The insight and experience of successful leaders and entrepreneurs are valuable sources of inspiration and motivation.
Many of these experts condense their experience and wisdom into short quotes that are meaningful and inspirational. Discover 100 of them in this post.
1. "Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier." -Mother Teresa
2. "When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on." -Franklin D. Roosevelt
3. "Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else." -Margaret Mead
4. "Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant." -Robert Louis Stevenson
5. "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." -Eleanor Roosevelt
7. "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart." -Helen Keller
8. "It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light." -Aristotle
9. "Whoever is happy will make others happy too." -Anne Frank
10. "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
11. "If life were predictable it would cease to be life and be without flavor." -Eleanor Roosevelt
12. "In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years." -Abraham Lincoln
13. "Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
14. "You will face many defeats in life, but never let yourself be defeated." -Maya Angelou
15. "Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game." -Babe Ruth
16. "Life is never fair, and perhaps it is a good thing for most of us that it is not." -Oscar Wilde
17. "The only impossible journey is the one you never begin." -Tony Robbins
18. "In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love." -Mother Teresa
19. "Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile." -Albert Einstein
20. "The purpose of our lives is to be happy." -Dalai Lama
21. "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans." -John Lennon
22. "You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough." -Mae West
23. "Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
24. "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined." -Henry David Thoreau
25. "The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall." -Nelson Mandela
27. "May you live all the days of your life." -Jonathan Swift
28. "Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale." -Hans Christian Andersen
29. "Do not let making a living prevent you from making a life." -John Wooden
30. "Life is ours to be spent, not to be saved." -D. H. Lawrence
31. "Keep smiling, because life is a beautiful thing and there's so much to smile about." -Marilyn Monroe
32. "Life is a long lesson in humility." -James M. Barrie
33. "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." -Robert Frost
34. "Love the life you live. Live the life you love." -Bob Marley
35. "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all." -Helen Keller
36. "You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose." -Dr. Seuss
37. "Life is made of ever so many partings welded together." -Charles Dickens
39. "Life is trying things to see if they work." -Ray Bradbury
40. "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." -Thomas A. Edison
41. "The secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well." -John D. Rockefeller Jr.
42. "I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." -Thomas Jefferson
43. "Success is not final; failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts." -Winston S. Churchill
44. "The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing." -Walt Disney
46. "Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it." -Henry David Thoreau
47. "I never dreamed about success, I worked for it." -Estee Lauder
48. "Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes but they don't quit." -Conrad Hilton
49. "There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure." -Colin Powell
50. "The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won't. It's whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere." -Barack Obama
51. "The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today." -Franklin D. Roosevelt
52. "It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." -Herman Melville
53. "Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don't wish it were easier; wish you were better." -Jim Rohn
54. "The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same." -Colin R. Davis
55. "I failed my way to success." -Thomas Edison
56. "If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success." -James Cameron
58. "A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him." -David Brinkley
59. "Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out." -John Wooden
60. "Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value." -Albert Einstein
61. "Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great." -John D. Rockefeller
62. "Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other one thing." -Abraham Lincoln
63. "Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." -Winston Churchill
64. "You know you are on the road to success if you would do your job and not be paid for it." -Oprah Winfrey
66. "If you genuinely want something, don't wait for it — teach yourself to be impatient." -Gurbaksh Chahal
67. "The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary." -Vidal Sassoon
68. "If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary." -Jim Rohn
69. "Before anything else, preparation is the key to success." -Alexander Graham Bell
70. "People who succeed have momentum. The more they succeed, the more they want to succeed and the more they find a way to succeed. Similarly, when someone is failing, the tendency is to get on a downward spiral that can even become a self-fulfilling prophecy." -Tony Robbins
71. "Believe you can and you're halfway there." -Theodore Roosevelt
72. "The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
73. "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." -Maya Angelou
74. "The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me." -Ayn Rand
76. "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right." -Henry Ford
77. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." -Wayne Gretzky
78. "I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples." -Mother Teresa
79. "You become what you believe." -Oprah Winfrey
80. "The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity." -Amelia Earhart
81. "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." -Anne Frank
82. "An unexamined life is not worth living." -Socrates
83. "Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear." -George Addair
85. "You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don't try." -Beverly Sills
86. "Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it." -Charles Swindoll
87. "Nothing is impossible, the word itself says, ‘I'm possible!'" -Audrey Hepburn
88. "It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop." -Confucius
89. "When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it." -Henry Ford
90. "Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears." -Les Brown
91. "I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear." -Rosa Parks
93. "If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat! Just get on." -Sheryl Sandberg
94. "I attribute my success to this: I never gave or took any excuse." -Florence Nightingale
95. "I would rather die of passion than of boredom." -Vincent van Gogh
96. "If you look at what you have in life, you'll always have more. If you look at what you don't have in life, you'll never have enough." -Oprah Winfrey
97. "Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning." -Gloria Steinem
98. "Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve." -Napoleon Hill
99. "First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end." -Aristotle
100. "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 safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover." -Mark Twain
Whether you're pursuing success as an entrepreneur, in sales, or in everyday life, the experiences and lessons of others are valuable resources. Those who keep learning and growing often find success. Where will your next success lie?
Editor's note: This post was originally published in August 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.