I’ve always loved a good inspirational quote. There’s just something so satisfying about seeing a powerful idea distilled down to its essence.
The right quote seen at the right time can change the direction of your life. It can uplift us when we’re down and motivate us when we need a push. The right quote can inspire us to be better, do better, and try harder.
Over the years, I’ve collected hundreds of quotes. Today, I’m sharing some of my favorites, selected to inspire anyone suffering from the many challenges of tinnitus and hyperacusis.
Here are 25 powerful quotes on perseverance, adversity, acceptance, and hope:
1) “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.” – Helen Keller
2) “You can lose yourself one small compromise at a time. You can transform yourself one small win at a time.” – James Clear
3) “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” – Alice Walker
4) “What it takes to really feel or know that you are going to be well, is to plan a future that you are excited about, and live it as though it is happening, as if you know it’s going to happen.… Whereas our current medical model keeps people’s focus on the illness and the trajectory that this illness may possibly take. And that’s where your mind goes. What we need to do is, we need to actually build a trajectory of wellness, of what am I going to do when I get well. What do I want to do with the rest of my life?” – Anita Moorjani
5) “Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
6) “You are better equipped to deal with stress when you are moving. When you feel tense or frustrated or worried, it is difficult to think your way into feeling better. The more you think about the situation, the larger it becomes in your mind. Trying to think your way out of it often leads to a spiral of overthinking and rumination. The first step is not to think something different, but to do something different. It doesn’t matter what. Stretch on the floor, go for a walk, work on a project. Get out of your mind and move your body.” – James Clear
7) “Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger than we were before.
Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant.
But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be… for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.” – Alice Walker
8) “Optimism is usually defined as a belief that things will go well. But that’s incomplete. Sensible optimism is a belief that the odds are in your favor, and over time things will balance out to a good outcome even if what happens in between is filled with misery. And in fact you know it will be filled with misery. You can be optimistic that the long-term growth trajectory is up and to the right, but equally sure that the road between now and then is filled with landmines and always will be. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.” – Morgan Housel
9) “Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.”- Ben Okri
10) “You can’t calm the storm, so stop trying. What you can do is calm yourself. The storm will pass.” – Timber Hawkeye
11) “While mourning the number of missed opportunities, we have no reason to abandon a belief in the ever-present possibility of moulding circumstances for the better.” – Alain de Botton
12) “Every day of our lives, we are on the verge of making those slight changes that would make all the difference.” – Mignon McLaughlin
13) “It is worth remembering that the time of greatest gain in terms of wisdom and inner strength is often that of greatest difficulty.” – Dalai Lama
14) “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela
15) “A moment of self-compassion can change your entire day. A string of such moments can change the course of your life.” – Christopher Germer
16) “The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.” – Mark Manson
17) “It is never too late to turn on the light. Your ability to break an unhealthy habit or turn off an old tape doesn’t depend on how long you’ve held on to the old view. When you flip the switch in that attic, it doesn’t matter whether it’s been dark for ten minutes, ten years or ten decades. The light still illuminates the room and banishes the murkiness, letting you see the things you couldn’t see before. It’s never too late to take a moment to look.” – Sharon Salzberg
18) “When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.” – Harriet Beecher Stowe
19) “If I could talk to myself twenty years ago, I would tell myself to focus on my strengths, and not on my weaknesses; on the things I could do and not the things I couldn’t do; to strive to excel and hone those skills to the point of excellence. That this was the best strategy to secure my future. I would say to myself that the only real obstacles you have are those you create for yourself.” – Painter Mariam Paré, who specializes in making paintings by mouth after suffering a spinal cord injury
20) “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face… You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
21) “Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald
22) “When feeling overwhelmed by a faraway goal, repeat the following: I have it within me right now, to get me to where I want to be later.” – Karen Salmansohn
23) “I often say now I don’t have any choice whether or not I have Parkinson’s, but surrounding that non-choice is a million other choices that I can make.” – Michael J. Fox
24) “Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible” – Francis of Assisi
25) “Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. It means the damage no longer controls our lives.” – Akshay Dubey
Bonus quote that I think about all the time as I work with tinnitus sufferers and hyperacusis patients all over the world:
“The universe never tells us if we did right or wrong. It is more important to try to help people than to know that you did. More important that someone else’s life gets better than for you to feel good about yourself. You never know the effect you might have on someone, not really. Maybe one core thing haunts them forever. Maybe one moment of kindness gives them comfort or courage. Maybe you said the one thing they needed to hear. It doesn’t matter if you ever know. You just have to try.”
– Naomi Nagata, a main character on “The Expanse”, season 6 episode 6
