Top Ten Inspirational Quotes

Here are my Top Ten Favorite Inspirational Quotes. Even though we’re all different, I’m sure you’ll enjoy a few of them.

1) Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend its boundaries. Only in proportion as we are desirous of living do we really live. -Ortega

2) We are not to make the ideas of contentment and aspiration quarrel, for God made them fast friends. A man may aspire, and yet be quite content until it is time to rise; and both flying and resting are but parts of one contentment. The very fruit of the gospel is aspiration. It is to the heart what spring is to the earth, making every root, and bud, and bough desire to be more. -H.W. Beecher

3) Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth. -Joubert

4) I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression. -Margaret Fuller

5) Edward Gibbon, in 1788 set forth in his famous book, “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, five basic reasons why that great civilization withered and died: 1) The undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis for human society. 2) Higher and higher taxes: the spending of public money for free bread and circuses for the populace. 3) The mad craze for pleasure, with sports and plays becoming more exciting, more brutal, and more immoral. 4) The building of great armaments when the real enemy was within: the decay of individual responsibility. 5) The decay of religion, whose leaders lost their touch with life, and their power to guide the people. -Unknown

6) How do we know but that the interruption we snarl at is the most blessed thing that has come to us in long days? -Anna R. Lindsay

7) The Wonderful Paradox: I have more fun and enjoy more financial success when I stop trying to get what I want and start helping other people get what they want. -Spencer Johnson & Larry Wilson, in The One Minute Sales Person

8) Explore your higher latitudes…be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, open new channels, not of trade but of thought. -Thoreau

9) No other success can compensate for failure in the home. -McKay

10) There is no chance and no anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every God is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there is he alone with them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant, and incessantly, fall snowstorms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that and whose movement and doings he must obey: he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that should resist their will, and think or act for himself? Every moment new changes and new showers of deception to baffle and distract him. But when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears and the clouds lift a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, they alone with him alone. -Emerson

Wait! There’s more! How could I stop at ten? Here are 5 more…just to give you some added value!

11) We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. -Pierre Teihlard de Chardin

12) By afflictions God is spoiling us of what otherwise might have spoiled us. When he makes the world too hot for us to hold, we let go of it. -Powell

13) Called or not called, God is present. -Carl Jung

14) Your circumstances may be uncongenial, but they shall not long remain so if you but perceive an Ideal and strive to reach it. You cannot travel within and stand still without. Here is a youth hard pressed by poverty and labour; confined long hours in an unhealthy workshop; unschooled, and lacking all the arts of refinement. But he dreams of better things; he thinks of intelligence, of refinement, of grace and beauty. He conceives of, mentally builds up, an ideal condition of life; the vision of a wider liberty and a larger scope takes possession of him; unrest urges him to action, and he utilizes all his spare time and means, small though they are, to the development of his latent powers and resources. Very soon so altered has his mind become that the workshop can no longer hold him. It has become so out of harmony with his mentality that it falls out of his life as a garment is cast aside, and, with the growth of opportunities which fit the scope of his expanding powers, he passes out of it forever. Years later we see this youth as a full-grown man. We find him a master of certain forces of the mind which he wields with world-wide influence and almost unequaled power. In his hands he holds the cords of gigantic responsibilities; he speaks, and lo! lives are changed; men and women hang upon his words and remould their characters, and sunlike, he becomes the fixed and luminous centre around which innumerable destinies revolve. He has realized the Vision of his youth. He has become one with his Ideal. And you, too, youthful reader, will realize the Vision (not the idle wish) of your heart, be it base or beautiful, or a mixture of both, for you will always gravitate toward that which you, secretly, most love. -James Allen

15) A glorious wind was blowing in from the west across the Irish Sea…my soul suddenly leaped forth. I felt what a cramped up stuffy life the life of my soul had often been, and I shouted against the wind…no-one was there to hear me and I shouted praise in a sort of madness. -Temple Gardiner

Well, there you have it. These 15 inspired quotations were taken from my book: “Aspire to Something Higher, A Pocket Book of Inspired Thoughts”.  (out of print; I still have lots of copies, but I mainly only give them away as incentives these days)