Wise Words from Wise People (Nov 2025 Edition)

I’ve collected quotes for many years. My database now contains thousands of them, and every month I add the best ones I learn from books, articles, newsletters, TED talks, YouTube videos, podcasts, etc.

Here are the best quotes I found this month:

“The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.” -Harry Truman

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of the lessons that history has to teach us.” -Aldous Huxley

“The surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.” -Eleanor Roosevelt

“See your own country as a tourist. Live abroad like a local.” -Ryan Holiday

“Anxiety feeds on idleness. You’re feeling stuck and anxious because you’re not doing anything. When you take action, you starve the anxiety of the oxygen it needs to survive.” -Sahil Bloom

“Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you’ll look back and realize they were the big things.” -Kurt Vonnegut

“Ignorance is a solvable problem...but it requires admitting the problem first. You can’t learn what you think you know.” -Ryan Holiday

“My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.” -Abraham Lincoln

“Talent is never enough. With few exceptions, the best players are the hardest workers.” -Magic Johnson

“Writing is weird medicine. You sit down not knowing what you believe and you get up knowing.” -Steven Pressfield

“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.” -Morrie Schwartz

“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” -Henry Adams

“Only when we forget about ourselves, when we get out of the thoughts of ourselves, can we fruitfully communicate with others, listen to them, and influence them.” -Leo Tolstoy

“It’s the irony of wisdom that the smarter you get, the less you need to feel like a smart person. The less you need to be right. The more comfortable you are with uncertainty and ambiguity and, of course, humility. Experience should reduce ego, not enlarge it. Study should make us less certain, not more so.” -Ryan Holiday

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” -Thomas Edison

“Remember what it was to be me, that is always the point.” -Joan Didion, about her journaling

“People like you more when you are working towards something, not when you have it.” -Drake

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” -H. G. Wells

“A student in a hurry learns the slowest.” -Samurai teacher, to Banzo

“Those who refuse to pick sides...make twice as many enemies.” -Ryan Holiday