Motivational Quotes & Sayings for Work, Sports & Life

An inspiring collection of motivational quotes to provide you perspectives on life, overcoming adversity and the importance of determination. Read some insightful words from some very notable figures from the past and present. Don’t reinvent the wheel; learn from the best.

Good Motivational Quotes

We become happier, much happier, when we realize life is an opportunity rather than an obligation.
Mary Augustine

I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.
Charlotte Brontë

Life has no smooth road for any of us; and in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim the very roughness stimulates the climber to steadier steps, till the legend, over steep ways to the stars, fulfills itself.
W. C. Doane

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?
George Eliot

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Viktor Frankl

Do not wait; the time will never be just right. Start where you stand.
Napoleon Hill

In any project the important factor is your belief. Without belief, there can be no successful outcome.
William James

The power of imagination makes us infinite.
John Muir

Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.
George S. Patton

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.
Harriet Beecher Stowe

Without inspiration the best powers of the mind remain dormant. There is a fuel in us which needs to be ignited with sparks.
Johann Gottfried Von Herder

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
Thornton Wilder

For Athletes

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle

If you don’t know where you are going,
you’ll end up someplace else.
Yogi Berra

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke

First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.
Epictetus

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.
Wayne Gretzky

The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will.
Vince Lombardi

Dream big and dare to fail.
Norman Vaughan

For Work and Business

It is the familiar that usually eludes us in life. What is before our noses is what we see last.
William Barrett

Men do less than they ought, unless they do all they can.
Thomas Carlyle

We are all faced with a series of great opportunities – brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
John Gardner

The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.
Oliver W. Holmes

We can do anything we want to do if we stick to it long enough.
Helen Keller

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Helen Keller

In every difficult situation is potential value. Believe this, then begin looking for it.
Norman Vincent Peale

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.
Eleanor Roosevelt

Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true.
Leon J. Suenes

In doubtful matters boldness is everything.
Publilius Syrus

An oak is not felled at one blow.
Unknown

Do or do not. There is no try.
Yoda

Motivational Sayings

The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it.
Marcus Aurelius

Men’s best successes come after their disappointments.
Henry Ward Beecher

Amazing how we can light tomorrow with today.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

He turns not back who is bound to a star.
Leonardo Da Vinci

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.
Albert Einstein

The best way out is always through.
Robert Frost

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.
Hypocrites

Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
Samuel Johnson

Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.
La Bruyere

If the wind will not serve, take to the oars.
Latin Proverb

Constant dripping hollows out a stone.
Lucretius

Life is a play.
It’s not its length,
but its performance that counts.
Seneca — Who was Seneca? Find out at Wikipedia.

If you do not hope, you will not find what is beyond your hopes.
St. Clement of Alexandra

Fortune favors the brave.
Publius Terence

Change is not merely necessary to life, it is life.
Alvin Toffler

Motivating

Happiness is like a butterfly.
The more you chase it, the more it eludes you.
But if you turn your attention to other things,
It comes and sits softly on your shoulder.
Henry David Thoreau

After the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box.
Unknown

Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need.
Voltaire

Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Willing is not enough; we must do.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Funny

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on. Samuel Butler

A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in on the experience.
Elbert Hubbard

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
John Lennon

Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
William B. Sprague

You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.
Unknown

Sayings to Inspire

Life consists not in holding good cards, but in playing those you hold well.
Josh Billings

The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
Robert Byrne

We must be willing to relinquish the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell

The grand essentials of life are something to do, something to love, something to hope for.
Thomas Chalmers

Govern thy life and thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one, and read the other.
Thomas Fuller

Life is something like a trumpet. If you don’t put anything in you don’t get anything out.
W. C. Handy

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
Nelson Henderson

To change one’s life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.
William James

The great blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach; but we shut our eyes, and like people in the dark, we fall foul upon the very thing we search for, without finding it.
Seneca

Well begun is half done.
Unknown

He who moves not forward goes backward.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Everything that happens to us leaves some trace behind; everything contributes imperceptibly to make us what we are.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life

Life is a child playing around your feet, a tool you hold firmly in your grip, a bench you sit down upon in the evening, in your garden.
Jean Anouilh

Life is a pure flame,
and we live by an invisible sun within us.
Sir Thomas Brown

One life – a little gleam of time between two eternities.
Thomas Carlyle

We are all motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is, the more he is inspired to glory.
Cicero

Along with success comes a reputation for wisdom.
Euripides

Life is a rich strain of music, suggesting a realm too fair to be.
George William Curtis

We make our fortunes, and we call them fate.
Earl of Beaconsfield

Keep steadily before you the fact that all true success depends at last upon yourself.
Theodore T. Hunger

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

Plutarch

That state of life is most happy where superfluities are not required and necessities are not wanting.
Plutarch
The whole of life is but a moment of time. It is our duty, therefore to use it, not to misuse it.
Plutarch

Get Motivated

The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague.
Who shall say where one ends, and the other begins?
Edgar Alan Poe

Life without endeavor is like entering a jewel mine and coming out with empty hands.
Unknown

They can because they think they can.
Virgil

I made my life my monument.
Ben Johnson

Life isn’t a matter of milestones, but of moments.
Rose Kennedy

Life’s a voyage that’s homeward bound.
Herman Melville

Clever people master life; the wise illuminate it and create fresh difficulties.
Emil Nolde

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.
Randy Pausch

Success

The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
Frank Loyd Wright — If you’re ever near southwest Wisconsin, make a point to visit Taliesin – Frank Lloyd Wright’s house. Very cool!

The surest way not to fail is to determine to succeed.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan

There is only one success — to be able to spend your life in your own way.
Christopher Morley

Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.
An Wang

Failures to heroic minds are the stepping stones to success.
Thomas Chandler Haliburton

The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows.
Aristotle Onassis

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.
Robert Collier

Accomplish

Everyone has a fair turn to be as great as he pleases.
Jeremy Collier

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure — which is: Try to please everybody.
Herbert Bayard Swope

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.
Booker T. Washington

Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one a second time.
Josh Billings

Success is the good fortune that comes from aspiration, desperation, perspiration and inspiration.
Evan Esar

He is great enough who is his own master.
Bishop Hail

Notable

If you wish success in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.
Jospeph Addison

Impatience never commanded success.
Edwin H. Chapin

Careful thinking and hard work will solve nearly all your problems. Try and see for yourself.
Ullery

The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do, well.
Henry W. Longfellow

A goal is a dream with a deadline.
Napoleon Hill

In everything the ends well defined are the secret of durable success.
Victor Cousins

Arriving at one goal is the starting point to another.
John Dewey

Words to Motivate

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?
Robert Browning

Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.
William Shakespeare

I am always more interested in what I am about to do than what I have already done.
Rachel Carson

The significance of a man is not in what he attains but in what he longs to attain.
Kahlil Gibran

Every ceiling, when reached, becomes a floor, upon which one walks as a matter of course and prescriptive right.
Aldous Huxley

Determination

He who would arrive at the appointed end must follow a single road and not wander through many ways.
Seneca

Some men give up their designs when they have almost reached the goal; while others, on the contrary, obtain a victory by exerting, at the last moment, more vigorous efforts than before.
Polybius

In all things that you do, consider the end.
Solon

Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.
Viktor Frankl

The virtue lies in the struggle, not in the prize.
Richard Monckton Milnes

To reach a port, we must sail – Sail, not tie at anchor – Sail, not drift.
Franklin Roosevelt

Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.
Seneca

You might also enjoy these other collections:

Inspirational Quotes (Main Page)

Sports Quotes (Main Page)