Good quotes can be the world's best motivator, so here are my favorites: Last updated December 2018
"What people in the world think of you is really none of your business" - Martha Graham
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Your goal should be out of reach, but not out of sight." - Anita DeFrantz
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell." - Edward Abbey
"Smile every chance you get; not because life has been easy, perfect, or exactly as you had anticipated, but because you choose to be happy and grateful for all the good things you do have, and all the problems you know you don’t have." - Marcandangel
"Fear is an instinctual human emotion designed to keep us aware and safe – like the headlights on a car clearly illuminating the twists and turns on the road ahead. But too much fear, like high beams blinding us on a dark, foggy road, can cause the loss of the very thing we feared losing in the first place." - Marcandangel
"What people in the world think of you is really none of your business" - Martha Graham
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Your goal should be out of reach, but not out of sight." - Anita DeFrantz
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell." - Edward Abbey
"Smile every chance you get; not because life has been easy, perfect, or exactly as you had anticipated, but because you choose to be happy and grateful for all the good things you do have, and all the problems you know you don’t have." - Marcandangel
"Fear is an instinctual human emotion designed to keep us aware and safe – like the headlights on a car clearly illuminating the twists and turns on the road ahead. But too much fear, like high beams blinding us on a dark, foggy road, can cause the loss of the very thing we feared losing in the first place." - Marcandangel
"Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error" - Linus Pauling
"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live" - Norman Cousins
“Most days, life seems to be lived in the gray areas. It's hard to know if you're making progress as a parent, a friend, an employee, or a person. Weightlifting is more black and white. It helps you get past that fuzziness and closer to understanding yourself. Combine this type of clarity with gradual improvement and your sense of self-worth will skyrocket. You know who you are and you are proving that you can become better than you were before.” - James Clear
"Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live" - Norman Cousins
“Most days, life seems to be lived in the gray areas. It's hard to know if you're making progress as a parent, a friend, an employee, or a person. Weightlifting is more black and white. It helps you get past that fuzziness and closer to understanding yourself. Combine this type of clarity with gradual improvement and your sense of self-worth will skyrocket. You know who you are and you are proving that you can become better than you were before.” - James Clear
"Quite simply, the reason you are often miserable and stressed is because of an unhealthy attachment to certain things you have no control over. So let go. Release the tension and stress. Realize you haven’t lost anything; you were never in control of the uncontrollable to begin with." - Marcandangel
"Life is NOT short if you spend every waking moment appreciating it. It’s just that by the time most of us catch up to appreciating what we have, we’ve already squandered our time and left life at least halfway behind us. The key is being thankful for what you have NOW." - Marcandangel
"Worry is a total waste of time. It doesn’t change anything. All it does is steal your joy and keep you very busy doing nothing." - Unknown
"The problem is, you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can’t say here’s the bad stuff, here’s vulnerability, here’s grief, here’s shame, here’s fear, here’s disappointment; I don’t want to feel these. I’m going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. You can’t numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects or emotions. When we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness, and then we are miserable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle." - Brene Brown
"The destination is just a tiny slice of the journey. We’re so worried about goals, about our future, that we miss all the great things along the way. If you’re fixated on the goal, on the end, you won’t enjoy it when you get there. You’ll be worried about the next goal, the next destination." - Leo Babauta
'Instead of asking, “Is this making me happy?” ask, “Is this contributing to my completeness?” If you’re struggling and making progress, the answer is “yes.”' - Marcandangel
"Some skills are easier to gain, depending on your natural strengths, but you can get impressively decent at just about anything with time. You don’t live forever though, so to get great at something means saying no to something else. You must pick, and focus. Fully developed strengths tend to make your weaknesses redundant." - Brian Lee
"Problems without solutions are just facts." - Laura Newcomer
"The past is something you learn from. It is not something you live in." - Brian Lee
"Everyone should have at least one thing in their life that they do for no other reason than that they enjoy it... To be able to revel in an activity that you’re not all that good at and that you don’t care that you’re not all that good at, to strive for and embrace mediocrity in some area of our lives, that’s a hard thing for a lot of us to do." - Dustin Wax
"Perfection doesn't exist; when I expect it, I immediately set myself up for failure because the unattainable standard I've set in my mind can never be reached. Therefore, I've unknowingly set the lowest expectation for myself by mistakenly setting the highest." - Danielle Robinson
“Apathy does not allow us to neglect responsibility: we're gonna have to deal with it at some point, usually when we're too tired to deal with it, or because we're up against a deadline... Stop making extra work for yourself – just remind yourself to freaking DO IT NOW, which accomplishes three crucial things:
Less work - Why do more when you can do less and get the same results?
It gets done - It’s gonna have to happen eventually, why not now?
Less mental stress - Every day spent procrastinating is another day spent worrying about that thing. Do it now, and move on with your life!” - Steve Kamb
“You have two ears and one mouth. Use them in that ratio. You learn more when you listen than when you talk” - Brian Lee
"Don’t let the idea of life’s impermanence bring you down. It is a beautiful thing to be reminded of because it allows for you to live life without taking anything for granted." - Vincent Nguyen
“Regretting a pivotal decision basically means you want an entirely new life... so the only time you ever regret a decision, is if you'd rather give up every single part of your life from then until now." - Dan Shipper
“Both boredom and busyness stem from feeling there is a lack of quality in what is covering your attention. Boredom is feeling that there are too few high quality ways to spend attention. Busyness is forced boredom. This means that you feel there are high quality ways to spend attention, but your attention is being stolen from you before you can use it” - Scott Young
“When we're subconsciously trying to avoid something, many of us fall into an "escape mode" where we pick up slightly unusual habits. It could be something fairly innocuous like obsessive cleaning or overeating, or even something dangerous like aggressive driving or heavy drinking. Either way, if you can identify the symptoms of your escape mode, you can work on breaking out of it” - Shep McAllister
“There’s only one person you can truly compare yourself to: yesterday’s version of you” - Steve Kamb
“Instead of saying "I don't have time" try saying "it's not a priority," and see how that feels. Often, that's a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don't want to. But other things are harder. Try it: "I'm not going to edit your résumé, sweetie, because it's not a priority." "I don't go to the doctor because my health is not a priority." If these phrases don't sit well, that's the point. Changing our language reminds us that time is a choice.” - Laura Vanderkam
“Changing habits, at its core, is simply a process of changing what’s normal for you” - Leo Babauta
"Choose to be happy for no reason at all. If you are happy for a reason, you could be in trouble, because that reason can get taken away from you" - Marc & Angel
"There is a tendency to equate "unusual" or "rare" with abnormal, but this is a logical fallacy." - Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran
"I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum." - Frances Willard
"There are two kinds of light- the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures." - James Thurber
"Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are." - Malcolm S. Forbes
"Sometimes I wonder if procreation is really just a way for people to manufacture more people to love them. I find that creepy." - Ed Decker
"An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind." - Mohandas Gandhi
"Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional." - Buddhist Proverb
"Thought is useful when it motivates for action, and a hindrance when it substitutes for action." - Bill Raeder
"The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." - George Will
"There is no truth. There is only perception." - Gustave Flaubert
