I love quotes! And I am always searching for the best quotes ever.
In a recent post, I shared how my search for one or two quotes led to over 500 of the best quotes ever for my book Zen Master Net Door: Parables for Enlightened Everyday Living.
Drawing from that post, where I shared some of the quotes I found for my book, I want to share a few more. These quotes cover topics such as: Simplicity and Living in the Ordinary, Happiness, Imagination, Compassion, Truth, Humility, Friendship, Kindness, Forgiveness, and Love.
Photo by Parker Coffman
Over Five Hundred of the Best Quotes Ever
Quotes are relatable because they are simple, powerful words that, regardless of culture, religion, or upbringing, help show how little separates us. Many times, they remind us to let go and live inspired lives.
Quotes tug at our emotions and serve as a kind of balm for what ails us.
They give us validation when, unfortunately, others miss the chance to do so.
The connection they create is incredible, as some of the greatest minds over a thousand years have thought and felt the very same things as us.
We all strive for the same things in life, no matter our upbringing, religion, culture, or circumstances.
Folks, we’re in this together; we are the same.
Enjoy exploring some of the best quotes ever!
Simplicity and Living Ordinarily
Mental toughness is many things. It is humility because it behooves all of us to remember that simplicity is the sign of greatness and meekness is the sign of true strength. Mental toughness is spartanism with qualities of sacrifice, self-denial, dedication. It is fearlessness, and it is love.
–Vince Lombardi
Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions, nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous. Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
–Leonardo da Vinci
Simplicity in character, in manners, in style; in all things the supreme excellence is simplicity
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.
–Leo Tolstoy
All great change in America begins at the dinner table.
–Ronald Regan
Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
–Frederic Chopin
It’s true. I’m a simple person. Some people tend to live from trauma to trauma, and that energizes them. I have a hectic schedule, but my mind seeks simplicity – like being in nature, a long bike ride, or sitting on the back porch.
–Amy Grant
Take care of the little things and the big things will take care of themselves.
–Aesop – The Astrologer
What we have to learn to do, we learn doing.
–Aristotle
Happiness
Be content with your lot.
–Aesop – The Fox and the Crab
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
–Mahatma Gandhi
There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.
–Henry David Thoreau
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
-George Orwell
To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one’s family, to bring peace to all, one must first discipline and control one’s own mind. If a man can control his mind he can find the way to Enlightenment, and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him.
–Buddha
Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
–Helen Keller
Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.
–Eleanor Roosevelt
Imagination
Everything you can imagine is real.
–Pablo Picasso
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
–Albert Einstein
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
–C.S. Lewis
Compassion
Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
–Dalai Lama
Forget injuries, never forget kindness.
–Confucius
The individual is capable of both great compassion and great indifference. He has it within his means to nourish the former and outgrow the latter.
–Norman Cousins
I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
–William Faulkner
The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
-Thomas Merton
Truth
Whatever is, is right.
–Alexander Pope
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
–Plato
From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth.
–Albert Camus
Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.
–Jesus
Humility
We often make much of the ornamental and despise the useful.
–Aesop – The Stag and His Reflection
Humility must always be the portion of any man who receives acclaim earned in the blood of his followers and the sacrifices of his friends.
–Dwight D. Eisenhower
Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.
–Saint Augustine
Power is dangerous unless you have humility.
–Richard J. Daley
There is no gardening without humility. Nature is constantly sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.
–Alfred Clayton
Friendship
Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Walk beside me that we may be as one.
–Ute saying
Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.
-Aristotle
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have friends in overalls whose friendship I would not swap for the favor of the kings of the world.
–Thomas A. Edison
But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.
–Thomas Jefferson
Kindness
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
-Aesop – The Lion and the Mouse
Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.
–Franklin D. Roosevelt
Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.
–Theodore Isaac Rubin
Kindness and faithfulness keep a king safe, through kindness his throne is made secure.
–King Solomon
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
–Mark Twain
That best portion of a man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.
–William Wordsworth
Forgiveness
Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
–Hannah Arendt
Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
–Norman Cousins
Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.
–Dag Hammarskjold
To err is human; to forgive, divine.
–Alexander Pope
He that cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself; for every man has need to be forgiven.
-Thomas Fuller
Love
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
–Henry David Thoreau
Love takes up where knowledge leaves off.
–Saint Thomas Aquinas
To love another person is to see the face of God.
–Victor Hugo
Love sought is good, but given unsought, is better.
–William Shakespeare
The greatest pleasure of life is love.
-Euripides
Love has features which pierce all hearts, he wears a bandage which conceals the faults of those beloved. He has wings, he comes quickly and flies away the same.
–Voltaire
Love is a chain of love as nature is a chain of life.
–Truman Capote
Where there is love there is life.
–Mohandas Gandhi
Without love in your life, you have nothing.
–Wynonna Judd
Love is life. And if you miss love, you miss life.
–Leo Buscaglia
Meditation and Prayer
You become what you think about all day long.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you begin to live life looking for the God that is all around you, every moment becomes a prayer.
–Frank Bianco
Prayer for many is like a foreign land. When we go there, we go as tourists. Like most tourists, we feel uncomfortable and out of place. Like most tourists, we therefore move on before too long and go somewhere else.
–Robert McAfee Brown
It is the prayer of my innermost being to realize my supreme identity in the liberated play of consciousness, the Vast Expanse. Now is the moment, Here is the place of Liberation.
–Alex Grey
Prayer indeed is good, but while calling on the gods a man should himself lend a hand.
–Hippocrates
Prayer is a thought, a belief, a feeling, arising within the mind of the one praying.
–Ernest Holmes
I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Experiences
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
–Charles Adams
If we could sell our experiences for what they cost us, we’d all be millionaires.
–Abigail Van Buren
Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
–John W. Gardner
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
–Auguste Rodin
If you enjoyed this post, take a look at these: Searching for a Quote, and Finding the Best One or Maybe More,If You Were Able to Talk to Your OLDER Self, Eddie Zen: A Zen Master Next Door, Love is a Strange Thing, The Time We Have
All quotes within this manuscript have been found in publications and the internet and remain the intellectual property of those to whom they have been attributed. Usage of all quotations adheres to the fair use copyright principle.
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About E.G. Kardos
I am a fiction writer and the author of five books. My writing draws inspiration from the beauty surrounding us all—both in nature and in each other. Spirituality, friendship, love, and our connection to the universe inspire me to write. Here’s more about me and my books.
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