Do Inspirational Quotes Actually Work? What the Research Says (and Why I Almost Left Them Out of Kansha)

By Matt Hughes · 2026-07-30 · 7 min read

I almost left quotes out of Kansha because most inspirational quotes are forgettable wallpaper. Here's the specific, narrow way a handful of them actually work.

Do inspirational quotes actually work, or are they just nice wallpaper for your lock screen? For years my honest answer was the second one — if you've ever winced at a "live, laugh, love" graphic with a sunset behind it, you already know the reputation this genre has. So when a quotes feature kept coming up as a request while I was building Kansha, I resisted it for months. Then I actually read the research on why some quotes genuinely stick and most evaporate the second you swipe past them, and it changed the feature, not just my opinion of the format.

Why do inspirational quotes have such a bad reputation?

Because a lot of them deserve it. There's a 2015 study by Gordon Pennycook and colleagues at the University of Waterloo, published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, worth knowing before you feel too smug or too sheepish about any quote you've ever shared. They gave nearly 800 participants a mix of statements: some randomly generated by a tool called the New Age Bullshit Generator, some real tweets from Deepak Chopra's account, some genuinely profound lines from serious writers, and some flatly mundane sentences. People rated each one for how profound it seemed.

The finding wasn't "inspirational quotes are for idiots" — that's the tabloid headline version, and it's not quite fair to the study or to anyone who's ever liked a quote on Instagram. What the researchers actually found is narrower and more interesting: a meaningful share of people rated randomly generated, grammatically correct nonsense — sentences engineered to sound deep while meaning nothing — as somewhere between profound and mind-blowing. The people most likely to do that also scored lower on tests of cognitive reflection, and were more likely to hold paranormal beliefs and endorse alternative medicine. It isn't a verdict on quotes. It's a verdict on how bad we can be, collectively, at telling "vague" apart from "true" — and quote culture leans hard on vagueness, because a vague statement is one almost anyone can nod along to.

So is there any real evidence that a quote can do something?

Yes — just not the thing quote culture is usually selling. The relevant research isn't about quotes specifically; it's about memory, and it's older and far better replicated than anything about profundity. In 1977, Timothy Rogers and colleagues ran a now-classic experiment where people processed a list of words four different ways: judging how the word looked on the page, whether it rhymed with another word, what it meant, or — the key condition — whether it described them personally. Nobody was told to memorise anything. When they were later asked to recall as many words as they could, the words processed in relation to themselves were remembered far better than words processed any other way. The self, it turns out, is an unusually good filing system.

Apply that to quotes and the picture gets clearer. A generic line about "chasing your dreams" that could apply to literally anyone gets read, mildly nodded at, and forgotten within the hour — there's nothing for your memory to hook it to. A quote that happens to name something true about your actual week — a specific fear you're sitting with, a decision you're avoiding, a way you've been unfair to yourself — gets processed differently, because you can't read it without also thinking about yourself. That's not the quote being magic. That's ordinary memory doing what it always does with anything self-relevant.

Why did I add a quotes feature to a gratitude journalling app, then?

Reluctantly, and later than the feature requests deserved. My worry was exactly the reputation problem above: a "quote of the day" bolted onto a journalling app risks becoming decoration — something that makes the app feel warmer without actually doing anything, which is the opposite of what I want Kansha to be. So the Quotes page inside the app is built around a distinction I didn't have proper language for until I read the self-reference research: there's a Discover tab, essentially a shuffleable feed of quotes, and a Favourites tab, where you keep the ones you've deliberately chosen to hold onto. The page copy just says "collect the ones that speak to your heart" — plain enough that I didn't think much of it when we wrote it, but it's actually the entire mechanism in one sentence.

I'll be honest about the Discover tab: on its own, it isn't that different from the scrolling behaviour I was just criticising. You tap "next quote", read a line, feel a flicker of something or nothing, tap again. If that's the whole interaction, I don't think it's doing much more than an Instagram quote account does. The part that's actually earning its place is the favourite button — the moment you stop passively receiving quotes and decide this one is mine, keep it. That's the self-reference effect in interface form: the app doesn't know which quote will land for you, but you do, instantly, and favouriting is what turns a generic line into a personally tagged one.

Isn't favouriting a quote just digital hoarding with extra steps?

This is the honest catch, and I'd be lying if I said it doesn't apply here. There's a well-documented pattern with "read it later" apps like Pocket and Instapaper: people save articles at a much higher rate than they ever reopen them. Saving something can function as a kind of psychological closure — it feels like you've dealt with it, which quietly reduces the pressure to actually go back and engage with it. A favourites list of quotes you never revisit is exactly that same trap wearing a nicer outfit. You get the small tick of "yes, that one's mine", and then it sits in a tab you don't open again — which means the self-reference effect never actually gets to finish its job. You've filed the quote away without doing the second half of the work, which is returning to it.

So favouriting isn't the finish line. It's a shortlist. What actually makes a quote useful is going back to that shortlist occasionally — while you're journalling, during a quiet moment, or as part of a weekly review — and asking why that particular line made the cut. Usually there's a reason, and the reason is worth writing down, which does more than adding a tenth quote to a list you've stopped opening.

How do you actually get something out of a quote, if you're going to bother at all?

A few things I've settled on, mostly by noticing what I actually do versus what I intended to do. First, treat the shuffle feed as browsing, not practice — reading forty quotes in a row is closer to scrolling than reflecting, and I don't think it does much either way. Second, when a line genuinely catches you — you feel it land somewhere specific rather than just nodding — that's the signal to stop and ask why, ideally in writing, even one sentence. "This one got me because I've been avoiding X" does more than favouriting ever will on its own. Third, keep the favourites list small on purpose. A shortlist of a dozen quotes you actually reread means something; a favourites list of two hundred quotes you scroll past without reading properly is a graveyard, not a resource.

And fourth — the one I had to learn from watching my own habits rather than from any study — put the favourites list somewhere you'll actually see it again. A quote you favourited three months ago and never looked at has done precisely nothing for you, no matter how true it felt in the moment. The value was never in the collecting. It's entirely in the returning.

The quote isn't the point

If there's one thing I'd want you to take from this, it's that the words themselves are doing less work than quote culture wants you to believe, and you're doing more work than you probably credit yourself for. A line only becomes useful once it's passed through you — once it's attached to something specific and true about your actual life, which is the same principle behind every gratitude prompt in this app. The quote is just the trigger. What sticks is whatever you noticed about yourself in the second after you read it, and that part was never going to come from Deepak Chopra's Twitter account. It was always going to come from you.