Innovate YourselF
Quotes to help you discover and create yourself, take action, innovate, and journey towards finding your calling
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world." -Henry David Thoreau
“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one… I learned this, at least, by my experiment; 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.” -Henry David Thoreau
“You can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed.” -Ken Kersey
“The tragedy of life is not death, but what we let die inside us while we live.” -Norman Cousins
"It's all right to have butterflies in your stomach. Just get them to fly in formation -Dr. Rob Gilbert
"Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt." -William Shakespeare
"Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so." -William Shakespeare
"The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving." -Oliver Wendell Holmes
"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." -Andre Gide
"Men are born to succeed, not to fail." -Henry David Thoreau
"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head." -Sally Kempton
"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Eighty percent of success is showing up." -Woody Allen
"You don't have to have drama in your life to make your life dramatic." -Darin Eich
"Once you accept your own death you are free to live." -Saul Alinsky
" If you want a place in the sun, you must leave the shade of the family tree." -Osage Saying
"He not busy being born is busy dying." -Bob Dylan
"This above all: to thine own self be true." -William Shakespeare
"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves to be like other people." -Arthur Schopenhauer
"If you're just part of the herd, sooner or later you're gonna get milked." -Darin Eich
"Drive thy business, or it will drive thee." -Benjamin Franklin
"One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar." -Helen Keller
"Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live." -Margaret Fuller
"I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." -Lily Tomlin
"If you want a quality, act as if you already had it. Try the "as if" technique." -William James
"Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it." -Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action. -Frank Tibolt
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. -Thomas Edison
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’” –Jack Kerouac
"You can drop it like it's hot, but more importantly, pick it up like you'd never been burned." -Darin Eich
"You can't build a reputation on what you're GOING to do." -Henry Ford
"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." -Thomas Edison
"Fall seven times, stand up eight." -Japanese Proverb
"No day but today" -RENT
"Just Do It" -Nike
"Positive anything is better than negative nothing." -Elbert Hubbard
"Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand." -Thomas Carlyle
"The best way out is always through" -Robert Frost
"Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action." -Benjamin Disraeli
"It is by acts and not by ideas that people live." -Anatole France
"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." -Theodore Roosevelt
"One meets his destiny often on the road he takes to avoid it." -French Proverb
"Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them up." -James A. Garfield
"Many a man fails because he never tries." -Norman MacEwan
"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." -Franklin Delano Roosevelt
"Let him that would move the world, first move himself." -Socrates
"Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power." -Seneca
"For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been!" -John Greenleaf Whittier
"Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work." -Thomas A. Edison
"No man is such a conqueror as the man who has defeated himself." -Henry Ward Beecher
"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Small ills are the fountains of most of our groans. Men trip not on mountains, they stumble on stones." -Chinese Proverb
"You see things and you say 'Why?'; but I dream things that never were and I say 'Why not?'" -George Bernard Shaw
"Our strength grows out of weakness." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Don't tell me that worry doesn't do any good. I know better. The things I worry about don't happen." -Anonymous
"The weakest link in the chain is the strongest because it can break it." -Stanislaw J. Lee
"You can't hold a man down without staying down with him." -Booker T. Washington
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small compared to what lies within us." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow." -Helen Keller
“Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.” -Edmund Burke
“Dream as if you’ll live forever; live as if you’ll die tomorrow.” -James Dean
“I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” -Robert Frost
“Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” -Thomas Jefferson
“The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.” -Charles du Bois
“The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning.” -Ivy Baker Priest
“You can be greater than anything that can happen to you.” -Norman Vincent Peale
“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” -Will Rogers
“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” -George Eliot
“When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and the time that the tide will turn.” -Harriet Beecher Stowe
“Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.” -H. Jackson Browne
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” -Henry David Thoreau
“What would it be like if you lived each day, each breath, as a work of art in progress? Imagine that you are a masterpiece unfolding, every second of every day, a work of art taking form with every breath.” -Thomas Crum
“There is no education like adversity.” -Benjamin Disraeli
“Some things have to be believed to be seen.” -Ralph Hodgson
“There is a future that makes itself and a future we make. The real future is composed of both.” -Alain
“All work is a seed sown: It grows and spreads and sows itself anew.” -Thomas Carlyle
“Life is not in holding a good hand but in playing a poor hand well.” -Unknown
“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” -Erich Fromm
“To be loved, love.” -Decimus Maximus Ausonius
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” -Eleanor Roosevelt
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.” -John Milton
“Find the journey’s end in every step.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly, kind companion.” -William Makepeace Thackeray
“Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone.” -Ella Wheeler Wilcox
“Become so wrapped up in something that you forget to be afraid.” -Lady Bird Johnson
“Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.” -Babe Ruth
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face.” -Eleanor Roosevelt
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” -Marcus Aurelius
“Do not walk through time without leaving worthy evidence of your passage.” -Pope John XXIII
“Life is a journey, not a destination. Happiness is not “there” but here, not “tomorrow” but today.” -Sidney Greenberg
“A grateful mind is a great mind which eventually attracts to itself great things.” -Plato
“I will not just live my life. I will not just spend my life. I will invest my life.” -Helen Keller
“No matter how long you live, die young.” -Elbert Hubbard
“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” -Edmond Burke
“A candle loses nothing of its light when lighting another.” -Kahlil Gibran
“You make a living by what you get. You make a life by what you give.” -Winston Churchill
“It is one of the beautiful compensations of this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We can’t do much about the length of our lives, but we can do plenty about its width and depth.” -Evan Esar
“One is not born into the world to do everything but to do something.” -Henry David Thoreau
“Begin to weave and God will give the thread” -German Proverb
“What you are is God’s gift to you. What you make of it is your gift to God.” -Anthony Dalla Villa
“Each man has his own gift from God” -I Corinthians 4:7