The Best Quotes of All Time

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.