Four-fifths of all our troubles would disappear, if we would only sit down and keep still.
Calvin Coolidge
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
If you wish to make an apple pie truly from scratch you must first invent the universe.
Carl Sagan
In essence, if we want to direct our lives, we must take control of our consistent actions. It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.
Tony Robbins
Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity.
Jose Marti
To see your drama clearly is to be liberated from it.
Ken Keyes Jr.
If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things in nature have a message you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.
Eleanora Duse
The truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt.
Thomas Merton
If we're growing, we're always going to be out of our comfort zone.
John Maxwell
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
John Muir
What you see in yourself is what you see in the world.
Afghan proverb
Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden, but it is forbidden because it is hurtful.
Benjamin Franklin
Many persons have the wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
Helen Keller
He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.
Michel de Montaigne
…human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but…life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
Soren Kierkegaard
We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.
John Cage
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
Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.
Mark TwainAge is opportunity no less
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
William James
He who sees the calamity of other people finds his own calamity light.
Arabian Proverb
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best–and therefore never scrutinize or question.
Stephen Jay Gould
If you don't have a spiritual practice in place when times are good, you can't expect to suddenly develop one during a moment of crisis.
Doug Coupland
Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.
Arthur Golden
Like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight, there is no need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we already are–as soon as we stop pretending we're small or unholy.
Bo Lozoff
Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than what people do or say. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill.
W. C. Fields
We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
Herman Melville
Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, and values are in balance.
Brian Tracy
The miracle of love comes to you in the presence of the uninterpreted moment. If you are mentally somewhere else, you miss real life.
Byron Katie
All who joy would win must share it.
Lord Byron
Happiness was born a twin.
If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.
Padmasambhava
For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love–this is an old rule.
The Dhammapada
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
Virginia Woolf
Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your own presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement.
Alice Koller
Everyone has a responsibility to not only tolerate another person's point of view, but also to accept it eagerly as a challenge to your own understanding. And express those challenges in terms of serving other people.
Arlo Guthrie
Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.
Pete Seeger
Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.
Howard Zinn
Remember above all that mental stability comes by examining the contents of the mind, not by avoidence.
Vernon Howard
I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.
Martha Washington
I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the same topic.
Abigail Adams
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams
The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living, which are to be desired when dying.
Norman Douglas
If you want a quality, act as if you already have it. If you want to be courageous, act as if you were–and as you act and persevere in acting, so you tend to become.
Norman Vincent Peale
If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.
Napoleon Hill
We are too much accustomed to attribute to a single cause that which is the product of several, and the majority of our controversies come from that.
Marcus Aurelius
Of all possessions a friend is the most precious.
Herodotus
I said to the almond tree, "Friend, speak to me of God," and the almond tree blossomed.
Nikos Kazantzakis
We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.
Japanese Proverb
What is man's ultimate direction in life? It is to look for love, truth, virtue, and beauty.
Shinichi Suzuki
Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don't complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don't bury your thoughts, put your vision to reality. Wake Up and Live!
Bob Marley
The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.
Dag Hammarskjold
Becoming "awake" involves seeing our confusion more clearly.
Chögyam Trungpa
Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Continuous effort–not strength or intelligence–is the key to unlocking our potential.
Winston Churchill
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
Henry Ellis
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.
Aldo Leopold
There is hope if people will begin to awaken that spiritual part of themselves, that heartfelt knowledge that we are caretakers of this planet.
Brooke Medicine Eagle
The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.
Alfred Adler
To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness.
Robert Muller
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan Watts
Treat those who are good with goodness,
Lao-Tzu
And also treat those who are not good with goodness.
Thus goodness is attained.
To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being; to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world.
Rudolf Steiner
I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
Khalil Gibran
Knowledge increases in proportion to its use–that is, the more we teach the more we learn.
H. P. Blavatsky
Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
Garrison Keillor
If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought.
Peace Pilgrim
Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.
Blaise Pascal
He said not 'Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased'; but he said, 'Thou shalt not be overcome.
Julian of Norwich
The transformation of the world is brought about by the transformation of oneself, because the self is the product and a part of the total process of human existence. To transform oneself, self-knowledge is essential, without knowing yourself there cannot be transformation.
J. Krishnamurti
Experience is not what happens to you. It is what you do with what happens to you.
Aldous Huxley
This is the highest wisdom that I own; freedom and life are earned by those alone who conquer them each day anew.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Fish swim, birds fly, and people feel.
Haim Ginott
When one's thoughts are neither frivolous nor flippant, when one's thoughts are neither stiff-necked nor stupid, but rather, are harmonious–they habitually render physical calm and deep insight.
Hildegard von Bingen
I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life; I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.
Theodore Roosevelt
He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.
Lao Tzu
The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.
Epictetus
You are what your deep driving desire is.
Upanishads
As your desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny
Life is a constant creation. It is a moment by moment, instant by instant creation. I don’t mean by this that it is a set of discrete creations, it is not like that. But nevertheless, this spontaneity is constantly arising. And it is within this that is our freedom.
Albert Low
Choose the life that is most useful, and habit will make it the most agreeable.
Francis Bacon
Reconciliation is to understand both sides; to go to one side and describe the suffering being endured by the other side, and then go to the other side and describe the suffering being endured by the first side.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Well-being means to be fully born, to become what one potentially is; it means to have the full capacity for joy and sadness or, to put it differently, to awake from the half-slumber the average man lives in and to be fully awake.
Erich Fromm
Anger: an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much.
Lewis Carroll
The more faithfully you listen to the voices within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.
Dag Hammarskjold
We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.
Joseph Campbell
Goals provide the energy source that powers our lives. One of the best ways we can get the most from the energy we have is to focus it. That is what goals can do for us; concentrate our energy.
Denis Waitley
If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
Carl Sagan
It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.
Helen Keller
In the time of your life, live–so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite variety and mystery of it.
William Saroyan
To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.
Lao Tzu
For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
Albert Camus
A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.
Christopher Reeve
Great knowledge sees all in one. Small knowledge breaks down into the many.
Chuang Tzu
Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.
Lin Yutang
It is how people respond to stress that determines whether they will profit from misfortune or be miserable.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured by decrease in bitterness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.
Bruce Lee
Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
Margaret Mead
It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
Edmund Hillary
If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system.
William James
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
Rene Daumal
When you accept where you are, you can let go of the emotionally charged state of duality that always wants something better. When you truly let go, the next step in your evolution of consciousness is waiting for you.
Richard Bartlett
Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.
Albert Schweitzer
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You leave old habits behind by starting out with the thought, 'I release the need for this in my life.'
Wayne Dyer
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
William James
Vision is not enough. It must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps; we must step up the stairs.
Václav Havel
Hating people is like burning down your own house to get rid of a rat.
Henry Emerson Fosdick
All who would win joy, must share it; happiness was born a twin.
Lord Byron
Do the best you can, and don't take life too serious.
Will Rogers
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.
John Lubbock
There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart.
Celia Thaxter
First keep peace with yourself, then you can also bring peace to others.
Thomas à Kempis
The price of freedom is responsibility, but it is a bargain, because freedom is priceless.
Hugh Downs
If we do not lay out ourselves in the service of mankind whom should we serve?
John Adams
Such happiness as life is capable of comes from the full participation of all our powers in the endeavor to wrest from each changing situation of experience its own full and unique meaning.
John Dewey
Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.
James Barrie
Failure happens all the time. It happens every day in practice. What makes you better is how you react to it.
Mia Hamm
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
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
Christopher Morley
Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
Dalai Lama
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
The two big advantages I had at birth were to have been born wise and to have been born in poverty.
Stevie Wonder
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
For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. The true test of our devotion to freedom is just beginning.
Nelson Mandela
Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.
Benjamin Disraeli
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
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
Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
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
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
The battle to keep up appearance unnecessarily, the mask–whatever name you give creeping perfectionism–robs us of our energies.
Robin Worthington
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
©2022 Tom Barrett