50 Bucket List Quotes to Help You Start Chasing Your Dreams

By Jo Moorhouse | Published September 23, 2023

These bucket list quotes will motivate you to start crossing items off your list!

In a world where life only seems to move faster with each passing day, the concept of a ‘bucket list’ has emerged to ensure we are living our lives to the fullest.

A term popularized by the 2007 film starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson, a bucket list represents a collection of dreams, desires, and aspirations that individuals hope to fulfill during their lifetime.

It is a tangible reminder that life is an adventure waiting to be seized.

Bucket lists are deeply personal, reflecting individual values, dreams, and passions.

They can encompass everything from daring adventures like skydiving and visiting exotic landscapes to simpler aspirations such as reconnecting with loved ones or mastering a new skill.

Are you thinking about making your own bucket list?

Here are 50 quotes that will help inspire and encourage you as you create and fulfill your own bucket list.

Why would someone make a bucket list?

Turning your dreams into the reality of your life starts with a bucket list.

1. “We all have two choices; we can make a living, or we can design a life.” — Jim Rohn

2. “In the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” — Abraham Lincoln

3. “Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” — Mark Twain

4. “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” — Diane Ackerman

5. “By recording your dreams and goals on paper, you set in motion the process of becoming the person you most want to be.” — Mark Victor Hansen

Why you should delay in working on your bucket list

Time passes quickly, as shown in the following quotes.

6. “Creating a bucket list is only one small piece of the passionate life puzzle—actually living the bucket list lifestyle is the whole shebang.” — Annette White

7. “Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” — Jack Kerouac

8. “The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

9. “Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often, it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes

10. “For too many people, it takes a terrifying illness, hitting retirement age, or some other life-altering event to begin thinking about the things they want to experience in their lifetime. In many of these cases, it will then be too late to turn these dreams into a reality.” — Annette White

How do you try new things?

Conquer your fears to conquer your bucket list!

Be inspired by these quotes about overcoming your fears to try something new.

11. “If you can dream it, you can do it.” — Walt Disney

12. “If not us, then who? If not now, then when?” — John Lewis

13. “If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.” — Seth Godin

14. “Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.” — John Wayne

15. “Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

16. “There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” — Paulo Coelho

17. “Some people want it to happen, some wish it would happen, others make it happen.” — Michael Jordan

18. “What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.” — Zig Ziglar

19. “…the reminder that our time is limited is actually one of the best gifts we can be given. It pushes us to catch our dreams before it is too late.” — Annette White

20. “We hold ourselves back in ways both big and small, by lacking self-confidence, by not raising our hands, and by pulling back when we should be leaning in.” — Sheryl Sandberg

How do you fulfill your bucket list goals?

Motivational quotes to help you check things off your bucket list

21. “Be the person who decided to try.” — Annette White

22. “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” — Winston Churchill

23. “Travel is never a matter of money but of courage.” — Paulo Coelho

24. “A year from now, you may wish you had started today.” — Karen Lamb

25. “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” — George Bernard Shaw

26. “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who’s going to stop me.” — Ayn Rand

27. “I don’t focus on what I’m up against. I focus on my goals, and I try to ignore the rest.” — Venus Wiliams

28. “When life gives you the opportunity to check off a thing on the bucket list, you have to check them.” — Ryan Tedder

29. “According to the ancient Chinese proverb, A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” — John F. Kennedy

30. “Some of the world’s greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart enough to know they were impossible.” — Doug Larson

What’s on other people’s bucket lists?

Curious about who shares your dreams?

Read on for quotes by notable figures about what’s on their personal bucket lists.

31. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” — Susan Sontag

32. “I would love to be a Bond girl. That is on my bucket list, definitely.” — Morena Baccarin

33. “If I had a bucket list, I’d say raising my four girls to be strong, good women would be No. 1.” — Matt Damon

34. “My way of discovering of what I like was to create a restaurant list and eat my way through it, and I call it my ‘inner fat girl bucket list.’” — Jack Kerouac

35. “My bucket list is pretty much checked off. But oh, we should play in space! Let’s do that. We’ll play in space, up on a satellite somewhere.” — Patrick Stump

36. “I won’t make a bucket list because I’m so afraid that I’ll die and then people will find my bucket list and be, like, ‘Oh, she didn’t get to do that.” — Emma Stone

37. “I’ve kind of achieved everything I thought that I never would, so I haven’t really got a bucket list. But I really want to go to loads of different places.” — Gabrielle Aplin

38. “I’m stopping in Italy, and I’m going in on a truffle hunt with the pigs and the dogs. That has been on my list for a long time. This year, I’m finally going to do that!” — Oprah Winfrey

More quotes to inspire you to make your bucket list

Read on for quotes that will have you reaching for a pen and paper to start your bucket list.

39. “Not all those who wander are lost.” — J. R. R. Tolkien

40. “Live your life by a compass, not a clock.” — Stephen R. Covey

41. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” — Helen Keller

42. “Fill your life with tiny and large adventurous moments.” — Sark

43. “You are never too old to set a new goal or to dream a new dream.” — C.S. Lewis

44. “Make a bucket list and fill it with dreams that have no boundaries.” — Annette White

45. “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” — Saint Augustine

46. “The only dreams that come true are the ones you chase; if you do nothing, you get nothing.” — Joseph Atser

47. “You must give everything to make your life as beautiful as the dreams that dance in your imagination.” — Roman Payne

48. “Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.” — Ernest Hemingway

49. “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.” — Mark Twain

50. “Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” — H. Jackson Brown