Quotations
Here is a very small sampling of some quotes that I have collected:
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.
—Thomas Merton
Concerning all acts of initiative, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
—James Thurber
One person with a belief is equal to a force of 99 who have only interests.
—John Stuart Mill
We could never learn to be brave or patient, if there were only joy in the world.
—Helen Keller
Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.
—Seneca
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom.
—Malcolm X
Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.
—Peter Daucher
Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in. One man with courage makes a majority.
—Andrew Jackson
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatreds. You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
—Abraham Lincoln
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved – loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves.
—Victor Hugo
If you stop searching, you stop living, because then you’re dwelling in the past. If you’re not reaching forward to any growth or future, you might as well be dead.
—Wynn Bullock
Humility is always proof of intelligence
—Rael
People who make no mistakes lack boldness and the spirit of adventure. They are the brakes on the wheels of progress.
—Dale E. Turner
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own soul.
—Carl G. Jung
Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
—Stephen Vincent Benét
The winners in life think constantly in terms of I can, I will, and I am. Losers, on the other hand, concentrate their waking thoughts on what they should have or would have done, or what they can’t do.
—Dennis Waitley
True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.
—Akhenaton
There are souls in this world which have the gift of finding joy everywhere and of leaving it behind them when they go.
—Frederick Faber
You’re always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem! I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.
—Robert Frost
Less fear; more hope: just four little four-letter words, but when they are vividly felt as emotion, they are behavior changing, life changing, world-changing.
—Lou Tice
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
—Jose Ortega y Gasset
You are what you believe you are.
—Seve Ballesteros
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
—Aristotle
I’ve never met a person, I don’t care what his condition, in whom I could not see possibilities. I don’t care how much a man may consider himself a failure, I believe in him, for he can change the thing that is wrong in his life at any time he is ready and prepared to do it. Whenever he develops the desire, he can take away from his life the thing that is defeating it. The capacity for reformation and change lies within.
—Preston Bradley
Without your wounds where would your power be? The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken in the wheels of living. In love’s service, only the wounded soldiers can serve.
—Thornton Wilder
God is not justice. Justice is in his nature, but love is predominant. People attach such importance to actions and their results. They do not know that above action and result is a law which can consume the fire of hell, which can dominate even if the whole world were being drowned in the flood of destruction; they do not know that the power of love is greater than any other.
—Hazrat Inayat Khan
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character give him power.
—Abraham Lincoln
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
—Vaclav Havel
One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!
—Winston Churchill
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them become what they are capable of being.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
Have no fear of robbers or murderers. Such dangers are without, and are but petty. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. What matters it what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think only of what threatens our souls.
—Victor Hugo
You never find yourself until you face the truth.
—Pearl Bailey
All knowledge is the outgrowth of obedience; everything else is just information.
—Watchman Nee
Man was born free, but everywhere he’s in chains.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseu – 18th Century Philosopher
Freedom is about realizing that you always have the choice to start moving in any desired direction regardless of your past
—W. Timothy Gallwey in The Inner Game of Work
What you see and hear depends a great deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.
—C.S. Lewis
The “Kingdom of Heaven” is a condition of the heart – not something that comes “upon the earth” or “after death”.
—Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Sweet are the uses of adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
—William Shakespeare
To feel joy requires a decision on our part – it is a chosen approach to life, a chosen attitude, a chosen awareness.
—Jaroldeen Asplund Edwards
Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.
—Karen Kaiser Clark
I discovered I always have choices, and sometimes it’s only a choice of attitude.
—Judith M. Knowlton
Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.
—Richard David Bach
Optimism is an intellectual choice.
—Diana Schneider
We draw our strength from the battle. From our greatest conflicts come our greatest victories.
—Rod Parsley
Life is like golf; golf is a nonviolent game played violently from within.
—Bob Toski
Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.
—Thomas Jefferson
Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time.
—Luigi Pirandello
He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.
—Mark Twain
There is a gold mine within you from which you can extract everything you need to live life gloriously, joyously, and abundantly.
—Joseph Murphy
As for me, I know nothing else but miracles.
—Walt Whitman
Until you make peace with who you are, you’ll never be content with what you have.
—Doris Mortman
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more.
—Melodie Beattie
Infinite riches are all around you if you will open your mental eyes and behold the treasure house of infinity within you.
—Joseph Murphy
The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.
—Benjamin Disraeli
Life is too short to be little. Man is never so manly as when he feels deeply, acts boldly and expresses himself with frankness and with fervor.
—Benjamin Disraeli
Perception is everything. It’s not reality but how we interpret it that influences our actions and the results we garner from them.
—Don Greene
Possibilities play a much bigger role in thinking than most people believe. Without possibilities you cannot make progress.
—Edward De Bono
Find the message first and the words will follow.
—Cato
Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.
—Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
If we could first know where we are going and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it.
—Abraham Lincoln
There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads to fortune.
—William Shakespeare
The old order changes yielding place to new.
—Alfred Lord Tennyson
Do not promote what you can’t explain, simplify, and prove early.
—Louis Pasteur
To learn is to change. Education, whether it involves books, body, or behavior, is a process that changes the learner… and the best learning of all involves how to learn – that is, to change. The lifelong learner is essentially one who has learned to deal with homeostasis, simply because he or she is doing it all the time. Lifelong learning is the special province of those who travel the path of mastery, the path that never ends.
—George Leonard
Time provides no replays.
—George Leonard
The real moment of success is not the moment apparent to the crowd.
—George Bernard Shaw
You can’t really study people; you can only get to know them.
–C. S. Lewis
Human consciousness is too obscure a mystery to itself for us to script our own lives.
–Robert Jenson
The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of.
–Blaise Pascal
Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love.
–Philip Yancey
God’s problem is not that God is not able to do certain things. God’s problem is that God loves. Loves complicates the life of God as it complicates every life.
–John Hall
The arrows [in our hearts] seem like the truest part of life, but they are not. The heart of the universe is still perfect love.
–Brent Curtis/John Eldredge
The most important belief we possess is true knowledge of who God is… The second most important belief is who we are as children of God.
–Neil Anderson
There is no escaping your identity. You will not live beyond how you see yourself; not for long.
–John Eldredge
There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.
–Simone Weil
Romance is the deepest thing in life, romance is deeper even than reality.
–G.K. Chesterton