Write Your TOEFL Essay With Famous Quotes
WritingUpdated 5 min read
Below are over 45 famous quotes you can use in TOEFL writing, grouped by the topics that come up most in opinion and discussion prompts: family and friends, work and effort, experience, attitude, and character. A well-chosen quote can give your response a strong opening or closing line, but use one only when it genuinely fits your point; a quote never replaces your own reasons and examples.
About the attributions
Many famous quotes are misattributed or paraphrased. Where a source is uncertain, the table says so. In your response, introduce any quote neutrally ("As the saying goes…" or "Churchill is often quoted as saying…") unless you are sure of the source.
Family, friends and love
| Quote | Attributed to |
|---|---|
| "Love is ever the beginning of knowledge, as fire is of light." | Thomas Carlyle |
| "People need to know one another to be at their honest best." | Source uncertain |
| "Admonish your friends privately, but praise them openly." | Publilius Syrus |
| "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." | Leo Tolstoy |
| "Friendship is both a source of pleasure and a component of good health." | Often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson; source uncertain |
| "If you fight for yourself, only you can win; when you fight for your marriage, you both win." | Paul Pearsall |
| "Young men make great mistakes in life; for one thing, they idealize love too much." | Benjamin Jowett |
Study, work and effort
| Quote | Attributed to |
|---|---|
| "If you don't learn to think when you are young, you may never learn." | Thomas Edison |
| "Whoever is in a hurry shows that the thing he is about is too big for him." | Lord Chesterfield (Philip Dormer Stanhope) |
| "It takes a lot of thought and effort and downright determination to be agreeable." | Often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson; source uncertain |
| "When work is a pleasure, life is a joy! When work is a duty, life is slavery." | Maxim Gorky |
| "It is no use doing what you like; you have got to like what you do." | Winston Churchill |
| "The more we do, the more we can do; the more busy we are, the more leisure we have." | William Hazlitt |
| "If you would have a thing well done, you must do it yourself." | Henry Wadsworth Longfellow |
| "I don't wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work." | Pearl S. Buck |
| "Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in." | Often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte or Andrew Jackson; source uncertain |
| "When you want knowledge like you want air under water, then you will get it." | Traditionally attributed to Socrates; not found in his recorded words |
Experience and learning
| Quote | Attributed to |
|---|---|
| "One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning." | James Russell Lowell |
| "Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want." | Dan Stanford |
| "Experience without learning is better than learning without experience." | Often attributed to Bertrand Russell; source uncertain |
| "Experience keeps a dear school, yet fools will learn in no other." | Benjamin Franklin |
| "Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action. We cannot learn men from books." | Benjamin Disraeli |
| "The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations." | Alfred North Whitehead |
| "Experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues." | Baruch (Benedict de) Spinoza |
| "Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action." | Often attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
| "The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes." | Winston Churchill |
Attitude and outlook
| Quote | Attributed to |
|---|---|
| "Almost any situation, good or bad, is affected by the attitude we bring to it." | Often attributed to Seneca; source uncertain |
| "Optimists always picture themselves accomplishing their goals." | Often attributed to Seneca; source uncertain |
| "The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not." | George Bernard Shaw |
| "The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather what they miss." | Thomas Carlyle |
| "I find life an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others." | Helen Keller |
| "Perhaps you can't control your job, but you may be able to make other changes in your life." | Alan Loy McGinnis |
| "Follow your own course, and let people talk." | Dante Alighieri (as paraphrased by Karl Marx) |
| "The Chinese word for crisis is made up of two characters, one meaning danger and the other meaning opportunity." | Popular saying, repeated by John F. Kennedy (linguists dispute the claim) |
| "The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts." | Omar Bradley |
Relationships and character
| Quote | Attributed to |
|---|---|
| "A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor's." | Richard Whately |
| "Throughout life, we rely on small groups of people for love, admiration, respect, moral support and help." | Often attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson; source uncertain |
| "No man is the whole of himself; his friends are the rest of him." | Harry Emerson Fosdick |
| "Treat other people as you hope they will treat you." | Often attributed to Aesop (a form of the Golden Rule) |
| "Behavior is a mirror in which everyone shows his image." | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
| "There is something that is much more scarce, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability." | Robert Half |
| "A man, like a watch, is to be valued by his manner of going." | William Penn |
| "The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse." | Edmund Burke |
| "Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds." | George Eliot |
| "When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package." | John Ruskin |
| "The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out." | Thomas Babington Macaulay |
How to use a quote in your response
Keep it short, connect it to your point immediately, and move on to your own reasoning:
"It is no use doing what you like; you have got to like what you do," as Winston Churchill is often quoted as saying. In my experience, this is why internships matter: they show students which kinds of work they can genuinely enjoy before they commit to a career.
A few rules of thumb:
- One quote at most. Short TOEFL responses don't have room for more.
- Quote exactly or paraphrase. If you can't remember the exact words, paraphrase: "Tolstoy observed that happy families tend to resemble each other."
- Explain the link. The sentence after the quote should say how it supports your answer.
- Skip it if it doesn't fit. A forced quote weakens a response more than no quote at all.
For more language you can reuse, see 79 useful phrases for TOEFL writing and the list of transition words and phrases.
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