58 Quotes to Inspire Leadership, Resilience and Social Change

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you know that I love posting inspirational quotes on a daily basis. Every morning as part of my centering process, I look for sources of strength and wisdom not just to get me through the day, but to help me thrive as I go about my work. Here are just a few (okay, a lot) of the ones that inspire me the most. I hope they provide light for your journey as well. Please share your favorites that I can add to this list in the comments!

Leadership

“Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime.” – W.E.B. Du Bois

“Once you make the unequivocal internal commitment to do something – when you absolutely know this is the time and the place to act – the world around you will shift in all sorts of apparently miraculous ways to make it happen.” - Sarah Susanka

“Start by starting.” – Meryl Streep

“The future started yesterday, and we’re already late.” - John Legend, “If You’re Out There”

“Thus, the task is not so much to see what no one else has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.” - Arthur Schopenhauer

“May I stress the need for courageous, intelligent, and dedicated leadership… Leaders of sound integrity. Leaders not in love with publicity, but in love with justice. Leaders not in love with money, but in love with humanity. Leaders who can subject their particular egos to the greatness of the cause.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.” - Leonardo da Vinci

“Talk does not cook rice.” - Chinese proverb

“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas; I’m frightened of the old ones.” - John Cage

“Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.” - Viktor Frankl

“Never say ‘I could have done that’ because you didn’t.” - Karim Rashid

“Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate and to connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives.” - Oprah

“Opportunity dances with those who are ready on the dance floor.” - H. Jackson Brown

“When you have chosen your part, abide by it and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself to the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common heroic. Congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We dreamed of doing but could not bring ourselves to do.” – Etheridge Knight

“So human beings come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don’t do it, it’s as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat. It’s a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. It’s a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on.” – Rumi

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” – Mary Oliver

“This is not the time to be afraid or timid because the challenges are formidable. Now is the time to take both personal and institutional risks.” - Wenda Weekes Moore

“Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.” - Kahlil Gibran

“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” — Rumi

“You don’t lead by pointing a finger and telling people some place to go. You lead by going to that place and making a case.” – Ken Kesey

“Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down. “
- Ray Bradbury

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center. “ - Kurt Vonnegut

“Don’t let anyone speak for you, and don’t rely on others to fight for you.” - Michelle Obama

“Good things happen to those who hustle.” - Anais Nin

Resilience

“Someone was hurt before you, wronged before you, hungry before you, frightened before you, beaten before you, humiliated before you, raped before you…yet, someone survived…You can do anything you choose to do.” – Maya Angelou

“Whatever is bringing you down, get rid of it. Because you’ll find that when you’re free . . . your true self comes out.” — Tina Turner

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” - Steve Jobs

“The journey is the destination.” – Dan Eldon

“Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.” – Natalie Goldberg

“Things do not change; we change.” – Henry David Thoreau

“The end is nothing; the road is all.” – Willa Cather

“We don’t change what we are, we change what we think what we are.“ – Eric Butterworth

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next.” - Gilda Radner

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” - Robert Anson Heinlein

“Each person’s task in life is to become an increasingly better person.” – Tolstoy

“Happiness is not the absence of problems but the ability to deal with them.” – H. Jackson Brown

“One thing is certain: That is that the power of belief, the power of thought, will move reality in the direction of what we believe and conceive of it. If you really believe you can do something, you can. That is a fact.” - Daisaku Ikeda

“You can fall, but you can rise also.” - Angelique Kidjo

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Life only demands from you the strength you possess.”- Dag Hammarskjold

“Whatever it is, if it doesn’t make you happy, walk away, give it away to someone else who wants it. Let it be their next dream; let it flee from you. Then you have room to grow, to allow magnificent things to fill the vacuum of those seemingly empty places. When you hold onto yesterday, when you hold onto dead and dying adventures, you have no room in your box for greatness.” - Unknown

“It’s never too late to be who you might have been.” - George Eliot

“I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.” - J. B. Priestley

“No one who is being himself is going to be approved of all the time. The whole world could love you, but if you do not love yourself, you would not even notice. The opposite is also true – the whole world could disapprove of you, but if you love yourself, you would not even notice. Accept yourself within you and the entire world becomes totally acceptable.” – Bartholomew

Social Change

“There is no greater gift to future generations than that we do the work God has asked us to do: love one another, that the world might be made right.” – Marianne Williamson

“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.” - Woodrow Wilson

“If you don’t like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.” - Marian Wright Edelman

“Until all of us have made it, none of us have made it.” - Rosemary Brown

“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?” - Ray Bradbury

“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” - Arundhati Roy

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” - Audre Lorde

“It takes more than money to change the world. We need a movement.” - Sheila C. Johnson

“To be young and not be revolutionary is a biological contradiction.” - Unknown

“Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it.” - Pablo Casals

“The only way to change the world is to change yourself.” - Sarah Susanka

“One must be able to get indignant.” - Abbé Pierre

“The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.” – Albert Einstein