I believe that struggling to accept certain life situations, circumstances, or changes is in the nature of each and every one of us.
However, our inability to adapt to those changes and our focus on how the situation should be can affect our well-being to a great extent, as 2017 research suggests.
Life is never as we want it to be which is why we need to accept it as it is in order to work out on changing it for the better, instead of beating up on ourselves, fighting, and resisting.
Below you’ll find the greatest acceptance quotes I collected from various online sources to teach you that accepting life as it is the only way to find inner peace.
Let’s have a look!
10 Greatest Acceptance Quotes
1. “The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
2. “Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there’s got to be a way through it.” — Michael J. Fox
3. “Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.” — William James
4. “Happiness can exist only in acceptance.” — George Orwell
5. “Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.” — Marcus Aurelius
6. “The happiest people in life are able to be themselves. But you cannot be yourself until you accept yourself.” — Jeff Moore
7. “Understanding is the first step to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery.” — J.K. Rowling
8. “Beauty is about being comfortable in your own skin. It’s about knowing and accepting who you are.” ― Ellen DeGeneres
9. “Serenity comes when you trade expectations for acceptance.” — Gautama Buddha
10. “You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
Powerful Quotes About Acceptance
1. “Accept, then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.” — Eckhart Tolle
2. “Have a big enough heart to love unconditionally, and a broad enough mind to embrace the differences that make each of us unique.” — D.B. Harrop
3. “To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.” — Robert A. Johnson
4. “To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow — this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.” — Elizabeth Gilbert
5. “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” — Alan Watts
6. “In order to accept any sort of change, you must realize that you do not have control over everything in your life.” — Auliq Ice
7. “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” — Lao Tzu
8. “Live your life, sing your song. Not full of expectations. Not for the ovations. But for the joy of it.” — Rasheed Ogunlaru
9. “If a child lives with criticism, he learns to condemn. … If a child lives with fear, he learns to be apprehensive. … If a child lives with encouragement, he learns to be confident. … If a child lives with acceptance, he learns to love.” — Dorothy Nolte
10. “We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.” — Carl Jung
11. “Acceptance is to be noble, to be whole, one with heaven and nature, with the Enduring Tao.” — Lao Tzu
12. “Nothing brings down walls as surely as acceptance.” ― Deepak Chopra
13. “The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives, by embracing with wakefulness and care our moment-to-moment experience.” — Tara Brach
14. “Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of present experience. It isn’t more complicated than that.” — Sylvia Boorstein
15. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” — Reinhold Niebuhr
16. “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” — Dolly Parton
17. “Growth begins when we start to accept our own weakness.” — Jean Vanier
18. “The most confused you will ever get is when you try to convince your heart and spirit of something your mind knows is a lie.” ― Shannon L. Alder
19. “Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late. You don’t have to like it… it’s just easier if you do.” — Byron Katie
20. “My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.” — Michael J. Fox
21. “The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.” — Maureen Dowd
See also: Top 90 Never Settle For Less Quotes To Encourage You
22. “Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are.” — Rachel Naomi Remen
23. “Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.” — Albert Einstein
24. “The two parts of genuine acceptance — seeing clearly and holding our experience with compassion — are as interdependent as the two wings of a great bird. Together, they enable us to fly and be free.” — Tara Brach
25. “Give love and unconditional acceptance to those you encounter, and notice what happens.” — Wayne Dyer
26. “There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance.” — John Lennon
27. “Acceptance of imperfection is attained through utmost emptiness and purest calm, through the return to the primal, to the root. All vain thoughts vanish, all cares fade away.” — Lao Tzu
28. “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.” — Melody Beattie
See also: 130 Gratitude Affirmations To Make Your Life More Joyful
29. “The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.” — Dave Smalley
30. “Acceptance doesn’t mean that life gets better; it just means that my way of living life on life’s terms improves.” — Sharon E. Rainey
Self-Acceptance Quotes
1. “Being authentic begins with unconditional self-acceptance, imperfections and all.” ― Azim Jamal and Brian Tracy
2. “There’s no alternative to being yourself. Accept it, honor it, value it, and get on with it.” — Rasheed Ogunlaru
3. “Accept yourself, love yourself, and keep moving forward.” — Roy Bennett
4. “Self-acceptance begets acceptance from others, which begets even deeper, more genuine self-acceptance. It can be done. But no one is going to bestow it on you. It is a gift only you can give yourself.” — Camryn Manheim
5. “Accept everything about yourself. I mean everything. You are you and that is the beginning and the end no apologies, no regrets.” — Henry A. Kissinger
6. “Change is possible, but it must start with self-acceptance.” — Alexander Lowen
7. “The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable.” ― Paul Tillich
8. “Self-love has very little to do with how you feel about your outer self. It’s about accepting all of yourself.” ― Tyra Banks
9. “Accept yourself: flaws, quirks, talents, secret thoughts, all of it, and experience true liberation.” ― Amy Leigh Mercree
10. “Your own level of self-acceptance is determined largely by how well you feel you are accepted by the important people in your life.” ― Brian Tracy
11. “To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.” — Nhat Hanh
12. “Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.” ― Audre Lorde
13. “Self-acceptance is how to find peace with one’s soul.” — Oscar Auliq-Ice
14. “I think once I kind of got to a place of self-acceptance, looking past all the insecurities that I have, I’ve really grown so much as a person.” ― Shannon Purser
15. “With self-acceptance, we have the ability to choose compassion and forgiveness over anger and self-hatred.” — Michelle Cruz-Rosado
16. “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.” — C.G. Jung
17. “Forgiveness is the path to healing; healing is the path to self-acceptance.” ― J.R. Incer
18. “Self-approval and self-acceptance in the now are the main keys to positive changes in every area of our lives.” — Louise Hay
19. “The first step in this process of mindfulness is radical self-acceptance.” ― Stephen Batchelor
20. “Everything begins with accepting oneself. Without self-acceptance, one cannot accomplish anything.” ― Xuan-Thu Nguyen
21. “Much of spiritual life is self-acceptance, maybe all of it.” ― Jack Kornfield
22. “When you stop living your life based on what others think of you real life begins. At that moment, you will finally see the door of self-acceptance opened.” — Shannon L. Alder
23. “You’re always with yourself, so you might as well enjoy the company.” — Diane Von Furstenberg
24. “A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.” — Mark Twain
25. “What self-acceptance does is open up more possibilities of succeeding because you aren’t fighting yourself along the way.” ― Shannon Ables
26. “Because one believes in oneself, one doesn’t try to convince others. Because one is content with oneself, one doesn’t need others’ approval. Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts him or her.” — Lao Tzu
27. “The more you know who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you.” — Stephanie Perkins
28. “As you become clearer about who you really are, you’ll be better able to decide what is best for you the first time around.” — Oprah Winfrey
29. “Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself.” — Nathaniel Branden
30. “No amount of self-improvement can make up for any lack of self-acceptance.” ― Robert Holden
See also: 170 Self-Improvement Quotes To Make Your Life Better
Acceptance Quotes To Motivate You
1. “I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.” — Michael Jordan
2. “Acceptance is not about liking a situation. It is about acknowledging all that has been lost and learning to live with that loss.” — Elisabeth Kübler
3. “Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it.” — Ann Landers
4. “Acceptance is a process that we experience, not a final stage with an endpoint.” — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler
5. “Take a deep breath. Breathe in a sense of acceptance of what is here, with as little judgment as possible.” — Rhonda V. Magee
6. “Letting go doesn’t mean that you don’t care about someone anymore. It’s just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.” ― Deborah Reber
See also: 130 Deep Goodbye Letting Go Of Someone You Love Quotes
7. “Courage doesn’t happen when you have all the answers. It happens when you are ready to face the questions you have been avoiding your whole life.” — Shannon L. Alder
8. “Nothing is impossible to a willing heart.” — John Heywood
9. “If you can recognize and accept your pain without running away from it, you will discover that although pain is there, joy can also be there at the same time.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
10. “The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.” — Brian Tracy
11. “Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.” — Coco Chanel
12. “We must have strong minds, ready to accept facts as they are.” — Harry S. Truman
13. “Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity, and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow.” — Tony Schwartz
14. “It’s best to accept life as it really is and not as I imagined it to be.” — Paulo Coelho
15. “Panic causes tunnel vision. Calm acceptance of danger allows us to more easily assess the situation and see the options.” — Simon Sinek
16. “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
17. “The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins.” — Salman Rushdie
18. “Sometimes you just have to regret things and move on.” ― Charlaine Harris
19. “If we have the strength and the courage to confront our own emotions and to accept every one of them as a part of us, we cannot only finish our “unfinished business,” but, as we have so often seen, add months and even years to our lives.” — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
20. “If you accept the expectations of others, especially negative ones, then you never will change the outcome.” — Michael Jordan
21. “At the heart of personality is the need to feel a sense of being lovable without having to qualify for that acceptance.” — Paul Tournier
22. “The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don’t be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.” — Chuck Palahniuk
23. “The image I’d had of myself as a child was someone I’d never be, and it was only recently that I realized it was okay to be who I was.” — Jeaniene Frost
24. “I accept the universe!” — Margaret Fuller
25. “Any natural, normal human being, when faced with any kind of loss, will go from shock all the way through acceptance.” — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
26. “If you do something with acceptance and kindness, you can create a true friendship.” — Dustin Lance Black
27. “Acceptance is the first step toward cultivating forgiveness and understanding, but it’s also the first step toward effecting change. By acknowledging and accepting that we are doing the best we can right now and that we would like to do better, we can begin (without judgment or shame) to set personal goals and work toward them.” — Erin Olivo
28. “I’m not wise, but the beginning of wisdom is there; it’s like relaxing into and an acceptance of things.” — Tina Turner
29. “Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, So what. That’s one of my favorite things to say. So what.” — Andy Warhol
30. “The moment that judgment stops through acceptance of what it is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.” — Eckhart Tolle
Life Quotes On Acceptance
1. “Of course, there is no formula for success, except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life, and what it brings.” — Arthur Rubinstein
2. “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” — James Baldwin
3. “I am Dead, but it’s not so bad. I’ve learned to live with it.” — Isaac Marion
4. “Acceptance of one’s life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.” — Paul Tournier
5. “Acceptance means acknowledging what is happening in the present moment and allowing it to be as it is, without fighting reality.” — Erin Olivo
6. “It’s through grieving that acceptance arrives.” — Sheryl Paul
7. “We must accept life for what it actually is a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
8. “Surrender is the inner transition from resistance to acceptance, from no to yes.” — Eckhart Tolle
9. “Every woman that finally figured out her worth, has picked up her suitcases of pride and boarded a flight to freedom, which landed in the valley of change.” — Shannon L. Alder
10. “Anything in life that we don’t accept will simply make trouble for us until we make peace with it.” — Shakti Gawain
11. “Wisdom… is knowing what you have to accept.” ― Wallace Stegner
12. “There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.” — Denis Waitley
13. “No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it.” — Fernando Pessoa
14. “To be human is to struggle. Eventually, we realize that when we sit under the umbrella of “shoulds” — “This shouldn’t be so hard. I should be happy” — the pain rains down harder. But when we accept the fact that anxiety, depression, loneliness, powerlessness, grief, joy, and exhilaration are all part of the design, we step out into the rain and perhaps even dance a little.” — Sheryl Paul
15. “Accepting all the good and bad about someone. It’s a great thing to aspire to. The hard part is actually doing it.” — Sarah Dessen
16. “I follow four dictates: face it, accept it, deal with it, then let it go.” — Sheng-yen
17. “A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself — and especially to feel, or not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at any moment is fine with them. That’s what real love amounts to letting a person be what he really is.” — Jim Morrison
18. “Humility means accepting reality with no attempt to outsmart it.” ― David Richo
19. “The acceptance of death gives you more of a stake in life, in living life happily, as it should be lived. Living for the moment.” — Sting
20. “For after all, the best thing one can do when it is raining is let it rain.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
21. “Acceptance… is an expression of lived wisdom.” — Jon Kabat-Zinn
22. “Nobody signs up for marriage because they want to be changed by their partner. It doesn’t work. Ever. Go all in or go home. Marriage and commitment can only work if we accept each other wholeheartedly.” — Stan Tatkin
23. “You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.” — Ray Bradbury
24. “Marriage equality is about more than just marriage. It’s about something greater. It’s about acceptance.” — Charlize Theron
25. “To be human is to grow toward an acceptance of paradox and widen our capacity to tolerate uncertainty until we say ‘I don’t know’ more often than ‘I know’.” — Sheryl Paul
26. “I’m not okay, you’re not okay, and that’s okay.” — William Sloane Coffin
27. “In actual life, it requires the greatest discipline to be simple, and the acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook upon life.” — Carl Jung
28. “We can’t honestly accept an experience unless we see clearly what we are accepting.” — Tara Brach
29. “Acceptance is the key to everything.” — Michael J Fox
30. “The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.” — Nathaniel Branden
Wrapping It Up
I believe the wisdom contained in this collection of acceptance quotes has made you realize what it means to accept and what effect it has on our well-being.
No matter how bad things might be, you should give your best to accept them because it’s the only way to find peace and move on.
