101 Inspiring Quotes From the Most Successful People in History
Whenever you're struggling to get things done, turn to this list of quotes for the inspiration and motivation you need to be the best you can be.
BY SUJAN PATEL 
IMAGE: Getty Images
Inspiration can come from anywhere, but one of my favorite sources is inspirational quotes. There are several that have helped me stay on track throughout my business adventures, and I hope the following sayings from some of the most successful people in history will have the same effect on you:
1. "Success is most often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable." -- Coco Chanel
2. "Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out."
- John Wooden
3. "Courage is grace under pressure." -- Ernest Hemingway
4. "If you are not willing to risk the usual, you will have to settle for the ordinary."
- Jim Rohn
5. "Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning." -- Albert Einstein
6. "Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life -- think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success." -- Swami Vivekananda
7. "Sometimes you can't see yourself clearly until you see yourself through the eyes of others." -- Ellen DeGeneres
8. "All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them."
- Walt Disney
9. "It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop."
- Confucius
10. "Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."
- Winston Churchill
11. "Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago." -- Warren Buffett
12. "Whenever you see a successful person, you only see the public glories, never the private sacrifices to reach them." -- Vaibhav Shah
13. "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened." -- Dr. Seuss
14. "Success? I don't know what that word means. I'm happy. But success, that goes back to what in somebody's eyes success means. For me, success is inner peace. That's a good day for me." -- Denzel Washington
15. "You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough." -- Mae West
16. "Opportunities don't happen. You create them." -- Chris Grosser
17. "Once you choose hope, anything's possible." -- Christopher Reeve
18. "Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to become a person of value." -- Albert Einstein
19. "There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires." -- Nelson Mandela
20. "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." -- Charles Darwin
21. "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched -- they must be felt with the heart." -- Helen Keller
22. "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." -- Eleanor Roosevelt
23. "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever." --Mahatma Gandhi
24. "The best revenge is massive success." -- Frank Sinatra
25. "The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting."
- Walt Disney
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26. "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -- Thomas Edison
27. "When you cease to dream you cease to live." -- Malcolm Forbes
28. "A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him." -- David Brinkley
29. "May you live every day of your life." -- Jonathan Swift
30. "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." -- Eleanor Roosevelt
31. "Failure is another steppingstone to greatness." -- Oprah Winfrey
32. "The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one's destiny to do, and then do it." -- Henry Ford
33. "If you're not stubborn, you'll give up on experiments too soon. And if you're not flexible, you'll pound your head against the wall and you won't see a different solution to a problem you're trying to solve." -- Jeff Bezos
34. "If you're going through hell, keep going." -- Winston Churchill
35. "In order to be irreplaceable one must always be different." -- Coco Chanel
36. "What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise." -- Oscar Wilde
37. "You miss 100 percent of the shots you don't take." -- Wayne Gretzky
38. "The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success."
- Bruce Feirstein
39. "The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."
- Dolly Parton
40. "To me, business isn't about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It's about being true to yourself, your ideas and focusing on the essentials."--Richard Branson
41. "The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes." -- Frank Lloyd Wright
42. "Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you." -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
43. "You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them."
- Michael Jordan
44. "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
- Albert Einstein
45. "You can't please everyone, and you can't make everyone like you." -- Katie Couric
46. "There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed."
-Ray Goforth
47. "I believe every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don't intend to waste any of mine."-Neil Armstrong
48. "Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can." -- Arthur Ashe
49. "Don't limit yourself. Many people limit themselves to what they think they can do. You can go as far as your mind lets you. What you believe, remember, you can achieve."-Mary Kay Ash
50. "People ask, 'What's the best role you've ever played?' The next one."
- Kevin Kline
51. "The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." -- Mark Twain
52. "I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have." -- Thomas Jefferson
53. "It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong."
- Abraham Lincoln
54. "Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day-in and day-out."
- Robert Collier
55. "As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others." -- Audrey Hepburn
56. "If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work." -- Thomas J. Watson
57. "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader." -- John Quincy Adams
58. "All progress takes place outside the comfort zone." -- Michael John Bobak
59. "The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate." -- Oprah Winfrey
60. "You may only succeed if you desire succeeding; you may only fail if you do not mind failing." -- Philippos
61. "A dream doesn't become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination, and hard work."-Colin Powell
62. "Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone."
-Pablo Picasso
63. "The biggest risk is not taking any risk... In a world that's changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks." -- Mark Zuckerberg
64. "We become what we think about most of the time, and that's the strangest secret." -- Earl Nightingale
65. "Do one thing every day that scares you." -- Eleanor Roosevelt
66. "The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary."
- Vidal Sassoon
67. "Don't be afraid to give up the good to go for the great." -- John D. Rockefeller
68. "Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And 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. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it."--Steve Jobs
69. "Don't worry about failure; you only have to be right once." -- Drew Houston
70. "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
71. "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
72. "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
- Mark Twain
73. "Keep your face to the sunshine and you can never see the shadow."
- Helen Keller
74. "The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself." -- Mark Caine
75. "One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody." -- Mother Teresa
76. "Identity is a prison you can never escape, but the way to redeem your past is not to run from it, but to try to understand it, and use it as a foundation to grow." -- Jay-Z
77. "The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus." -- Bruce Lee
78. "Rarely have I seen a situation where doing less than the other guy is a good strategy." -- Jimmy Spithill
79. "If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased."
- Katharine Hepburn
80. "Keep on going, and the chances are that you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I never heard of anyone ever stumbling on something sitting down." -- Charles F. Kettering
81. "I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward."
- Charlotte Bronte
82. "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
- Steve Jobs
83. "Life is short, and it is here to be lived." -- Kate Winslet
84. "Everything you can imagine is real." -- Pablo Picasso
85. "Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."
- Barack Obama
86. "If you want to make a permanent change, stop focusing on the size of your problems and start focusing on the size of you!" -- T. Harv Eker
87. "Successful people do what unsuccessful people are not willing to do. Don't wish it were easier; wish you were better." -- Jim Rohn
88. "It is never too late to be what you might have been." -- George Eliot
89. "If you love what you do and are willing to do what it takes, it's within your reach. And it'll be worth every minute you spend alone at night, thinking and thinking about what it is you want to design or build." -- Steve Wozniak
90. "In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it." -- Jane Smiley
91. "In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you."
- Deepak Chopra
92. "Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time." -- George Bernard Shaw
93. "I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well." -- Diane Ackerman
94. "As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others." -- Bill Gates
95. "Our greatest fear should not be of failure... but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter." -- Francis Chan
96. "Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken." -- Oscar Wilde
97. "If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much." -- Jim Rohn
98. "But you have to do what you dream of doing even while you're afraid."
- Arianna Huffington
99. "To be successful, you must accept all challenges that come your way. You can't just accept the ones you like." -- Mike Gafka
100. "Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it's holy ground. There's no greater investment." -- Stephen Covey
101. "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." -- Thomas A. Edison
As Zig Ziglar said, motivation doesn't last. But neither does showering. That's why both are recommended daily. Whenever you're struggling to get things done, turn to these quotes for the inspiration and motivation you need to be the best you can be.
Have another quote that you feel should be added to this list? Share it by leaving a comment below!
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
