“In our culture anyway, especially in modern times, the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it. Tell a young man that he is entitled to be a hero and he will blush. We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.”
-Ernest Becker
“We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.”
-Tom Robbins
“Attitude is a choice.
Happiness is a choice.
Optimism is a choice.
Kindness is a choice.
Giving is a choice.
Respect is a choice.
Whatever choice you make makes you.
Choose wisely.”
-Roy T. Bennett
“This life is what you make it. No matter what, you’re going to mess up sometimes, it’s a universal truth. But the good part is you get to decide how you’re going to mess it up. Girls will be your friends—they’ll act like it anyway. But just remember, some come, some go. The ones that stay with you through everything—they’re your true best friends. Don’t let go of them. Also remember, sisters make the best friends in the world. As for lovers, well, they’ll come and go, too. And baby, I hate to say it, most of them—actually pretty much all of them are going to break your heart, but you can’t give up because if you give up, you’ll never find your soulmate. You’ll never find that half who makes you whole and that goes for everything. Just because you fail once, doesn’t mean you’re gonna fail at everything. Keep trying, hold on, and always, always, always believe in yourself, because if you don’t, then who will, sweetie? So keep your head high, keep your chin up, and most importantly, keep smiling, because life’s a beautiful thing and there’s so much to smile about.”
-Marilyn Monroe
“The major question to ask on the job is not,
‘What am I getting here?’ The major question is,
‘What am I becoming here?’ Because true
happiness is not contained in what you get.
Happiness is contained in what you become.”
-Jim Rhon
“You need to put what you learn into practice and
do it over and over again until it’s a habit.
I always say, ‘Seeing is not believing.
Doing is believing.’ There is a lot to learn about
fitness, nutrition, and emotions, but once you do,
you can master them instead of them mastering you.”
-Brett Hoebel
“We [America] went from the best hero making machine country in the world, to now being
the best villain making machine in the world,
turning complainers into heroes.”
-Patrick Bet-David
“Never lose hope.
Storms make people stronger and never last forever.”
-Roy T. Bennett
“We cannot live better than in
seeking to become better.”
-Socrates
“I believe that a lot of people become, what I like to call, crystallized. You know? Very early on: this is who I am, this is what I’m about, and that’s it. —It’s not like I am dismissing my past. My past made me who I am. But I don’t need to stay in the past.”
-Dorian Yates
“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
-Winston Churchill
“Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions,
Their lives a mimicry,
Their passions a quotation.”
-Oscar Wilde
“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain,
but it is more common and also more hard to bear.
The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say, ‘My tooth is aching’
than to say, ‘My heart is broken.’”
-C.S. Lewis
“By three methods we may learn wisdom:
first, by reflection, which is noblest;
second, by imitation, which is easiest;
and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”
-Confucius
“If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.”
-Thomas Jefferson
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
-Rumi
“Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely.”
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
“Your life is what your thoughts make it.”
-Marcus Aurelius
“Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.”
-Thomas Jefferson
“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”
-Marcus Aurelius
“When you know your why, you can endure any how.”
-Viktor Frankl
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit.
Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
-Arthur Schopenhauer
“What you seek is seeking you.”
-Rumi
“We’ll spend all the time we can find on
our careers. But we need to be spending more
time studying how to be a great husband,
how to be a great father, how to be a great man.”
-Terry Crews
“Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goals; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.”
-Thomas Jefferson
“It is my view that the vegetarian manner of living by its purely physical effect on the human temperament would most beneficially influence the lot of mankind.”
-Albert Einstein
“I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary;
the evil it does is permanent.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
“Tell me what you eat,
and I will tell you who you are.”
-Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
“The most painful thing is losing yourself in the process of loving someone too much,
and forgetting that you are special, too.”
-Ernest Hemingway
“Be as you wish to seem.”
-Socrates
“Be kind, for everyone you meet
is fighting a hard battle.”
-Socrates
“The price of anything is the amount
of life you exchange for it.”
-Henry David Thoreau
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
-Sun Tzu
“I mean to make myself a man, and if I succeed in that, I shall succeed in everything else.”
-James A. Garfield
“Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”
-Maya Angelou
“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in.
That’s what this storm’s all about.”
-Haruki Murakami
“A reputation once broken may possibly be repaired, but the world will always keep their eyes on the spot where the crack was.”
-Joseph Hall
“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
-C.G. Jung
“All children should be taught to unconditionally accept, approve, admire, appreciate, forgive, trust, and ultimately, love their own person.”
-Asa Don Brown
“You can fail at what you don’t want,
so you might as well take a chance
on doing what you love.”
-Jim Carrey
“Fortunately analysis is not the only way to resolve inner conflicts. Life itself still remains
a very effective therapist.”
-Karen Horney
“It takes a very long time to become young.”
-Pablo Picasso
“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
-Rumi
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
-Albert Einstein
If
“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”
-Rudyard Kipling
“Wherever you find a great man, you will find a great mother or a great wife standing behind him—or so they used to say. It would be interesting to know how many great women have had great fathers and husbands behind them.”
-Dorothy L. Sayers
“We carry about us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young—not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age—and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.”
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
-Oscar Wilde
“I want people to see the dress,
but focus on the woman.”
-Vera Wang
“Why do women want to dress like men when they’re fortunate enough to be women? Why lose femininity, which is one of our greatest charms? We get more accomplished by being charming than we would be flaunting around in pants and smoking. I’m very fond of men. I think they are wonderful creatures. I love them dearly. But I don’t want to look like one.
When women gave up their long skirts,
they made a grave error.”
-Tasha Tudor
“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable
that we have to alter it every six months.”
-Oscar Wilde
“Fashion is about dressing according to what’s fashionable. Style is more about being yourself.”
-Oscar de la Renta
“Don’t be into trends. Don’t make fashion own you, but you decide what you are, what you want to express by the way you dress and the way to live.”
-Gianni Versace
“Clothes make the man.
Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
-Mark Twain
“Life without thankfulness is devoid of
love and passion. Hope without thankfulness
is lacking in fine perception. Faith without thankfulness lacks strength and fortitude.
Every virtue divorced from thankfulness is
maimed and limps along the spiritual road.”
-John Henry Jowett
“Be at war with your vices,
at peace with your neighbors,
and let every new year find you a better man.”
-Benjamin Franklin
“That’s basically the mantra of Herr Silverman’s teaching—think for yourself and do what’s right for you, but let others do the same.”
-Matthew Quick
“Life isn’t about finding yourself.
Life is about creating yourself.”
-George Bernard Shaw
“Imperfection is beauty,
madness is genius,
and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous
than absolutely boring.”
-Marilyn Monroe
“We are all in the gutter,
but some of us are looking at the stars.”
-Oscar Wilde
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
-Aristotle
“You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself any direction you choose.
You’re on your own.
And you know what you know.
And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go.”
-Dr. Seuss
“The quality of your communication shapes
the quality of your life. Every cell in your being
aligns with what you declare.”
-Niurka
“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you,
pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The best cure for one’s bad tendencies is to see them in action in another person.”
-Alain de Botton
“I will act now.
I will act now.
I will act now.
Henceforth, I will repeat these words each hour,
each day, every day, until the words become
as much a habit as my breathing, and the action
which follows becomes as instinctive as the blinking
of my eyelids. With these words, I can condition
my mind to perform every action necessary for my success. I will act now. I will repeat these words
again and again and again. I will walk where
failures fear to walk. I will work when failures
seek rest. I will act now for now is all I have.
Tomorrow is the day reserved for the labor
of the lazy. I am not lazy. Tomorrow is the day
when the failure will succeed. I am not a failure.
I will act now. Success will not wait.
If I delay, success will become wed to
another and lost to me forever.
This is the time.
This is the place.
I am the person.”
-Og Mandino
“A champion is someone who gets up when they can’t.”
-Jack Dempsey
“Heroes are made by the paths they choose,
not the powers they are graced with.”
-Brodi Ashton
“At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done.
We will be judged by ‘I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was naked and you clothed me. I was homeless, and you took me in.’”
-Mother Teresa
“People do not decide their futures; they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures.”
-F.M. Alexander
“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
-G.K. Chesterton
“If you plan on being anything less than what you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy
all the days of your life.”
-Abraham Maslow
“The first step, perhaps, is to take stock. Who are you? When you buy a house and prepare to live in it, you hire an inspector to list all its faults—as it is, in reality, now, not as you wish it could be. You’ll even pay him for the bad news. You need to know. You need to discover the home’s hidden flaws. You need to know whether they are cosmetic imperfections or structural inadequacies. You need to know because you can’t fix something if you don’t know it’s broken—and you’re broken. You need an inspector.”
-Jordan Peterson
“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president.
You realize that you control your own destiny.”
-Albert Ellis
“There is no greater agony
than bearing an untold story inside you.”
-Maya Angelou
“A failure is not a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances.
The real mistake is to stop trying.”
-B.F. Skinner
“A man is worked upon by what he works on.
He may carve out his circumstances,
but his circumstances will carve him out as well.”
-Frederick Douglass
“People need people—for initial and for continued survival, for socialization, for the pursuit of satisfaction. No one—not the dying, not the
outcast, not the mighty—transcends the
need for human contact.”
-Irvin Yalom
“No event is depressing.
I may feel depressed; if so, I take responsibility.”
-Larry Godwin
“When I consider that the nobler animal have been exterminated here—the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, dear, the beaver, the turkey and so forth and so forth, I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and, as it were, emasculated country … Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature I am conversing with? As if I were to study a tribe of Indians that had lost all its warriors … I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance, thinking that I have here the entire poem, and then, to my chagrin, I hear that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess and have read, that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves and grandest passages, and mutilated it in many places. I should not like to think that some demigod had come before me and picked out some of the best of the stars. I wish to know an entire heaven and an entire earth.”
-Henry David Thoreau
“There is nothing to writing.
All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
-Ernest Hemingway
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure
with no loss of enthusiasm.”
-Winston S. Churchill
“The attempt to escape from pain,
is what creates more pain.”
-Gabor Maté
“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall come easily
by what others have labored hard for.”
-Socrates
“No one can make you feel inferior
without your consent.”
-Eleanor Roosevelt
“The Anatomy of Conflict:
If there is no communication
then there is no respect.
If there is no respect
then there is no caring.
If there is no caring
then there is no understanding.
If there is no understanding
then there is no compassion.
If there is no compassion
then there is no empathy.
If there is no empathy
then there is no forgiveness.
If there is no forgiveness
then there is no kindness.
If there is no kindness
then there is no honesty.
If there is no honesty
then there is no love.
If there is no love
then God doesn’t reside there.
If God doesn’t reside there
then there is no peace.
If there is no peace
then there is no happiness.
If there is no happiness
—then there is conflict
because there is no communication!”
-Shannon L. Alder
“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
“Writing is a form of therapy;
sometimes I wonder how all those
who do not write, compose, or paint
can manage to escape the madness,
melancholia, the panic and fear which is
inherent in a human situation.”
-Graham Greene
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling,
but in rising every time we fall.”
-Confucius
“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.”
-Rumi
“The trouble with most of us is that we would rather be ruined by praise than saved by criticism.”
-Norman Vincent Peale
“Lack of communication can drive a spike between two people wider than any physical distance.”
-Mark W. Boyer
“Children must be taught how to think,
not what to think.”
-Margaret Mead
“The shoe that fits one person pinches another;
there is no one recipe for living that suits all cases.”
-Carl Jung
“In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
-Carl R. Rogers
“A fine glass vase goes from treasure to trash, the moment it is broken. Fortunately, something else happens to you and me. Pick up your pieces.
Then, help me gather mine.”
-Vera Nazarian
“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
-Thomas Sowell
“Author says her father was so diplomatic that when people came to him for solutions, people not only accepted them, but they believed they thought of them.”
-Immaculee Ilibagiza
“One of the greatest barriers to connection is the cultural importance we place on “going it alone.” Somehow we’ve come to equate success with not needing anyone. Many of us are willing to extend a helping hand, but we’re very reluctant to reach out for help when we need it ourselves. It’s as if we’ve divided the world into ‘those who offer help’ and ‘those who need help.’ The truth is that we are both.”
-Brené Brown
“Asking for help with shame says:
You have the power over me.
Asking with condescension says:
I have the power over you.
But asking for help with gratitude says:
We have the power to help each other.”
-Amanda Palmer
“One thing you must realize is that:
you either kill your addiction
or your addiction will eventually kill you.”
-Oche Otorkpa
“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
-Paulo Coelho
“Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.”
-Eckhart Tolle
“Mindfulness is a way of
befriending ourselves and our experience.”
-Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Body awareness not only anchors you in the
present moment. It is a doorway out of
the prison that is the ego.”
-Eckhart Tolle
“When you arise in the morning,
think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive―
to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”
-Marcus Aurelius
“I am playing the violin,
that’s all I know,
nothing else,
no education,
no nothing.
You just practice every day.”
-Itzhak Perlman
“The questions we don’t ask
become the puzzles we don’t solve.”
-A.J. Darkholme
“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.”
-Norman Vincent Peale
“To be candid, some people have given positive thinking a bad name. I can’t stand to hear some gung-ho individual say that with positive thinking you can just do ‘anything.’ If you think about that one for a moment, you recognize the absurdity of it.”
-Zig Ziglar
“In life, you either need inspiration or desperation.”
-Tony Robbins
“A man’s mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.”
-James Allen
“I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, ’Remember how good this is.
Because you can lose it.’”
-Jim Carrey
“To learn to see―to accustom the eye to calmness,
to patience, and to allow things to come up to it;
to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.”
-Friedrich Nietzsche
“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
-Stephen Chbosky
“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
-Peter Drucker
“In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
“If you keep saying things are going to be bad,
you have a good chance of being a prophet.”
-Isaac Bashevis Singer
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
-Benjamin Franklin
“The future belongs to those who believe
in the beauty of their dreams.”
-Eleanor Roosevelt
“No matter what the work you are doing,
be always ready to drop it.
And plan it, so as to be able to leave it.”
-Leo Tolstoy
“Life can only be understood backwards;
but it must be lived forwards.”
-Søren Kierkegaard
“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”
-J.R.R. Tolkien
“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor—such is my idea of happiness.”
-Leo Tolstoy
“Most men lead quite lives of desperation,
and go to the grave with their song still in them. “
-Henry David Thoreau
“What is to give light must endure burning.”
-Viktor E. Frankl
Postcards and paintings like this always make me smile and laugh. Past the silliness of it, I see happiness in the form of everyone playing together. From music halls filled with dance to playing cards with friends, my one-word answer to what is happiness is: Community.
“We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say ‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’
Then there are those who see the need and respond.
—I consider those people my heroes.”
-Fred Rogers
“To love oneself
is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”
-Oscar Wilde
“For the rest, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is righteous, whatever is clean, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good report,
if there is any uprightness and if there is
any praise―think on these.”
-Philippians 4:8
“That’s the moment of enlightenment. That is the moment that you become for the first time an unconditioned, sane, really free human being.”
-Osho
“If you smile while no one else is around,
you really mean it.”
-Andy Rooney
“Everyone thinks of changing the world
but no one thinks of changing himself.”
-Leo Tolstoy
“So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved
only for the strong, just as he had tasted
for a little while the deep happiness.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
“My brain is only a receiver; in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength, and inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of
this core, but I know that it exists.”
-Nikola Tesla
“A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundations with the bricks others throw at him.”
-David Brinkley
“Never be bullied into silence.
Never allow yourself to be made a victim.
Accept no one’s definition of your life; define yourself.”
-Harvey Fierstein
“Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.”
-Elbert Hubbard
“Always have a willing hand to help someone,
you might be the only one that does.”
-Roy T. Bennet
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re doing something.
So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make new mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is:
art, or love, or work, or family, or life.
Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, do it.
Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”
-Neil Gaiman
“Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would
but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy,
and strength, if faced with an open mind.
Every moment is a golden one for him who
has the vision to recognize it as such”
-Henry Miller
“If you light a lamp for someone else,
it will also brighten your path.”
-Buddha
“Are you right now a role model for somebody else? Would you be the role model you would have had years ago? Would you be an example of (years ago) what you would hope for? Now you want even more. So, what you’re doing is, here’s the game you’re playing and I want all of you to hear this: No amount of money will ever make you wealthy because as soon as you get there, you will raise the game. And here is what’s great about that: To continue growing in all areas of life—if you can grow emotionally, should you? Yes or no? If you could give more, should you? Yes or no? If you could grow intellectually, should you? If you could give more love, should you? If you could grow more financially, should you? Yes, ‘cause growth is life. But having to grow in order to feel significant enough means you’re always poor. It’s a game that never ends.”
-Tony Robbins
