21 Quotes For When You Really, Really Need A Good Day

We all go through bouts of listlessness, where we feel uninspired or directionless or simply too lazy to get out of bed and do anything. It’s a natural part of the human experience, but the struggle can sometimes be overwhelming. So here are 21 quotes that will hopefully leave you feeling like you have a little more spark within you to help you start your day.

Flickr / hmoong
Flickr / hmoong

“Dreams are lovely. But they are just dreams. Fleeting, ephemeral, pretty. But dreams do not come true just because you dream them. It’s hard work that makes things happen. It’s hard work that creates change.”

-Shonda Rhimes

“Today I tell you that whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality.”

-Conan O’Brien

“Loving ourselves through the process of owning our story is the bravest thing we’ll ever do.”

-Brené Brown

“For the most part, ‘naturals’ are myths. People who are especially good at something may have some innate inclination, or some particular talent, but they have also spent about ten thousand hours practicing or doing that thing.”

-Meg Jay

“Build your dreams or someone else will hire you to build theirs.”

-Farrah Gray

“One thing we do know: Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.”

-Eckhart Tolle

“Be open to learning new lessons, even if they contradict the lessons you learned yesterday.”

-Ellen DeGeneres

 “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“What would be really interesting to see [in your film] is how beautiful things grow out of shit. Because nobody ever believes that. Everybody thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head—they’d somehow appeared there and formed in his head—before he, and all he had to do was write them down and they would kind of be manifest to the world. But I think what’s so interesting, and what would really be a lesson that everybody should learn is that things come out of nothing, things evolve out of nothing.”

-Brian Eno

“Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.”

-Carl Bard

“When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: ‘Is this person in between me and what I want to do?’ If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.”

-Tina Fey

“As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.”

-Toni Morrison

“A hashtag does not make you Dr. King. A hashtag does not change anything. It’s a hashtag. It’s you, sitting on your butt, typing on your computer and then going back to binge-watching your favorite show. I do it all the time. For me, it’s Game of Thrones. Volunteer some hours. Focus on something outside yourself. Devote a slice of your energies towards making the world suck less every week.”

-Shonda Rhimes

“You’re imperfect, and you’re wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.”

-Brené Brown

“You have to care about your work but not about the result. You have to care about how good you are and how good you feel, but not about how good people think you are or good people think you look.”

-Amy Poehler

“The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”

-Steven Pressfield

It is nearly impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.”

-Andrew Solomon

“Everyone who works with love and with intelligence finds in the very sincerity of his love for nature and art a kind of armor against the opinions of other people.”

-Vincent Van Gogh

“The whole point of being alive is to evolve into the complete person you were intended to be.”

-Oprah Winfrey

“For my first show at ‘SNL’, I wrote a Bill Clinton sketch, and during our read-through, it wasn’t getting any laughs. This weight of embarrassment came over me, and I felt like I was sweating from my spine out. But I realized, ‘Okay, that happened, and I did not die.’ You’ve got to experience failure to understand that you can survive it.”

-Tina Fey

Interviewer: How do you want to be remembered?
“As someone who did the best she could with the talent she had.”

-J.K. Rowling Thought Catalog Logo Mark

I’m a staff writer for Thought Catalog. I like comedy and improv. I live in Chicago. My Uber rating is just okay.

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