This collection of inspirational life quotes can help you gain perspective on various questions, from “what is the good life?” to “what is the meaning of life?”
You can also use life quotes to help you find your purpose.
I included life quotes from a variety of sources including Buddha, Confucius, Dr. Seuss, Emerson, Gandhi, Tony Robbins, and more.
They are all here in your corner to shine a spotlight on life and share their lessons learned on how to live life, love life, find happiness, and live your version of the good life.
What Do You Want Your Life to Be About?
Is life but a dream? … Is life a bowl of cherries? …
Or, is life ultimately what you make of it?
I’m a believer that life is what you make of it. I think one of the best questions you can ask yourself is, “What do you want your life to be about?”
Just by asking that questions sets the stage for learning.
What Inspirational Life Quotes Teach Us
What can we learn from this collection of the best inspirational life quotes?
Here’s my take … Life quotes teach you to have a metaphor for life. Whether you see life as a comedy, a drama, a dream, or an an adventure, use whatever works for you.
Life quotes also teach you to grow your happiness right under your feet, live your life, not somebody else’s, drive from your life style, don’t regret the path not taken, and don’t wait until your life is on the line to squeeze all the juice you can out of it.
If you want to make the most of this life quotes collection, I recommend reading the top 10 list, then scanning the categories that are most interesting or meaningful for you, and choose three quotes to add to your toolkit for life.
Top 10 Inspirational Life Quotes
“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” — Abraham Lincoln
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” — Dr. Seuss
“Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.” — James Dean
“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” — Maria Robinson
“It is not length of life, but depth of life.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Our lives are defined by opportunities, even the ones we miss.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take, but by every moment that takes your breath away.” – Anonymous
“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.” — Randy Pausch
“Why are you trying so hard to fit in, when you’re born to stand out.” — Oliver James
“You live but once; you might as well be amusing.” — Coco Chanel
Challenges (Inspirational Life Quotes)
Here are some of the best inspirational life quotes on how to think about challenges in life:
Purpose and the Meaning of Life (Inspirational Life Quotes)
Here are some of the best inspirational life quotes on how to think about your purpose and the meaning of life:
“Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.”
— Richard Bach
“I don’t want to live. I want to love first, and live incidentally.”
— Zelda Fitzgerald
“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.”
— Emily Dickinson
“I’m killing time while I wait for life to shower me with meaning and happiness.”
— Bill Watterson
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
— Robert Frost
“It is not what we get. But who we become, what we contribute… that gives meaning to our lives.”
— Tony Robbins
“Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
— Soren Kierkegaard
“Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it’s in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile.”
— Nicholas Sparks
“Only a life lived for others is a life worth while.”
— Albert Einstein
“The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.”
— William James
“The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”
— E. M. Forster
“The purpose of life is a life of purpose.”
— Robert Byrne
“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
“The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.”
— Terry Pratchett
“This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.”
— William James
“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”
— John Lennon
“When you can live forever what do you live for?”
— Stephenie Meyer
“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
— Mark Twain
“Where you end up is not the most important thing. It’s the road you take to get there. The road is what you’ll look back on and call your life.”
— Tim Willey
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
— Albert Camus
Regrets and Mistakes (Inspirational Life Quotes)
Here are some of the best inspirational quotes on how to think about mistakes and regrets:
“A learning experience is one of those things that says, ‘You know that thing you just did? Don’t do that.”
— Douglas Adams
“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
— George Bernard Shaw
“Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.”
— Oscar Wilde
“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“How much I missed, simply because I was afraid of missing it.”
— Paulo Coelho
“I’ll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.”
— Mae West
“If you wait to do everything until you’re sure it’s right, you’ll probably never do much of anything.”
— Win Borden
“Look at life through the windshield, not the rear-view mirror”
— Byrd Baggett
“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”
— Arthur Miller
“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.”
— John Greenleaf Whittier
“The past has no power over the present moment.”
— Eckhart Tolle
“This life is what you make it. Not matter what, you’re going to mess up sometimes, it’s a universal truth.”
— Marilyn Monroe
“We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It’s one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it’s another to think that yours is the only path.”
— Paulo Coelho
The Good Life (Inspirational Life Quotes)
Here are some of the best inspirational life quotes about how to live the good life:
“Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
— Mark Twain
“I don’t think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer
“I’m the one that has to die when it’s time for me to die, so let me live my life, the way I want to.”
— Jimi Hendrix
“It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.”
— Dale Carnegie
“It’s all about quality of life and finding a happy balance between work and friends and family.”
— Philip Green
“Life loves the liver of it.”
