85 Insightful Quotes To Inspire

In our fast-paced, ever-evolving world, a little inspiration can go a long way. Whether you're facing a challenging day, seeking motivation to start a new project, or simply looking for a moment of reflection, the right words can provide the clarity and encouragement you need. This thoughtfully curated collection of the top 85 insightful quotes is designed to uplift your spirit and ignite your creativity. Join us as we delve into the wisdom of great thinkers, philosophers, and modern-day visionaries. Let their words resonate with you and inspire meaningful action in your life.

1. “I love children, especially when they cry, for then someone takes them away.” - Nancy Mitford

2. “There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.” - Haruki Murakami

3. “Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.” - Carl Sagan

4. “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!” - Larry Niven

5. “Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire, passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the human intellect that has made appearances appear and transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

6. “the greatest Americanshave not been born yetthey are waiting patientlyfor the past to die” - Saul Williams

7. “A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.” - Zora Neale Hurston

8. “Women should be respected as well! Generally speaking, men are held in great esteem in all parts of the world, so why shouldn't women have their share? Soldiers and war heroes are honored and commemorated, explorers are granted immortal fame, martyrs are revered, but how many people look upon women too as soldiers?...Women, who struggle and suffer pain to ensure the continuation of the human race, make much tougher and more courageous soldiers than all those big-mouthed freedom-fighting heroes put together!” - Anne Frank

9. “Life is a long lesson in humility.” - J.M. Barrie

10. “The world is not magic — and that’s the most magical thing about it.” - Sean Carroll

11. “People lose sight of their dreams, only to hold tight their fears.” - Gustave Geyer

12. “Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things—though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside.” - Jess C. Scott

13. “Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside.” - Jess C. Scott

14. “Leave your excuses and live your dreams!” - Paul F. Davis

15. “That's the big mistake a lot of people make when they wonder how soldiers can put their lives on the line day after day or how they can fight for something they may not believe in. Not everyone does. I've worked with soldiers on all sides of the political spectrum; I've met some who hated the army and others who wanted to make it a career. I've met geniuses and idiots, but when all is said and done,we do what we do for one another. For friendship. Not for country, not for patriotism, not because we're programmed killing machines, but because of the guy next to you. You fight for your friend, to keep him alive, and he fights for you, and everything about the army is built on this simple premise. ” - Nicholas Sparks

16. “Friends are the family you choose (~ Nin/Ithilnin, Elven rogue).” - Jess C. Scott

17. “What is reason given me for, if I am not to use it to avoid bringing unhappy beings into the world!” - Leo Tolstoy

18. “Living a good life is like flipping pancakes. If you hesitate, it splatters all over the place.” - Matt Simpson

19. “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.” - Alexis de Tocqueville

20. “A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.” - Vladimir Nabokov

21. “Crazy by definition isKnowing that true sanity isA figment of the educated mind” - Caleb Warta/Ritter

22. “Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment...'dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love -- which is to transform us.' Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.” - bell hooks

23. “Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” - M. Scott Peck

24. “A mere redrawing of borders, a change in governments, those things can never faze a Jewess with a good supply of hand wipes in her bag.” - Michael Chabon

25. “At that moment, he was meaner and madder than he’d ever been, but mainly at himself, which is the worst kind of mean and mad to be, because the only thing to do about it is to take it out on someone else.” - Victoria Forester

26. “I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn't like it, and changed.” - David Sedaris

27. “It's about how you're like a lighthouse, always searching far into the distance. But the thing you're looking for is usually close to you and always has been. That's why you have to look within yourself to find answers instead of searching beyond.” - Susane Colasanti

28. “Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed.Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn't quite sure he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art or about the flies Orr saw in Appleby's eyes. he had Orr's word to take for Appleby's eyes.” - Joseph Heller

29. “I was, but then I realized that I was holding on to something that didn't exist anymore. That the person I missed didn't exist anymore. People change. The things we like and dislike change. And we can wish they couldn't all day long but that never works.” - Sarah Ockler

30. “It's hard to be nice when the rest of the world is so mean.” - Sarah Dessen

31. “People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.” - Saul Bellow

32. “There ain't half been some clever bastards” - Ian Dury

33. “I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,' I said. 'By Black and White. By Indian and White. But I know this isn't true. The world is only broken into two tribes: the people who are assholes and the people who are not.” - Sherman Alexie

34. “Adversity is only yet another means to remind us of 'How Truly Awsome We All Are'!” - W. O. Wainwright

35. “There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.” - Anthony Powell

36. “Why'd you want to sing about sad things?" Candy had asked him."Because any fool can be happy," he'd said to her."It takes a man with real heart"—he'd made a fist and laid it against his chest—"to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.” - Clive Barker

37. “Seems like the light at the end of the tunnel may be you.” - Steven Tyler

38. “There is something cathartic about what has happened to me during this stay in hospital. I’ve heard others say that coming face to face with your own mortality can have this effect. You look with harsh, savage eyes at the life you are living and resolve to make the best of the time you have left, if you can be allowed the luxury of a few extra years to fulfill your plans. Around me, I see an urgency creep into the lives of friends once they have an AIDS diagnosis: they rush out and try to complete as many life projects as they can, before their health deteriorates.” - David Menadue

39. “This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.” - Steven Johnson

40. “Chance favors the connected mind.” - Steven Johnson

41. “Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own; and from morning to night, as from the cradle to the grave, it is but a succession of changes so gentle and easy that we can scarcely mark their progress.” - Charles Dickens

42. “I wanted a heaven. And I grew up striving for that world-- an eternal world- that would wash away my temporary misery.” - Craig Thompson

43. “She herself had grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer than another: there was no center of earth pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and tenderness for others.” - Edith Wharton

44. “A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.” - Jennifer Egan

45. “The actor playing Lee got really irritated. He tried to escape by turning, running, or twisting and talking or yelling above the voice of the illness, but the illness didn't sit quietly.” - Pete Earley

46. “As an improviser, I always find it jarring when I meet someone in real life whose first answer is no. “No, we can’t do that.” “No, that’s not in the budget.” “No, I will not hold your hand for a dollar.” What kind of way is that to live?” - Tina Fey

47. “Louie found the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow porcession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple. He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about.” - Laura Hillenbrand

48. “Life made you get your hands dirty; life was vengeful if you tried an easy route.” - Meghan Ciana Doidge

49. “Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one's dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made.” - Anthony Powell

50. “My world is about stories that entertain; emotions that move; people you’ll remember; literature that matters.” - M.G.Crisci

51. “I have never met the man I could despair of after discerning what lies in me apart from the grace of God.” - Oswald Chambers

52. “...just remember, darling, it is pain that changes our lives.” - Steve Martin

53. “Power is a trick. It lies where we believe it lies.” - George R.R. Martin

54. “To broaden one's prospective is to push back the swirling winds of ignorance.” - Joel T. McGrath

55. “...yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.” - Melville Herman

56. “...there occurred to me the simple epitaph which, when I am no more, I intend to have inscribed on my tombstone. It was this:"He was a man who acted from the best motives. There is one born every minute.” - P.G. Wodehouse

57. “I reckon if you care for someone and you can't have their love, you can either be a spiteful bastard about it or you can try your damnedest to make sure they're going to find some happiness in the world.” - Lindsay Buroker

58. “An empty man is full of himself.” - Edward Abbey

59. “The more a man judges, the less he loves” - Honoré de Balzac

60. “from the beginning, through themiddle years and up to theend:too bad, too bad, too bad.” - Charles Bukowski

61. “In my mind, President Snow should be viewed in front of marble pillars hung with oversized flags. It's jarring to see him surrounded by the ordinary objects in the room. Like taking the lid off a pot and finding a fanged viper instead of stew.” - Suzanne Collins

62. “It paid barely a living wage, but he stayed with it—gradually and in the end gratefully arriving at the point in life when you understand there are no great changes ahead.” - Ann Packer

63. “For me, the times I always regret are missed opportunities to say farewell to good people, to wish them long life and say to them in all sincerity, "You build and do not destroy; you sow goodwill and reap it; smiles bloom in the wake of your passing, and I will keep your kindness in trust and share it as occasion arises, so that your life will be a quenching draught of calm in a land of drought and stress." Too often I never get to say that when it should be said. Instead, I leave them with the equivalent of a "Later, dude!" only to discover there would be no later for us.” - Kevin Hearne

64. “Since every individual is accountable ultimately to the self, the formation of that self demands our utmost care and attention.” - Frank Herbert

65. “I told her that I can't be doing with the Wonder part of these trips, but she said it should be the icing on the cake... I've never liked wedding cake due to the amount of icing, but then imagine a wedding cake without it; just a dark, stodgy, horrible dry sponge. The icing covers up the mess, and that's how I feel about most of the Wonders. They use them to get people to visit a place that you probably wouldn't think about visiting.” - Karl Pilkington

66. “Where would we be without the success of our mothers?” - Edna Stewart

67. “In as much time as it takes to smoke a cigarette, a person's life was changed forever.” - Karen McQuestion

68. “Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one's eyes, of the various events of one's life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables ones to resuscitate dead recollections, but even then, there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable.” - Marcel Proust

69. “In the Catskills, nostalgia runs backwards. The upwardly mobile Jewish masses of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced by the Jews of 19th century Poland.” - Kevin Haworth

70. “Life’s easy.It’s living it that’s difficult.” - Mike Sasso

71. “Rush-hour on the A rain. A blind man staggers forth, his cane tapping lightlyown the aisle. He leans against the door,raises a violin to chin, and says I’m sorry to bother you, folks. But please. Just listen. And it kills me, the word sorry. As if something like musicshould be forgiven. He nuzzles into the wood like a lover, inhales, and at the first slow stroke, the crescendo seeps through our skin like warm water, we who have nothing but destinations, who dream of light but descend into the mouths of tunnels, searching. Beads of sweat fall from his brow, making dark roseson the instrument. His head swooning to each chord exhaled through the hollow torso. The woman beside me has put down her book, closed her eyes, the babyhas stopped crying, the cop has sat down, and I know this train is too fast for dreaming, that these iron jaws will always open to swallow a smile already lost.How insufficient the memory, to fail before death.how will hear these notes when the train slides into the yard, the lights turned out, and the songlingers with breaths rising from empty seats? I know I am too human to praise what is fading. But for now, I just want to listen as the train fillscompletely with warm water, and we are all swimming slowly toward the man with Mozart flowing from his hands. I want nothingbut to put my fingers inside his mouth, let that prayer hum through my veins. I want crawl into the hole in his violin.I want to sleep there until my flesh becomes music.” - Ocean Vuong

72. “There are times, Kruppe murmurs, when celibacy born of sad deprivation becomes a boon, nay, a source of great relief.” - Steven Erikson

73. “Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” - John Edgar Wideman

74. “Denial does not change reality for everyone else. Only for the one denying and those who are foolish enough to believe the fantasy.” - Elle Casey

75. “He who least likes courting favour, ought also least to think of resenting neglect; to feel wounded at being refused a distinction can only arise from an overweening appetite to have it.” - Plutarch

76. “We believe people with Passion CAN change the World for the Better." -Steve Jobs” - Steve Jobs

77. “Because sometimes when someone is telling you something really important, it’s best to just let there be silence, to really think about what they’re saying. A lot of times people think they have to say something all insightful or wise or something to try and make the person feel better. But really, sometimes silence is best.” - Lauren Barnholdt

78. “Freedom, privileges, options, must constantly be exercised, even at the risk of inconvenience. Otherwise they fall into desuetude and become unfashionable, unorthodox—finally irregulationary.” - Jack Vance

79. “I suppose that's one of the ironies of life doing the wrong thing at the right moment.” - Charlie Chaplin

80. “To truly defeat an enemy, no sacrifice is too great.” - Preston Morgan

81. “I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan” - George Orwell

82. “Only learning oneself better, and understanding one’s place in the world, made the touch of another mundane.” - N.K. Jemisin

83. “...This is a place of learning where very few learn anything of value. That you, who have courage and intelligence, are held in contempt by most of your kind here because you have no sorcery... I have seen you protect others, though they consider you to be weaker than they. I have seen a very few decent people, like the boy we took from the tower. I have seen women trade pleasure for coin to feed their children, and others do the same so that they could ignore their children while making themselves foolish with wines and powders. I have seen men who labor as long as the sun is up go home to wives who hold them in contempt for never being there. I have seen men beat and use those whom they should protect, even their own children. I have seen your kind place others of their own in slavery. I have seen them fighting to be free of the same. I have seen men of the law betray it, men who hate the law be kind. I have seen gentle defenders, sadistic healers, creators of beauty scorned while craftsmen of destruction are worshiped. Your Kind, Aleran, are the most vicious and gentle, most savage and noble, most treacherous and loyal, most terrifying and fascinating creatures I have ever seen.” - Jim Butcher

84. “There’s nothing you could do to make me any more or less gay, Dad. It’s who I am.”“It’s not who you are. It’s part of who you are, but it’s not who you are. You’re so much more than just that, and I’m proud of you. All of you." ~ Lucas' Father” - Madison Parker

85. “Soil, blood, seed- Let me draw strength from you. let it be enough.” - Emily Whitman