Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out.
John Wooden
I will tell you one thing that will make you rich for life. There are two struggles: an Inner-world struggle and an Outer-world struggle...you must make an intentional contact between these two worlds; then you can crystallize data for the Third World, the World of the Soul.
G.I. Gurdjieff
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving: To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
All of life is like a mirror. Smile at it and it smiles back at you. I just put a big smile on my face and everyone smiles back.
Peace Pilgrim
We can never know what strengths and revelations might be on the other side of our fears until we face them and feel them all the way through. True positive thinking is the mental stance of surrender, simply trusting the process. We learn to accept what is.
Jacquelyn Small
Examples are few of men ruined by giving.
Christian Bovee
Do not say, "I follow the one true path of the Spirit," but rather, "I have found the Spirit walking on my path," for the Spirit walks on all paths.
Khalil Gibran
Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Tenderness, generosity and respect are the Three Graces, and opposite sentiments are all disgraces.
Stuart Wilde
Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
Will Rogers
Consciousness is a phase of mental life which arises in connection with the formation of new habits. When habit is formed, consciousness only interferes to spoil our performance.
W. R. Inge
Wisdom is the faculty of knowing what will be the effect of a cause.
Alfred A. Montapert
The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps cool.
William McFee
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, "This is the real me," and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
William James
Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.
Henry Ford
The most valuable possession you can own is an open heart. The most powerful weapon you can be is an instrument of peace.
Carlos Santana
The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.
Vaclav Havel
A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.
Samuel Adams
There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen to them.
Henry Wheeler Shaw
Act the way you want to be and soon you will be the way you act.
Dr. Johnnie Coleman
Giving thanks for what we have in our lives is like a pause when eating. It allows us to feel full, to register on the emotional and spiritual level that we have, in fact been given "enough."
M.J. Ryan
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.
Ursula LeGuin
Mind without agitation is meditation. Mind in the present moment is meditation. Mind that has no hesitation, no anticipation is meditation. Mind that has come back home, to the source, is meditation. Mind that becomes no mind is meditation.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Enlightenment is not imagining figures of light but making darkness conscious.
Carl Gustav Jung
If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.
Will Rogers
When we focus on abundance, our life feels abundant; when we focus on lack, our life feels lacking. It is purely a matter of focus.
Susan Jeffers
Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.
Sophia Loren
I conceive that the land belongs to a vast family of which many are dead, few are living, and countless numbers are still unborn.
A Nigerian Chieftain
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
Orson Welles
The most powerful agent of growth and transformation is something much more basic than any technique: a change of heart.
John Welwood
The present never ages. Each moment is like a snowflake, unique, unspoiled, unrepeatable, and can be appreciated in its surprisingness.
Gail Sheehy
It is when we ask for love less and begin giving it more that the secret of human love is revealed to us.
Leo Buscaglia
If you look to others for fulfillment, you will never truly be fulfilled. If your happiness depends on money, you will never be happy with yourself. Be content with what you have: rejoice in the way things are.
Lao Tzu
A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein
Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy.
Milton Erickson
All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.
Walter Benjamin
Throughout my life, I've been gratified that I've been able to keep the child in me alive and inspire others.
Jonathan Winters
Of all the "attitudes" we can acquire, surely the attitude of gratitude is the most important and by far the most life-changing.
Zig Ziglar
We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.
Thomas Merton
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
Henry David Thoreau
By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.
Voltaire
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
G.K. Chesterton
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
Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are who already possess it.
Francois de la Rochfoucauld
Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass. It's about learning how to dance in the rain.
Vivian Greene
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
Galileo Galilei
In today's highly interdependent world, individuals and nations can no longer resolve many of their problems by themselves. We need one another. We must therefore develop a sense of universal responsibility... It is our collective and individual responsibility to protect and nurture the global family, to support its weaker members, and to preserve and tend to the environment in which we live.
The Dalai Lama
The truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do.
Ursula LeGuin
It's innocence when it charms us, ignorance when it doesn't.
Mignon McLaughlin
You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.
Abraham Lincoln
If you concentrate on finding whatever is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, from "God's Fingerprints on the Soul" in Handbook for the Soul
You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success - or are they holding you back?
W. Clement Stone
Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
James Dean
The real secret of success is enthusiasm.
Walter Chrysler
Self-discipline begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don't control what you think, you can't control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward.
Napoleon Hill
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
Dalai Lama
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
Aristotle
Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
Leo Buscaglia
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.
Chinese Proverb
Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.
John Wooden
Some people confuse acceptance with apathy but there's all the difference in the world. Apathy fails to distinguish what can and cannot be helped; acceptance makes the distinction.
Arthur Gordon
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
James Thurber
Practice hope. As hopefulness becomes a habit, you can achieve a permanently happy spirit.
Norman Vincent Peale
The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.
Lao Tzu
Calmness of mind does not mean you should stop your activity. Real calmness should be found in activity itself.
Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
One has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when one plants shade trees under which one knows full well one will never sit.
Elton Trueblood
The more rules you have about how people have to be, how life has to be for you to be happy, the less happy you're going to be.
Anthony Robbins
The past is not only that which happened but also that which could have happened but did not.
Tess Gallagher
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou
Everything is flowing. The Great River of Time takes everything with it, and nothing in this world remains unchanged or stabilized.
Mouni Sadhu
The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
William James
Keep your mind on the things you want and off the things you don't want.
Hannah Whitall Smith
One who is slow to anger is better than a warrior, and one who rules his spirit is better than one who takes a city.
King Solomon, Proverbs 16:32
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
The time is now, the place is here. Stay in the present. You can do nothing to change the past, and the future will never come exactly as you plan or hope for.
Dan Millman
If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.
Nelson Mandela
Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverence.
Samuel Johnson
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.
Mother Teresa
Of course there is no formula for success except perhaps, an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings.
Arthur Rubinstein
Only the light which we have kindled in ourselves can illuminate others.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Real life isn't always going to be perfect or go our way, but the recurring acknowledgement of what is working in our lives can help us not only to survive but surmount our difficulties.
Sara Ban Breathnach
You wouldn't worry so much about what other people thought if you realized how seldom they do.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
Mahatma Gandhi
The spiritual journey is one of continually falling on your face, getting up, brushing yourself off, looking sheepishly at God, and taking another step.
Sri Aurobindo
Insist on yourself; never imitate.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Time has a wonderful way of weeding out the trivial.
Richard Ben Sapir
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
Mark Twain
I have always noticed that people will never laugh at anything that is not based on truth.
Will Rogers
I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot.
Horace Greeley
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
We must see that consciousness is neither an isolated soul nor the mere function of a single nervous system, but of that totality of interrelated stars and galaxies which makes a nervous system possible.
Alan Watts
Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
Francis of Assisi
Once our hearts are open, all existence appears naturally beautiful and harmonious.
Tarthang Tulku
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
Erich Fromm
The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.
Joyce Cary
Every relationship you have with another person reflects the relationship you have with yourself.
Alice DeVille
Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.
Carl Jung
We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.
Thomas Merton
Happiness...not in another place, but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.
Walt Whitman
Direct your eye right inward, and you'll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them and be
Expert in home-cosmography.Henry David thoreau
Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
Marcus Aurelius
Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.
John F. Kennedy
Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.
Bill Moyers
Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.
Blaise Pascal
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
Anais Nin
There are two educations. One should teach us how to make a living and the other how to live.
John Adams
The promised land always lies on the other side of the wilderness.
Havelock Ellis
Breath is the bridge which connects life to consciousness, which unites your body to your thoughts.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Fire is the test of gold; adversity of strong men.
Seneca
I think the one lesson I have learned is that there is no substitute for paying attention.
Diane Sawyer
Our intention creates our reality.
Wayne Dyer
We do not so much need the help of our friends as the confidence of their help in need.
Epicurus
None will improve your lot if you yourself do not.
Bertolt Brecht
If we have the opportunity to be generous with our hearts, ourselves, we have no idea of the depth and breadth of love's reach.
Margaret Cho
People are not lazy. They simply have impotent goals---that is, goals that do not inspire them.
Anthony Robbins
Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The enlightened being is one with everything, with no distinction of self or other. Life then has no past and present and pervades all.
Yangshan
If you see good in people, you radiate a harmonious loving energy which uplifts those who are around you. If you can maintain this habit, this energy will turn into a steady flow of love.
Annamalai Swami
It is characteristic of the ego that it takes all that is unimportant as important and all that is important as unimportant.
Meher Baba in Discourses
Opinion is that exercise of the human will which helps us to make a decision without information.
John Erskine
The concept, the label, is perpetually hiding from us all the nature of the real.
Joyce Cary
Before we can find new ways to prevent war, we have to understand why it is so popular.
Lawrence LeShan
Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.
Henry Ford
If you're going through hell, keep going.
Winston Churchill
He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.
Ben Jonson
Let everyone sweep in front of his own door and the whole world will be clean.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
We must not allow other people's limited percetions to define us.
Virginia Satir
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
Things pass...That I have seen. Life is what you make it now. So let us put our energies into life.
U Kyi Maung
Each experience through which we pass operates ultimately for our good. This is a correct attitude to adopt and we must be able to see it in that light.
Raymond Holliwell
Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing.
Lao Tzu
Observation, not old age, brings wisdom.
Publilius Syrus
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
Epictetus
The greatest intellectual capacities are only found in connection with a vehement and passionate will.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.
Nido Qubein
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.
G. K. Chesterton
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
Orson Welles
Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to
Alan Keightly
Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.
Shakti Gawain
As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.
Henry Van Dyke
Two persons cannot long be friends if they cannot forgive each other's little failings.
Jean De La Bruyere
The best gift you can give is a hug: one size fits all and no one ever minds if you return it
Unknown
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
Seneca
'Without pain, how could we know joy?' This is an old argument in the field of thinking about suffering and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not, in any way, affect the taste of chocolate.
John Green in The Fault in Our Stars
As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.
Helen Keller
We are more disturbed by a calamity which threatens us than by one which has befallen us.
John Lancaster Spalding
Happiness is not a reward-it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.
Robert G. Ingersoll
It is human nature to hate him whom you have injured.
Tacitus
The world is a spell, an enchantement, an amazement, an arabesque of such stunning rhythm and a plot so intriguing that we are drawn by its web into a state of involvement where we forget that it is a game.
Alan Watts
The true way to mourn the dead is to take care of the living who belong to them.
Edmund Burke
There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition, and of unspeakable love.
Washington Irving
Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.
Marion Wright Edelman
The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
Mitch Albom
When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance.
Brian Tracy
The wise man does not lay up his own treasures.
Lao Tzu
The more he gives to others,
the more he has for his own.
I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
Maya Angelou
As irrigators lead water where they want,
The Buddha
as archers make their arrows straight,
as carpenters carve wood,
the wise shape their minds.
That which one wants to hide most are one's own faults, but on the contrary, they should not be hidden but rather acknowledged, if one has any real desire to be free from them. By acknowledging one's faults, one destroys them or finds a way to improve on them.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
When the mind goes back to the present moment, it also goes back to the body; body and mind are united. Breathing is the bridge between body and mind.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.
Benjamin Franklin
Never make excuses. Your friends don't need them and your foes won't believe them.
John Wooden
Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent.
Krishnamurti
All things are our relatives; what we do to everything, we do to ourselves. All is really One.
Black Elk
As more people achieve some degree of mental calm, insight, or the ability to transform negative emotions into positive ones, there will be a natural reinforcement of basic human values and consequently a great chance for peace and happiness for all.
The Dalai Lama
The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.
Thich Nhat Hanh
©2012 Tom Barrett