Inspirational quotes I loved at 16

At 16 I didn't keep a journal but I had this very slender, purple notebook that you could seal shut with a stud. I used it to scribble down quotes I liked from conversations, books, short stories or poems.

All this time it's been in my top bedside drawer. I hadn't opened it for years and years and forgotten what was inside.

The other morning I was trying to convince my wide-awake baby to lie quietly in bed with me for a while.  He hauled himself onto my face and started grabbing tissues from the tissue box on top of the drawers. As you do when you're 13 months old.

I opened the drawer and scrabbled around blindly for something to keep him still for a while. Out came the book, and I let him chew on the corner before opening it to find out what I had written in there anyway.

I thought since it would reveal my idealistic, teenaged self. A nice momento of who I was then, but not irrelevant now that I'm all grown up and so much has changed in my life.

I opened it, and guess what?

I am the same. Staggeringly so. There's something so comforting about finding out that I'm just as dreamy, determined, idealistic, realistic, and nerdy as I ever was. And the ideals by which I wanted to live my life are unchanged 20 years later.

Here are the thoughts from the first pages. I don't know where they all came from. I'd love to know if you like any of them or what your favourite inspirational quote is.

All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours we must think them over again honestly, until they take root in our personal experience. Goethe (I wrote this one on the first page, two days before I turned 16.)

Enthusiasm is one of the most precious of all jewels in the crown of life.

Definition of a saint: a sinner who kept on trying!

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

Love one another as yourself. Gospel of Mark

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

An interested person is an interesting person.

Happiness is the art of making a beautiful bouquet with the flowers you are given. (I've written on happiness here and here.)

One can never consent to creep when one has an impulse to soar. Helen Keller

Got a favourite quote? Leave it in the comments box below, and see more quotes here.