Looking for some inspirational words that are thought-provoking? We have rounded some of the best thought provoking quotes, sayings, and proverbs (with images and pictures) about love, life, and success to give you the right perspective on life.
These classic quotes are written by the world’s most famous philosophers, leaders, writers, actors, and more. which will stir some deep thoughts.
Also See: Philosophical Quotes On Life
Deep philosophical quotes can change your point of view in life when you are depressed and need real motivation.
We can get inspired by the wise words about life of some of the greatest philosophers in history such as Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Charles Bukowski, and others.
Also see: Life Changing Quotes
These meaningful quotes will make you think about the reality of life. A lot of these sayings are wise, clever, funny, witty, and will be relatable to you.
Top 10 Thought-Provoking Quotes
- “No medicine cures what happiness cannot.” – Gabriel García Márquez
- “To fall in love with yourself is the first secret to happiness.” – Robert Morley
- “Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” – Albert Einstein
- “The oldest, shortest words – ‘yes’ and ‘no’ – are those which require the most thought.” – Pythagoras
- “The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” – Martin Heidegger
- “If you want to be happy, set a goal that commands your thoughts, liberates your energy, and inspires your hopes.” – Andrew Carnegie
- “It is necessary… for a man to go away by himself… to sit on a rock… and ask, ‘Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?’” – Carl Sandburg
- “The purpose of life is not to be happy – but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you lived at all.” – Leo Rosten
- “Who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?” – Hunter S. Thompson
- “Problems come about when we try to direct the flow of the universe rather than allow it to reveal its own design. Inherent in that design is a love for all living things.” – Marianne Williamson
Famous Quotes That Are Thought-Provoking
- “The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates
- “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.” – Albert Einstein
- “One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory.” – Rita Mae Brown
thought provoking quotes - “People will always show their true selves in the end.” – Leona Lewis
- “The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.” – Albert Schweitzer
thought provoking quotes images - “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” – Ernest Hemingway
Deep thought provoking quotes - “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle
- “You have to die a few times before you can really live.” – Charles Bukowski
thought provoking charles bukowski quotes - “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” – Soren Kierkegaard
- “Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.” – William James
Famous Thought Provoking Sayings
- “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw
- “People don’t notice whether it’s winter or summer when they’re happy.” – Anton Chekhov
- “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Soren Kierkegaard
best thought provoking quotes - “A river cuts through rocks, not because of its power, but because of its persistence.” – Unknown
- “What screws us up most in life is the picture in our head of how it is supposed to be.” – Unknown
- “Confidence is like a dragon where, for every head cut off, two more heads grow back.” – Criss Jami
- “If you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you’ve still got a soul left to lose.” – Charles Bukowski
- “Indeed, man wishes to be happy even when he so lives as to make happiness impossible.” – St Augustine
- “When the winds of life are pushing you back, that’s when you push forward the hardest.” – Yvonne Pierre
- “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” – Albert Einstein
- “Happiness is not some ‘thing’ to be pursued, it is a way of being born from appreciating.” – Rasheed Ogunlaru
- “Every morning you have two choices: Continue to sleep with your dreams, or wake up and chase them.” – Unknown
- “If you aren’t grateful for what you already have, what makes you think you would be happy with more.” – Roy T. Bennett
- “There is no better time than the autumn to begin forgetting the things that trouble us, allowing them to fall away like dried leaves.” – Paulo Coelho
- “The most dangerous risk of all – the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” – Unknown
- “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
- “People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.” – Charles Bukowski
- “People were created to be loved. Things were created to be used. The reason the world is in chaos is that things are being loved and people are being used.” – Unknown
- “Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” – Gautam Buddha
Deep Thought-Provoking Quotes
Words are powerful. They can create and destroy. The words we write or speak can have a huge impact on others be it good or bad.
So some insightful quotes and thoughts in the morning can give you the much-needed motivation to keep pushing your limits and be on your way to success.
- “A wrong motive involves defeat.” – Mary Baker Eddy
- “If you change nothing, nothing will change.” – Unknown
- “Few minds wear out; more rust out.” – Christian N. Bovee
- “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” – Anais Nin
top thought provoking quotes - “The thing we take for granted someone else is praying for.” – Unknown
- “Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence.” – Thomas Szasz
thought provoking quotes about life - “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” – Zig Ziglar
- “The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.” – Oscar Wilde
- “The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.” – Jim Rohn
Motivational Thought Provoking Quotes - “What a sad era when it is easier to smash an atom than a prejudice.” – Albert Einstein
Thought Provoking
- “You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.” – Kahlil Gibran
- “An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it.” – Jef Mallett
- “Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- “Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” – John F. Kennedy
- “The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.” – William Mather Lewis
- “Sorrows cannot all be explained away in a life truly lived, grief and loss accumulate like possessions.” – Stefan Kanfer
- “Not all scars fade, some are supposed to stay to remind us that real beauty lies in surviving them.” – D.G. Torrens
- “Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought.” – Yip Harburg
- “I will welcome happiness for it enlarges my heart; Yet I will endure sadness for it opens my soul.” – Og Mandino
- “A feeling of sadness and longing, That is not akin to pain, and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Quotes That Will Make You Think
- “Reality is such an elusive concept.” – Laura Gilfillan
- “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J.R. R. Tolkein
thought provoking quotes inspirational - “There is no substitute for hard work.” – Thomas Edison
- “Well done is better than well said.” – Benjamin Franklin
- “Misery is almost always the result of thinking.” – Joseph Joubert
thought provoking sayings - “Character is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking.” – J.C. Watts
- “A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.” – Mark Twain
- “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.” – Mark Twain
thought provoking quotes wallpaper - “The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.” – Mark Twain
thought provoking quotes to make you think - “Even the finest sword plunged into salt water will eventually rust.” – Sun Tzu
Quotes To Make You Think Deep
- “Give us everything we ask for and suddenly it’s too much.” – Mark Lawrence
- “A wise man will be master of his mind. A fool will be its slave.” – Publilius Syrus
- “The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work.” – Mark Twain
- “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” – Leo Tolstoy
- “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.” – Lewis B. Smedes
- “Sometimes we choose the road we follow. And sometimes the road chooses us.” – Richie Singh
- “The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- “Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.” – Plato
- “Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “Don’t go around saying the world owes you something. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” – Mark Twain
- “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” – Norman Cousins
- “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” – Oscar Wilde
- “People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they are not on your road, doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.” – Dalai Lama
Thought-Provoking Quotes to Get You Motivated
- “Don’t find fault, find a remedy.” – Henry Ford
- “If you don’t like how things are, change it. You are not a tree.” – Jim Rohn
- “Don’t use yesterday’s state of mind, to make today’s decision.” – C. Nzingha Smith
- “Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” – J.K. Rowling
- “The distance is nothing; it’s only the first step that is difficult.” – Marquise du Deffand
- “Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.” – Jim Rohn
- “A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?” – Albert Einstein
- “Many eyes go through the meadow, but few see the flowers in it.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
- “He that is good for making excuses, is seldom good for anything else.” – Benjamin Franklin
Thoughtful Quotes
- “We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.” – Winston Churchill
thought provoking quotes pictures - “Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life’.” – Helen Exley
- “Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.” – Alexis Carrel
- “I have had dreams, and I’ve had nightmares. I overcame the nightmares because of my dreams.” – Jonas Salk
- “Your mind can be either your prison or your palace. What you make it is yours to decide.” – Bernard Kelvin Clive
- “It doesn’t matter if I don’t succeed in something. What matters is if I learn from my mistakes.” – Linda Evans
- “And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?” – Ann Druyan
- “If you don’t like something change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.” – Maya Angelou
- “You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.” – Marcus Aurelius
- “You will have bad times, but they will always wake you up to the stuff you weren’t paying attention to.” – Robin Williams
- “The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” – William Arthur Ward
- “There is some self-interest behind every friendship. There is no friendship without self-interests. This is a bitter truth.” – Chanakya
- “Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society. The optimist invents the airplane, and the pessimist the parachute.” – Gil Stein
- “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” – Diane Ackerman
- “If we understood the power of our thoughts, we would guard them more closely. If we understood the awesome power of our words, we would prefer silence to almost anything negative. In our thoughts and words, we create our own weaknesses and our own strengths.” – Betty Eadie
More Motivational Quotes
Read on to find these encouraging words of wisdom about sad but true sayings that will motivate you to keep hustling in building your business, leading your life, creating success, achieving your goals as a student, and overcoming your fears to do anything you set your mind to.
Don’t forget to check out feeling like a burden and when things fall apart quotes if you are heartbroken.
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