Have you ever come across a simple line that inspired you to make a major life change? The best quotes of all time are distillations of the experiences and thoughts of inspiring people. They can have a powerful effect on us.
A few impactful words can change your mind on an important issue, or shift your entire perspective on a problem. Sometimes a good quote is just what you need when you’re looking for a quick smile and a bit of motivation.
We’ve looked through hundreds of quotes by famous leaders and thinkers. We picked some of the best to share with you in a few categories. These are inspiring, motivational quotes that will hopefully get you thinking about your life, your work, or your dreams – and perhaps show you ways to make these things better.
We’ve been updating this article with more quotes since it first appeared. It now stands at around 300! Please also check out our list of the Best Quotes About Life!
If your own favorite inspirational and motivational quotes aren’t on the list, or you know another version of one that is, let us know in the comments.
Here’s our list of the best quotes of all time – let’s get started!
Quotes on Age
If there’s a single thing all living things have in common, then it’s that we all age. Here are some of our top pieces of wisdom about youth, aging, and age:
The secret to staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.
– Lucille Ball
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.
– Henry Ford
We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
– George Bernard Shaw
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
– Mark Twain
No one is so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.
– Henry David Thoreau
Forty is the old age of youth; fifty is the youth of old age.
– Victor Hugo
The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.
– Oscar Wilde
Life’s tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.
– Benjamin Franklin
Middle age is when you’re sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn’t for you.
– Ogden Nash
You know you are getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.
– Bob Hope
Anger Quotes
Feeling a little hot under the collar? Here are some of our top picks for the best adages on anger:
I would not look upon anger as something foreign to me that I have to fight… I have to deal with my anger with care, with love, with tenderness, with nonviolence.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
In times of great stress or adversity, it’s always best to keep busy, to plow your anger and your energy into something positive.
– Lee Iacocca
Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.
– Maya Angelou
He who angers you, conquers you.
– Elizabeth Kenny
Man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep.
– Mohandas Gandhi
When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.
– Mark Twain
Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
– William Congreve
You will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger.
– Buddha
Anyone can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person at the right time and for the right purpose and in the right way – that is not within everyone’s power and that is not easy.
– Aristotle
Anger repressed can poison a relationship as surely as the cruelest words.
– Dr. Joyce Brothers
Thoughtful Beauty Quotes
Here is some of our favorite wisdom regarding beauty. Because it is so notoriously subjective, beauty – of places, of ideas, and of course of people – offers a lot of perspective for contemplation.
Beauty, without expression, tires.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
– Leo Tolstoy
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
– Margaret Hungerford
I’m tired of all the nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That’s deep enough. What do you want – an adorable pancreas?
– Jean Kerr
Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.
– Confucius
Some people, no matter how old they get, never lose their beauty – they merely move it from their faces into their hearts.
– Martin Buxbaum
It is not beauty that endears; it’s love that makes us see beauty.
– Leo Tolstoy
Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.
– Dorothy Parker
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty is whatever gives joy.
– Edna St. Vincent Millay
Motivational Quotes on Beginnings and Starting Out
Here are some of our favorite quotes about starting out and making new beginnings.
Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.
– Les Brown
Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.
– Carl Bard
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
– Mark Twain
Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
– Samuel Johnson
Every artist was first an amateur.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.
– Steve Jobs
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.
– Mark Twain
Much of the advice given to young men about saving money is wrong. I never saved a cent until I was forty years old. I invested in myself – in study, in mastering my tools, in preparation. Many a man who is putting a few dollars a week into the bank would do much better to put it into himself.
– Henry Ford
Brilliant Business Quotes
Here are some of our top picks of sage advice for managers, business owners, and workers who’re aiming high.
A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.
– Henry Ford
By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.
– Robert Frost
Never burn bridges. Today’s junior jerk, tomorrow’s senior partner.
– Sigourney Weaver
The secret of business is to know something that nobody else knows.
– Aristotle Onassis
It is difficult, but not impossible, to conduct strictly honest business.
– Mahatma Gandhi
If your business keeps you so busy that you have no time for anything else, there must be something wrong either with you or with your business.
– William J. H. Boetck
If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work.
– Kahlil Gibran
A real entrepreneur is somebody who has no safety net underneath them.
– Henry Kravis
Good products can be sold by honest advertising. If you don’t think the product is good, you have no business to be advertising it.
– David Ogilvy
Drive your business. Let not your business drive you.
– Benjamin Franklin
Great Quotes About Change
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on change:
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
– Gandhi
The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.
– Oprah Winfrey
The only thing constant in life is change.
– Francois de la Rochefoucauld
He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.
– Harold Wilson
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
– George Bernard Shaw
Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.
– Jacob M. Braude
No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
– Charles Darwin
Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.
– Confucius
Change the changeable, accept the unchangeable, and remove yourself from the unacceptable.
– Denis Waitley
Children Quotes
Children! Truly one of life’s biggest delights – and one of its biggest challenges. As we teach them, so we learn from them. Here’s what some of the best thinkers in history have said about children.
Children are one third of our population and all of our future.
– Select Panel for the Promotion of Child Health
Adults are always asking little kids what they want to be when they grow up ’cause they’re looking for ideas.
– Paula Poundstone
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
– James Baldwin
Don’t handicap your children by making their lives easy.
– Robert A. Heinlein
There’s nothing that can help you understand your beliefs more than trying to explain them to an inquisitive child.
– Frank A. Clark
Pretty much all the honest truth telling in the world is done by children.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes
We worry about what a child will be tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today.
– Stacia Tauscher
We cannot always build the future of our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.
– Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Children are our most valuable resource.
– Herbert Hoover
Never underestimate a child’s ability to get into more trouble.
– Martin Mull
Always be nice to your children because they are the ones who will choose your rest home.
– Phyllis Diller
Motivational Quotes on Courage
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of the ages on courage:
It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.
– E.E. Cummings
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
– Winston Churchill
Courage is grace under pressure.
– Ernest Hemingway
Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway.
– John Wayne
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
– Mark Twain
Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
– Ambrose Redmoon
Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.
– Bruce Lee
Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says ‘I’ll try again tomorrow.’
– Mary Anne Radmacher
Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.
– W. Clement Stone
In any situation, the best thing you can do is the right thing; the next best thing you can do is the wrong thing; the worst thing you can do is nothing.
– Theodore Roosevelt
Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage.
– Confucius
Comforting Quotes About Death
Here are some of our top picks for the best sayings on death and dying:
In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
– Benjamin Franklin
Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.
– Buddha
Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation. For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.
– Albert Einstein
The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
– Mark Twain
The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.
– Will Rogers
As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.
– Leonardo da Vinci
The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
– Edgar Allan Poe
Death is nothing, but to live defeated and inglorious is to die daily.
– Napoleon Bonaparte
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
– Mark Twain
No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.
– Plato
Quotes on Education
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on education:
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
– Aristotle
Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don’t.
– Pete Seeger
To repeat what others have said requires education. To challenge it requires brains.
– Marry Pettibone Poole
It is possible to store the mind with a million facts and still be entirely uneducated.
– Alec Bourne
Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself.
– Charles J. Sykes (although often attributed to Bill Gates due to a viral email)
Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.
– Albert Einstein
Education is like a double-edged sword. It may be turned to dangerous uses if it is not properly handled.
– Wu Ting-Fang
Ignorance, the root and the stem of every evil.
– Plato
Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
– Malcolm Forbes
Outstanding Quotes on Equality
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on equality:
The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.
– Aristotle
Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions. It only guarantees equality of opportunity.
– Irving Kristol
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
– Steven Pinker
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
– Thomas Jefferson
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
– George Orwell
I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.
– Mohandas Gandhi
Before God we are all equally wise – and equally foolish.
– Albert Einstein
Nobody can give you freedom. Nobody can give you equality or justice or anything. If you’re a man, you take it.
– Malcolm X
The sole equality on earth is death.
– Philip James Bailey
To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.
– William Faulkner
Unless man is committed to the belief that all mankind are his brothers, then he labors in vain and hypocritically in the vineyards of equality.
– Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
Pick-me-up Quotes on Failure
Here are some of our top picks for wise words on the topic of failure:
Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.
– John Wooden
I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
– Bill Cosby
The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.
– Sven Goran Eriksson
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
– Henry Ford
Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.
– Winston Churchill
All misfortune is but a stepping stone to fortune.
– Henry David Thoreau
You can do anything, but not everything.
– David Allen
The road to success and the road to failure are almost exactly the same.
– Colin R. Davis
I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.
– Thomas Edison
The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.
– Walt Disney
No one can cheat you out of ultimate success but yourself.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.
– Bill Cosby
Family Quotes
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on family:
The only rock I know that stays steady, the only institution I know that works is the family.
– Lee Iacocca
Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.
– George Burns
A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
– George Bernard Shaw
You know the only people who are always sure about the proper way to raise children? Those who’ve never had any.
– Bill Cosby
Family isn’t about whose blood you have. It’s about who you care about.
– Trey Parker and Matt Stone
All happy families resemble one another. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
– Leo Tolstoy
Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.
– Jane Howard
You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.
– Desmond Tutu
As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
– Pope John Paul II
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
– George Bernard Shaw
Quotes About Friendship
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on friends:
Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend.
– Albert Camus
Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
– Aristotle
Your friend is the man who knows all about you and still likes you.
– Elbert Hubbard
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
– Dale Carnegie
True friends stab you in the front.
– Oscar Wilde
Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.
– Helen Keller
I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.
– Abraham Lincoln
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value. Rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
– C. S. Lewis
There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met.
– William Butler Yeats
Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
– George Eliot
Powerful Happiness Quotes
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on happiness:
Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
– Abraham Lincoln
Happiness is not doing fun things. Happiness is doing meaningful things. – Maxime Lagacé
If you aren’t grateful for what you already have, what makes you think you would be happy with more? – Roy T. Bennett
Happiness is a butterfly which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
– Nathaniel Hawthorne
The best way to cheer yourself up is to cheer somebody else up.
– Mark Twain
The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.
– Vince Lombardi
It is very important to generate a good attitude, a good heart, as much as possible. From this, happiness in both the short term and the long term for both yourself and others will come.
– Dalai Lama
Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.
– Robert Frost
Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.
– Storm Jameson
The U.S. Constitution doesn’t guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself.
– Benjamin Franklin
Humor Quotes
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on humor (or just humorous quotes we love):
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
– Oscar Wilde
I intend to live forever. So far, so good. – Steven Wright
There’s so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?
– Dick Cavett
Never be afraid to laugh at yourself. After all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.
– Dame Edna Everage
That is the saving grace of humor. If you fail no one is laughing at you.
– A. Whitney Brown
Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
– Albert Schweitzer
Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.
– Christopher Morely
Life is tough, and if you have the ability to laugh at it you have the ability to enjoy it.
– Salma Hayek
The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful.
– Kurt Vonnegut
Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.
– E.B. White
You are not angry with people when you laugh at them. Humor teaches tolerance.
– W. Somerset Maugham
I think the next best thing to solving a problem is finding some humor in it.
– Frank Howard Clark
Enchanting Quotes About Love
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on love:
Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
– Aristotle
To love is risky. Not to love is foolish. – Maxime Lagacé
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Age does not protect you from love, but love to some extent protects you from age. – Jeanne Moreau
Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
– Robert Heinlein
Love is friendship, set on fire.
– Jeremy Taylor
Love doesn’t make the world go round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
– Elizabeth Browning
It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Love is, above all else, the gift of oneself.
– Jean Anouilh
Love at first sight is easy to understand; it’s when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.
– Amy Bloom
Love is the irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
– Mark Twain
Friendship may, and often does, grow into love, but love never subsides into friendship.
– Lord Byron
Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.
– Maya Angelou
Quotes About Men and Women
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on men and women:
A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age.
– Robert Frost
Women marry men hoping they will change. Men marry women hoping they will not. So each is inevitably disappointed.
– Albert Einstein
Men are what their mothers made them.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
– Margaret Fuller
If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.
– Plato
For most of history, ‘Anonymous’ was a woman.
– Virginia Woolf
Women are made to be loved, not understood.
– Oscar Wilde
There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves.
– Will Rogers
Women don’t want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think – in a deeper voice.
– Bill Cosby
Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
– Timothy Leary
Inspiring Quotes on Money
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on money:
The best way to teach your kids about taxes is by eating 30 percent of their ice cream. – Bill Murray
The more you learn, the more you earn. – Warren Buffett
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
– Mark Twain
I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.
– Warren Buffet
A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.
– Robert Frost
Money won’t create success. The freedom to make it will.
– Nelson Mandela
Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the ‘gotta have it’ scale.
– Zig Ziglar
Time is money.
– Benjamin Franklin
If you’re given a choice between money and sex appeal, take the money. As you get older, the money will become your sex appeal.
– Katherine Hepburn
It is the wretchedness of being rich that you have to live with rich people.
– Logan Pearsall Smith
The only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.
– Edith Wharton
Noteworthy Quotes on Movies
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes on movies (about movies, not from them – for those, check out our 100 all-time-best movie quotes!).
This film cost $31 million. With that kind of money I could have invaded some country.
– Clint Eastwood
All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.
– Steve Martin
A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.
– David Mamet
Shoot a few scenes out of focus. I want to win the foreign film award.
– Billy Wilder
The best reason to make a film is that you feel passionately about it.
– Jodie Foster
A film has its own life and takes its own time.
– Aaron Eckhart
Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.
– Walt Disney
The average Hollywood film star’s ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman, and have a French boyfriend.
– Katharine Hepburn
In the theater, you go from point A to point Z, building your performance as the evening progresses. You have to relinquish that control on a film.
– Gwyneth Paltrow
Every great film should seem new every time you see it.
– Roger Ebert
Memorable Music Quotes
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on music:
Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.
– Ed Gardner
Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence.
– Robert Fripp
Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.
– Plato
Life is one grand, sweet song so start the music.
– Ronald Reagan
Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.
– Bill Cosby
Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
– Samuel Johnson
Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.
– Lao Tzu
I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.
– Elvis Presley
Music is a safe kind of high.
– Jimi Hendrix
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
– Victor Hugo
Famous Quotes About Peace
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on peace:
If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.
– John Lennon
Peace begins with a smile.
– Mother Teresa
Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.
– Albert Einstein
Peace is its own reward.
– Mohandas Gandhi
If you want to make peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
– Moshe Dayan
The only alternative to coexistence is codestruction.
– Jawaharlal Nehru
Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.
– George Carlin
Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.
– Dalai Lama
Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.
– Buddha
It isn’t enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.
– George Washington
Powerful Quotes About Politics
Here are some of our top picks for the best sayings on politics:
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.
– Plato
Politics is such a torment that I advise everyone I love not to mix with it.
– Thomas Jefferson
I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
– Charles De Gaulle
Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it’s important.
– Eugene McCarthy
Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year and to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.
– Winston Churchill
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
– H.L. Mencken
Politics have no relation to morals.
– Niccolo Machiavelli
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
– John Kenneth Galbraith
It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.
– Ronald Reagan
Quotes about Science
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on science:
Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.
– Bertrand Russell
Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.
– George Bernard Shaw
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
– Charles Darwin
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
– Isaac Asimov
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.
– Sir William Bragg
New discoveries in science will continue to create a thousand new frontiers for those who still would adventure.
– Herbert Hoover
However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible.
– Lewis Mumford
I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.
– Marie Curie
Science is simply common sense at its best. That is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
– Thomas Huxley
Sports Quotes
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on sports:
Sports do not build character. They reveal it.
– Heywood Broun
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
– George Orwell
We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time.
– Vince Lombardi
I went to a fight last night and a hockey game broke out.
– Rodney Dangerfield
Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.
– George F. Will
You can’t win unless you learn how to lose.
– Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Winners never quit and quitters never win.
– Vince Lombardi
Sport is imposing order on what was chaos.
– Anthony Starr
The difference between the old ballplayer and the new ballplayer is the jersey. The old ballplayer cared about the name on the front. The new ballplayer cares about the name on the back.
– Steve Garvey
The breakfast of champions is not cereal, it’s the opposition.
– Nick Seitz
Inspiring Quotes on Success
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on success:
Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.
– Thomas Edison
A goal is a dream with a deadline.
– Napoleon Hill
Motivation is a fire from within. If someone else tries to light that fire under you, chances are it will burn very briefly.
– Stephen R. Covey
People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.
– Zig Ziglar
Eighty percent of success is showing up.
– Woody Allen
Never leave that till tomorrow which you can do today.
– Benjamin Franklin
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.
– Aristotle
Anyone can do something when they want to do it. Really successful people do things when they don’t want to do it.
– Dr. Phil
Opportunity is missed by most people, because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
– Maya Angelou
Famous Quotes on War
Here are some of our top picks for the best quotes of all time on war:
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
– Albert Einstein
May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won’t.
– George Patton
You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.
– Jeannette Rankin
There never was a good war or a bad peace.
– Benjamin Franklin
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless whether the mad destruction is brought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
– Mahatma Gandhi
There is no glory in battle worth the blood it costs.
– Dwight Eisenhower
It is well that war is so terrible – otherwise we would grow too fond of it.
– Robert E. Lee
War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
– Thomas Mann
Civil war? What does that mean? Is there any foreign war? Isn’t every war fought between men, between brothers?
– Victor Hugo
I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
– John Adams
Wise Quotes
Here are some of our top picks for the wisest quotes of all time: Thinking about life itself.
In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.
– Robert Frost
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. – Søren Kierkegaard
Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well. – Jack London
A little foolishness, enough to enjoy life, and a little wisdom to avoid the errors, that will do. – Osho
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. – Rita Mae Brown
If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.
– Milton Berle
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time. But you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
– Abraham Lincoln
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
– Thomas Jefferson
The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.
– Socrates
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self control — these three alone lead to power.
– Alfred, Lord Tennyson
There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance.
– Hippocrates
Other Great Quotes
While reviewing quotes there were some favorites that didn’t quite fit within the categories above, but they were still considered worth including as some of the best quotes of all time. Here are those quotes:
That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
– Eleanor Roosevelt
Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.
– Henry Ford
If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems.
– Frank Wilczek
Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
– Benjamin Franklin
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
– William Arthur Ward
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
– Thomas Edison
I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.
– Voltaire
Do you have any favorite quotes you’d put your personal list of the best quotes of all time? Remember, different quotes will touch and inspire different people in different ways. Your favorite quote might become a favorite of other readers as well. Please leave a comment below and share your favorite quotes with the rest of us.
