Need A Push? Let These Positive Recovery Quotes Inspire Your Healing Journey

Sometimes life brings us to our knees, whether it’s through postpartum, an illness, injury, or an addiction. Remaining on the path to recovery, whatever that might mean to you, can be daunting at times. It’s easy to feel discouraged, especially when the path might seem long ahead. That’s just one of many reasons it’s so important to keep being inspired by life, and reading positive recovery quotes can keep your spirits high and your soul nourished.

Of course, recovery is a nuanced and ongoing process. According to Psychology Today, “Recovery maintenance is a lot like tending a garden. If we want healthy results, it requires consistent attention and concerted effort — tilling the soil, careful planting, checking for and pulling weeds, and regular watering — in short, continuing attention, care, and feeding.” And that’s true no matter what type of recovery you (or a loved one) are going through.

Sometimes words of wisdom from others that speak to your personal experience can help keep you motivated, get you back on track, and make you feel hopeful about the day ahead. Below is a list of our favorite recovery quotes to inspire you to stick to your goals and make your road to recovery smooth and positive.

Recovery Quotes to Inspire Your Journey

1. “Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.'” — Mary Anne Radmacher
2. “Don’t let the past steal your present.” — Cherríe L. Morga
3. “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” — George Eliot
4. “If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.” — Mary Pickford
5. “Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.” — A. A. Milne
6. “Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.” — Carl Bard
7. “No matter how dark the night may get, your light will never burn out.” — Jeanette LeBlanc
8. “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
9. “You can come out of the furnace of trouble in two ways: If you let it consume you, you come out a cinder; but there is a kind of metal which refuses to be consumed, and comes out a star.” — Jean Church
10. “Nothing is impossible. The word itself says ‘I’M POSSIBLE’!” — Audrey Hepburn
11. “You can’t calm the storm, so stop trying. What you can do is calm yourself. The storm will pass.” — Timber Hawkeye
12. “The only journey is the one within.” — Rainer Maria Rilke
13. “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
14. “Turn your wounds into wisdom.” — Oprah Winfrey
15. “Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.” — Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds
16. “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” — Nelson Mandela
17. “Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit.” — Bernard Williams
18. “Courage isn’t having the strength to go on; it’s going on when you don’t have strength.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
19. “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” — Babe Ruth
20. “If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime.” — Benjamin Alire Sáenz
21. “The best way out is always through.” — Robert Frost
22. “No matter how dark the moment, love and hope are always possible.” — George Chakiris
23. “Relax. Breathe. It takes time, but there is a great joy to be had in moments of every day. Just remember, you’re learning new steps, a new dance.” — Lisa Frederiksen
24. “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” — C.S. Lewis
25. “Recovery is an acceptance that your life is in shambles and you have to change it.” — Jamie Lee Curtis
26. “Recovery is not a race. You don’t have to feel guilty if it takes you longer than you thought it would.” — Unknown
27. “Fall seven times and stand up eight.” — Japanese Proverb
28. “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work; you don’t give up.” — Anne Lamott
29. “Resting is not laziness, it’s medicine!” — Glenn Schweitzer
30. “Maybe it’s not always about trying to fix something that is broken. Maybe it’s about starting over and creating something better.” — Unknown
31. “When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: you haven’t.” — Thomas Edison
32. “Maybe life isn’t about avoiding the bruises. Maybe it’s about collecting the scars to prove that we showed up for it.” — Hannah Brencher
33. “Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.” — John Wayne
34. “Never let the things you cannot do prevent you from doing the things you can.” — Coach John Wooden
35. “When the unthinkable happens, the lighthouse is hope. Once we choose hope, everything is possible.” — Christopher Reeve
36. “It’s been 10 years since I used drugs or alcohol and my life has improved immeasurably. I have a job, a house, a cat, good friendships, and, generally, a bright outlook. The price of this is constant vigilance because the disease of addiction is not rational.” — Russell Brand
37. “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” — Joseph Campbell
38. “I avoid looking forward or backward and try to keep looking upward.” — Charlotte Brontë
39. “If opening your eyes, or getting out of bed, or holding a spoon, or combing your hair is the daunting Mount Everest you climb today, that is OK.” — Carmen Ambrosio
40. “Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking of what we want to become. Sometimes we motivate ourselves by thinking about who we don’t ever want to be again.” — Shane Niemeyer
41. “You will face your greatest opposition when you are closest to your biggest miracle.” — Shannon L. Adler
42. “We honor ourselves when we speak out for recovery. We show the world that recovery matters because it brings hope and peace into the lives of individuals and their loved ones.” — Beth Wilson
43. “We are stronger in the places we have been broken.” — Ernest Hemingway
44. “You are strong when you know your weaknesses. You are beautiful when you appreciate your flaws. You are wise when you learn from your mistakes.” — Unknown
45. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” — Helen Keller
46. “Cause sometimes you just feel tired. Feel weak, and when you feel weak, you feel like you wanna just give up. But you gotta search within you. You gotta find that inner strength. And just pull it out of you, and get that motivation to not give up, and not be a quitter, no matter how bad you wanna just fall flat on your face.” — Eminem
47. “Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.” — Dale Carnegie
48. “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” — Confucius
49. “If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking.” — Zen proverb
50. “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising up every time we fail.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
51. “My recovery must come first so that everything I love in life does not have to come last.” — Unknown
52. “As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as in being able to remake ourselves.” — Mahatma Gandhi
53. “I think that the power is in the principle. The principle of moving forward, as though you have the confidence to move forward, eventually gives you confidence when you look back and see what you’ve done.” — Robert Downey Jr.
54. “I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear.” — Rosa Parks
55. “One of the hardest things was learning that I was worth recovery.” — Demi Lovato
56. “If we are facing the right direction, all we have to do is keep walking.” — Buddhist Proverb
57. “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.” — Henry Ford
58. “I don’t need alcohol to see the world in its depths, I carry the sun in me.” — Lamine Pearlheart
59. “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” — Robert Collier
60. “If it wasn’t for that rehab center, I probably wouldn’t have been here. In terms of recovery, it has been very important for me to be a part of a recovery community, to actively be around my people because they understand me. They get it.” — Macklemore
61. “Find the seed at the bottom of your heart and bring forth a flower.” — Shigenori Kameoka
62. “Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!” — Anne Frank
63. “What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.” — Hecato
64. “All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
65. “The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” — Alice Walker
66. “Every experience in your life is being orchestrated to teach you something you need to know to move forward.” — Brian Tracy
67. “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used to create them.” — Albert Einstein
68. “As one goes through life, one learns that if you don’t paddle your own canoe, you don’t move.” — Katharine Hepburn
69. “Recovery is hard. Regret is harder.” — Brittany Burgunder
70. “You can’t defeat the darkness by keeping it caged inside of you.” — Seth Adam Smith
71. “Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving; we get stronger and more resilient.” — Steve Maraboli
72. “Change must start from the individual. And the individual must want and feel ready to make such change.” — Efrat Cybulkiewicz
73. “Anyone can give up; it is the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone would expect you to fall apart, now that is true strength.” — Chris Bradford
74. “Your best days are ahead of you. The movie starts when the guy gets sober and puts his life back together; it doesn’t end there.” — Bucky Sinister
75. “If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.” — Michael Jordan
76. “I understood, through rehab, things about creating characters. I understood that creating whole people means knowing where we come from, how we can make a mistake, and how we overcome things to make ourselves stronger.” — Samuel L. Jackson
77. “I realized that I only had two choices: I was either going to die, or I was going to live, and which one did I want to do? And then I said those words, ‘I’ll get help,’ or, ‘I need help. I’ll get help.’ And my life turned around. Ridiculous for a human being to take 16 years to say, ‘I need help.’” — Sir Elton John
78. “The great thing in this world is not so much where you stand, as in what direction you are moving.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes
79. “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life — and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.” — Georgia O’Keeffe
80. “Once I was clear-headed, and I hadn’t been clear-headed in so long, I was like, I can never go back. And I’m still thankful.” — Travis Barker
81. "Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race." — Calvin Coolidge
82. “I never dreamed about success. I worked for it.” — Estée Lauder