Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.
Groucho Marx
The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy.
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
Abraham Lincoln
What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.
Colette
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away.
Elvis Presley
I've found that worry and irritation vanish into thin air the moment I open my mind to the many blessings I possess.
Dale Carnegie
In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness.
Mahatma Gandhi
The spiritual aspirant must swim upstream, against the current of habit, familiarity and ease.
Eknath Easwaran
Why do you so earnestly seek
Ryokan
the truth in distant places?
Look for delusion and truth in the
bottom of your own heart.
Each person's map of the world is as unique as their thumbprint. There are no two people alike…no two people who understand the same sentence the same way…So in dealing with people try not to fit them to your concept of what they should be.
Milton Erickson
The texture of our universe is one where there is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction.
Calvin & Hobbes
When we are dreaming alone it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality.
Dom Helder Camara
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
Dale Carnegie
The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with.
Eleanor Holmes Norton
Controversy equalizes fools and wise men–and the fools know it.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Be kind to unkind people–they need it the most.
Ashleigh Brilliant
The mind's job is to validate what it thinks.
Byron Katie
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
J. B. Priestley
We must rediscover the distinction between hope and expectation.
Ivan Illich
Our task is to strike a balance, to find a middle way, to learn not to overstretch ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations, but to simplify our lives more and more. The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity.
Sogyal Rinpoche
Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.
John Ruskin
Life is not a spectator sport. If you're going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, in my opinion you're wasting your life.
Jackie Robinson
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Bruce Lee
There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart.
Celia Thaxter
Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Thomas Merton
The most complete revenge is not to imitate the aggressor.
Marcus Aurelius
No memory is ever alone; it's at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.
Louis L'Amour
When one's thoughts are at peace and have become transparent
Hung Ying-Ming
One sees the true form of the mind.
Now today, moment by moment, realize that each person and event that happens is life for you. Life is not somewhere else. See how fully you can accept the life that presents itself to you now.
Brenda Shoshanna
Meditation is the dissolution of thoughts in Eternal awareness or Pure consciousness without objectification, knowing without thinking, merging finitude in infinity.
Voltaire
It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.
Leonardo da Vinci
He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.
Epictetus
If you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains; if you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
A thing is not proved because no one has ever questioned it…Skepticism is the first step toward truth.
Denis Diderot
Reflect upon your present blessings of which every man has many–not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
Charles Dickens
Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says "I need you because I love you."
Erich Fromm
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
Only when you awaken do you realize you were dreaming.
John Wareham
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down. We don't move, today is today, always is today.
Octavio Paz
I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy.
Thomas Paine
A finger points at the moon, but the moon is not at the tip of the finger. Words point at the truth, but the truth is not in words. To seek illumination through words is to get lost in the web of words and not see the truth.
Huineng
All is beautiful, all is more beautiful, and life is thankfulness.
Iguilik Eskimo song
Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.
Muhammad Ali
Don't wait. The time will never be just right.
Napoleon Hill
If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.
Lin Yutang
Joy seems to arise from a sense of being where one belongs…All the discontented people I know are trying sedulously to be something they are not, to do something they cannot do.
David Grayson
The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end–you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.
J. Krishnamurti
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler.
Henry David Thoreau
Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight.
Helen Keller
By happiness I mean here a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind. This is not a mere pleasureable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being. Happiness is also a way of interpreting the world, since while it may be difficult to change the world, it is always possible to change the way we look at it.
Matthieu Ricard
If you don't know the kind of person I am
William Stafford
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
All right, every day ain't going to be the best day of your life, don't worry about that. If you stick to it you hold the possibility open that you will have better days.
Wendell Berry
"I have done my best." That is about all the philosophy of living that one needs.
Lin Yutang
Having failed to distinguish thoughts from things, we then fail to distinguish words from thoughts. We think that if we can label a thing we have understood it.
Maha Sthavira Sangharakshita
I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we, too, will be remembered not for victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
All great work is preparing yourself for the accident to happen.
Sidney Lumet
Nothing is ever lost by courtesy. It is the cheapest of pleasures, costs nothing, and conveys much.
Erastus Wiman
The world of achievement has always belonged to the optimist.
J. Harold Wilkins
Time is not a line, but a series of now-points.
Taisen Deshimaru
It is a great piece of skill to know how to guide your luck even while waiting for it.
Baltasar Gracian
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
William James
You live longer once you realize that any time spent being unhappy is wasted.
Ruth E. Renkl
It is not from reason that justice springs, but goodness is born of wisdom.
Maurice Maeterlinck
A false sense of security is the only kind there is.
Michael Meade
When I dare to be powerful–to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
Audre Lorde
Reality is a staircase going neither up nor down. We don't move, today is today, always is today.
Octavio Paz
Glance into the world just as though time were gone: and everything crooked will become straight to you.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
William Stafford
Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The meaning of life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm; on the contrary, it can be found by eating the succulent fruit of the Tree of Life and by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can.
Paul Kurtz
I believe the ability to think is blessed. If you can think about a situation, you can deal with it. The big struggle is to keep your head clear enough to think.
Richard Pryor
We look forward to the time when the Power of Love will replace the Love of Power. Then will our world know the blessings of peace.
William E. Gladstone
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
Pericles
We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
Maya Angelou
Love is when the other person's happiness is more important than your own.
Jackson Browne, Jr.
The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want.
Byron Katie
The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.
Zeno
One characteristic of winners is they always look upon themselves as a do it yourself project.
Denis Waitley
Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.
Winston Churchill
Life is like an onion: you peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
Carl Sandburg
What we are tempted to call a disaster is sometimes the first, painful stage of a blessing.
Stephen Mitchell
If we insist on being as sure as is conceivable…we must be content to creep along the ground, and never soar.
John Henry Newman
Happiness is the reward we get for living to the highest right we know.
Richard Bach
Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.
Groucho Marx
The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy.
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realized it sooner.
Colette
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away.
Elvis Presley
I've found that worry and irritation vanish into thin air the moment I open my mind to the many blessings I possess.
Dale Carnegie
In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness.
Mahatma Gandhi
The spiritual aspirant must swim upstream, against the current of habit, familiarity and ease.
Eknath Easwaran
Why do you so earnestly seek
Ryokan
the truth in distant places?
Look for delusion and truth in the
bottom of your own heart.
Each person's map of the world is as unique as their thumbprint. There are no two people alike…no two people who understand the same sentence the same way…So in dealing with people try not to fit them to your concept of what they should be.
Milton Erickson
The texture of our universe is one where there is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal.
John Lennon
History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction.
Calvin & Hobbes
When we are dreaming alone it is only a dream. When we are dreaming with others, it is the beginning of reality.
Dom Helder Camara
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
Dale Carnegie
To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven.
J. B. Priestley
Our task is to strike a balance, to find a middle way, to learn not to overstretch ourselves with extraneous activities and preoccupations, but to simplify our lives more and more. The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity.
Sogyal Rinpoche
Doing is the great thing, for if people resolutely do what is right, they come in time to like doing it.
John Ruskin
The energy of the mind is the essence of life.
Aristotle
A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.
Jackie Robinson
Happy were men if they but understood
John Fountain
There is no safety but in doing good.
To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are.
Eric Hoffer
The worst thing that happens to you may be the best thing for you if you don't let it get the best of you.
Will Rogers
Enlightenment is always there. Small enlightenment will bring great enlightenment. If you breathe in and are aware that you are alive– that you can touch the miracle of being alive–then that is a kind of enlightenment.
Thich Nhat Hanh
We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Wherever my travels may lead, paradise is where I am.
Voltaire
People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Jalal ad-Din Rumi
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mohandas Gandhi
I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.
Isaac Asimov
Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.
Tony Robbins
I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride.
William James
Change the changeable, accept the unchangeable, and remove yourself from the unacceptable.
Denis Waitley
A finger points at the moon, but the moon is not at the tip of the finger. Words point at the truth, but the truth is not in words. To seek illumination through words is to get lost in the web of words and not see the truth.
Huineng
When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.
P.D. Ouspensky
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.
Mark Twain
Man's task is to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.
Carl Jung
You can never get enough of what you don't need to make you happy.
Eric Hoffer
The great awareness comes slowly, piece by piece. The path of spiritual growth is a path of lifelong learning. The experience of spiritual power is basically a joyful one.
M. Scott Peck
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
Placing the blame or judgment on someone else leaves you powerless to change your experience. Taking responsability for your beliefs and judgments gives you the power to change them.
Byron Katie
Once gone, a day will never return.
from the Jain scriptures
Therefore, one must strive to do good in every moment.
We reach the goal of the great life by good works.
We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn't you—all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are.
Rachel Naomi Remen
There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget, that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is contained in these two words, 'Wait and Hope.'
Alexandre Dumas
I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.
Maya Angelou
To educate yourself for the feeling of gratitude means to take nothing for granted, but to always seek out and value the kindness that stands behind the action. Nothing that is done for you is a matter of course. Everything originates in a will for the good, which is directed at you. Train yourself never to put off the word or action for the expression of gratitude.
Albert Schweitzer
Humor is perhaps a sense of intellectual perspective: an awareness that some things are really important, others not; and that the two kinds are most oddly jumbled in everyday affairs.
Christopher Morley
The best way to do good to ourselves is to do it to others; the right way to gather is to scatter.
Seneca
Visualize this thing that you want, see it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blue print, and begin to build.
Robert Collier
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Every gift which is given, even though it be small, is in reality great, if it is given with affection.
Pindar
Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.
G.K. Chesterton
The more you love, the more you'll find that life is good and friends are kind, for only what we give away enriches us from day to day.
Helen Steiner Rice
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Albert Einstein
Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
While you are walking, smile and be in the here and now, and you will transform that place into paradise.
Thich Nhat Hanh
To undertake a genuine spiritual path is not to avoid difficulties but to learn the art of making mistakes wakefully, to bring to them the transformative power of our heart.
Jack Kornfield
If, with the rope of mindfulness,
Shantideva in Engaging in the Conduct of a Bodhisattva, V, 3
You bind firm the elephant of the mind,
You will let go of every fear
And find virtue close at hand.
The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.
Deepak Chopra
We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
Alan Watts
This is the way of peace: Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love.
Peace Pilgrim
Common sense dictates that we evaluate our beliefs on the basis of how they affect us. If they make us more loving, creative, and wise, they are good beliefs. If they make us cruel, jealous, depressed and sick, they cannot be good beliefs.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.
Nelson Mandela
We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.
Dag Hammarskjold
One's first step in wisdom is to question everything–and one's last is to come to terms with everything.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
When the will and imagination are in conflict, the imagination invariably wins the day.
Emile Coue
You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.
Maimonides
One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word “I.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.
Roy E. Disney
The greatest gift we can give one another is rapt attention to one another's existence.
Sue Atchley Ebaugh
How wonderful it is that nobody needs to wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
Anne Frank
Real generosity is doing something nice for someone who'll never find out.
Frank A. Clark
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
Aesop
No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
Aesop
There is one spectacle grander than the sea; that is the sky. And there is one spectacle grander than the heavens; that is the interior of the psyche.
Victor Hugo in Les Misérables
If we examine every stage of our lives, we find that from our first breath to our last we are under the constraint of circumstances. And yet we still possess the greatest of all freedoms, the power of developing our innermost selves in harmony with the moral order of the Universe, and so winning peace at heart whatever obstacles we meet.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
©2022 Tom Barrett