Inspirational Quotes

Short Uplifting Quotes

1. Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

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2. The poetry of earth is never dead.

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3. If one truly loves nature one finds beauty everywhere.

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4. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.

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5. We can never have enough of nature.

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6. We know what we are but know not what we may be.

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7. Grow old along with me!
   The best is yet to be.

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8. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
   Old Time is still a-flying.

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9. My heart leaps up when I behold
   A rainbow in the sky.

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Uplifting Quotes About Life

1. I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail.

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2. Isn't it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about?

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3. "But just to keep alive isn't enough," he said. "To live you must have sunshine and freedom and a little flower to love!"

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4. Clouds come floating into my life from other days no longer to shed rain or usher storm but to give colour to my sunset sky.

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5. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

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Inspirational Quotes About Hope

1. Hope is the thing with feathers
   That perches in the soul,
   And sings the tune without the words,
   And never stops at all.

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2. We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

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3. Hold fast to dreams
   For if dreams die
   Life is a broken-winged bird
   That cannot fly.

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4. That I could think there trembled through
   His happy good-night air
   Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
   And I was unaware.

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5. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

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Funny Inspirational Quotes

Wit counts as inspiration too.

1. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

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2. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

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3. Without music life would be a mistake.

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4. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake.

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Inspirational Quotes About Nature

1. In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.

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2. The mountains are calling and I must go, and I will work on while I can, studying incessantly.

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3. And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
   Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
   Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

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4. And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

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5. I think that I shall never see
   A poem lovely as a tree.

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6. The fog comes
   on little cat feet.

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7. And since to look at things in bloom
   Fifty springs are little room,
   About the woodlands I will go
   To see the cherry hung with snow.

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Quotes About Wonder and Beauty

1. The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

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2. To see a world in a grain of sand
   And a heaven in a wild flower,
   Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
   And eternity in an hour.

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3. A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
   Its loveliness increases; it will never
   Pass into nothingness.

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4. To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
   Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

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5. Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
   In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
   Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

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6. Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
   Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.

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Quotes About Books and Quiet Places

1. A library is true fairyland, a very palace of delight, a haven of repose from the storms and troubles of the world.

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2. There is no frigate like a book
   To take us lands away,
   Nor any coursers like a page
   Of prancing poetry.

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3. The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter, not the house.

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4. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

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Famous Misquotes, and Who Really Said Them

Some of the most shared inspirational quotes were never said by the people they're credited to. Here is where they really come from.

• "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

  Not by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It isn't in Emerson's works. It's adapted from a 1903 poem by Muriel Strode, whose own words are in the quotes about life above. Source: Quote Investigator.

• "What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."

  Not by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry Stanley Haskins wrote it in Meditations in Wall Street (1940). Source: Quote Investigator.

• "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do."

  Not by Mark Twain. There's no sign of it before 1990, when H. Jackson Brown Jr. printed it in P.S. I Love You as advice from his mother. Source: Quote Investigator.

• "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken."

  Not by Oscar Wilde. There's no evidence Wilde said it. The earliest exact wording is an anonymous online post from 1999. Two of his real lines are on this page. Source: Quote Investigator.

• "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."

  Not quite Henry David Thoreau's words. A shortened paraphrase of the end of Walden, where Thoreau wrote that "if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." Source: Walden Woods Project.

• "Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky."

  Not quite Rabindranath Tagore's words. Stray Birds (1916) says the clouds come "no longer to shed rain or usher storm but to give colour to my sunset sky." The original is in the quotes about life above. Source: Stray Birds on Project Gutenberg.

• "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world."

  Not quite John Muir's words. A misquote of My First Summer in the Sierra (1911). His real sentence is in the quotes about life above. Source: Sierra Club.

• "And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul."

  Not by John Muir. Muir never wrote it. A Tumblr user says she wrote it in 2014. Source: Sierra Club.

• "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

  Not by John Lennon. It was in print by 1956 and credited to the cartoonist Allen Saunders in 1957. Lennon sang a version of it in 1980. Source: Quote Investigator.

FAQs

What's the difference between inspirational and motivational quotes?

Motivational quotes push you to act. Inspirational quotes change how you see things. For the push, try the motivational quotes.

Are these quotes real?

Yes. Each one links to the source we checked it against, usually the original book or poem. Lines we couldn't trace were left out.

Why isn't "Be yourself; everyone else is already taken" here?

There's no evidence Oscar Wilde said it. It's in Famous Misquotes with the others.