I love motiviational quotes and a couple of years ago an author from Inc. Magazine compiled these wonderful quotes from a variety of inspirational sources.
As you begin your job-seeking/career journey in 2017, I think you’ll find great wisdom in these inspirational words.
- “Walk away from anything or anyone who takes away from your joy. Life is too short to put up with fools”- Unknown
- “Life is short, live it. Love is rare, grab it. Anger is bad, dump it. Fear is awful, face it. Memories are sweet, cherish them”- Unknown
- “If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.” -Napolean Hill
- “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” -Henry Stanley Haskins
- “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” -George Eliot
- “Never let your memories be greater than your dreams.” -Doug Ivester
- “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.” ~Vince Lombardi
- “The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Just keep going. Everybody gets better if they keep at it.” -Ted Williams
- “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” ~ Alan Kay
- “Very often a change of self is needed more than a change of scene.” -Arthur Christopher Benson
- “Good things come to those who wait… greater things come to those who get off their ass and do anything to make it happen.”–Unknown
- “Obsessed is just a word the lazy use to describe the dedicated.” -Russell Warren
- “Even if you fall on your face, you’re still moving forward.” -Victor Kiam
- I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure–which is: Try to please everybody. Herbert Swope
- “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” ~Elbert Hubbard
- “What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.” -Tim Ferriss
- “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.” -Theodore Roosevelt
- “Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.” -Charles Kettering
- “What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” -Winston Churchill
- “Goals are dreams with deadlines.” -Diana Scharf Hunt
- “You must have long term goals to keep you from being frustrated by short term failures.” -Charles C. Noble
- “The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goals to reach.” -Benjamin Mays
- “You measure the size of the accomplishment by the obstacles you had to overcome to reach your goals.” -Booker T. Washington
- “Goals help focus you on areas in both your personal and professional life that are important and meaningful, rather than being guided by what other people want you to be, do, or accomplish.” -Catherine Pulsifer
- “Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” -Francis of Assisi
- “Never be satisfied with what you achieve, because it all pales in comparison with what you are capable of doing in the future.” Rabbi Nochem Kaplan
- “Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.” -William E. Channing
- “Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.” -Henry Ford
- “People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.” -Andrew Carnegie
- “It was courage, faith, endurance and a dogged determination to surmount all obstacles that built this bridge.” -John J. Watson
- “Perseverance is a great element of success; if you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate you are sure to wake up somebody.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “Perseverance is failing nineteen times and succeeding the twentieth.” -Julie Andrews
- “People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.” -Anne Sullivan
- “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” -Robert Collier
- You are not your resume, you are your work.–Seth Godin
- You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.–Warren Buffett
- “The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same”.–Carlos Castaneda
- “You must either modify your dreams or magnify your skills.”–Jim Rohn
- “Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right!”–Henry Ford
- “Does everyone have a new years resolution? I do, mine is to never change for anyone!” Sara Dalton
- “I feel that luck is preparation meeting opportunity.”–Oprah Winfrey
- “Please think about your legacy, because you’re writing it every day.”–Gary Vaynerchuck
- “The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.”–Nolan Bushnell
- “There is no security on the earth, there is only opportunity.”–General Douglas MacArthur
- “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.–Howard Aiken
- “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself, any direction you choose.”–Dr. Seuss
- “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”–Thomas Edison
- “If you work just for money, you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.”–Ray Kroc
- “By recording your dreams and goals on paper, you set in motion the process of becoming the person you most want to be. Put your future in good hands–your own.”-Mark Victor Hansen
- “If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude.”-Charles R. Swindoll
- “Enter every activity without giving mental recognition to the possibility of defeat. Concentrate on your strengths, instead of your weaknesses… on your powers, instead of your problems.”-Paul J. Meyer
- “Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”-Calvin Coolidge
- “The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born–that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.” -Warren G. Bennis
- “Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.”-Stephen Covey
- “The great successful men of the world have used their imagination. They think ahead and create their mental picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building–steadily building.”-Robert Collier
- “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”- Aristotle
- “He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.”-Chinese Proverb
- “You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.” –George Lorimer
- “Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drowned your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”-Steve Jobs
- “Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.”-Lyndon Johnson
- “I find it best to dive right in and learn the hard way.”- Pete Cashmore, Mashable
- “If you’ve got an idea, start today. There’s no better time than now to get going. That doesn’t mean quit your job and jump into your idea 100% from day one, but there’s always small progress that can be made to start the movement.”- Kevin Systrom, Instagram
- “Success is … knowing your purpose in life, growing to reach your maximum potential, and sowing seeds that benefit others.” –John C. Maxwell
- “I think I was very nave early on, but that also meant I didn’t know what couldn’t be done.”- Matt Mickiewicz, 99 Designs
- “There’s no committee that says, ‘This is the type of person who can change the world–and you can’t.’ Realizing that anyone can do it is the first step. The next step is figuring out how you’re going to do it.”- Adora Svitak, Flying Fingers
- “The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”- Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook
- “The hardest part about being an entrepreneur is that you’ll fail ten times for every success.”- Adam Horwitz, Mobile Monopoly
- “Fortune sides with him who dares.” -Virgil
- “Every single person I know who is successful at what they do is successful because they love doing it.”- Joe Penna, Mystery Guitar Man
- Sometimes life knocks you on your ass…get up! Happiness is not the absence of problems, it’s the ability to deal with them. Steve Maraboli
- “We are really competing against ourselves, we have no control over how other people perform.”- Pete Cashmore, Mashable
- “Success comes down to hard work plus passion, over time. If you work really, really hard over a long period of time, it will pay off.”- Stanley Tang, eMillions
- “Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.” ~ William Faulkner
- “I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.” ~ Carl Jung
- “We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face. We must do that which we think we cannot.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
- “Your attitude not your aptitude will determine your altitude.” ~ Zig Ziglar
- “Nobody controls me. I’m uncontrollable. The only one who can control me is me, and even that’s barely possible.” -John Lennon
- Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that. ~ Norman Vincent Peale
- “If you believe in what you are doing, then let nothing hold you up in your work. Much of the best work of the world has been done against seeming impossibilities.” ~ Dale Carnegie
- “The only disability in life is a bad attitude.”–Scott Hamilton
- “When people undermine your dreams, predict your doom, or criticize you remember, they’re telling you their story, not yours.”–Cynthia Occelli
- “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”–Goethe
- “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are, the people who get on in the world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances that they want and if they can’t find them, make them.”- George Bernard Shaw
- You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.–Joe Sabah
- If you are not doing what you love, you are wasting your time.–Billy Joel
- Whatever happens to you, don’t fall in despair. Even if all the doors are closed, a secret path will be there for you that no one knows. You can’t see it yet but so many paradises are at the end of this path…Be grateful! It is easy to thank after obtaining what you want, thank before having what you want.–Rumi
- There is only one thing which makes a dream impossible to achieve; the fear of failure.–Paulo Coelho
- The only impossible journey is the one you never begin.–Anthony Robbins
- You don’t die if you fall in water; you die only if you don’t swim.–Unknown
- Nothing with power is working against me. Everything with power is working for me. At the center of my being is that which cannot be intimidated, threatened, or oppressed.–T.K. Coleman
- “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than the ones you did do” –Mark Twain
- “Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.”–Arthur Ashe
- “We lose ourselves in the things we love; we find ourselves there, too.”–Kristin Martz
- “If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”–Roald Dahl
- “Your dream doesn’t have an expiration date. Take a deep breath and try again.”–K T Witten
- Sometimes in tragedy we find our life’s purpose. The eye sheds a tear to find its focus.–Robert Brault
- “Do just once what others say you can’t do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again.”–James Cook
- “Our subconscious minds have no sense of humor, play no jokes and cannot tell the difference between reality and an imagined thought or image. What we continually think about eventually will manifest in our lives.”–Robert Collier
- “Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are.” -Unknown
