Quotes are a way of communicating to each other the kinds of people we respect and admire. Our favorite good vibes quotes may say something about ourselves, about how we see life or how we feel in a particular moment. In this article, we tried to show good vibes quotes from various backgrounds that all talk about the virtues of peace, hard work, effort, and human kindness.
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
―Albert Camus, The Summer
This quote comes from the Nobel Prize winner of 1958, Albert Camus. He was an Argelian writer and philosopher born in 1913. He became known for his absurdist thinking style, which gave a body to the anxiety and despair he describes in his writings. Although this may seem like a downer, Albert Camus was a really happy man, a passionate person who saw loving life as a nice response to the absurd of men’s relationship with existence. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” he used to say. Give Camus a read whenever you are feeling lost.
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
―Neil Gaiman citing G. K. Chesterton in the Epigraph of Coraline
An author crucial to our current culture is often overlooked because we engage more closely with the people influenced by him than his work. The writer that penned Coraline, or the comic book series The Sandman, is a staple of Anglo-Saxon culture as much as anyone and must be respected for that. In this quote, Gaiman is trying to inspire us to beat not only the dragons in the stories we read but the obstacles in our daily lives that, although not breathing fire, do get in the way of us achieving our dreams. Don’t let them.
“Magic is believing in yourself. If you can make that happen, you can make anything happen.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
As one of Germany’s most acclaimed writers, we should listen to what Goethe has to say. In all of his works, he looks at the human heart and tries to find what keeps it going in the face of tragedy or despair. He was in love with big feelings that made people do things they wouldn’t normally do, and as such, he liked to remind his readers of what made humans what they are: creatures of inspiration. As seen in this quote, he just wanted people to indulge in the magic of believing in themselves. Think where we could be if we all listened to him.
“Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing the monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.”
—C.S. Lewis
The writer of The Chronicles of Narnia series is someone that deals a lot with pain, as expressed by his characters using his fantastic landscapes to escape to better realities for the sake of learning more about themselves and growing as people, as individuals with the capacity to look back to a time of pain and having the strength to associate that memory with a How-to guide of dealing with pain through the subtle art of letting go. We don’t have a door into another world to help us, but we all can let go of the things hurting us.
“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
—Ayn Rand
There are a lot of things that could be said about Ayn Rand. This controversial thinker brought us “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” but if you can say something with the utmost certainty, it is that she respected people who got things done far more than those who talked about what they wanted to do. In her novels, people of great talent and vision fought against systems that tried to take that away from them. One look at her work can tell us what she respected in humans, and that is a capacity to make their desires come true through hard work and effort. She wrote about architects that worked manually in their buildings, about train executives that knew how to be a conductor. Rand believed there is nothing that can stop someone that is armed with the power of infinite motivation.
“It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a life for me, and I’m feeling good.”
—Feeling Good, Michael Bublé
From this classic song, we can learn many things or get inspired to do all that is in our reach. Michael Bublé sings with an outstanding production about how feeling good is the most powerful thing in the world.
“We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it is part of success.”
—Arianna Huffington
This one tells us about society’s and culture’s fear of failure as if it were something capable of killing our hopes and dreams. Failure is a stepping stone to reach new heights that make us stronger and more experienced to fail in the future. The greatest men are the ones that knew the best what failure meant and evolved thanks to this fact to become what we know them for.
No one is born a success; we are all collaborating to put society in motion and pull ourselves forward to become better people. In whatever circumstance, our perception of ourselves is built onto our social and economic standing. Because of this, we need some validation in the form of success to feel as if our efforts are worth the sacrifice they inherently imply, and sometimes we don’t get that answer. This is something that we have to learn to unlearn because the fear of failure may be the one thing that is making us fail in its force and pressure to make us conform to rules that maybe, if bent, could accelerate us to the top of the ladder we decided to climb. Don’t let yourself stay in situations that hold you back, especially if it is you, the one keeping you there. Always look forward, and don’t let yourself lose track of your goal.
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
―George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones.
Straight from the lips of Tyrion Lannister, the character that most viewers called their favorite back when Game of Thrones was airing, not in small part thanks to an iconic performance by Peter Dinklage. In this quote, Tyrion speaks of how underappreciated his passion for reading is in a world that deals with problems using swords. But as anyone who has watched the show knows, Tyrion is one of the few characters that use wits to survive, to various degrees of success, but hey, that’s Game of Thrones for you. Literature does that to you, and that’s what Martin, a heavy reader, is evoking in this quote.
According to most book readers, the theme of the antiwar present in most of Martin’s work is something that the TV show failed to capture. Although fans are still waiting for the sixth installment release, we may still have a lot to learn from the books already written, even the first one.
“Out of the void and vastness of the cosmos, life emerges; audacious, improbable. You and I are here. No other miracle is needed.”
―John Mark Green
This quote relies on our limited understanding of the universe and the laws that rule it and how the mere improbability of our existence makes every encounter some sort of miracle. This is a way of looking at our lives that greatly improves how we do things because we appreciate how special it is to live when our past and present thrive in that need to look for a greater explanation to our existence.
This is when people have to accept their mortal and fragile condition and be happy despite it. There is nothing more difficult, and that is why we have our whole lives to figure out how to do it.
“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
―Mahatma Gandhi
As far as political activists go, there are few figures more renowned than Gandhi. The people that hated him have been marked in history as its villains and the methods he used to protests against British rule in India have been used as an ideal way to conduct protests ever since. Whether or not you can say that his methods can apply in every situation with the same level of success is a question that is urians look at. Still, to our purposes of looking at inspirational quotes, there is nothing more desirable for every small human living on this planet than to create a movement strong enough to change the way it spins.
We need more people like Gandhi, who look outside the box and try to make the world a better place using methods that, although unorthodox, are necessary to bring about necessary changes.
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
―George Eliot
We could write an entire book just about this one quote. For starters, no one can use this phrase knowing more about it than “George Eliot.”
George Eliot doesn’t exist. It was an alias used by Mary Ann Evans, who, aware of the enormous prejudices that would arise as a response to a woman writing in the 17th century, used the most stereotypically male pen name imaginable to publish her work. Of course, this was not known at the time, being perceived instead of as a feminist icon, as a typical brilliant writer. Years later, when it was impossible to hide the fact that Mary Ann was a woman, she became what she always wanted to be. Sadly, the only way out of a sexist society was to die and be rediscovered later. Still, her work inspires many young women who don’t have much else to read from another woman in the period we are talking about.
If Mary Ann could become one of the greatest writers of all time, it’s not too late for you to do whatever it is you are struggling with.
“After interviewing hundreds of rich and famous people, I understand that money and fame don’t make people automatically happy. This is something that has to come from inside. I prefer to have a hundred smiles in my hearth than a million dollars in my pocket.”
―Robin Leach
We often become nothing more than working machines that just do whatever it’s necessary to get to our next paycheck, hoping that after a certain amount of money is obtained, life will just magically become a rose-colored road to more success. This is not often the case. We have to remember at all times that a huge part in maintaining our resistance to the all-powerful weight of daily life, that can do so much to rob you of your motivation, the fuel for your soul, comes down to maintaining that soul well oiled. There is nothing to gain in a world where everything becomes a number that goes up and down because watching it go up is an activity without a ceiling, and can therefore suck you out of your own body and become a mindless zombie just looking for more.
Creating great relationships with the people around is the best way of not becoming a zombie. Although work is something that you inevitably will have to go through to reach any of your goals in life, you have to remember that achieving those goals is a matter of effort. If you don’t refill that effort with something else, you are going to empty.
“Those of us who were in the concentration camps remember the men that walked around the shafts, consoling others and giving them their last piece of bread. They may have been few in numbers, but they are sufficient proof that you can strip away everything from a man, except for something: the last of his liberties: That of choosing his attitude in whatever sort of given circumstance, and choose his own path.”
―Victor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
A book written during World War II is bound to be a downer, but that is not the case when reading this. A psychoanalyst incarcerated for his Jewish ancestry, Frankl is always looking for flashes of life during his stay in a concentration camp. Even during arguably the darkest moment of recent human history, he still finds those rare glimpses into the beauty that make us reconsider why we are here and whether we are doing it with love.
He may be a bit of a strong read for a younger person, but it explores the same themes as the recent Pixar movie Soul. It is not about finding a significant meaning; it is about enjoying the journey while it lasts, no matter how dark the road gets.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
―Theodore Roosevelt
This progressive figure of 20th-century American history is someone that we could all learn a little from. His embrace of hard work to get over his obstacles as a sickly small child made him an icon of politics because his built physic added to his explosive and charismatic personality. The man was shot and continued to deliver his speech, so maybe he knows a thing or two about dealing with critics.
“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure whether the storm is over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
―Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
Murakami has an exceptional talent for writing these essential passages into his more absurd works. The storm here symbolizes hardship in whatever form it might appear as, and the description of its effects on people is a poetic way of communicating how we all go through some type of “storm” at a point in our lives and how they change us into something different, stronger and more malleable.
One shouldn’t underestimate the storm, for sure. But one must not remind himself to always look to the end of the storm because every storm eventually ends. Whatever happens afterward is the deciding factor in how prepared we will be when the other one, inevitably, comes for us. But for you to think about when you get to the shore.
“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it, there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”
―J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
With the big-sounding words that made Middle Earth a place every reader dreams of, Tolkien shows us how he sees good in the world: as a thing to be protected from the evils in the world. Grief makes sense here as an image of lost; after great suffering, there is still a chance for happiness and goodness, which may be enhanced and made more precious by the darkness surrounding it.
Tolkien set up to write a battle between good and evil, and in the end, there is a bittersweet victory. Those who dive into his world know that he is a lot more nuanced than commonly thought. A bit of light in the darkness is hope, but a bit of darkness in the light is real.
“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”
―Confucius
Confucius is one of the most important thinkers in traditional eastern culture. Even though ere are many things about other cultures that feel alien for us in the West, we can connect based on how much emphasis is put into work.
Asian philosophy cares a lot about tradition and respect for authorities and does, because of this, regard consistency over many other values and things. Confucius believed that if we all followed a routine, we could be better individuals, and therefore society would be better. We respect him for that.
“Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
―Voltaire
Voltaire had a knack for comedy that many people don’t know about. Even when writing about this time’s big questions, Voltaire always found a chance to be as irreverent as he could be in that era. This is a shining example of that, where we see Voltaire write about singing no matter what is happening in our lives. Maybe he would have something to talk about with Murakami.
This also evokes the image from the movie Titanic by James Cameron, where during the sinking of the ships, musicians choose not to stop playing and instead do something they love right before their deaths. Of course, that movie is more than slightly better known than Voltaire’s aphorism, but that in it by itself is not reason enough to dismiss this piece of wisdom out of hand. Voltaire had a lot to say about many issues, and this view on life can significantly improve the way we see its most tragic moments.
“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger–but recognize the opportunity.”
―John F. Kennedy
Another American president for our collection of quotes. This one is by one of the most remembered presidents in recent history. A charismatic young politician who died tragically young before reaching his full potential. He left us with this great quote that references the Chinese writing system and how it allows for new forms of meaning to form in the selection of characters for each word.
This allows for words to carry more than their denotative meaning when written and have to be taken as a composition of characters instead of the minimal expression of semantic intention in it by itself.
The quote itself talks about how we can use moments of hardship to excel in managing them and come ahead by the end of it. We have to go forward with everything we have when managing the crisis, because that is the only way of making sure not to miss the opportunities that may arise as a direct consequence of the said crisis.
“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”
―Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai, The Teaching of Buddha.
Buddha is one of the most influential figures that has ever lived. We may not have a firm understanding of his teachings, but Buddha carries a lot of weight in the East, and most of their culture is based on the values he teaches.
Not unlike Jesus Christ, Buddha talked to people of all ages and backgrounds, trying to let them go of the unimportant things in life in favor of meditation and peace. According to Buddha, it is in meditation that we can find respect for ourselves and the world, our place in it, and what we can do to make it a better place.
We sincerely hope you take these good vibes quotes and turn them into a responsible work ethic that leads you to success. If you want to share that story of success with someone, don’t forget about us, that’s kind of what we do. You can also remember us if you decide to put some of these quotes in a picture of yours to post on social media. We suspect you look great in it and would like to help embellish it to your liking.
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