Quotes About Self Improvement

For years, I've collected quotes about self improvement. These are what I consider to be the best of the bunch...

'If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.'
- Lyall Watson

'I not only use all the brains I have, but all I can borrow.'
- Woodrow Wilson

'The power of imagination makes us infinite.'
- John Muir

'No-one ever listened themselves out of a job.'
- Calvin Coolidge

'If there is light in the soul, there will be beauty in the person. If there is beauty in the person, there will be harmony in the house. If there is harmony in the house, there will be order in the nation. If there is order in the nation, there will be Peace in the World.'
- Chinese proverb

'Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.'
- Samuel Butler

'The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.'
- Elbert Hubbard

'How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.'
- Anne Frank

'One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.'
- Abraham Maslow

'The world is a great mirror. It reflects back to you what you are. If you are loving, if you are friendly, if you are helpful, the world will prove loving and friendly and helpful to you. The world is what you are.'
- Thomas Dreier

'Discontent is the source of all trouble, but also of all progress, in individuals and nations.'
- Berthold Auerbach

'That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.'
- Aldous Huxley

'The best way I know to win an argument is to start by being in the right.'
- Lord Halishan

'If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.'
- Erica Jong

'It is good to die before one has done anything deserving death.'
- Anaxandrides

'Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.'
- Jim Rohn

'By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.'
- Confucius

'The first step in the acquisition of wisdom is silence, the second listening, the third memory, the fourth practice, the fifth teaching others.'
- Solomon Ibn Gabriol

'All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes to make it possible.'
- T E Lawrence

'I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.'
- Kurt Cobain

'Everyone has a fair turn to be as great as he pleases.'
- Jeremy Collier

'It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.'
- Harry S Truman

'What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.'
- Zig Ziglar

'You may delay, but time will not.'
- Benjamin Franklin

'The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything.'
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

'Remedy your deficiencies and your merits will take care of themselves.'
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

'There is nothing noble about being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.'
- Hindu proverb

'There are two things to aim at in life; first to get what you want, and after that to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind has achieved the second.'
- Logan Pearsall Smith

'If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.'
- Rene Descartes

'As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.'
- Henry David Thoreau

'Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.'
- Benjamin Disraeli

'We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.'
- Aristotle

'The best way out is always through.'
- Robert Frost

'Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.'
- Thomas Jefferson

'Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.'
- Henry Ford

'Today is the last day of some of your life.'
- Jill Shalvis

'Winning isn't everything, but wanting to win is.'
- Vince Lombardi

'Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives.'
- Viktor Frankl

'There is only one success: to be able to spend your life in your own way.'
- Christopher Morley

'If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.'
- Henry David Thoreau.

'Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.'
- Aristotle

'Whoever in debate quotes authority uses not intellect, but memory.'
- Leonardo Da Vinci

'I don't despise, because no-one should live rent-free inside your head.'
- Anne Robinson

'Knowledge is learning something every day. Wisdom is letting go of something every day.'
- Zen proverb

'It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help.'
- Miss Manners

'I strive to be brief, and I become obscure.'
- Horace

'Every day do something that will inch you closer to a better tomorrow.'
- Doug Firebaugh

'Be not afraid of growing slowly; be afraid only of standing still.'
- Chinese proverb

'No man was ever wise by chance.'
- Seneca

'The art of being wise is knowing what to overlook.'
- William James

'When you do a good turn you feel rich, even if you are broke.'
- Lionel Blue

'Getting everything done is not always a sign of good time management; it can also be a sign of not having enough to do.'
- Susan Billbess

'Don't wish it were easier, wish you were better.'
- Jim Rohn

'Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.'
- Rudyard Kipling

'Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way a car is driven.'
- Edward de Bono

'Years teach us more than books.'
- Berthold Auerbach

'Of all parts of wisdom the practice is the best.'
- John Tillotson

'Do not walk behind me, I may not lead. Do not walk in front of me, I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.'
- Albert Camus

'People ask the difference between a leader and a boss.... The leader works in the open, and the boss in covert. The leader leads and the boss drives.'
- Theodore Roosevelt

'Commander, it is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.'
- Captain Picard to Commander Data in Star Trek TNG

'It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else’s opinion.'
- Thomas Sowell

'I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.'
- Confucius

'The safest principle through life, instead of reforming others, is to set about perfecting yourself.'
- B R Haydon

'Fear less, hope more; eat less, chew more; whine less, breathe more; talk less, say more; hate less, love more... and good things will be yours.'
- Swedish proverb

'The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.'
- Marcel Proust

'It's not that some people have willpower and some don't. It's that some people are ready to change and others are not.'
- James Gordon

'Every positive change in your life begins with a clear, unequivocal decision that you are going to either do something or stop doing something.'
- Brian Tracy

'There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.'
- Bruce Lee

'You can't talk your way out of a situation you behave yourself into.'
- Dr Stephen Covey

'All my life I've had one dream, to achieve my many goals.'
- Homer Simpson

'We are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from others.'
- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

'A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.'
- Francis Bacon

'Better go home and make a net, rather than dive for fish at random.'
- Chinese proverb

'Kind words are the music of the world.'
- F W Faber

'Arguing with a fool proves there are two.'
- Doris M Smith

'The more you say, the less people remember.'
- Francois Fenelon

'It requires less character to discover the faults of others than it does to tolerate them.'
- J Petit Senn

'If you don't program yourself, life will program you!'
- Les Brown

'Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.'
- Anton Chekhov

'It is with the heart that one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.'
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

'In learning to know other things, and other minds, we become more intimately acquainted with ourselves, and are to ourselves better worth knowing.'
- Philip Gilbert Hamilton

'There is only one person who could ever make you happy, and that person is you.'
- David Burns

'Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action.'
- Benjamin Disraeli

'The more a man knows, the more he forgives.'
- Catherine the Great

'Before you speak, ask yourself: Is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence?'
- Shirdi Sai Baba

'A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.'
- Harvey Mackay

Specific Quotes About Success In Business

'Whatever you are, be a good one.'
- Abraham Lincoln

'I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.'
- Bill Cosby

'To improve is to change, to be perfect is to change often.'
- Winston Churchill

'Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.'
- Winston Churchill

'If we all did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves.'
- Thomas Edison

'All riches have their origin in mind. Wealth is in ideas - not money.'
- Robert Collier

'The surest way not to fail is to determine to succeed.'
- Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Specific Quotes About Success In Creative Endeavours

'But it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.'
- Herman Melville

'Insist on yourself. Never imitate.'
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

'When your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt.'
- Henry J Kaiser

'A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.'
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

'Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.'
- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

'Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.'
- Carl Sagan

'Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots.'
- Edward Bulwer Lytton

'It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.'
- Alfred N Whitehead

'Every artist was first an amateur.'
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

'Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple, learn how to look after them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.'
- John Steinbeck

'Inspiration and genius - one and the same.'
- Victor Hugo

'The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.'
- Linus Pauling

Quotes By Dr Wayne W Dyer

'Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else.'

'I cannot always control what goes on outside. But I can always control what goes on inside.'

'You cannot solve a problem with the mind that created it. First you must change the mind.'

'Everything you are against weakens you. Everything you are for empowers you.'

'If you are living out of a sense of obligation, you are slave.'

'If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.'

'The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.'

'Try viewing everyone who comes into your life as a teacher.'

Quotes By Albert Einstein

'Try not to become a man of success but a man of value.'

'Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.'

'In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.'

'Imagination is more important than knowledge.'

Quotes By Mark Twain

'Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it is lightning that does the work.'

'It is wiser to find out than to suppose.'

'We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.'

'The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.'

'Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.'

'You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.'

'Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do.'

'If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.'