The Most Inspiring Quotes and Poems of 2014

My top picks on everything from love and fear to self-actualization.

I love quotes and poems. Here are my favorites from 2014, organized into categories for your reading pleasure. May they inspire you for 2015. Enjoy!

Love & Heartbreak

“Your breath was a gust of wind That blew through my ribcage And knocked my heart off its shelf Where I had arranged it to be Seen, not moved.”
— Derek Ouyang

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
— W. S. Merwin

Letting Go & Forgiveness

“Letting go means to come to the realization that some people are a part of your history, but not a part of your destiny.”
— Steve Maraboli

The tighter you squeeze, the less you have.
— Zen Saying

“So often we want happiness, but the very way we pursue it is so clumsy and unskillful that it brings only more sorrow. Usually we assume we must grasp in order to have that something that will ensure our happiness. […] Learning to live is learning to let go.”
— Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

“I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.”
— Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner

“The important thing is allowing the whole world to wake up. Part of allowing the whole world to wake up is recognizing that the whole world is free to be as they are. Until the whole world is to agree with you or disagree with you, until you have given the freedom to everyone to like you or not like you, to love you or hate you, to see things as you see them or to see things differently — until you have given the whole world its freedom — you’ll never have your freedom.”
— Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

Meaning & Purpose

“We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.” — Winston Churchill

Connection & Compassion

“One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss.”
— Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki

“Appreciation is the legal tender that all souls enjoy.”
— Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ‘Universe’ — a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
— Albert Einstein

Fear

“I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind the locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.”
― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

Strength

“I’ve learned to rely on the strength I inherited from all those who came before me—the grandmothers, sisters, aunts, and brothers who were tested with unimaginable hardships and still survived. ‘I go forth alone, and stand as ten thousand,’ Maya Angelou proclaimed in her poem ‘Our Grandmothers.’ When I move through the world, I bring all my history with me—all the people who paved the way for me are part of who I am.”
— Oprah Winfrey, What I Know For Sure

Self-Actualization

“Uniqueness does not come from external things that people do to themselves or other things like what they wear. All the uniqueness that radiates to the world comes from how you deal with the world, your best inner strengths. It never comes from a tattoo or a designer outfit.”
— Eva Kor, Holocaust Survivor

“To step away from the world isn’t to draw back; it’s actually a way to tune in.”
— Pico Iyer

“What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us and when you bring what is within out into the world, miracles happen.”
— Henry David Thoreau

Maturity

“Maturity is the ability to reap without apology and not complain when things don’t go well.”
— Jim Rohn

Mindfulness

“When you finally begin living in the moment, you stop living for the future — which was never really living to begin with.”
— The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

“I think, therefore I am … not here.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh, You Are Here

“This one question—‘What do I know for certain?’—is tremendously powerful. When you look deeply into this question, it actually destroys your world. It destroys your whole sense of self, and it’s meant to. You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions—things that you believe because you were taught or told they were true. Until we start to see these false perceptions for what they really are, consciousness will be imprisoned within the dream state.”
— Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

Reading

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
— Franz Kafka

“Read books by people you disagree with.”
— Humans of New York

Design

“A well designed-chair summons your ass to it.”
— Mike Monteiro

“Nothing is more rewarding, personally or financially, than melding mind and matter to summon forth living systems that reach out through the inter-aether and significantly impact people’s lives.”
— Leigh Taylor

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
— Ira Glass

Habits & Success

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.”
— Henry David Thoreau

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. — Aristotle

“Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.”
— Jim Rohn

“We have as many hours in the day as Beyonce. No excuses.”
— A Wise Friend

What were your favorite quotes and poems of 2014? Leave a response!
Also check out some of my poems here.