Powerful statements for when you need them
Here’s a list of short and powerful statements that I have collected and updated over the years, divided into three categories: life, productivity, and relationships.
Read through them whenever you need some encouragement or a reality check.
Life
Misery comes from counting misfortunes. Happiness comes from counting blessings.
Forget about what you don’t have, so that you enjoy what you do have.
Life’s too short to make all possible mistakes. Learn from those of others.
When you take responsibility for your actions, you also take the chaos out of your life.
You cannot fix your character defects until you admit that you have them.
Lying to yourself is like slowly dying from poisoning. Truth is the antivenin.
What we imagine in our minds is often more terrifying than reality.
Your character amounts to the sum average of that of your closest friends.
The worst thing that can happen to you is not failure, it’s giving up.
You can have an easy life, or a happy life. You can’t have both.
Do not allow the dark nightmares of your past to overshadow the bright dreams of your future.
Keep your eyes on reaching your goals and not on the people ahead of you.
Change is the only constant in our lives. Always be ready be for it.
To become a better person, you must mostly improve on your weaknesses. Your strengths can wait.
You made it this far, so there’s no doubt that you can keep going.
Your lifespan is short. A second passed will never return.
Your mind will work against you the moment that you stop surveilling it.
You can’t know if a seed will flourish until you sow and water it.
You cannot foresee the future, so make your best possible decisions now.
A broken tool can’t repair anything. Fix yourself before trying to fix the world.
Wishing for a life free of trouble is pointless, since you can avoid most of it by making better decisions.
Life is a war made up of many small battles. Most of them are not worth fighting.
Unless you start working on your idea, you will never see what its real potential is.
Always place what you could still become above what you currently are, or you’ll fall back.
Resentment is pointless and painful. Stand up for yourself or take responsibility.
Mindlessness is the enemy most people don’t realize they fight every day.
There are no solutions in life, only trade-offs.
No matter what you do in life, learn at least one practical trade with which you can support yourself.
Your worth is not measured by your wealth, status, or success, but entitles you to none of those.
Dangerous decisions seldom appear scary. Many other decisions are scary but not dangerous. Learn the difference.
Failure is like a step on the ladder towards success. Each step gets you closer.
Something’s wrong if you’re too busy to seek meaning in your life.
Surround yourself with the kind of people that will pull you up above, not push you down below.
Luck comes to those who go out and look for it. Even to win in the lottery, you need to fill out the ticket.
Roads have ditches on either side. Stay on the track, don’t fall into either one.
Look at the bright side of things, and you’ll soon find enough reasons to be happy.
There’s always something to fret about in everyday life, so there’s no point in coming up with additional reasons.
The surest way to find sadness and trouble in life is to magnify small issues.
Lofty ambitions need to be married to pure and noble motives, or else they will lead you to self-destruction.
Ask yourself often if you are the kind of person you want others to become.
Your keeping busy doing good and/or important things doesn’t hide your character flaws, nor will it redeem you.
Most people who criticize you for creating something of value have never created something themselves.
Risk aversion is the greatest enemy of opportunity.
Your actions will either build up your confidence or tear it down.
There’s no point in comparing yourself to others. Their journey is different from yours.
You can’t be happy if you believe that happiness comes by chance rather than by choice!
Our greatest moments usually occur when we’re stretched to our limits to achieve something great.
If someone has already done it, then you can do it too. If they haven’t, then you can become the first to do it.
Don’t focus on the problem. Focus on the options. There’s always more than one.
Find something to occupy your time with that gives you power, peace, and purpose.
Hard-earned happiness is difficult to destroy.
That which is worth doing at all is worth doing well.
What you are afraid of is seldom as bad as what you imagine in your head.
You cannot practice adaptability if you don’t have a plan at all.
All you own in life is time. Don’t allow bad habits or bad people to take it away from you.
Luck will naturally occur where effort and opportunity meet each other.
Mistakes are not a problem in and of themselves. Not taking responsibility for them, however, is.
Your success is not defined by just a single moment of victory.
Persist in doing what’s right, and soon you’ll forget about doing what’s wrong.
The meaningful things in your life won’t happen until you pursue them.
When you’re going through hell, keep moving. Eventually you’ll reach the end of it.
When you stop growing as a person, you don’t stagnate, you tend to fall back.
For as long as you can think for yourself, things never have to remain the way they are, no matter how bad.
At this very moment, you are creating the future that you are going to have to live through.
Success is determined to a great degree by what and how much you in the moment when you don’t feel like doing much of anything at all.
Why would you wait to die to rest in peace when you can live in peace instead?
Humility is not thinking less of oneself, but thinking of oneself less.
Most of your first attempts will fail, so there’s nothing to worry about.
Weeds grow in every garden and all of them can and should be plucked, including those in your mind.
No one can take your freedom of thought from you. Don’t allow it.
You’re a lot better at retaining what you teach than what you’re taught.
A cluttered mind is suffering from obesity of thought and needs a mental diet.
Money is just the fuel to keep your engine pulling you through your journey. It is not your destination.
Your time belongs to whomever or whatever you devote it to. Choose wisely.
The easiest way to accurately predict your future is to create it yourself.
Whoever invented schools and degrees, was neither schooled nor had a degree.
Part of knowing what you want is knowing what you need to give up to get it.
You tend to keep the limitations that you defend in arguments.
Our road to success is always under construction, and we’re its builders.
You’ll never know how far you can go until you try going further then heretofore.
Don’t wrestle with a pig, or else you’ll get dirty, and the pig will be pleased.
Panic is a bad advisor.
You have skills that people will pay money for. Every minute you don’t put them to use, you lose money.
Every time you use the tools you have to create something, you increase the chances of obtaining more or better tools.
The world makes way for the people who know where they’re going.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land on a star.
Don’t learn just to acquire knowledge. Learn to act on it.
You’re in deep trouble if you discard the obvious in favor of the attractive.
Take your eyes off the mile and onto the yard, so you don’t stumble on what’s right in front of you.
Create your feelings. Don’t allow them to create you.
When you’re not walking at all, you’re walking in the wrong direction.
You can correct your course but inaction takes you nowhere.
Your greatest fear can become your greatest skill.
The only difference between you and a professional is the time you took to learn.
You can make the world a better place by becoming a better person.
Until you admit responsibility for your bad choices you won’t make better ones.
When you don’t know what you’re working for you end up working all the time.
It’s not as important how many books you get through as how many get through to you.
Don’t lose the lesson when you lose the game.
Not getting what you want is sometimes the best that could happen to you.
Open your arms to change but don’t let go of your values.
Live a good life so you can enjoy it a second time when you remember it in your old age.
The knowledge and experience you share with others is part of your legacy.
How successful you were in life is determined by how much you had to sacrifice.
Don’t work yourself harder. Work harder on yourself.
You have a gift to give to the world. Find out what it is and hand it out.
Don’t ask, “Can I do this?” Ask, “How can I do this?”
It may take a lifetime to recover from one foolish act, so don’t yield into temptation.
Only compare yourself with who you were yesterday.
Asking the right question can make the answer clear.
You don’t have to be the best in a field. You just have to be ahead of a few of those who you want to reach out to.
Take the vitamins and you wont have to take the aspirin.
Everything is created twice: first in our minds and then in reality.
Every mistake we make started out as a thought we didn’t capture, analyze, and throw away.
When you choose to be happy, your outlook on your circumstances changes.
To have a job is good. Having career is better. However, having a calling is the best.
You cannot sincerely express gratitude and remain in a negative state, so do it more often.
You need to be open enough to allow good into your life and strong enough to keep out the bad.
When you keep too many doors open, you go through none of them.
How well you take care of your health when you’re young determines your quality of life when you get old.
Our tendency is to either move away from pain or to move towards pleasure. You can avoid the former and obtain the latter by moving towards meaning.
You can greatly improve your safety by getting to know yourself deeper.
Say no to the good things so that you can say yes to the best things.
Change is inevitable. Growth is a choice.
You can open up a lot of opportunities in your life by simply telling people about what it is that you want.
Your external environment tends to reflect your internal environment.
It’s hard to make a painting when the canvas has no edges. The limits are there to help you, not to constrain you.
Be an inch wide and a mile deep. Don’t stretch yourself too thin.
Happiness is to earn all we can, save all we can, and give all we can.
Feelings are not to be suppressed, nor to be put in charge, but to be managed.
You alone can change your feelings and your attitude to the better.
Focus on doing the right thing, not on doing everything right.
You’ll never enjoy the present if you wait for happiness in the future.
Don’t live to work. Work to live.
If you knew how quickly people forget the dead you’d stop living to impress people.
Every action you take is a vote for the kind of person you want to become.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will lead your life and you will call it fate.
The days where you don’t feel like doing what you must are the most important ones.
Walk slowly but never backwards.
Being aliterate is almost as bad as being illiterate.
Nothing is worse for a just clause than someone hysterically defending it.
What matters is not how you started, it’s how you finish.
Change your thoughts and the way you think, and you’ll change your life.
You can pay the small price of discipline or the large price of regret.
If you’re not running to work every day than financial stability won’t change that.
If you want to save the world but don’t want to be crucified, then you will fail.
Inconveniences are not injustices. Privileges are not rights.
Worrying about tomorrow ruins today.
All the woulds, coulds, and shoulds, ran away and hid from one little did.
Don’t drown in information while thirsting for wisdom.
Comparison is the death of joy.
If you feel like you have to do anything in secret at all, you probably shouldn’t do it.
Progress adds more responsibilities, not less, so prune them as you go.
Productivity
The surest way to save time, is to be intentional about everything that you do, even about having fun.
Fatigue is often just an emotion. Persist a little longer and it’ll usually go away.
Your brain is meant to create ideas, not store them, so write them down.
Good and efficient work comes from a good and efficient system.
Productivity is less about managing your time better and more about developing self-control.
A damaged machine will continue to malfunction until you diagnose and fix the problem. The same goes for your habits and routines.
To say yes to some things, you’ll have to have to say no to others. You can’t say yes to everything.
Minimalism is not getting rid of everything, but of that which distracts you from what is truly important.
You waste more time and energy in dreading your responsibilities than if you took them on one step at a time.
Productivity is less about doing more than it is about doing that which is expedient and which is right.
The way you spend your time is the way you spend your life. Don’t overspend or waste it.
Change and unpredictability are not good enough excuses for lack of communication and planning.
Decision fatigue isn’t the end of productivity. Create routines and systems to work around it.
When you stop working on your goals, you immediately tend to procrastinate.
You can’t run a two-battery toy on only one. Don’t tackle a task that requires more energy than you currently feel you have.
You can only make a finite amount of wise decisions each day. Determine your limits and relegate what’s left over for tomorrow.
You don’t casually fall into healthy and productive habits. You plan and execute them.
Your plans will fail when you fail to make a plan.
The 5 P’s that avert procrastination are: Prior planning prevents poor performance.
A task list a day keeps procrastination away.
You won’t be able to get another candle if you burn yours at both ends.
The things that we do regularly are more important than the things that we do occasionally.
Ask yourself often: “What can I do right now that makes everything else easier or unnecessary?”
Striving for perfection and being a perfectionist are two separe things. The former delivers. The latter doesn’t.
Money, time, energy, etc. Whatever thing you don’t budget, gets wasted.
The time you spend decluttering saves you double that time later.
The secret of life’s success is in a careful, conscientious attention to the little things.
Make time to do things today that will create more time for you tomorrow.
“GO FAR”: goals, obstacles, focus, acts, review.
You can do anything but you cannot do everything.
If you do not keep your goals on the top of your mind at all times you will have all the reasons to indulge in wasting time.
Motivation is an exhaustible resource. Following a plan requires less of it.
It’s easier to do something out of habit than to muster the willpower to do it.
Perfectionism is a socially acceptable way to procrastinate.
Winners and losers both have goals, but winners have systems.
You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.
You will never find time for the things that are important to you. You have to make time them.
You can’t manage what you don’t measure.
Relationships
Forgiveness is meant for the people who don’t deserve it, or else it wouldn’t be forgiveness.
You can’t change people around, but you can change the people around you.
You can influence people through evil manipulation or through benevolent inspiration.
You cannot change what other people do to you, but you can change the way that you react to it.
It’s quite unfair when we judge people by their actions and ourselves by our intentions.
Trust cannot be manufactured. It’s not a checklist, and you can lose it, so handle it with care.
You earn people’s trust once you convince them that you’re driven by more than self-gain.
People care less about what you do than about why you do it, so ask yourself why you do it before you do it.
The opposite of being a jerk is not being a decent person, it’s being a doormat. Don’t be either one.
Being too compliant endangers your independence. Know your limits and what you’re about.
Try always to assume that people are ignorant rather than malevolent, and you’ll save yourself from a lot of trouble.
It’s more challenging and more rewarding to deal kindly with people, rather than sarcastically.
Consider yourself too important to be nice, and people won’t consider you important enough to be nice to you.
People give you what you want more readily if you articulate it clearly, concisely, and honestly.
Your ability to know when to deal with others nicely or nastily determines the quality of your relationships.
Give genuine smiles and say pleasant words to people, and there’s an increased chance that they will do so in return.
Through every single action, your example either inspires or injures those that surround you.
Boundaries should be like fences with gates. They must allow the good in and keep the bad out.
The only group where you’re required to look and behave like everyone else is the military.
We should pity people when they can’t help themselves, not when they don’t want to.
You will never appease your conscience if you live to appease other people.
It’s easy to spot the gaps in the integrity of other people and easier to overlook our own.
There might be holy intentions but there are no holy humans.
Choose your words and actions based on how you want others to react.
Don’t bring up the past. Disagreements deal with the current situation.
Your relationships need positive deposits not negative withdrawals.
Openly draw the lines in the sand for every new relationship you establish and no boundaries will ever be crossed.
It’s good to have lots of friends. It’s better to have only a few close friends.
Boundaries are a defensive tool, not an offensive weapon.
People won’t ask you why you said “no” to them as often as you think they will.
You problem is not other people’s emergency.
Sometimes you help others by allowing them to suffer the consequences of their actions.
Don’t allow happily irresponsible people to make you miserably responsible.
You’re responsible towards others. You’re not responsible for others.
Don’t comply with something that you know you are going to resent.
To forgive whilst to guard your heart is not a contradictory behavior.
Be interested, not interesting.
Your thoughts, feelings, attitude, behavior, choices, desires, and needs are primarily your responsibility, not that of those around you.
You can’t impose limits on bad people, but you can limit how much you interact with them.
Setting boundaries is not unloving. It protects us from unloving behaviors on both sides.
Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.
“Yes” and “no” are not emotional words. They are directional words.
Honesty is never guaranteed to be safe nor free of risks, but it is free of regrets.
Only one person is needed for forgiveness to occur. Only for reconciliation do you need both.
It’s OK to be confident. It’s not OK to be cocky.
It’s not what they call you, it’s what you answer to.
What you win people with is what you win people into.
The suffering that you don’t use transform yourself, you transmit to others.
Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.