Some new beginnings are ones we choose—a new job, a move, or a decision to finally try something different. Others arrive through loss, disappointment, or a change we never saw coming.
Even when starting over is what you want, leaving behind something familiar can be harder than you expected.
You might feel hopeful about what comes next and sad about what you’re leaving behind. You might be afraid to take the first step, even when you know it’s time.
Those feelings can exist together. You don’t have to feel ready or find the bright side before you begin.
These 90 quotes about new beginnings offer words to lean on when your own are hard to find. Keep one close, share a few with someone facing a difficult change, or let them offer a little encouragement as you take your next small step.
Table of Contents
- Quotes About New Beginnings When You’re Not Ready to Start Over
- Quotes About Letting Go When Goodbye Is Hard
- Quotes About Finding Courage to Begin Again
- Quotes About Starting Over After a Setback
- Quotes About New Beginnings After a Relationship Ends
- Quotes About New Chapters in Work and Life
- Quotes About Taking Small Steps and Starting Slowly
- Short Quotes About New Beginnings to Keep Close or Share
- Hopeful Quotes About New Beginnings When the Future Feels Uncertain
Quotes About New Beginnings When You’re Not Ready to Start Over
1. “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.” — Mary Shelley
2. “Beginnings are always troublesome.” — George Eliot
3. “Live the questions now.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
4. “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
5. “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” — William Shakespeare
6. “I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.” — Louisa May Alcott
7. “We may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated.” — Maya Angelou
8. “I dwell in Possibility –” — Emily Dickinson
9. “Only that day dawns to which we are awake.” — Henry David Thoreau
10. “Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?” — L. M. Montgomery
Quotes About Letting Go When Goodbye Is Hard
11. “And, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.” — Mary Oliver
12. “To weep is to make less the depth of grief.” — William Shakespeare
13. “Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell.” — Emily Dickinson
14. “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” — Alfred, Lord Tennyson
15. “Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad.” — Christina Rossetti
16. “Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.” — Sara Teasdale
17. “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin
18. “The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.” — Charles Dickens
19. “Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art is of ending.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
20. “Just keep going. No feeling is final.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
Quotes About Finding Courage to Begin Again
21. “Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’” — Mary Anne Radmacher
22. “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.” — Mark Twain
23. “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” — Nelson Mandela
24. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” — Anaïs Nin
25. “Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.” — Brené Brown
26. “Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.” — Samuel Johnson
27. “He who has begun has half done. Dare to be wise; begin!” — Horace
28. “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.” — Frederick Douglass
29. “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.” — Squire Bill Widener, quoted by Theodore Roosevelt
30. “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” — Samuel Beckett
Quotes About Starting Over After a Setback
31. “Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again.” — Henry Ford
32. “And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.” — J. K. Rowling
33. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” — Samuel Beckett
34. “Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” — Oliver Goldsmith
35. “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.” — Oscar Wilde
36. “Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.” — Oprah Winfrey
37. “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” — Michael Jordan
38. “I really think a champion is defined not by their wins but by how they can recover when they fall.” — Serena Williams
39. “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same” — Rudyard Kipling
40. “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith.” — Steve Jobs
Quotes About New Beginnings After a Relationship Ends
41. “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” — Charlotte Brontë
42. “You will love again the stranger who was your self.” — Derek Walcott
43. “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” — Oscar Wilde
44. “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” — Michel de Montaigne
45. “I shall gather myself into myself again, I shall take my scattered selves and make them one.” — Sara Teasdale
46. “And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.” — Kahlil Gibran
47. “You your best thing, Sethe. You are.” — Toni Morrison
48. “Love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
49. “Determined to save the only life you could save.” — Mary Oliver
50. “Not knowing when the Dawn will come, I open every Door” — Emily Dickinson
Quotes About New Chapters in Work and Life
51. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” — Steve Jobs
52. “For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim.” — Michelle Obama
53. “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.” — Henry David Thoreau
54. “Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road.” — Walt Whitman
55. “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” — Zora Neale Hurston
56. “The old order changeth, yielding place to new.” — Alfred, Lord Tennyson
57. “As long as you live, keep learning how to live.” — Seneca
58. “The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
59. “Act well your part: there all the honour lies.” — Alexander Pope
60. “’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” — Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Quotes About Taking Small Steps and Starting Slowly
61. “The journey of a thousand li commenced with a single step.” — Lao Tzu
62. “No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig.” — Epictetus
63. “Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.” — William Shakespeare
64. “For the great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together.” — Vincent van Gogh
65. “No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.” — Virginia Woolf
66. “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
67. “Dripping water hollows out a stone, a ring is worn away by use.” — Ovid
68. “Do not be desirous to have things done quickly.” — Confucius
69. “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” — James Clear
70. “Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and to wait.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Short Quotes About New Beginnings to Keep Close or Share
71. “Every moment is a fresh beginning.” — T. S. Eliot
72. “There is more day to dawn.” — Henry David Thoreau
73. “The beginning is the most important part of any work.” — Plato
74. “All things are ready if our minds be so.” — William Shakespeare
75. “Nothing is worth more than this day.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
76. “Forever — is composed of Nows —” — Emily Dickinson
77. “I exist as I am, that is enough.” — Walt Whitman
78. “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
79. “All are architects of Fate.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
80. “Nothing is so strong as gentleness.” — Francis de Sales
Hopeful Quotes About New Beginnings When the Future Feels Uncertain
