

Of all the passions that inspire a man in a battle, none, we have to admit, is so powerful and so constant as the longing for honor and reknown.

The more physical the activity, the less the difficulties will be. The more the activity becomes intellectual and turns into motives which exercise a determining influence on the commander's will, the more the difficulties will increase.

Timidity is the root of prudence in the majority of men.

Now I'm going to tell you something I've kept to myself for years. None of you ever knew George Gipp. He was long before your time, but you all know what a tradition he is at Notre Dame. And the last thing he said to me, 'Rock,' he said, 'sometime when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they've got and win just one for the Gipper. I don't know where I'll be then, Rock,' he said, 'but I'll know about it and I'll be happy.'

The more is given the less the people will work for themselves, and the less they work the more their poverty will increase.

Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.

All my actions have their rise in my inalienable love of mankind.

Find purpose, the means will follow.

You may never know what results come of your action, but if you do nothing there will be no result.

Victory is sweetest when you've known defeat.

. . . time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee. . . . I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

I fight on, I fight to win.

A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.

Pilgrim's Progress, about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.

It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval.

Thou waitest for the spark from heaven! and we, Light half-believers of our casual creeds, Who never deeply felt, nor clearly will'd, Whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, Whose vague resolves never have been fulfill'd; For whom each year we see Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new; Who hesitate and falter life away, And lose to-morrow the ground won to-day- Ah! do not we, wanderer! await it too?

If my mind can conceive it; and my heart can believe it - then I can achieve it.

I think we're going to the moon because it's in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It's by the nature of his deep inner soul ... we're required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.

Our chief want in life is somebody who shall make us do what we can.

Hitch your wagon to a star.