Quotes

Courage and optimism

“The reasons you do things affects how you do them.”

“This present moment used to be the unimaginable future.”
— Christian Mason

“Everything great that ever happened in this world happened first in somebody’s imagination.”
— Astrid Lindgren

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
— C.S. Lewis

“Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”
— Edmund Burke

“It is little by little that we find courage for it all.”
— J.H. Hard

“If you want something you’ve never had, you’ll have to do something you’ve never done.”

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.”
— Nelson Mandela

Persistence

“It may seem difficult at first but everything is difficult at first.”
— Miyamoto Musashi

“The thing about everything is it gets easier with practice, so be careful what you practice.”

“Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most.”
— Abraham Lincoln

“A path is made by walking.”
— Zhuangzi

“Slowly, then all at once.”

Inner peace

“A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
— Laozi

“And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.”
— Jack Kerouac

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”
— Abraham Lincoln

“Act always as if the future of the universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference.”
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“Success is not a public thing. It’s a private thing. It’s when you have fewer and fewer regrets.”
— Toni Morrison

Curiosity and wonder

“The brain is a very big place in a very small space.”
— Carl Sagan

“Having all the answers just means you’ve been asking boring questions.”
— Joey Comeau

“Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one.”
— Voltaire

“We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh

“Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”
— Richard P. Feynman

“If you are not living in awe, you are not paying attention.”
— Rumi

“Look for beauty everywhere, and you will find it anywhere.”

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
— Isaac Newton

Together

“We are all ordinary. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day.”
— Brad Meltzer

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
— Anaïs Nin

“It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like, ‘what about lunch?’”
— A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“’Which is more important?’ asked Big Panda, ‘the journey or the destination?’
‘The company,’ said Tiny Dragon.”
— James Norbury

“We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves’, the universe ‘peoples.’”
— Alan Watts

“We’re all just walking each other home.”
— Ram Dass

Note: If you’re looking for the full list of quotes in my footer, here’s the JSON file.

Updated July 30, 2025