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I collect inspirational quotes as a hobby. So far, I've collected about 424 of them. Here are my favorite ones.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit - Aristotle.
So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths that wind and wind, while just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs - Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
I have an important rule that I remind myself of every morning. Nothing I say this day will teach me anything. So, if I'm going to learn, I have to do it by listening - Bill Gilbert.
A strict belief in fate is the worst kind of slavery, on the other hand there is comfort in the thought that God will be moved by our prayers - Epicurus.
Anyone who lives within his means, suffers from a lack of imagination - Lionel Stander.
Pain makes man think; thinking makes man wise; wisdom makes life tolerable.
Nothing begins and nothing ends, that is not paid with moan; for we are born in other's pain, and perish in our own.
Small kindness, small courtesies, small considerations, habitually practiced in our social intercourse, give a greater charm to the character, than the display of great talents and accomplishments Mary Ann Kelly.
Learn to see in others' misfortune the ills which you should avoid.
On meeting with misfortune, to blame fate and to remain unconscious of his own failures and faults characterizes the uncultured man - The Mahabharatha.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the Earth. (The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not the mineral rights - J Paul Getty.)
The glory of a nation rests upon the character of her men - President Herbert Hoover.
Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is dangerous.
Better to remain silent and be though a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt.
Distrust all men in whom the power to punish is powerful - Freidrich Nietzsche.
Every job has its problems. A key consideration in choosing a career is determining what type of problems you enjoy solving - Steve Elledge.
Character is what you are willing to do when the spotlight has been turned off, the applause has died down and no one is around to give you credit - Ann Landers.
No one is anyone's friend; no one is anybody's enemy; it is circumstance that creates enemies and friends - The Mahabharatha.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C Clarke.
The wise old owl, that sat on an oak; the more he heard, the less he spoke; the less he spoke, the more he heard; why can't we all be like the wise old bird.
The anticipation of having something is often more fun than actually having it - Calvin & Hobbes.
Stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
The wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear - Emerson.
Success is the result of good judgment; good judgment is the result of experience and experience is often the result of bad judgment.
A conference is a gathering of important people who singly do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done - Fred Allen.
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored - Evelyn Waugh.
9/10 of serious controversies which arise in life result from misunderstanding, result from one man not knowing the facts to which the other man seem important or failing to appreciate his point of view - Louis D Brandeis.
You cannot motivate people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion. That becomes more true the higher the skill level gets - An Open Source evangelist.
Seeing is a marvelous manner of becoming aware. Awareness is the first order of knowing and precedes creativity.
Pragmatics must take precedence over elegance - Coggin's law of Software Engineering.
With the money we do not have, we buy things we do not need, to impress people we do not like. That is consumerism at it's best and that is what drives the modern economy.
The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the essence of all true Science. He, to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand in rapt awe, is as good as dead - Albert Einstein.
Do you think its better to live in stupefying security or take risks and live life on the edge? I think its better to accept danger and live to the fullest - Calvin & Hobbes.
A calm person reflects restfulness in his eyes, keen intelligence in his face, and proper receptivity in his mind. He is a person of decisive and prompt action, but he is not moved by his impulses and desires that suddenly occur to him. Be sure to work, slowly or fast, from a center of calmness.
I believe with a passionate and unshakable conviction that in all circumstances and at all times, life is a blessed gift; that the spirit that animates it is one of love, not hate or indifference, of light not darkness, of creativity not destruction, of order not chaos - Malcolm Muggeridge.
The Serenity prayer - God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Everyone wants to go to Heaven, but no one wants to die - Texan saying.
Do what you feel in your heart to be right for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do and damned if you don't - Eleanor Roosevelt.
If you aren't making mistakes, you aren't trying hard enough - Mark McCormak.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth - A Conan Doyle.
It is the rule in war, if our forces are ten to the enemy's one, to surround him; if five to one, to attack him; if twice as numerous, to divide out army into two. If equally matched, we can offer battle; if slightly inferior in numbers, we can avoid the enemy; if quite unequal in everyway, we can flee from him - Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
Be nice to the people on the way up, because you might meet them again on your way down.
A man needs a little madness, otherwise he never dares to cut the rope and be free!
Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable. But as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead - Freidrich Von Schiller.
It invited dreams. It was a call to action. A refusal to hear excuses and a license to be mad, courageous and exceptional - Bill Bowerman, Co-founder of Nike.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams - Eleanor Roosevelt.
Chance favors the prepared mind - Louis Pasteur.
Winners never quit. Quitters never win.
A free society is not just a nation. It is an idea. It is a natural sovereignty committed to the cause of human sovereignty. It is an instrument through which we can work fuller life - whether in terms of physical needs or our creative and spiritual reach. This ideology is real and it is ours.
Progress begins with the idea that progress is possible. Cynicism begins with the notion that retreat and defeat are inevitable.
Nothing in the universe has more grandeur than the infinity of the human mind. Even pea-size computers capable of forecasting the movement of the galaxies are not more wondrous than the mysterious human creature that produced them. The ultimate frontier is not geographical or spatial, but intellectual.
A man is as big as the things that make him angry - Winston Churchill.
Money doesn't talk. It swears - Bob Dylan.
What we learn to do, we learn by doing - Aristotle.
Give a person a fish and that person eats for a day, teach a person to fish and that person eats for a lifetime.
Some people are pragmatists, taking things as they come and making the best of the choices available. Some people are idealists, standing for principle and refusing to compromise. And some just act on any whim that enters their heads. I pragmatically turn my whims into principles - Calvin & Hobbes, It's a Magical World.
How to motivate employees - Reorganize often to improve focus. "Redefine work as 'opportunity' and increase it daily. Take time to ask for opinions then explain why they are wrong" - Dilbert, Casual day has gone too far.
A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of History - Mahatma Gandhi.
Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark, professionals built the Titanic.
If necessity is the Mother of Invention, Frustration is it's Father.
There is nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot - Dilbert.
Dreams die, Ambitions endure.
There is no merit in discipline under ideal conditions. I will have it in the face of death, or it is useless - The Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov.
The secret of success lies in the constancy of purpose. Use time as a tool and not a cushion.
Now this the law of the jungle; as old and as true as the sky; and the wolf that keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die; as the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back. And the strength of the pack is the wolf; and the strength of the wolf is the pack - Rudyard Kipling.
We abandoned the appearance of power to preserve the essence of it - Foundation's Edge, Isaac Asimov.
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power - Abraham Lincoln.
Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse) - Unknown
It has occurred to me recently that I have never chosen anything. I was born into a role that had been prepared for me. I did everything I was asked to do because it never occurred to me to choose otherwise. And now, at the end of my life, I wonder what might have been. - Centuari Emporer Turhan, Babylon 5.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena - who at the best knows in the end the triumphs of high achievements and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place will never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt.
If we don't change, we don't grow. If we don't grow, are we really living? Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. It may mean giving up familiar but limiting patterns, safe but unrewarding work, or values no longer believed in. Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what many people fear most. It should be the opposite - Anon.
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world - indeed it's the only thing that ever has - Margaret Mead.
The only thing I can be proud of, the greatest merit of my life, is that I was able to fundamentally alter my views - General Dimitri Volkogonov.
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win. - Mohandas K. Gandhi
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there - Will Rogers
My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there - Anon.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education - Mark Twain.
The human understanding, once it has adopted opinions, either because they were already accepted and believed, or because it likes them, draws everything else to support and agree with them. And though it may meet a greater number and weight of contrary instances, it will, with great and harmful prejudice, ignore or condemn or exclude them by introducing some distinction, in order that the authority of those earlier assumptions may remain intact and unharmed - Sir Francis Bacon.
Cognitive dissonance is the inner conflict we experience when we do something that is counter to our prior values, beliefs and feelings. To reduce our tension, we either change our beliefs or explain away our actions -The complete idiot's guide to Psychology.
Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them more - Oscar Wilde.
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no help at all. -Dale Carnegie
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is - Anon.
Every child is an artist. The challenge is to remain an artist once he grows up - Pablo Picasso.
Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS). It's not hard to outsmart yourself.
Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original dimensions. -Oliver Wendell Holme.
Worry enough to anticipate trouble. But not so much as to bring it about.
Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice: It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved. -William Jennings Bryan
We stubbornly fight to preserve our core beliefs, consciously and unconsciously, fair and foul, any way we can. We may ignore anomalous data or flat-out reject or exclude them from consideration. We may decide to hold them in abeyance, intending to deal with them "later." We may reinterpret and refashion them so that they no longer contradict our beliefs. We may use what knowledge we have of arguments that oppose the threat to construct a barrier to arguments that threaten our beliefs. If none of these mental tricks works and contradiction begins to penetrate our defenses, we may consent to shave just the periphery of a belief, thereby allowing its core to survive. In the unlikely instance in which we find ourselves forced to alter a core, we may depend upon its resilience and ability slowly to resume its original shape. In short, beliefs survive unless we are strongly motivated to examine contradictory data with as unbiased a mind as we can muster and are both able and willing to think deeply about it. - Steven M. Wise, Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals
Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told--and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion. - Michael Crichton in The Lost World
If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call into question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it--the life of that man is one long sin against mankind. - W. K. Clifford
What we recall is not what we actually experienced, but rather a reconstruction of what we experienced that is consistent with our current goals and our knowledge of the world. - Memory, Brain, and Belief
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in 7 years! Mark Twain