During my time at university on the west coast of Sweden, I often found myself lacking motivation and stuck in procrastination. It wasn’t until the final 5 days before an exam when deadline anxiety would kick in.
However, things took a turn in my last year of school. I began reading motivational books by individuals like Brian Tracy and delved into quotes from various figures throughout history.
In this post, I aim to share 160 powerful, helpful, and motivational quotes for students that I wish I had access to back then.
These quotes are meant to provide guidance and inspiration for exams, setbacks in school, and achieving success in your studies.
Motivational Quotes for Students (Help to Focus and Work Smart)
“A man’s mind, stretched by new ideas, may never return to its original dimensions.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
– Albert Einstein
“I would visualize things coming to me. It would just make me feel better. Visualization works if you work hard. That’s the thing. You can’t just visualize and go eat a sandwich.”
– Jim Carrey
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
– Mark Twain
“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”
– Alexander Graham Bell
“You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety.”
– Abraham Maslow
“Who questions much, shall learn much, and retain much.”
– Francis Bacon
“Minds are like parachutes, they only function when they are open.”
– James Dewar
“If you don’t pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.”
– David Allen
“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”
– Arthur Ashe
“Either you run the day or the day runs you.”
– Jim Rohn
“Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.”
– Zig Ziglar
“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.”
– Jiddu Krishnamurti
“Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.”
– Leonardo da Vinci
“Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.”
– Chinese proverb
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
– Dorothy Parker
“The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.”
– Cicero
“Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.”
– Bruce Lee
“The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.”
– Baruch Spinoza
“Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.”
– Chinese Proverb
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
– Abraham Maslow
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
– Aristotle
“What makes a child gifted and talented may not always be good grades in school, but a different way of looking at the world and learning.”
– Chuck Grassley
“Life is an open book test. Learning how to learn is your most valuable skill in the online world.”
– Marc Cuban
“Learning is not compulsory. Neither is survival.”
– Dr. W. Edwards Deming
Motivational Quotes for Students Exams
“Believe in yourself and all that you are. Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle.”
– Christian D. Larson
“Begin while others are procrastinating. Work while others are wishing.”
– William Arthur Ward
“Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day.”
– Denis Waitley
“It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.”
– Confucius
“The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.”
– Bruce Lee
“Real difficulties can be overcome; it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable.”
– Theodore N. Vail
“The only way to do great work is to love what you study.”
– Steve Jobs
“Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.”
– Sam Levenson
“Never give up on a dream just because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway.”
– Earl Nightingale
“Procrastination is like a credit card: it’s a lot of fun until you get the bill.”
– Christopher Parker
“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Your education is a dress rehearsal for a future that is yours to design.”
– Unknown
“Study hard, for the well is deep, and our brains are shallow.”
– Richard Baxter
“The best way to predict your future is to create it.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“If your dreams don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough.”
– Muhammad Ali
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
– Nelson Mandela
“Successful people are not gifted; they just work hard, then succeed on purpose.”
– G.K. Nielson
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their goals.”
– Unknown
“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
– Mark Twain
“Through hard work, perseverance, and faith in God, you can live your dreams.”
– Ben Carson
“In a world where you can be anything, be kind. To yourself too.”
– Alice Jones
“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”
– Margaret Fuller
“You don’t drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there.”
– Ed Cole
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”
– Michel Legrand
“The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice.”
– Brian Herbert
Positive and Motivational Quotes for Success
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
– Mark Twain
“The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.”
– B.B. King
“Success isn’t always about ‘Greatness’, it’s about consistency. Consistent, hard work gains success. Greatness will come.”
– Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
“If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.”
– Nora Roberts
“Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism.”
– David M. Burns
“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.”
– Malcolm X
“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
– Andy McIntyre
“The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”
– Thomas Paine
“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.”
– Herbert Spencer
“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
– Steve Jobs
“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn …and change.”
– Carl Rogers
“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”
– Will Durant
“Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.”
– Wayne Dyer
“Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
– John R. Wooden
“If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”
– Ben Franklin
“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then, by God, do something. Don’t just stand there, make it happen.”
– Lee Iacocca
“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr
“Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.”
– Og Mandino
“They cannot stop me. I will get my education, if it is in the home, school, or anyplace.”
– Malala Yousafzai
“Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.”
– Bill Nye
“Success is a poor teacher.”
– Robert Kiyosaki
“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.”
– Unknown
“When you educate one person you can change a life, when you educate many you can change the world.”
– Shai Reshef
“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead.”
– Aristotle
“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”
– George Santayana
“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
Motivational Quotes for Setbacks and Mistakes in School
“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
– Albert Einstein
“Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.”
– Dale Carnegie
“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
– Michael Jordan
“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Remember that failure is an event, not a person.”
– Zig Ziglar
“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”
– Maya Angelou
“The difference between school and life? In school, you’re taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you’re given a test that teaches you a lesson.”
– Tom Bodett
“We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.”
– Lloyd Alexander
“If people did not do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Nothing is impossible. The word itself says ‘I’m Possible’.”
– Audrey Hepburn
“To accuse others for one’s own misfortunes is a sign of want of education. To accuse oneself shows that one’s education has begun. To accuse neither oneself nor others shows that one’s education is complete.”
– Epictetus
“Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they started.”
– David Allen
“We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday’s burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it.”
– John Newton
“People learn something every day, and a lot of times it’s that what they learned the day before was wrong.”
– Bill Vaughan
“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”
– Michael Jordan
“Change is the end result of all true learning.”
– Leo Buscaglia
“When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.”
– George Bernard Shaw
“Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of the car is separate from the way the car is driven.”
– Edward De Bono
“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”
– Albert Einstein
“Education would be much more effective if its purpose was to ensure that by the time they leave school every boy and girl should know how much they do not know, and be imbued with a lifelong desire to know it.”
– William Haley
“It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.”
– Robert G. Ingersoll
“Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”
– Henry Ford
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.”
– Buckminster Fuller
“Failure defeats losers, but it inspires winners.”
– Robert Kiyosaki
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
– Thomas Edison
“A well-educated mind will always have more questions than answers.”
– Helen Keller
“Success is not final; failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts.”
– Winston S. Churchill
“I’ve learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.”
– Maya Angelou
Motivational Quotes for Students to Work Hard
“Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.”
– Robert Collier
“The harder you work for something, the greater you’ll feel when you achieve it.”
– Unknown
“Study while others are sleeping; work while others are loafing; prepare while others are playing; and dream while others are wishing.”
– William Arthur Ward
“The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.”
– Confucius
“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.”
