There's something about the written word that has a way of speaking straight to your heart. When you read something that has you thinking for days, when you hear a saying that gives you that yes! feeling right in your gut, or seeing those words, the ones that you've been yearning for, the ones you needed to hear right in that moment, even though you didn't know it until they were right there, before your eyes.
For as long as I can remember, I've recklessly scribbled down motivational quotes on paper, saved thousands in my bookmarks, posted them in plain view as reminders, and always refer back to them whenever I need a little pick-me-up. Words come with a powerful punch, they carry vibration and intention. They have a way of resonating, connecting, understanding, soothing, comforting, uplifting, encouraging, and empowering.
I must admit, for me, after seeing the same quotes time and time again, they tend to lose their value so over the past few weeks I've been saving some goodies that have been flying under the radar. These rare quotes are all about truth, love, happiness, visioning, creating, and overcoming challenges. I hope some of these will speak straight to your soul and give you that spark you might need today. I encourage you to spread this list around online, share it with your loved ones, and add to it in the comments!
I understand that you may not have the time to get through this entire list right now so please! bookmark this post and come back to it whenever you need to hear some words of love and encouragement.
Dream big, be you, and rock your best life xx
ON LIFE
“The happiness of life is made up of minute fractions – the little soon forgotten charities of a kiss or a smile, a kind look, a heartfelt compliment, and the countless infinitesimals of a pleasurable and genial feeling." | Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Bless everything. (And I mean everything.) Notice what things, people, experiences, events you are having trouble blessing. These are the things you hold as separate from the wholeness, from the divine. When all things – including these – are included in blessing, you will live in a blessed, sacred world." | Amy Oscar
"All the masterpieces of art contain both light and shadow. A happy life is not one filled with only sunshine, but one which uses both light and shadow to produce beauty." | Billy Graham
"If consensus is overrated, I think balance is, too. I have no interest in living a balanced life. I want a life of adventure." | Chris Guillebeau
“Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.” | Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Patience child, patience. Remember, life is a journey. If you got everything you wanted all at once there’d be no point to living. Enjoy the ride, and in the end you’ll see these “setbacks” as giant leaps forward, only you couldn’t see the bigger picture in the moment. Remain calm, all is within reach; all you have to do is show up every day, stay true to your path and you’ll surely find the treasure that you seek.” | Jackson Kiddard
"There are only four questions of value in life. What is sacred? Of what is the spirit made? What is worth living for? And what is worth dying for? The answer to each is the same. Only love." | San Juan DeMarco
ON HAPPINESS + LOVE
"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point 'if this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'" | Kurt Vonnegut
"Don't move the way fear makes you move. Move the way love makes you move. Move the way joy makes you move." | Osho
"We need to make a fundamental choice. A choice on which all of our other choices and behaviors are built. The choice to live at our highest potential. To choose to be a creator not a victim. To choose health and vitality. To choose love." | Mark Buckingham
"I will waste not even a precious second today in anger or hate or jealousy or selfishness. I know that the seeds I sow I will harvest, because every action, good or bad, is always followed by an equal reaction. I will plant only good seeds this day." | Og Mandino
"There's nothing more beautiful than just allowing yourself to really be happy and be comfortable in your own skin." | Jason Collins
“We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy's fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, under him the whole time. Your treasure--your perfection--is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the buy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart.” | Elizabeth Gilbert
"If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely." | Ronald Dahl
"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." | Lao Tzu
“It's been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.” | L.M. Montgomery
"Simply seek happiness and you are not likely to find it. Seek to create and love without regard to your happiness and you are likely to be happy much of the time." | Dr M Scott Peck
"When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too." | Coelho
"Now and then, it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy." | Guillaume Apollinaire
ON DREAMING + VISIONING
“Your vision will only become clear when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.” | Leo Carl Jung
“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
"We are desire. It is the essence of the human Soul, the secret of our existence. Absolutely nothing of human greatness is ever accomplished without it. Not a symphony has been written, a mountain climbed, an injustice fought, or a love sustained apart from desire. Desire fuels our search for the life we prize." | John Elderidge
"Keep your dreams alive. Understand to achieve anything requires faith and belief in yourself, vision, hard work, determination, and dedication. Remember all things are possible for those who believe." | Gail Devers
"I am compelled by some deep hunger of the soul, driven by a desire that will not leave me alone, to live life to the fullest. And I know this does not mean working endlessly, accomplishing the most, or consuming the greatest amount and variety of things and experiences. It means tasting each mouthful, feeling each breath, listening to each song, being awake and aware of each moment as it unfolds." | Oriah Mountain Dreamer
"We are made of stardust. Every atom of every element in your body except for hydrogen has been manufactured inside stars, scattered across the universe in great stellar explosions and recycled to become part of you." | John Gribbin
“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?” | John Lennon
"A desire is anything but frivolous. It is the interface between you and that which is greater than you. No desire is meaningless or inconsequential. If it pulls you, even a little bit, it will take everyone higher. Desire is where the Divine lives, inside the inspiration of your desire. Every desire is of profound importance with huge consequences, and deserves your attention." | Mama Gena
"What you seek is seeking you." | Rumi
ON CHANGE + GROWTH
“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
"All great changes are preceded by chaos." | Deepak Chopra
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” | Howard Thurman
"You grow most in your areas of greatest strength. You will improve the most, be the most creative, be the most inquisitive, and bounce back the fastest in those areas where you have already shown some natural advantage over everyone else— your strengths. This doesn’t mean you should ignore your weaknesses. It just means you’ll grow most where you’re already strong." | Marcus Buckingham
"We know intuitively that most of the time, we should not run, we should stay and look for a different way forward... but we are wiser, more present, more mature, and more understanding when we realize we can never flee from the need to run away." | David Whyte
“The most creative act you will ever undertake is the act of creating yourself.” | Deepak Chopra
"I am on a journey... With my work, my explorations, and a few sad stories. I travel with a suitcase full of outrageous blessings. I am on a quest for truth, beauty, and quiet joy. I am an artist, a writer, an explorer." | Unknown
"Freedom is an inner awareness, a knowing that nothing can touch the truth of who you are; it is the "I am" that is within you and everyone." | Ed and Deb Shapiro
“You must find the place inside yourself where nothing is impossible.” | Deepak Chopra
"The reason you are here is to express the highest form of who you are." | Cheryl Richardson
Forgiveness is not an emotion. It is a decision made by your whole self after your true emotional work has been done. - Karla McLaren
“Be impeccable with your word. Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love.” | Don Miguel Ruiz
"Forgiveness is the catalyst for your greatest change." | Gabrielle Bernstein
"In the space between yes and no, there's a lifetime. It's the different between the path you walk and the one you leave behind; it's the gap between who you thought you could be and who you really are." | Jodi Picoult
"Take a journey into the things which you are carrying, the known—not into the unknown—into what you already know: your pleasures, your delights, your despairs, your sorrows. Take a journey into that, that is all you have." | J. Krishnamurti
“Passion is a feeling that tells you: this is the right thing to do. Nothing can stand in my way. It doesn't matter what anyone else says. This feeling is so good that it cannot be ignored. I'm going to follow my bliss and act upon this glorious sensation of joy." | Wayne W. Dyer
“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.” | Annie Dillard
"Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down." | Charles F. Kettering
"You make a choice or set a goal and let people know about it. Then just getting started leads to the discovery of internal resources that help us to go further than we ever thought we could." | Christopher Reeve
“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” | Dale Carnegie
"I am my best work— a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines." | Audre Lorde, poet
"You have your way, I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist." | Friedrich Nietzsche
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” | Ralph Waldo Emerson
"When I say be creative, I don’t mean you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem." | Osho
ON OVERCOMING LIMITING BELIEFS
"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." | Rumi
"The limiting factor on your success is not the size of the obstacles, but the size of your dream." | Orrin Woodward
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - Mark Twain
“It’s your life — but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.” | Eleanor Roosevelt
“We often hesitate to follow our intuition out of fear. Most usually, we are afraid of the changes in our own life that our actions will bring. Intuitive guidance, however, is all about change. It is energetic data ripe with the potential to influence the rest of the world. To fear change but to crave intuitive clarity is like fearing the cold, dark night while pouring water on the fire that lights your cave. An insight the size of a mustard seed is powerful enough to bring down a mountain-sized illusion that may be holding our lives together. Truth strikes without mercy. We fear our intuitions because we fear the transformational power within our revelations.” | Caroline Myss
“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 is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure." | Paulo Coelho
“Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.” | Eckhart Tolle
"Always go with the choice that scares you the most, because that’s the one that is going to require the most from you" | Caroline Myss
"There is no such thing as failure. There is only success, manifesting in its many aspects. Always remember, you never fail to succeed." | Neale Donald Walsch
“Give up defining yourself - to yourself or to others. You won't die. You will come to life. And don't be concerned with how others define you. When they define you, they are limiting themselves, so it's their problem. Whenever you interact with people, don't be there primarily as a function or a role, but as the field of conscious Presence. You can only lose something that you have, but you cannot lose something that you are.” | Eckhart Tolle
"I found out that there weren’t too many limitations, if I did it my way." | Johnny Cash
"Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds." | Bob Marley
