85 Star-Inspired Motivational Quotes

Gazing up at the night sky, many of us find a sense of wonder and inspiration in the stars above. Their distant shimmer has sparked the imagination of poets, philosophers, and dreamers across centuries. As celestial symbols of hope, aspiration, and the unknown, stars remind us to aim high and reach for our dreams despite the challenges we face. In this collection of the top 85 star-inspired motivational quotes, you'll find words that shine light on perseverance, ambition, and the endless possibilities that lie ahead. Whether you're looking for a daily dose of motivation or seeking encouragement for a specific journey, these quotes are sure to inspire you to look to the stars and believe in the extraordinary potential within yourself.

1. “What Is Love? I have met in the streets a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the water passed through his shoes and the stars through his soul” - Victor Hugo

2. “What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars.” - Jodi Picoult

3. “Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” - Marcus Aurelius

4. “You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all Ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all: you never enjoy the world.” - Thomas Traherne

5. “Mortal as I am, I know that I am born for a day. But when I follow at my pleasure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the earth.” - Ptolemy

6. “I love the stars.Because they can't say anything.I love the stars.Because they do not judge anyone.” - Natsuki Takaya

7. “The clouds were disappearing rapidly, leaving the stars to die. The night dried up.” - André Breton

8. “They rarely discovered a star red as a distant crime or a star-fish.” - André Breton

9. “There are even some stars so remote that their light will reach the Earth only when Earth itself is a dead planet, as they themselves are dead, so that the living Earth will never be visited by that forlorn ray of light, without a living source, without a living destination. Often on fine nights when the park of this establishment is vacant, I amuse myself with this marvelous instrument (telescope). I go upstairs, walk across the grass, sit on a bench in the Avenue of Oaks – and there, in my solitude, I enjoy the pleasure of weighing the rays of dead stars.” - Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

10. “If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.” - Anne Michaels

11. “Witches are naturally nosy,” said Miss Tick, standing up. “Well, I must go. I hope we shall meet again. I will give you some free advice, though.”“Will it cost me anything?”“What? I just said it was free!” said Miss Tick.“Yes, but my father said that free advice often turns out to be expensive,” said Tiffany.Miss Tick sniffed. “You could say this advice is priceless,” she said, “Are you listening?”“Yes,” said Tiffany.“Good. Now...if you trust in yourself...”“Yes?”“...and believe in your dreams...”“Yes?”“...and follow your star...” Miss Tick went on.“Yes?”“...you’ll still be beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye.” - Terry Pratchett

12. “The spaces between stars are where the work of the universe is done.” - Ivan Doig

13. “Let me peer out at the worldthrough your lens. (Maybe I'll shudder,or gasp, or tilt my head in a question.)Let me see how your blueis my turquoise and my orangeis your gold. Suddenly binarystars, we have startlinggravity. Let's comparescintillation - let's sharestarlight.” - Naomi Shihab Nye

14. “We both wondered whether these contradictions that one can't avoid if one begins to think of time and space may not really be proofs that the whole of life is a dream, and the moon and stars bits of nightmare.” - Arthur Machen

15. “For you, a comet, under a blue sky, leaves trail of color,For you, a star, dreams of being able to kiss you, dream to hear your voiceFor you, full moon, keep vigil for you, my girl, keep vigil for you, my love.” - Miguel Ángel Sáez Gutiérrez «Marino»

16. “All we ever see of stars are their old photographs.” - Alan Moore

17. “Or sit they girt by laws unknownWhereto the senses serve as bars –With fire of unrecorded starsThat light a heaven not our own?(“The Testimony of the Suns”)” - George Sterling

18. “The Word says God put ever star in the heavens and even give ever one of em a name. If one of em was gon' fall out the sky, that was up to Him, too. Maybe we can't see where it's gon' wind up, be He can.” - Ron Hall

19. “Then he went out without touching anything and put his arm around Ingeborg, and like that, with their arms around each other, they returned to the village while the whole past of the universe fell on their heads.” - Roberto Bolaño

20. “its like you said? i lead my people-"forth!" zifnab carried on enthusiastically! " out of eygpt! out of bondage! across the desert! pillar of fire-"desert?" lenthan looked anxious again. "fire? i thought we were going to the stars!"sorry. wrong script" zifnab said” - Margaret Weis

21. “It was a lone tree burning on the desert. A heraldic tree that the passing storm had left afire. The solitary pilgrim drawn up before it had traveled far to be here and he knelt in the hot sand and held his numbed hands out while all about in that circle attended companies of lesser auxiliaries routed forth into the inordinate day, small owls that crouched silently and stood from foot to foot and tarantulas and solpugas and vinegarroons and the vicious mygale spiders and beaded lizards with mouths black as a chowdog's, deadly to man, and the little desert basilisks that jet blood from their eyes and the small sandvipers like seemly gods, silent and the same, in Jeda, in Babylon. A constellation of ignited eyes that edged the ring of light all bound in a precarious truce before this torch whose brightness had set back the stars in their sockets.” - Cormac McCarthy

22. “I will lose the habit of stars in the heavens, as frozen water loses the habit of snowflakes. I will take my frozen body, and give it to the young goats that they might graze it.” - Nichita Stanescu

23. “Non est ad astra mollis e terris via" - "There is no easy way from the earth to the stars” - seneca

24. “The fish is my friend too... I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars. Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky; he thought” - Ernest Hemingway

25. “It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.” - Lisa Mantchev

26. “Love is a selfless service to mankind like a showcase done by the twinkling stars in beautiful nightly sky.” - Santosh Kalwar

27. “Rose had the sort of eyes that manage perfectly well with things close by, but entirely blur out things far away. Because of this even the brightest stars had only appeared as silvery smudges in the darkness. In all her life, Rose had never properly seen a star.Tonight there was a sky full.Rose looked up, and it was like walking into a dark room and someone switching on the universe.” - Hilary McKay

28. “The stars look like they're so close, you could reach out and touch them. But you can't. Sometimes things look a lot closer than they are.” - Kami Garcia

29. “Twilight was laying claim to the cité, and the sky was a deepening shade of lavender, spangled with stars and fleecy clouds the colour of plums.” - Sharon Kay Penman

30. “Any system which allows men to choose their own future will end by choosing safety and mediocrity, and in such a Reality the stars are out of reach.” - Isaac Asimov

31. “The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” - Dante Alighieri

32. “When darkness is at its darkest, a star shines the brightest.” - Louise Philippe

33. “How you ever gonna reach the starsIf you never get off the ground?” - Big Time Rush

34. “But I will confess 
that I began as an astronomer—a liking
for bright flashes, vast distances, unreachable things,
a hand stretched always toward the furthest limit—
and that my longing for you has not taken me
very far from that original desire
to inscribe a comet’s orbit around the walls
of our city, to gently stroke the surface of the stars.” - Troy Jollimore

35. “He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot ... He found himself flying among stars and planets ...” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

36. “The moon went slowly down in loveliness; she departed into the depth of the horizon, and long veil-like shadows crept up the sky through which the stars appeared. Soon, however, they too began to pale before a splendour in the east, and the advent of the dawn declared itself in the newborn blue of heaven. Quieter and yet more quiet grew the sea, quiet as the soft mist that brooded on her bosom, and covered up her troubling, as in our tempestuous life the transitory wreaths of sleep brook upon a pain-racked soul, causing it to forget its sorrow. From the east to the west sped those angels of the Dawn, from sea to sea, from mountain-top to mountain-top, scattering light from breast and wing. On they sped out of the darkness, perfect, glorious; on, over the quiet sea, over the low coast-line, and the swamps beyond, and the mountains above them; over those who slept in peace and those who woke in sorrow; over the evil and the good; over the living and the dead; over the wide world and all that breathes or as breathed thereon.” - H. Rider Haggard

37. “The storm long past, the night sky was beset with stars. Pointing upward, I asked her to pick a point of light and stay with it. Standing up, I eased Sara to her feet. Whispering into her ear, I asked, “Have you ever stood under a star... and felt the earth move under your feet?” - Michael Poeltl

38. “In a world turned upside-down, where everything was wrong, bizarre, you could at least look up at the sky and see normality. Stars that shone regardless of who won a civil war, or who should or should not be a president. Their light was billions of years old. They didn't have a care...” - Alex Scarrow

39. “There had to be something wrong with my life. I should have been born a Yugoslavian shepherd who looked up at the Big Dipper every night.” - Haruki Murakami

40. “As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.” - W.B. Yeats

41. “Life is so complete that even when we are knocked on our backs, we have the best view of the stars.” - Laura Teresa Marquez

42. “The stars are on the inside. They are effing beautiful.” - Cath Crowley

43. “Stars, I have seen them fall,But when they drop and dieNo star is lost at allFrom all the star-sown sky.The toil of all that beHelps not the primal fault;It rains into the seaAnd still the sea is salt.” - A.E. Housman

44. “I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.” - Roger Zelazny

45. “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” - Carl Sagan

46. “He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.” - Cormac McCarthy

47. “Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of those ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries—but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.” - Ransom Riggs

48. “There’s something about sitting alone in the dark that reminds you how big the world really is, and how far apart we all are. The stars look like they’re so close, you could reach out and touch them. But you can’t. Sometimes things look a lot closer than they are.” - Kami Garcia

49. “See the stars, Lily?"She sighed, surrendering. "Of course.""Do you think they can see the sun coming up?""I don't know. Probably?""Do you think they're scared?""They're burning balls of gas, Calder.""Oh, c'mon. Where's the poet in you?"She exhaled, and I sensed her smile. "I see. Well, in that case, yes. They've finally come home. They are triumphant in their midnight kingdom. But the enemy approaches. They have the numbers on their side, but the enemy is bigger, stronger, with a history of winning that goes back to the dawn of time. They're definitvely terrified."I nodded. She understood my analogy."But they don't run, Calder.” - Anne Greenwood Brown

50. “I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.” - Jack Kerouac

51. “I am the eye that beholds... And I am the dreamer that paints the stars in the night sky... For I am the one they call artist, and you call Love.” - Solange nicole

52. “Now she realized that she was not peering at a so-dark-blue-it-looked-black ocean, but rather she was looking straight through miles of incredibly clear water at something enormous and black in its nethermost depths. Maybe it was the bottom--so deep that not even light could touch it.And yet, down in those impossible depths, she thought she could see tiny lights sparkling. She stared uncertainly at the tiny glimmerings. They seemed almost like scattered grains of sand lit from within; in some places they clustered like colonies, faint and twinkling.Like stars...” - Fuyumi Ono

53. “Heaven, envious of our joys, is waxen pale; And when we whisper, then the stars fall down To be partakers of our honey talk.(Dido, Queen of Carthage 4.4.52-54)” - Marlowe Christopher

54. “All through the night, men looked at the sky and were saddened by the stars.” - Joseph Heller

55. “I stare at the stars... And even though there are so many and they look so close together, I know they are light years apart. The glitter in the sky looks as if I could scoop it all up in my hands and let the stars swirl and touch one another, but they are so distant, so very far apart, that they cannot feel the warmth of each other, even though they are made of burning.This is the secret of the stars, I tell myself. In the end, we are alone. No matter how close you seem, no one else can touch you.” - Beth Revis

56. “...when you look at the stars, you should tremble - only dullards have become callous to this frisson ...” - John Geddes

57. “I will never, never be the same.I have seen stars.Real stars.” - Beth Revis

58. “The rest of the girls out there are just shooting stars," Simon whispered into my ear. "They're on a crash course to nowhere. But you, my lady friend, you're a black hole. You've sucked me in, and now there's no escape” - Amanda Howells

59. “SUN, MOON, AND STARRY SKYEarly summer evenings, when the first stars come out, the warm glow of sunset still stains the rim of the western sky.Sometimes, the moon is also visible, a pale white slice, while the sun tarries.Just think -- all the celestial lights are present at the same time!These are moments of wonder -- see them and remember.” - Vera Nazarian

60. “wherever you go,wherever you live, still the stars up there will remain the same, as they were when we were together.” - Jaymin Panchasara

61. “His grandmother had taught him that there was no such thing as coincidence. There are millions of people in this world, she had told him, and the spirits will see that most of them, you never have to meet. But there are one or two that you are tied to, and spirits will cross you back and forth, threading so many knots until they catch and you finally get it right.” - Jodi Picoult

62. “There have been bleak nights along my way, many of my own making, but life is all the brighter for them now. To the human eye, without the darkness there are no stars.” - Sumangali Morhall

63. “He had always thought there was an answer to all life's mysteries in the stars, yet whenever he stared at them the answer slipped out of his grasp... But he had to think now, and he stared at the smoke-dimmed stars in the hope that they would help him, but all they did was go on shining.” - Bernard Cornwell

64. “Prosperity cannot be experienced by living detached from Nature. Everything else is only a gradation of materialistic, earthly ambitions. We came from the stars and there lies the path to our substantive evolution.” - Grigoris Deoudis

65. “I am Orafoura, but you can call me Jarod Kintz. I’m fairly proud to proclaim that Dora J. Arod has me on her short list of “World’s worst writers.” The list couldn’t get any shorter, because I’m the only name on it. I should tell her to stop calling it a list, and change the title to “World’s worst writer.” If you’re wondering why I rate all my work one star, it’s because the rating system doesn’t have a zero star option, or better yet, go into negative numbers.” - Orafoura

66. “To get through the night, I sometimes imagined the sky filled with a canopy of stars. I imagined that each star contained the soul of a girl or boy who had died too young, and the light the stars gave off was their brightness.” - Jill Bialosky

67. “Isn't it strange that all life can pretty much end, but the universe goes on as it is? No one else exists, but the moon keeps shining and the stars keep falling.” - Isabella Olivia Ellis

68. “Sometimes words come out of me and I don't know where they come from or why. They're like falling stars tumbling through the universe; bright, burning things that can't be stopped.” - Glenda Millard

69. “Jetez sur une étoile un rapide coup d'œil, regardez-la obliquement, en tournant vers elle la partie latérale de la rétine (beaucoup plus sensible à une lumière faible que la partie centrale), et vous verrez l'étoile plus distinctement; vous aurez l'appréciation la plus juste de son éclat, éclat qui s'obscurcit à proportion que vous dirigez votre vue en plein sur elle. Dans le dernier cas, il tombe sur l'œil un plus grand nombre de rayons; mais dans le premier, il y a une réceptibilité plus complète, une susceptibilité beaucoup plus vive. Une profondeur outrée affaiblit la pensée et la rend perplexe; et il est possible de faire disparaître Vénus elle-même du firmament par une attention trop soutenue, trop concentrée, trop directe.” - Edgar Allan Poe

70. “The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike” - Christopher Marlowe

71. “The steeper the climb, the more incentive to reach the top.Even in the midst of the darkness, there is always a shard of light if we will but search for it hard enough and believe in it strongly enough.A name portrays the nature of its wearer. The meaning of a name, however, portrays the trueness of its wearer in depths that very few ever come to comprehend.May God bless you and keep you and give you peace in all that you do, and may we rest assured of this: that though we travel far apart and in many different directions and for long periods of time, we will meet again, if not in this lifetime, then in eternity, and there we will never have to say ‘good-bye’ again.Courage is not found in lacking fear, courage is found in not allowing your fear to rule you.Courage is really just facing fear.Do not put too much stock in the stars my boy, they are fickle and distant and do not affect the lives of men by very great a margin.” - Jenelle Leanne Schmidt

72. “Get close to grass and you’ll see a star.” - Dejan Stojanovic

73. “I do think that poetry is important though, if you don’t strive at it, if you don’t fill it full of stars and falseness.” - Charles Bukowski

74. “Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at the stars because we are human?” - Neil Gaiman

75. “You are the one star I wish upon nightly, praying your glory will fall from the heavens and land in my undeserving arms.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

76. “...you ask me why I compare you to stars - it's simple - that's where your goddess has fled...” - John Geddes

77. “...I remember your profile in darkness outlined by stars ...” - John Geddes

78. “...I can’t grasp the stars, but I love them – in the same way, I love you...” - John Geddes

79. “...freshly cut Christmas trees smelling of stars and snow and pine resin - inhale deeply and fill your soul with wintry night...” - John Geddes

80. “The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.” - Carl Sagan

81. “One night when we were lying under the stars together she pointed to this beaming bright star beside the moon and said wherever she was in the world, whether we were together or apart, that I should remember her with that star because it would always be there-that it was her with me.” - Rebecah McManus

82. “when you shoot for the stars, you can't ever look back.” - Brittany Perloff

83. “You deserve a life.” - John Green

84. “The postgrad at least knew enough to know that he would never know enough, lying under the stars which hung from the inky sky like bunches of inconceivably heavy, lustrous grapes, dusted with the yeast of eternity.” - Will Self

85. “I cannot squeeze the stars; but I can squeeze my mind to feel the moon compressed.” - Munia Khan