College can be a trying time for any young woman. There are so many opportunities available to you that one cannot simply take all of them, and losing opportunities tends to leave one feeling left behind. Lately I have been seeking some encouraging words for the moments when a door closes, I feel self conscious, or when my many hours of hard work feel unrewarded and I do not know how much harder I can push myself. Here are some of the most inspirational quotes I have found from successful women who want us to succeed.
“The highest honor on Earth that you will ever have is the honor of being yourself,” — Oprah Winfrey
“The success of every woman should be the inspiration to another. We should raise each other up. Make sure you’re very courageous: be strong, be extremely kind, and above all be humble.” — Serena Williams
“What makes you different or weird, that’s your strength.” — Meryl Streep
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
“The final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.” — Anne Frank
“We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.” — Marie Curie
“I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.” — Louisa May Alcott
“I don’t want other people to decide who I am. I want to decide that for myself.” — Emma Watson
“The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself.” — Maya Angelou
“Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.” — Mia Hamm
“If you’re constantly pushing yourself higher, higher, the law of averages—not to mention the myth of Icarus—predicts that you will at some point fall. And when you do, I want you to know this, remember this: There is no such thing as failure.” — Oprah Winfrey
The common theme across the advice from these empowered women seems to be confidence. Confidence in oneself and confidence in the eyes of failure is vital to success. It can be so easy in college to feel like you are failing because you do not have the same activities list, gpa or life plans as those around you. The point of college is not to shape your goals and ideal of success based on everyone else, but to discover where your true talent, passion and key to success lies. Sometimes you reach the point where you feel there are challenges in your way of achieving goals, that your hardest work is not getting you past. At times like this one has to gain perspective to redefine failure rather than feeling like one. Keeping a list of empowering quotes on your phone, or painting them on canvases to hang in your room, is the perfect way to give yourself the push you need to keep working hard. Why not take advice from empowered women who know what they are talking about?