Inspiration, motivation, and dedication…

163 inspirational quotes on confidence, courage, and making it when you think you can’t.

Hey Sacred Bombshell,

Here’s the real deal.

This is a testament to the will of the human spirit. If one of us can make it through, we all can. Right?

Here’s a timeless list of just what the goddess ordered.

Check out these beautifully inspiring quotes. It is truly incredible that so many women and men, poets and scholars, folks from diverse walks of life and different time periods agree on the core definitions of courage, self-confidence, and kicking booty.

Your Inspirational Quotes! Jump In

From Dr. Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey to poet Rumi and Herodotus, a historian born in 484 BC, these passion makers share their wisdom about living your best life in their inspiring words below.

1. If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
-Henry David Thoreau

2. Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.
-Norman Vincent Peale

3. As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
-Johann Von Goethe

4. It’s so important to believe in yourself. Believe that you can do it, under any circumstances. Because if you believe you can, then you really will. That belief just keeps you searching for the answers, and then pretty soon you get it.
-Wally “Famous” Amos

5. Search and you will find that at the base and birth of every great business organization was an enthusiast, a man consumed with earnestness of purpose, with confidence in his powers, with faith in the worthwhile-ness of his endeavors.
-BC Forbes

6. My mind to me a kingdom is.
-Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford

7. I’ve always seen myself as a winner, even as a kid. If I hadn’t, I just might have gone down the drain a couple of times. I’ve got something inside of me, peasant-like and stubborn, and I’m in it ’til the end of the race.
-Truman Capote

8. It is as proper to have pride in oneself as it is ridiculous to show it to others.
-Francois de la Rochefoucauld

9. As is our confidence, so is our capacity.
-William Hazlitt

10. Calm self-confidence is as far from conceit as the desire to earn a decent living is remote from greed.
-Channing Pollock

11. Only so far as a man believes strongly, mightily, can he act cheerfully, or do anything worth doing.
-Frederick W. Robertson

12. To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything.
-Joan Didion

13. Experience tells you what to do; confidence allows you to do it.
-Stan Smith

14. Confidence is that feeling by which the mind embarks on great and honorable courses with a sure hope and trust in itself.
-Cicero

15. If a man doesn’t delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?
– Sherwood Anderson

16. Your success depends mainly upon what you think of yourself and whether you believe in yourself.
-William JH Boetcker

17. Never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.
-Clementine Paddleford

18. They conquer who believe they can.
-John Dryden

19. Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.
-Andrew Carnegie

20. Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control. These three alone lead to sovereign power.
-Alfred, Lord Tennyson

21. Faith in oneself…is the best and safest course.
-Michelangelo

22. There’s one blessing only, the source and cornerstone of beatitude: confidence in self.
-Marcus Annaeus Seneca

23. Self-respect will keep a man from being abject when he is in the power of enemies, and will enable him to feel that he may be in the right when the world is against him.
-Bertrand Russell

24. Self-trust is the first secret of success.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

25. I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.
-William Ernest Henley

26. Once you get rid of the idea that you must please other people before you please yourself, and you begin to follow your own instincts–only then can you be successful. You become more satisfied, and when you are other people tend to be satisfied by what you do.
-Raquel Welch

27. There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem, the more likely one will treat others with respect, kindness, and generosity. People who do not experience self-love have little or no capacity to love others.
-Nathaniel Branden

28. Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.
-Helen Keller

29. The way to develop self-confidence is to do the thing you fear and get a record of successful experiences behind you.
-William Jennings Bryan

30. Class is an aura of confidence that is being sure without being cocky. Class has nothing to do with money. Class never runs scared. It is self-discipline and self-knowledge. It’s the surefootedness that comes with having proved you can meet life.
-Ann Landers

31. Confidence…is directness and courage in meeting the facts of life.
-John Dewey

32. Measure yourself by your best moments, not by your worst. We are too prone to judge ourselves by our moments of despondency and depression.
-Robert Johnson

33. “Glamour” is assurance. It is a kind of knowing that you are all right in every way, mentally and physically and in appearance, and that, whatever the occasion or the situation, you are equal to it.
-Marlene Dietrich

34. Perhaps I am stronger than I think.
-Thomas Merton

35. Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstances.
-Bruce Barton

36. I always thought I should be treated like a star.
-Madonna

37. Real adulthood is the result of two qualities: self-discipline and self-reliance. The process of developing them together in balance is called maturing.
-JW Jepson

38. He who would be well taken care of must take care of himself.
-William Graham Sumner

39. The future is not in the hands of fate, but in ours.
-Jules Jusserano

40. What pulls the strings is the force hidden within; there lies…the real man.
-Marcus Aurelius

41. He who is plenteously provided for from within needs but little from without.
-Johann von Goethe

42. I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.
-Louisa May Alcott

43. If you want a thing done, go; if not, send.
-Benjamin Franklin

44. I have always regarded myself as the pillar of my life.
-Meryl Streep

45. Do not rely completely on any other human being, however dear. We meet all of life’s greatest tests alone.
-Agnes MacPhail

46. If it is to be, it is up to me.
-Anonymous

47. You’ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.
-Irish Proverb

48. The destiny of man is in his own soul.
-Herodotus

49. Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

50. There are three types of baseball players — those who make it happen, those who watch it happen, and those who wonder what happened.
-Tommy Lasorda

51. Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.
-Nikki Giovanni

52. There ain’t nothing from the outside can lick any of us.
-Margaret Mitchell

53. I’ve never met a person, I don’t care what his condition, in whom I could not see possibilities. I don’t care how much a man may consider himself a failure, I believe in him, for he can change the thing that is wrong in his life anytime he is prepared and ready to do it. Whenever he develops the desire, he can take away from his life the thing that is defeating it. The capacity for reformation and change lies within.
-Preston Bradley

54. God, why do I storm heaven for answers that are already in my heart? Every grace I need has already been given me. Oh, lead me to the Beyond within.
-Macrina Wieherkehr

55. Knowing that we can be loved exactly as we are gives us all the best opportunity for growing into the healthiest of people.
– Fred Rogers

56. Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
-Dr. Alexis Carrel

57. It is what you are inside that matters. You, yourself, are your only real capital.
-Vladimir Zworykin

58. Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creature of man. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.
-Benjamin Disraeli

59. Up to a point a man’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and movements and changes in the world about him, then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be…Everyone has it within his power to say, this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow.
-Louis L’Amour

60. Every time I start a picture…I feel the same fear, the same self-doubts…and I have only one source on which I can draw, because it comes from within me.
-Federico Fellini

61. It is our relationship to circumstances that determines their influence over us. The same wind that carries one vessel into port may blow another off shore.
-Christian Bovee

62. There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
-Aldous Huxley

63. Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.
-Anne Frank

64. A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction.
-Rita Mae Brown

65. I would not sit waiting for some value tomorrow, nor for something to happen. One could wait a lifetime….I would make something happen.
-Louis L’Amour

66. Circumstances are the rulers of the weak; they are but the instruments of the wise.
-Samuel Lover

67. You have to take it as it happens, but you should try to make it happen the way you want to take it.
-Old German Proverb

68. Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into something beautiful, or debase it into ugliness. It’s in our hands.
-Cathy Better

69. Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life.
-Herbert Otto

70. People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. The people who get on in this world are they who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.
-George Bernard Shaw

71. Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.
-Francis Bacon

72. We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers — you can blame anyone, but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you want to change, you’re the one who has got to change. It’s as simple as that, isn’t it?
-Katharine Hepburn

73. How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.
-Marcus Aurelius

74. Be yourself and think for yourself; and while your conclusions may not be infallible, they will be nearer right than the conclusions forced upon you.
-Elbert Hubbard

75. Though reading and conversation may furnish us with many ideas of men and things, our own meditation must form our judgment.
-Isaac Watts

76. Each of us makes his own weather, determines the color of the skies in the emotional universe which he inhabits.
-Fulton J. Sheen

77. I am responsible for my own well-being, my own happiness. The choices and decisions I make regarding my life directly influence the quality of my days.
-Kathleen Andrus

78. Learn to depend upon yourself by doing things in accordance with your own way of thinking.
-Grenville Kleiser

79. When I have been unhappy, I have heard an opera…and it seemed the shrieking of winds; when I am happy, a sparrow’s chirp is delicious to me. But it is not the chirp that makes me happy, but I that make it sweet.
-John Ruskin

80. Thinking is like loving and dying. Each of us must do it for himself.
-Josiah Royce

81. Blame yourself if you have no branches or leaves, don’t accuse the sun of partiality.
-Chinese Proverb

82. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

83. It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
-Agnes Repplier

84. No one gives you joy or sorrow….We gather the consequences of our own deeds.
-Garuda Purana

85. In the long run we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
-Eleanor Roosevelt

86. Felicity, felicity…is quaffed out of a golden cup…the flavor is with you alone, and you can make it as intoxicating as you please.
-Joseph Conrad

87. Some pursue happiness–others create it.
-Anonymous

88. I wasn’t really naked. I simply didn’t have any clothes on.
-Josephine Baker

89. To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you that you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
-Robert Louis Stevenson

90. If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
-Albert Camus

91. Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure are, by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral, and subject to chance.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

92. Under normal periods, any man’s success hinges about 5 percent on what others do for him and 95 percent on what he does.
-James A. Worsham

93. No man will succeed unless he is steady to face and overcome difficulties and prepared to assume responsibilities.
-William JH Boetcker

94. Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
-William Jennings Bryan

95. I am my own heaven and hell!
-JCF von Schiller

96. Every man is the architect of his own fortune.
-Sallust

97. A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
-Francis Bacon

98. If people are suffering, then they must look within themselves….Happiness is not something ready-made [Buddha] can give you. It comes from your own actions.
-The Dalai Lama

99. Man is still responsible….His success lies not with the stars, but with himself. He must carry on the fight of self-correction and discipline.
-Frank Curtis Williams

100. To character and success, two things, contradictory as they may seem, must go together–humble dependence and manly independence; humble dependence on God and manly reliance on self.
-William Wordsworth

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