50 Inspirational, profound, thought-provoking quotes for your immediate contemplation. Sit back, relax and ponder over the heroic wisdom of history.

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.”

— Bill Bryson

“When I hear somebody sigh, “Life is hard” – I am always tempted to ask, “Compared to what?”

— Sydney Harris

“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, or a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”

— Alfred D. Souza

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

— Winston Churchill

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

— Christopher McCandless

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is a quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.”

— Mary Anne Radmacher

“Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”

— Carl Sagan

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

— Stephen Roberts

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

— Aristotle

“ ‘I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing, so you don’t get to say I’m bored.”

— Louis C.K.

“I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”

— Robert A. Heinlein

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”

— Hunter S. Thompson

“Remember how long you’ve been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them. At some point you have to recognise what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and you will never return.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Speak only if it improves upon the silence.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”

— Maurice Switzer

“I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man’s word should be as good as his bond; that character — not wealth or power or position — is of supreme worth.”

— John D. Rockefeller (Jr.)

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch!”

— Edgar Mitchell, Apollo Astronaut

“Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are stiffened.”

— Billy Graham

“To be sick, or to suffer, is inevitable – but to become bitter and vindictive in sickness and suffering, and to surrender to irrationality, supposing yourself the innocent and virtuous victim of the evil intentions of the world, is not inevitable. The appropriate answer to the question, Why me? is the other question, Why not me?”

— Michael Scott Moore – Journalist held prisoner by Somali pirates for 977 days in captivity

“Patience is something you admire in the driver behind you, but not in one ahead.”

— Bill McGlashen

“If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you’re going to die. So they’ll talk. They’ll gloat. They’ll watch you squirm. They’ll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.”

— Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions. Their lives a mimicry. Their passions a quotation.”

— Oscar Wilde

“Travel, my friend. See the world, or at least some bits of it. And don’t wait because you don’t know what’s down the road. It’s not the “big” moments you’ll remember — standing under the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty. It’ll be the little moments — watching her squeeze into a doorway in Florence trying to stay out of the rain, smelling a giant flower in Belize, or having the sunlight catch her as she walks down some side street in New York City you’ll never get back to. That’s where your life happens, and those are the things you’ll keep close — those few seconds that nobody else saw. Those are yours and yours only.”

— JamesJax, Reddit user

“They’re in front of us, they’re in back of us. They’re on our left and on our right. They can’t get away now.”

— Chesty Puller – Battle of the Chosin Reservior

“All men dream, but not equally; those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible.”

— T.E. Lawrence

“Aut viam inveniam aut faciam.” – Translation: “I will either find a way, or make one.”

— Hannibal

“To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When Students cheat on exams it’s because our School System values grades more than Students value learning.”

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

— Mark Twain

“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.”

— Earl Nightingale

“Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”

— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me – who lives and who dies? – Power resides where men believe it resides.”

— George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones

“Frightened of change? But what can exist without it? What’s closer to nature’s heart? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without something being changed?”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

— Carl Sagan

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Your future self is watching you right now through memories.”

— Unknown

“An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.”

— Pliny the Younger

“Inanimate matter, born from exploding stars billions of years ago, can come together in a form that has the capacity to question its own existence.”

— Unknown

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

“If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal.”

— Paulo Coelho

“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.”

— Azar Nafisi

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could do. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“If you are willing at look at another person’s behavior toward you as a reflection of the state of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person, then you will, over a period of time cease to react at all.”

— Yogi Bhajan

“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”

— Plato, The Republic

“It never ceases to amaze me: We all love ourselves more than other people, but we care more about their opinion than our own.”

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

— Napoleon Bonaparte

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

— Isaac Asmiov

“Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.”

— Erich Fromm

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

— G.K. Chesterton