This collection of the best quotes of all time gathers 200 lines from history’s greatest minds — philosophers, poets, novelists, scientists and leaders — organized by theme, from life and love to success, wisdom and happiness. Every line was checked against our existing collections so that nothing here repeats a quote already published on CrownQuote.
What makes these the best quotes of all time is not fame alone but staying power: lines that have been quoted, argued over and lived by for centuries, alongside modern voices that earned their place beside the classics.
In this collection (18)
Read them straight through, or dip into the theme you need today. That is the simplest way to use the best quotes of all time: pick one line, carry it through the day, and let it shape a single decision.
Editor’s Picks
| Quote | Best For |
|---|---|
| “If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.” — William Arthur Ward | On dreams and determination |
| “Love cures people — both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.” — Karl Menninger | On love and healing |
| “The best way out is always through faith and perseverance.” — Robert Frost | On perseverance and faith |
| “I’m a slow walker, but I never walk back.” — Abraham Lincoln | On steady progress |
| “It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.” — Rabindranath Tagore | On happiness and simplicity |
| “The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them.” — Michel de Montaigne | On living fully |
| “A path is made by walking on it.” — Chuang Tzu | On taking the first step |
| “No pressure, no diamonds.” — Attributed to Thomas Carlyle | On pressure and growth |
| “To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do.” — John Adams | On character and kindness |
| “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” — William Faulkner | On memory and time |
1.
Life and Living
- “The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them.” — Michel de Montaigne
- “We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
- “If we were not all so interested in ourselves, life would be so uninteresting that none of us would be able to endure it.” — Arthur Schopenhauer
- “The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost.” — Michel de Montaigne
- “Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here.And when it does come, we no longer exist.” — Epicurus
- “The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.” — Epicurus
- “Man is the most intelligent of animals — and the most silly.” — Diogenes
- “You cannot step twice into the same rivers.” — Heraclitus
- “The sea has neither meaning nor pity.” — Anton Chekhov
- “We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.” — Anton Chekhov
- “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” — T. S.Eliot
- “Existence precedes essence.” — Jean-Paul Sartre
- “Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” — James Joyce
- “The meaning of life is that it stops.” — Franz Kafka
- “I am a cage, in search of a bird.” — Franz Kafka
- “Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect.” — Hermann Hesse
What these teach: A life is measured by attention, not length.
Purpose, honesty about death, and the courage to keep changing are the threads that run through these lines.
2. Love
- “Love cures people — both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.” — Karl Menninger
- “I love you the more in that I believe you had liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.” — John Keats
- “Who would give a law to lovers?Love is unto itself a higher law.” — Boethius
- “To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.” — Bertrand Russell
- “To love someone means to see him as God intended him.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “Life is the flower for which love is the honey.” — Victor Hugo
- “Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones,as the wind blows out the candle and blows up the bonfire.” — François de La Rochefoucauld
- “What comes from the heart goes to the heart.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- “God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.” — Attributed to St. Augustine
- “If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!” — Mary Shelley
- “I am not sure that I exist, actually.I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.” — Jorge Luis Borges
- “And your very flesh shall be a great poem.” — Walt Whitman
- “The rose and the thorn, and sorrow and gladness are linked together.” — Saadi
- “Stay close to anything that makes you glad you are alive.” — Hafez
- “The joys of parents are secret,and so are their griefs and fears.” — Francis Bacon
- “A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.” — Thomas Mann
What these teach: Love is both a cure and a risk. It asks for honesty, patience and the willingness to see another person as they truly are.
3. Success and Achievement
- “If you can imagine it, you can achieve it.If you can dream it, you can become it.” — William Arthur Ward
- “I’m a slow walker, but I never walk back.” — Abraham Lincoln
- “Glass, china, and reputation are easily cracked, and never well mended.” — Benjamin Franklin
- “When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.” — Benjamin Franklin
- “Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.” — Attributed to Mark Twain
- “A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.” — Mark Twain
- “No pressure,no diamonds.” — Attributed to Thomas Carlyle
- “There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.” — Francis Bacon
- “Chiefly the mold of a man’s fortune is in his own hands.” — Francis Bacon
- “Quality is never an accident.It is always the result of intelligent effort.” — John Ruskin
- “No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune.” — Plutarch
- “The desire to write grows with writing.” — Erasmus
- “One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.” — Marie Curie
- “In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” — Charles Darwin
- “A writer — and, I believe,generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource.” — Jorge Luis Borges
- “A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit.” — Erasmus
What these teach: Success is built slowly — by reading, by habit, by refusing to turn back, and by trying when failure is the safer choice.
4.
Courage and Perseverance
- “The best way out is always through faith and perseverance.” — Robert Frost
- “A path is made by walking on it.” — Chuang Tzu
- “The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection.” — Thomas Paine
- “Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us,as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.” — James Russell Lowell
- “Patience and tenacity are worth more than twice their weight of cleverness.” — Thomas Henry Huxley
- “Patience is a conquering virtue.” — Geoffrey Chaucer
- “The path to paradise begins in hell.” — Dante Alighieri
- “Do not be afraid; our fate cannot be taken from us; it is a gift.” — Dante Alighieri
- “Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed.” — William Faulkner
- “Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing,I would choose pain.” — William Faulkner
- “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion.” — Franz Kafka
- “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing.” — Thomas Jefferson
- “Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great.” — Niccolò Machiavelli
- “I have always believed, and I still believe,that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.” — Hermann Hesse
- “Sorrow is knowledge.” — Lord Byron
What these teach: Courage is not the absence of fear but the decision to move through it. Patience, rebellion and a steady will carry these lines.
5.
Happiness
- “It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.” — Rabindranath Tagore
- “He who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing.” — Epicurus
- “He has the most who is most content with the least.” — Diogenes
- “I know the joy of fishes in the river through my own joy, as I go walking along the same river.” — Chuang Tzu
- “Pleasure can be supported by an illusion,but happiness rests upon truth.” — Nicolas Chamfort
- “Nothing is miserable unless you think it so.” — Boethius
- “Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness.” — Sophocles
- “Short is the joy that guilty pleasure brings.” — Euripides
- “Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty.” — Franz Kafka
- “What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.” — John Steinbeck
- “A man is insensible to the relish of prosperity till he has tasted adversity.” — Saadi
- “Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky.” — Khalil Gibran
- “The journey,not the destination, matters.” — Attributed to T. S. Eliot
- “The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.” — John Steinbeck
What these teach: Happiness is simpler than we make it — contentment with little, joy in small things, and truth instead of illusion.
6.
Wisdom and Knowledge
- “The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.” — Benjamin Franklin
- “Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise.” — William Shakespeare
- “The wise man learns more from his enemies than the fool from his friends.” — Baltasar Gracián
- “One’s first step in wisdom is to question everything — and one’s last is to come to terms with everything.” — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
- “The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth.” — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
- “A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it,you can’t expect an apostle to look out.” — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
- “Great knowledge sees all in one.Small knowledge breaks down into the many.” — Chuang Tzu
- “A man, though wise, should never be ashamed of learning more, and must unbend his mind.” — Sophocles
- “Cleverness is not wisdom.” — Euripides
- “Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools talk because they have to say something.” — Plato
- “No enemy is worse than bad advice.” — Sophocles
- “It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves.” — François de La Rochefoucauld
- “The greatest scholars are not usually the wisest people.” — Geoffrey Chaucer
- “There is no truth.There is only perception.” — Gustave Flaubert
- “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” — T. S. Eliot
What these teach: Wisdom begins with admitting ignorance. It grows by questioning, by learning from enemies as well as friends, and by telling truth from cleverness.
7.
Friendship
- “Confidence in others’ honesty is no light testimony of one’s own integrity.” — Michel de Montaigne
- “We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.” — François de La Rochefoucauld
- “We discover in ourselves what others hide from us, and we recognize in others what we hide from ourselves.” — Marquis de Vauvenargues
- “Do not speak of your happiness to one less fortunate than yourself.” — Plutarch
- “Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary,how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne
- “Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne
- “Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other.” — John Steinbeck
- “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself.” — Hermann Hesse
- “Human beings are members of a whole,in creation of one essence and soul.” — Saadi
- “He who loves others is constantly loved by them.” — Mencius
- “We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others.” — François de La Rochefoucauld
- “Nothing is so contagious as example.” — François de La Rochefoucauld
- “The face is a picture of the mind with the eyes as its interpreter.” — Cicero
- “To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do.” — John Adams
- “A thing moderately true is not true at all.” — Thomas Paine
What these teach: Friendship rests on honesty,
forgiveness and understanding. The people who know us best are the ones we treat with the most care.
8. Dreams and Ambition
- “If you want to work on your art, work on your life.” — Anton Chekhov
- “Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.” — Richard Feynman
- “Do I dare disturb the universe?” — T. S.Eliot
- “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.” — Attributed to Plutarch
- “Our actions are like the terminations of verses, which we rhyme as we please.” — François de La Rochefoucauld
- “From a little spark may burst a flame.” — Dante Alighieri
- “No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.” — Isaac Newton
- “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through,and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.” — Mary Shelley
- “I ardently desired the acquisition of knowledge.” — Mary Shelley
- “If a story is in you, it has got to come out.” — William Faulkner
- “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous.” — Thomas Mann
- “Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.” — James Russell Lowell
- “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.” — Hannah Arendt
- “Forget the years, forget distinctions.Leap into the boundless and make it your home.” — Chuang Tzu
- “Not failure, but low aim, is crime.” — James Russell Lowell
What these teach: Dreams start small — a spark, a bold guess, a story that refuses to stay inside. Ambition is the willingness to disturb the universe.
9.
Kindness and Character
- “Politeness is the flower of humanity.” — Joseph Joubert
- “Compassion is the chief law of human existence.” — Fyodor Dostoevsky
- “He who sees a need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it.” — Dante Alighieri
- “The omission of good is no less reprehensible than the commission of evil.” — Plutarch
- “Courage stands halfway between cowardice and rashness, one of which is a lack, the other an excess of courage.” — Plutarch
- “It was pride that changed angels into devils;it is humility that makes men as angels.” — St. Augustine
- “It is not good to be too free.It is not good to have all one wants.” — Blaise Pascal
- “Our virtues are most frequently no more than our vices disguised.” — François de La Rochefoucauld
- “Consider your origin; you were not born to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.” — Dante Alighieri
- “The more a thing is perfect, the more it feels pleasure and pain.” — Dante Alighieri
- “The devil is not so black as he is painted.” — Attributed to Dante Alighieri
- “No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness,the good he seeks.” — Mary Wollstonecraft
- “Virtue can only flourish among equals.” — Mary Wollstonecraft
- “I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.” — Mary Wollstonecraft
- “Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking.” — H. Jackson Brown Jr.
What these teach: Character is what you do when no one is watching. Kindness, humility and self-command are quieter than talent, and they last longer.
10. Time and Change
- “Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.” — Cicero
- “The least movement is of importance to all nature.The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.” — Blaise Pascal
- “The present is not a potential past; it is the moment of choice and action.” — Simone de Beauvoir
- “The future is made of the same stuff as the present.” — Simone Weil
- “The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.” — Marcel Proust
- “Waste not fresh tears over old griefs.” — Euripides
- “Look not mournfully into the past.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “Time has no divisions to mark its passage,there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year.” — Thomas Mann
- “A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike.” — John Steinbeck
- “He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.” — Francis Bacon
- “To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.” — Isaac Newton
- “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.” — Charles Darwin
- “It is not enough to have great qualities;we should also have the management of them.” — François de La Rochefoucauld
- “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” — William Butler Yeats
- “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
What these teach: Time changes everything, including us. The past stays alive in memory, the future arrives before we notice, and every age makes us beginners again.
11.
Leadership and Service
- “The welfare of the people is the ultimate law.” — Cicero
- “Freedom is a possession of inestimable value.” — Cicero
- “An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” — Plutarch
- “The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.” — Hannah Arendt
- “No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.” — Hannah Arendt
- “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” — Attributed to Plato
- “The wisest men follow their own direction.” — Euripides
- “The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.” — Erasmus
- “The lion cannot protect himself from traps,and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves.” — Niccolò Machiavelli
- “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” — Thomas Jefferson
- “Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil.” — Thomas Paine
- “Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide.” — James Russell Lowell
- “All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” — John Steinbeck
- “The people are the most important element in a nation; the spirits of the land and grain are the next;the sovereign is the least.” — Mencius
- “The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.” — Bertrand Russell
- “The mob is the mother of tyrants.” — Diogenes
What these teach: Leadership is service to people, not power over them. It means deciding in the hard moment, keeping the peace when war is easier, and stating the problem clearly.
12. Faith and Hope
- “The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.” — Attributed to St.Augustine
- “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.” — Bertrand Russell
- “The only excuse for God is that he does not exist.” — Stendhal
- “Death is not the worst that can happen to men.” — Plato
- “Give light,and the darkness will disappear of itself.” — Erasmus
- “The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.” — Thomas Paine
- “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” — Thomas Paine
- “She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.” — Nathaniel Hawthorne
- “The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague.” — Edgar Allan Poe
- “I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.” — Charlotte Brontë
- “Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking,feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.” — Hermann Hesse
- “Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.” — Franz Kafka
- “Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.” — Albert Camus
- “He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.” — Plato
- “Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion.” — Thomas Henry Huxley
What these teach: Faith is not certainty but a way of looking upward — toward light, toward new beginnings,
toward what is right even when it is not acceptable.
13.
Humor and Joy
- “There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.” — Michel de Montaigne
- “Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress.” — Anton Chekhov
- “I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.” — Edgar Allan Poe
- “Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.” — Edgar Allan Poe
- “Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life.” — Nicolas Chamfort
- “In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” — Bertrand Russell
- “Everyone is a genius at least once a year.The real geniuses simply have their bright ideas closer together.” — Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
- “Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.” — Edgar Allan Poe
- “The past is not dead.It’s not even past.” — William Faulkner
- “It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.” — Thomas Henry Huxley
- “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” — Erasmus
- “Those who realize their folly are not true fools.” — Chuang Tzu
- “It is a painful thing to look at your own trouble and know that you yourself and no one else has made it.” — Sophocles
- “Do nothing secretly,for time sees and hears all things and discloses all.” — Sophocles
- “The thing that doesn’t fit is the most interesting.” — Richard Feynman
- “The remedy is worse than the disease.” — Francis Bacon
What these teach: Humor is wisdom with a smile.
The sharpest lines here laugh at our own folly, our secrets and our certainties — and leave us lighter for it.
How to Use These Quotes in Everyday Life
A long collection is easy to admire and easy to abandon, so it helps to give these lines a small, regular job. The best quotes of all time were not written to be scrolled past; they were written to be carried, repeated and tested against real days.
Pick one line in the morning, keep it where you will see it again, and notice what it changes by evening. That single habit turns a list of 200 lines into a tool you actually use.
Start with the theme you need, not the theme that sounds most impressive. On a difficult morning, the sections on courage and perseverance will speak more directly than a general search for inspiration. On a quiet evening, the wisdom and friendship sections offer slower, more reflective lines. Reading the best quotes of all time by need, rather than from first to last, keeps the collection practical: you arrive with a question, and you leave with a sentence that answers it.
Choose One Line a Day
Choose one line each morning and let it set the tone for the day.
Write it on a card, save it as a phone note, or place it at the top of your journal page. The point is not to memorise many lines at once but to live with one line long enough to understand it. When readers return to the best quotes of all time day after day, they often find that a line they skipped on Monday becomes the exact line they need on Friday.
That is why a daily habit matters more than a single reading of the best quotes of all time: familiarity lets a line work quietly in the background. At night, ask one short question: did this line change anything I did today? Sometimes the answer is a small choice, such as pausing before a hasty reply, and sometimes it is simply a calmer way of seeing a problem. That nightly check is what separates a quote you liked from a quote you used.
Over a month, thirty such lines build a personal anthology far more valuable than a list read once and forgotten.
Use a Quote When You Write or Speak
A well-chosen line can open a speech, soften a difficult message, or close a letter with warmth. Keep the quotation short, keep the author’s name attached, and let the line do one job rather than carrying the whole message.
The best quotes of all time work best in this supporting role: they give a familiar voice to an idea you already hold, and they invite listeners to recognise a truth they may already know.
For social media, the same care applies. Share the line exactly as written, name the author, and add one sentence of your own explaining why it mattered to you. That personal sentence is what turns a copied line into a genuine post. Lines marked “Attributed to” deserve an extra note, so readers know the attribution is traditional rather than certain.
Readers trust a collection of the best quotes of all time more when its attributions are honest, even about uncertainty, and honesty about sources protects both the writer and the reader.
Keep a Commonplace Book
A commonplace book is simply a notebook, digital or paper, where you copy lines worth keeping. Under each line, add the date, the section it came from, and one sentence about why it struck you. Over time, that notebook becomes a record of what you were thinking and feeling across different seasons of life.
Many readers find that the best quotes of all time gain meaning on a second reading, once the circumstances of their own lives have changed.
Revisit your notebook once a week and mark the lines that still hold up. In that weekly review, the best quotes of all time often sort themselves: a few lines keep returning, and those are the ones to keep close. Some will feel less urgent, and that is useful information too: it shows how your concerns have shifted. Others will feel stronger, and those are the lines worth learning by heart. A small, regularly revisited notebook beats a large, untouched collection every time. Wikiquote, the free quote compendium, collects thousands more lines in the same spirit.
Match the Line to the Moment
Different moments call for different kinds of wisdom.
Before a decision, a line from the wisdom sections can slow you down just enough to think clearly. After a setback, a line on perseverance can steady you without pretending the difficulty is small. In celebration, a line on joy or gratitude can help you pause and enjoy the moment instead of rushing to the next task. The best quotes of all time cover so many situations precisely because human situations repeat, even as centuries change.
Try pairing a line with a single action. If a line speaks about kindness, perform one kind act before the day ends. If a line speaks about patience, choose one conversation in which you will listen fully before answering. That pairing keeps reading honest: the line is not decoration, it is a prompt, and the action is the proof that it was heard.
This is the practical test for the best quotes of all time: a line that prompts no action may still be beautiful, but a line that prompts one kind act has done its work.
Revisit, Rotate and Share Thoughtfully
Return to a different section each week so no theme is neglected. Rotating in this way also keeps the best quotes of all time fresh, because a line met in a new season of life can read like a new line.
A month spent only on success lines can narrow your view, while rotating through love, humour, faith and time keeps the collection balanced. Sharing works the same way: send one line to a friend who needs it, with a short note about why you thought of them, rather than forwarding a long list. One thoughtful share is remembered; a flood of forwards is not.
Above all, let the collection stay a companion rather than a chore. You do not need to finish all 200 lines, rank them, or agree with every voice here. Read slowly, keep what helps, and set the rest aside without guilt.
That unhurried approach is how the best quotes of all time have survived for centuries: not because every reader loved every line, but because each generation kept the lines that told the truth simply, and passed them on.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best quotes of all time?
The best quotes of all time are lines that have survived centuries because they say something true about life, love, success or character in a few words. This collection gathers 200 such lines, each checked against our existing collections so nothing here repeats a quote already published on CrownQuote.
Readers often return to the best quotes of all time not for novelty but for clarity, because a familiar line can name a feeling faster than a long explanation.
How were these 200 quotes chosen?
By staying power and verification. Famous lines already published on CrownQuote were excluded, so every line here is new to the site. Lines with no named primary source carry “Attributed to” labels rather than being presented as certain.
The aim was a set of the best quotes of all time that a reader can trust, reuse and return to, rather than a list assembled only for fame.
Can I use these quotes for speeches or social media?
Yes, with attribution to the named author. Short quotations for personal, educational or social use are standard practice. Keep the author’s name attached, and note that lines labeled “Attributed to” are traditional attributions rather than verified quotations.
When you share the best quotes of all time, keep the wording intact and the author attached, so the line travels with its source rather than as an anonymous saying.
What is the best quote of all time for hard times?
It depends on the moment.
For perseverance, try Frost’s “The best way out is always through faith and perseverance.” For hope, try Paine’s “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” For steady progress, try Lincoln’s “I’m a slow walker, but I never walk back.” In that sense, the best quotes of all time work best as companions for a difficult week, not as slogans to be recited once and forgotten.
A Short Note on Attribution
Lines labeled “Attributed to” circulate widely under that name but lack a named primary source,
so they are presented as traditional attributions rather than certain quotations. A few famous lines were deliberately excluded from this collection because research shows they belong to others or lack evidence, including Churchill’s “Success is not final,” Twain’s “Buy land,” and Shakespeare’s “When I saw you I fell in love.” Where a translation varies, the collection-standard wording is used.
Conclusion
These 200 lines span three thousand years, and they agree on one thing: the best quotes of all time endure because they tell the truth simply.
Keep the one that speaks to you today, and return tomorrow — the next line you need may be waiting in a different section. If one line stays with you, write it down and revisit it in a week; that is how the best quotes of all time earn their place, one reader and one ordinary day at a time.
CURATED BY
CrownQuote Editorial Team
The CrownQuote editorial team researches, verifies, and curates every quote collection on this site. Spot an error? Reach us through the Contact page and we will fix it.