It’s the first day of the new year and I’m spending it defining my intentions for living a better life, being a better person and traveling to greater creative expression in the new year.

Are you using the holiday to write the story of your new 365-day life chapter? Here are 20 of my favorite quotes to help inspire the journey.

1. LIFE:  

“All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson 

2. CHANGE:

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” ~  Lao Tzu

3. PURPOSE:

“Your profession is not what brings home your paycheck. Your profession is what you were put on Earth to do with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.”  ~Vincent Van Gogh

4. TRAVEL:

“Travel brings power and love back to your life. ” - Rumi

5. WRITING:

“One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore.” -  Anne Lamott

6. IMAGINATION:

“Logic will get you from point A to B, imagination will get you everywhere.” ~ Albert Einstein

7. GOALS:

“Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.” ~Louisa May Alcott

8. UNCERTAINTY:

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”~ Gilda Radner

9. INDIVIDUALITY:

“Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one. ” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

10. DISCOMFORT:

“Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes — with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.” ~ Michael Crichton

11. STILLNESS:

“The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.” ~ Colette

12. ADVENTURE:

“To awaken alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.” ~ Freya Stark

13. PLANNING:

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.” ~ E.B. White

14. WANDERLUST:

“Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent.” ~ Margot Fonteyn

15. REJECTION:

“As I look back on my life, I realize that every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being re-directed to something better.” ~ Steve Maraboli

16. EMPATHY:

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”~ Henry David Thoreau 

17. FOREIGNNESS:

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” ~ Italo Calvino

18. HAPPINESS:

“Don’t wait around for other people to be happy for you. Any happiness you get you’ve got to make yourself.” ~  Alice Walker 

19. FAITH: 

“Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” ~ E.E. Cummings

20. HOME:

“The journey is my home.”~ Muriel Rukeyser

What about you? What words of wisdom help you to move forward? Use the comment box below to share. I’d love to learn what inspires you.

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