Everyone needs a little motivation sometimes. Middle school can be a rough time for many students, with a lot of changes going on in their lives. These 80 inspirational quotes can help your middle schoolers get through some tough times. This collection of quotes for students from successful and famous people can be a powerful weapon that can turn ordinary people into successful people, and give your students hope for tomorrow and affirmations for success.
1. “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” -Vidal Sassoon
2. “Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.” – John Wooden
3. “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” – Thomas A. Edison
4. “You’ve got to get up every morning with determination if you’re going to go to bed with satisfaction.”- George Lorimer
5. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.”- Winston Churchill
6. “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”- Thomas Jefferson
7. “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.”- Robert Collier
8. “By the end of high school I was not of course an educated man, but I knew how to try to become one.”- Clifton Fadiman
9. “Promise yourself to be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. To talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet.”- Christian D. Larson
10. “Living in fear or judgment is not how I will spend my life. Realizing that this life is all I get and your life is all you get, brings a need to make the best of all possible.”- Giancarlo Stanton
11. “Procrastination is the thief of time: Year after year it steals, till all are fled, And to the mercies of a moment leaves the vast concerns of an eternal scene.”- Edward Young
12. “Look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, what do I want to do every day for the rest of my life…do that.”- Gary Vaynerchuk
13. “I’m not telling you it’s going to be easy. I’m telling you it’s going to be worth it.”- Art Williams
14. “Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed.”- Cavett Robert
15. “Work is that which you dislike doing but perform for the sake of external rewards. At school, this takes the form of grades. In society, it means money, status, privilege.”- Abraham Maslow
16. “Nothing has transformed my life more than realizing that it’s a waste of time to evaluate my worthiness by weighing the reaction of the people in the stands.”- Brene Brown
17. “Be true to yourself, help others, make each day your masterpiece, make friendships a fine art, drink deeply from good books-especially the Bible, build a shelter against a rainy day, give thanks for your blessings and pray for guidance every day.”- John Wooden
18. “The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.”- Susan Griffin
19. “When you know better you do better.”- Maya Angelou
20. “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”- Theodore Roosevelt
21. “My attitude has always been, if you fall flat on your face, at least you’re moving forward. All you have to do is get back up and try again.”- Richard Branson
22. “No one is perfect- that’s why pencils have erasers.”- Wolfgang Riebe
23. “No matter how you feel, get up, get dressed, and show up.”- Regina Brett
24. “Only surround yourself with people who lift you higher.”- Oprah Winfrey
25. “Never let the odds keep you from doing what you know in your heart you were meant to do.”- H. Jackson Brown
26. “You can be discouraged by failure, or you can learn from it.”- Thomas J. Watson
27. “It’s the courage to risk your life, not in war, not in battle, not out of fear … but out of love and a sense of injustice that has to be challenged.”- Riane Eisler
28. “Do a little more than you’re paid to. Give a little more than you have to. Try a little harder than you want to. Aim a little higher than you think possible, and give a lot of thanks to God for health, family, and friends.”- Art Linkletter
29. “There are those who work all day. Those who dream all day. And those who spend an hour dreaming before setting to work to fulfill those dreams. Go into the third category because there’s virtually no competition.”- Steven J. Ross
30. “Learning is the only thing that the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets.”- Leonardo da Vinci
31. “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you will live forever.”- Mahatma Gandhi
32. “Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”- Henry Ford
33. “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life thinking it is stupid.”- Albert Einstein
34. “What seems to us as bitter trials are often blessings in disguise.”- Oscar Wilde
35. “Success doesn’t come to you, you go to it.”- Marva Collins
36. “Success isn’t overnight, it’s when every day you get a little better than the day before. It all adds up.”- Dwayne Johnson
37. “Many of life’s failures are people who did not know how close they were to success when they gave up.”- Thomas Edison
38. “I don’t manage a man’s success by how high he climbs, but how high he bounces when he hits the bottom.”- George S. Patton
39. “You just can’t beat the person who never gives up.”- Babe Ruth
40. “When you undervalue what you do, the world will undervalue who you are.”- Oprah Winfrey
41. “There is no sadder thing than a young pessimist; except an old optimist.”- Mark Twain
42. “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”- Maya Angelou
43. “What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.”-Maya Angelou
44. “All our dreams can come true. If we have the courage to pursue them.”- Walt Disney
45. “A dream doesn’t become reality through magic; it takes sweat, determination, and hard work.”- Colin Powell
46. “The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you.”- B.B. King
47. “Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent.”- Steve Martin
48. “Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.”- Horace Mann
49. “The most important ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with other people.”- Horace Mann
50. “Fall seven times and stand up eight.” – Japanese Proverb
51. “If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.”- Nora Roberts
52. “Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”- Jim Ryun
53. “If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.”- John D. Rockefeller
54. “Reading forces you to be quiet in a world that no longer makes place for that.”- John Green
55. “Attitude is the first quality that marks the successful man. If he has a positive attitude and is a positive thinker, who likes challenges and difficult situations, then he has half his success achieved.”- John Maxwell
56. “That some achieve great success, is proof that others can achieve it as well.”- Abraham Lincoln
57. “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
58. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”- Steve Jobs
59. “Assert you right to make a few mistakes, if people can’t accept your imperfections, that’s their fault.”- David M. Burns
60. “The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today.”- H. Jackson Brown
61. “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.”- Henry David Thoreau
62. “It’s the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us. The question is not what you look at but what you see.”- Henry David Thoreau
63. “You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, smarter than you think, and more loved than you know.”- A.A. Milne
64. “All progress takes place outside the comfort zone.”- Michael John Bobak
65. “Nothing is so strong as gentleness and nothing is as gentle as real strength.”- Ralph Sockman
66. “If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.”- Jim Rohn
67. “It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re a number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.”- Vince Lombardi
68. “So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.”- Christopher Reeve
69. “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”- Frederick Douglass
70. “Life isn’t about how you survive the storm; it’s about how to dance in the rain.”- Taylor Swift
71. “To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”- Ralph Waldo Emerson
72. “It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep and you sit in your room trying to play scales.”- B. B. King
73. “A man is but a product of his thoughts, what he thinks, he becomes.”- Mahatma Gandhi
74. “If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from peace.”- Archbishop Desmond Tutu
75. “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”- Les Brown
76. “Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortune, but great minds rise above it.”- Washington Irving
77. “When one door closes, another opens, but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”- Alexander Graham Bell
78. “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity. … Don’t stop to marvel.”- Albert Einstein
79. “A successful man is one who can lay a foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.”- David Brinkley
80. “What we learn with pleasure we never forget.”- Alfred Mercier
81. “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”- Colin Powell
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