In life, we constantly seek new sources of wisdom in order to help us understand this journey a little bit better. Life may not always give you what you want, but it always gives you what you need, and quotes from famous philosophers, musicians, and authors can provide you with the understanding that you seek. While the truest wisdom comes from within ourselves, sometimes you just need a little inspiration and knowledge from others.
Life can seem impossible to understand at times – after all, we all just sort of showed up here and have to learn as we go along. We may not ever have all the answers, but we can at least try to gain as much wisdom as possible during our time here. Contemplation and quiet introspection can offer a great deal of insight about life, and even though we may not ever totally understand our purpose or place here on Earth, we can all benefit from the knowledge shared below.
We have gathered some of what we believe to be the wisest quotes out there, so that you may continue to learn and grow each and every day you spend here on Earth. Keep in mind, we couldn’t possibly fit all our favorite quotes into this article, but the following contain great wisdom and perspective about life, love, happiness, and more.
Here are 100 of the wisest quotes of all time:
1. “If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” -Bruce Lee
2. “Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow”. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
3. ‘Buddha was asked, “What have you gained from meditation?” He replied, “Nothing!” However, Buddha said, let me tell you what I lost:Anger, Anxiety, Depression, Insecurity, Fear of Old, Age and Death.”‘
4. “The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.” – Alexandra K. Trenfor
5. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” – Plato
6. “Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” – Steve Jobs
7. “Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
8. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead
9. “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell
10. Man: ‘I want happiness’
Buddha: First remove”I”,this is ego. Then remove “Want”, this is desire. Finally all that remains is “happiness.”
11. “Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.” – Albert Einstein
12. “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” – Carl Jung
13. “I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.” – Bruce Lee
14. “Do not pray for an easy life. Pray for the strength to endure a difficult one” – Bruce Lee
15. “Never let school interfere with your education.” – Mark Twain
16. “Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.” – Rumi
17. “It is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” – Jiddu Krishnamurti
18. “The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.” – Maya Angelou
19. “Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.” – Morticia Addams
20. “The real question is not whether life exists after death. The real question is whether you are alive before your death.” – Osho
21. “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” – Lao Tzu
22. “He who controls others may be powerful but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.” – Lao Tzu
23. “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Harold Whitman
24. “You have enemies? Good; that means you have stood up for something, sometime in your life.” – Winston Churchill
25. “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” – Oscar Wilde
26. “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them” – Albert Einstein
27. “Loneliness is and will always be the most abundant source of human experience.” – Swami Vivekanand
28. “You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.” – J.K. Rowling
29. “The beautiful thing about fear is that when you run to it, it runs away.” – Robin Sharma
30. “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 conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.” – Christopher McCandless
31. “When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy.” They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” – John Lennon
32. “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” – Albert Einstein
33. “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” – Gandhi
34. “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
35. “Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity.” – Henry van Dyke
36. “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” – Stephen Covey
37. “Happiness is like a butterfly. The more you chase it, the more it eludes you. But if you turn your attention to other things, it comes and sits softly on your shoulder.” – Henry David Thoreau
38. “You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.” – Wayne Gretzky
39. “We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” – Aristotle
40. “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle
41. “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.” – Ellen Goodman
42. “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” – Socrates
43. “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” – Albert Einstein
44. “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw
45. “The flower that blooms in adversity is the rarest and most beautiful of all.” – Walt Disney Company, Mulan
46. “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
47. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anaïs Nin
48. “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection” – Gautama Buddha
49. “The past has no power over the present moment.” – Eckhart Tolle
50. “The truth is, everyone’s going to hurt you. You’ve just got to find the ones worth suffering for.” – Bob Marley
51. “I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it.” – Maya Angelou
52. “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” – J.K. Rowling
53. “A man who conquers himself is greater than one who conquers a thousand men in battle”. – Buddha
54. “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
55. “If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.” – Ancient Chinese Proverb
56. “An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.” — Mahatma Gandhi
57. “A man is but the product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes.” — Mahatma Gandhi
58. “Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.” – Carl Jung
59. “People are unrealistic, illogical, and self-centered. Love them anyway.” – Mother Teresa
60. “I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” – Mother Teresa
61. “Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.” – Benjamin Franklin
62. “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
63. “Never be bullied into silence, never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one’s definition of your life, define yourself.” – Robert Frost
64. “You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.” – Wayne Dyer
65. “Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising every time we fail.” – Confucius
66. “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” – Albert Einstein
67. “Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.” – JK Rowling
68. “To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh
69. “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.” – Eckhart Tolle
70. “You yourself are the eternal energy of the Universe. You didn’t come into this world, you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.” – Alan Watts
71. “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” – T. S. Eliot
72. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien
73. “We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” – Anonymous
74. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” – Mark Twain
75. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost
76. “As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words but to live by them.” – John F. Kennedy
77. “With everything that has happened to you, you can either feel sorry for yourself or treat what has happened as a gift. Everything is either an opportunity to grow or an obstacle to keep you from growing. You get to choose.” – Wayne Dyer
78. “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”— Albert Einstein
79. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
80. “We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
81. “The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates
82. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” ~ Steve Jobs
83. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” – Mahatma Gandhi
84. “Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
85. “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” Abraham Lincoln
86. “Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.” Lou Holtz
87. “Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” Dalai Lama
88. “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” – John Wooden
89. “Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” – Dr. Seuss
90. “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
91. “Stop letting people who do so little for you control so much of your mind, feelings, and emotions.” – Will Smith
92. “Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” – Buddha
93. “Laugh when you can, apologize when you should, and let go of what you can’t change. Kiss slowly, play hard, love deeply, forgive quickly, take chances, give everything, and have no regrets. Life is too short to be anything but happy.” – Unknown
94. “Sing like no one’s listening, love like you’ve never been hurt, dance like nobody’s watching, and live like its heaven on earth.” – Mark Twain
95. “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?” – Marianne Williamson
96. “Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
97. “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” – Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
98. “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius…” – Steve Jobs
99. “Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” – Brené Brown
100. “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
What are your favorite of these wisest quotes of all time? Share with us in the comments below!
