One of the earliest adult realizations we make is that nothing comes free—it either costs you time, money, or both.
However, things such as this don’t make sense until we chance upon them ourselves. That’s why we call experience the mother of wisdom.
The same goes for life-changing quotes. Powerful quotes that can change one’s perspective don’t mean much if you can’t relate to them. But when you do, the jumble of words that make up these words of wisdom forever alters how we view them.
Depending on what you are currently going through, particular quotes will strike a chord with you, while others will vacate your mind the moment you lift your eyes off the screen. What’s so interesting about life is that we will stumble upon the same things repeatedly, yet there will come a day when we encounter something for the God-knows-what-number time, and we will see it in a completely different light.
Quotes about being alone don’t hit home until you understand your solitude. Trust quotes are just empty words until your trust has been broken by someone you truly care about. And quotes about truth start to ring true once you’ve been lied to.
Inspirational short quotes from books, movies, famous speeches, or historical figures will ring a different tune for everyone. And while some will fail to identify the song, others will be able to recognize every note of it.
Below, we’ve compiled a list of quotes that will change your life and perception of things, perhaps not today, but someday.
If a particular life-changing quote strikes a chord with you while reviewing the list, give it an upvote. If you are looking for even more inspirational quotes to change your life, be sure to check out our article featuring more motivational quotes!
#1
“It’s easy to fool someone, it’s hard to convince them that they’ve been fooled.”
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#2
“Before you speak let your words pass through 3 gates, is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary?”
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#3
“Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.” — Sully Sullenberger
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#4
“You might be the sweetest peach on the tree, but some people just don’t like peaches.”
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#5
“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life. Most of which never happened.” — Mark Twain
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#6
“Do not confuse activity with productivity.”
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#7
“In order to empathize with someone’s experience you must be willing to believe them as they see it and not how you imagine their experience to be.” — Brené Brown
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#8
“Don’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm.”
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#9
“You can’t control people’s actions, only your reaction.”
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#10
“Don’t believe everything you think.”
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#11
“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” — C. S. Lewis
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#12
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” — John A. Shedd
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#13
“Holding onto a grudge is like not pulling a thorn out of your foot because you were not the one who put it there.”
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#14
“When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.” — A. J. Heschel
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#15
“Most people will not remember what you say to them, but they will remember how you made them feel.”
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#16
“We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.” — Charles Bukowski
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#17
“Whatever you do today is very important: you are exchanging a day of your life for it.” ― Elizabeth George
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#18
“The meaning of life is to give life meaning.” — V. E. Frankl
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#19
“If you don’t heal what hurt you, you’ll bleed on people who didn’t cut you.”
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#20
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” — Upton Sinclair
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#21
“Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.” — Terry Pratchett
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#22
“Never give up on a dream because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.” — Earl Nightingale
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#23
“If there must be trouble let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” — Thomas Paine
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#24
“We accept the love we think we deserve.” — Stephen Chbosky
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#25
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.”
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#26
“It’s possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness. That is life.” — C. J. Picard
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#27
“The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.” — Marcel Pagnol
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#28
“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift. That’s why they call it present.” — Master Oogway
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#29
“If you’re going through hell, keep going.” — Winston Churchill
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#30
“You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” — C. S. Lewis
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#31
“You lose every shot you don’t take.” — Michael Jordan
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#32
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
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#33
“And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.” — Dr. Seuss
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#34
“What you allow is what will continue.”
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#35
“The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.” — G. W. F. Hegel
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#36
“What other people think of me isn’t my business.”
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#37
“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.” — Terry Pratchett
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#38
“Never wrestle with a pig – you both get dirty, but the pig enjoys it.”
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#39
“Everyone you’ll ever meet knows something you don’t.”
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#40
“When people show you who they are, believe them.” — Maya Angelou
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#41
“We are not punished for our sins, but by them.” — Oscar Wilde
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#42
“A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” — Kurt Vonnegut
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#43
“We suffer more in our imagination than we do in reality.”
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#44
“Smooth seas never made a skilled sailor.”
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#45
“Anxiety is a terrible predictor of what will actually go wrong in life.” — Megan Devine
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#46
“The only normal people are the ones that you don’t know very well yet.” — Alfred Adler
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#47
“People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.” — R. W. Emerson
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#48
“Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
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#49
“Graveyards are full of irreplaceable people.”
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#50
“To realize that you are not your thoughts is when you begin to awaken spiritually.” — Eckhart Tolle
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#51
“I’ve been all over the world and I’ve never seen a statue of a critic.” — Leonard Bernstein
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#52
“Chaos will always beat order, because it is better organized.”
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#53
“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life.” — Anne Lamott
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#54
“Never be so kind you forget to be clever, and never be so clever you forget to be kind.”
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#55
“Character is what you do when no one is looking.”
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#56
“There’s a lot of narcissism in self-hatred.” — D. F. Wallace
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#57
“There is no such thing as multitasking, only rapid switching.”
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#58
“If life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade. And try to find someone whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.”
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#59
“The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That’s the deal.” — C. S. Lewis
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#60
“You can’t edit an empty page.”
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#61
“Expectations are just premeditated resentments.”
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#62
“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” — Mark Twain
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#63
“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” —Nelson Mandela
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#64
“We all do damage. Character is determined by how we repair it.” — Piney Winston
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#65
“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” — John Steinbeck
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#66
“Worrying is like carrying an umbrella and waiting for it to rain.”
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#67
“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.” — Walt Disney
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#68
“If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.” — Jean-Paul Sartre
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#69
“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.” — Henry David Thoreau
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#70
“Thoughts are like clouds – they change, move, and pass. The sky behind it is the reality.”
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#71
“You’re not what you think but what you do.”
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#72
“Stop trying to be liked by everyone. You don’t even like everyone.”
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#73
“Revenge… is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.” — Jeremy Taylor
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#74
“When the axe came to the woods the trees said: ‘At least the handle is one of us.’”
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#75
“You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give it. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.” — Cheryl Strayed
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#76
“Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.” — Aldous Huxley
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#77
“Today is the oldest you’ve ever been in your life and the youngest you’ll ever be again.”
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#78
“Nothing will work unless you do.” — Maya Angelou
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#79
“I don’t trust my inner feelings. Inner feelings come and go.” — Leonard Cohen
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#80
“Any thought you have about the future is a delusion.”
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#81
“You can’t cross the ocean, until you lose sight of the shore.”
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#82
“Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.” — Publilius Syrus
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#83
“Those who matter don’t mind, those who mind don’t matter.”
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#84
“The axe forgets; the tree remembers.” — Zimbabwean proverb
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#85
“You can make all the mistakes and still win.”
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#86
“Just because you lost me as a friend doesn’t mean you gained me as an enemy. I still want to see you eat just not at my table.”
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#87
“If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.”
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#88
“We are our choices.” — Jean-Paul Sartre
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#89
“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” — Hanlon’s Razor
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#90
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” — Viktor Frankl
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#91
“A lion doesn’t concern himself with the opinion of a sheep.”
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#92
“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes it is a quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’” — Mary Anne Radmacher
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#93
“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
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#94
“Worrying about things you can’t control or change is pointless.”
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#95
“I can do anything but I can’t do everything.”
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#96
“Worrying is a waste of your imagination.”
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#97
“We learn that we are neither devils nor divines.” — Maya Angelou
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#98
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” — Alan Wilson Watts
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#99
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” — William Morris
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#100
“When you’re the ocean, you don’t have to be afraid of the waves.”
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#101
“If you look for the light, you will often find it, but if you look for the dark, it is all you will ever see.” — Uncle Iroh (Legend of Korra)
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#102
“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”
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