Staying motivated and positive can be tough when you have a bad day (week, month or year!) and everything around you seems to be going wrong. Trust that we ALL have these days and that it’s normal to feel dejected and uninspired at times. The difference between people who succeed and those who don’t is not if they have these dark moments -rather it’s how they deal with them. The primary difference between success and failure is tenacity and our ability to handle adversity.
You can have all the education, connections, and money in the world, but the ability to handle adversity in a healthy way is what matters the most at the end of the day. It’s also important not to discredit or be ashamed of failure and adversity. In order to be genuinely strong and wise, we have to fail at times. Every person who has ever reached greatness has failed over and over again. So, it’s important not to fear failure, but to embrace it and know that there is a lesson to be learned in every adverse moment in your life.
Here are 20 incredible, inspiring quotes from wise people that will give you a boost during those trying times when you want to throw in the towel.
1. “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” -Michael Jordan
2. “I enjoy life when things are happening. I don’t care if it’s good things or bad things. That means you’re alive.” -Joan Rivers
3. “No human ever became interesting by not failing. The more you fail and recover and improve, the better you are as a person. Ever meet someone who’s always had everything work out for them with zero struggle? They usually have the depth of a puddle. Or they don’t exist.” – Chris Hardwick
4. “If you don’t build your own dream, someone will hire you to build theirs.” -Tony Gaskins Jr.
5. “Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” -Denis Waitley
6. “Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.” – Lance Armstrong
7. “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” – Jack Canfield
8. “When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.”- Ellen DeGeneres
9. “We are all failures – at least the best of us are.” – J.M. Barrie
10. “Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it.”-Oprah Winfrey
11. “Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”–Les Brown
12. “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”– Albert Einstein
13. “I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.”-Muhammad Ali
14. “Tough times never last, but tough people do.” -Dr. Robert Schuller
15. “It does not matter how many times you get knocked down, but how many times you get up.”- Vince Lombardi
16. “If you don’t try at anything, you can’t fail… it takes back bone to lead the life you want.” – Richard Yates
17. “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” – Henry Ford
18. “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” -Wayne Gretsky
19. “Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.” – Robert T. Kiyosaki
20. “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”- Robert F. Kennedy
