120 Deep Quotes That Will Make You Think
Thought-provoking quotes have a way of sticking with us and shaping our perspectives. They can make us pause and consider life from different angles. This article aims to do just that by sharing 120 profound quotes from renowned thinkers past and present. Whether about human nature, society, love or meaning, each quote is brief yet leaves room for deeper contemplation.
The quotes are organized into different categories for easy browsing of topics the reader finds most thought-provoking. Sections include quotes on life and living, people and relationships, society and culture, and more abstract philosophical themes. Within each section, quotes are listed with attribution so readers can explore the insights and wisdom of the people who said them.
More than just inspiration posters or Instagram captions, these impactful quotes will hopefully spark reflection on big questions and help us gain fresh points of view. In today’s fast-paced world, taking time for thought-provoking ideas is valuable for personal and intellectual growth. This collection aims to be such a catalyst for examining both outer world and inner self in a more profound way.
– Words of wisdom and reflection
– “The time is always right to do what is right.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
– “Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.” – Theodore Roosevelt
– “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” – Benjamin Franklin
– “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” – Semisonic
– “Don’t let yesterday take up too much of today.” – Will Rogers
– “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” – Randy Pausch
– “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” – Chinese Proverb
– “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
– “We do not remember days, we remember moments.” – Cesare Pavese
– “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picasso
– “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
– “Fall down seven times, stand up eight.” – Japanese Proverb
– “Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. And today? Today is a gift. That’s why we call it the present.” – Master Oogway
– “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” – Marianne Williamson
– “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.” – Maya Angelou
– “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” – Mae West
– “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
– “We accept the love we think we deserve.” – Stephen Chbosky
– “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain
– Profound thoughts on life and living
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman
“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.” – Maya Angelou
“Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.” – Robin Williams
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” – Robert Frost
“Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.” – Albert Einstein
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” – Carl Jung
“You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.” – Maya Angelou
“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” – Seneca
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picasso
“The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.” – William James
“The most wasted of days is one without laughter.” – E. E. Cummings
“The purpose of our lives is to be happy.” – Dalai Lama
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
“Dreams are illustrations… from the book your soul is writing about you.” – Marie Joseph
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” – Dr. Seuss
“Even if you fall on your face, you’re still moving forward.” – Victor Kiam
“Positive anything is better than negative nothing.” – Elbert Hubbard
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall.” – Confucius
“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” – Confucius
– Insightful perspectives on humanity
‘We must open the doors of opportunity. But we must also equip our people to walk through those doors.’ – Barbara Jordan
‘We must seek to elevate humanity, not destroy or diminish it.’ – Marianne Williamson
‘We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.’ – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
‘Humanity may lose much in losing its variety and splendor of races.’ – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
‘Humanity’s true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.’ – Milan Kundera
‘No fate is worse than the loss of faith in humanity.’ – Caitlin Moran
‘My faith is that whatever progress has been made, it is because people worked to make it happen, and we can continue building on that progress, step by step, if we stay engaged.’ – Barack Obama
‘Being human ourselves, we sometimes have to err on the side of humanity toward others.’ – Barack Obama
‘We are not put on this earth to see through one another but to see one another through.’ – Kanye West
‘The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.’ – Martin Luther King Jr.
‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.’ – Martin Luther King Jr.
‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’ – Martin Luther King Jr.
‘The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops – no, but the kind of man the country turns out.’ – Ralph Waldo Emerson
‘There is no way to peace – peace is the way.’ – A.J. Muste
‘Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original joke.’ – Terry Pratchett
‘The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.’ – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’ – Universal Declaration of Human Rights
‘I belong to no organized political party. I am a Democrat.’ – Will Rogers
‘When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it – always.’ – Mahatma Gandhi
– Moving quotes on the meaning of existence
‘We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.’ – Martin Luther King Jr.
‘The motion of light and ideas. This is the purpose of life.’ – John Mack
‘The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.’ – Arnold J. Toynbee
‘We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.’ – Robert Louis Stevenson
‘All motion is a test case of the space. Our inner shifts define our outer frontiers.’ – Anonymous
‘Existence is change. And infinite existence demands infinite change.’ – Sri Aurobindo
‘I shall pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.’ – Stephen Grellet
‘You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.’ – Rene Daumal
‘I move, therefore I am.’ – Friedrich Nietzsche
‘The journey, not the arrival, matters.’ – T.S. Eliot
‘Motion, change, progress–these characterize existence.’ – John Locke
‘We’re all just walking each other home.’ – Ram Dass
‘Movement is a medicine for creating change in your life.’ – Randy Pausch
‘Existence is elsewhere. Let’s go.’ – Randal Jarrell
‘Each moment is a place you’ve never been.’ – Mark Strand
‘I exist as I am, that is enough.’ – Walt Whitman
‘While we stay together, the problems will never stop coming, but as long as we keep moving ahead together, nothing else matters.’ – Osho
‘The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.’ – Pablo Picasso
‘The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.’ – Walker Percy
‘Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.’ – Basil King
‘To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.’ – e.e. cummings
‘Keep walking. There’s always something new to discover.’ – Anonymous
– Thought-provoking sayings about society
‘Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.’ – Winston Churchill
‘A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.’ – Greek Proverb
‘Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.’ – Kahlil Gibran
‘Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.’ – Martin Luther King Jr.
‘The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.’ – Patrick Henry
‘You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.’ – Abraham Lincoln
‘An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.’ – Mahatma Gandhi
‘The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.’ – Mahatma Gandhi
‘Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.’ – Mahatma Gandhi
‘Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.’ – Bertrand Russell
‘A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.’ – Greek Proverb
‘We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.’ – Martin Luther King Jr.
‘If you judge people, you have no time to love them.’ – Mother Teresa
‘Social equality is the only basis of human happiness.’ – Flora Tristan
‘Inequality is a choice that policy has introduced into an otherwise egalitarian world. To redesign policy, we must choose equality again.’ – Noam Chomsky
‘We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.’ – Konrad Adenauer
‘No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.’ – Nelson Mandela
‘The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.’ – Gandhi
‘Every society has a right to defend itself against law-breaking, but no group has the right to define deviancy and determine punishment outside of due process.’ – Jesselyn Radack
‘The people who succeed in an enterprise and in their work are those who forget that it is scientific and concentrate on the moral – the beauty, truth and goodness of their vision.’ – Simone Weil
– Powerful phrases for seeing things in a new light
‘The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.’ – Henri Bergson
‘An awareness of apparent opposites can help bring us to an enlarged sense of truth.’ – Unknown
‘To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.’ – William Blake
‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’ – Martin Luther King Jr.
‘A new light illuminated my mind, as though the mists had cleared, and that which had appeared dull and meaningless was shown to be full of life and splendor.’ – St. Augustine
‘Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time.’ – Betty Smith
‘Most people see things as they are and wonder why. I see things that never were and wonder why not.’ – Unknown
‘Refuse to accept your limits and go for more.’ – Unknown
‘You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.’ – Maya Angelou
‘Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.’ – Carl Gustav Jung
‘Problems are not stop signs, they are guidelines.’ – Robert H. Schuller
‘Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.’ – Marie Curie
‘No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.’ – Voltaire
‘The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed.’ – Buddha
‘Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.’ – J. F. Kennedy
‘Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.’ – Dale Carnegie
‘The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life simply by altering his attitudes.’ – William James
‘There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.’ – Albert Einstein
‘You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.’ – C. S. Lewis
Conclusion
This collection of 120 profound quotes aim to inspire deep thinking and reflection. They tackle profound questions about life, humanity and our place in the universe. Reading through each quote is an opportunity to gain perspective beyond our day to day experiences. The insights shared in a few short lines can challenge preconceived notions and spark new ideas. I encourage taking the time to ponder over these thoughts and letting them provoke your own reflections. Reflecting on quotes is a simple yet meaningful practice to cultivate wisdom and work towards living an examined life.
