Many great authors have written autobiographies and novels about the journey to success and what it takes. Below, I have found the top 10 most inspiring excerpts to motivate us.
1. Becoming by Michelle Obama
“There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.”
2. A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft
“I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.”
3. With The Fire On High by Elizabeth Acevedo
“…you can’t control how people look at you, but you can control how far back you pull your shoulders and how high you lift your chin.”
4. Middlemarch by George Eliot
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
5. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
6. Dear Ijeawele, Or A Feminist Manifesto In 15 Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“Teach her to reject likeability. Her job is not to make herself likable, her job is to be her full self, a self that is honest and aware of the equal humanity of other people.”
7. Parable Of The Sower by Octavia E Butler
“The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist. Persisting isn’t always safe, but it’s often necessary.”
8. David And Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, And The Art Of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell
“Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.”
9. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”
10. The Essential Calvin And Hobbes by Bill Watterson
“Know what I pray for? The strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can’t, and the incapacity to tell the difference.”