Things do not change; we do.”   --Henry David Thoreau

“By dedication, I mean a passionate belief in something.   This sort of intense and abiding commitment is the basis for great works of art, inventions, scientific discoveries, explorations, and lives.   It is what makes marriages, corporations, and governments work.   Indeed, absolute fidelity to someone or something is what makes us more fully human.”   --Warren Bennis

“Live your life so that if someone says ‘Be yourself,' it's good advice.”   --Robert Orben

“The only way to be just is to judge your own actions by the best part of you, and to judge the actions of others by the worst part of you.”   --Sydney J. Harris

“Creativity is something that we are all born with and that almost all of us manage to lose. We don't really see the world around us.   We may see a flower but not the miracle of it, its intricate structure, its complete harmony, its amazing colors.   To restore our creativity, we must restore our sense of wonder, to break through our own preconceptions and see everything new and fresh-- as when we were children.   This means making the familiar strange and making the strange familiar.”   --Warren Bennis

"To form monsters and join incongruous shapes and appearances costs the imagination no more trouble than to conceive the most natural and familiar objects."--David Hume

“Our greatest danger is our failure to heed the voice within, the vision within, while we defer to external realities.”   --Eileen Walkenstein

“The problem is that in being so sensible all day, we forget our needs to be a bit wild at night.   We lose our need to let loose, let our hair down, and be a bit crazy.   We neglect such qualities as spontaneity, imagination, childishness, normal eccentricities, and primitive feelings.”   --Dr. Pierre Mornell

“The man is only half himself, the other half is expression.”   --Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.”   --Albert Einstein

“Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you're scared to death.”   --Earl Wilson

“We have to carry on the struggle against the evil that is in mankind, not by judging others, but by judging ourselves.   Struggle with oneself and veracity towards oneself are the means by which we influence others.   We quietly draw them into our efforts to attain a deep spiritual self-realization which springs from reverence for one's own life.” --Albert Schwietzer

“If you are standing upright, don't worry if your shadow is crooked.”   --Chinese Proverb

“The result of our mental traveling is that most of us spend our life lost in the twilight zone-- reliving the past, worrying about the future, and never settling down where we are right here in the present space and time.”   --Kramer and Kramer, Losing the Weight of the World

“The point to be grasped is this, that HEART means the very Core of one's being, the Center, without which there is nothing whatever.   The Heart is the undifferentiated Light of pure Consciousness.”   --Ramana Maharshi

“Somewhere in this [thinking] process, you will come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy.   Your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels   barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and hopeless.   No problem.   You are not crazier than you were yesterday.   It has always been this way, and you just never noticed.   You are also no crazier than everybody else around you.   The only real difference is that you have confronted the situation; they have not...don't let this realization unsettle you.  It is a milestone actually, a sign of real progress.   The very fact that you have looked at the problem straight in the eye means that you are on your way up and out of it.”   --Henepola Gunaratana (Sri Lankan philosopher)

“Instead of being aware of our emotions and handling them effectively, many learn emotional avoidance and overcontrol.   We learn to ignore and suppress our emotions so we have little idea of what we actually feel, our feelings may be confused or ambiguous.”   --Kramer & Kramer, Losing the Weight of the World

“I discovered I always have choices and sometimes it's only a choice of attitudes.” --Judith Knowlton

“There are many more people trying to meet the right person than to become the right person.”   --Gloria Steinem

“People who have their feelings under tight control may find that getting out of bed in the morning is hard.   They may feel sluggish during the day.   This is because it takes enormous energy for the personality to ward off powerful feelings and keep them from coming to consciousness.   This effort (though most of us hardly know we're making it) saps our energy and makes everything in life more difficult.”   --Kramer & Kramer, Losing the Weight of the World

“Reality is simply the loss of ego... There is no greater mystery than seeking reality though in fact we are reality.   We think there is something hiding reality and that this must be destroyed before reality is gained.   How ridiculous!   A day will dawn when you will laugh at all your past efforts.   That which will be on the day you laugh is also here and now.”   --Ramana Maharshi

“Character is like chiseling a statue; one has to knock of huge hunks of selfishness, which requires self-discipline.   Only then does character begin to emerge.” --Fulton J. Sheen, clergyman

“Most of us clutch our soffering close and think it the most important thing about us.   It is all we want to tell people about ourselves.   Why?   Suffering resolves all doubts.   It gives a job in life... Our suffering is what we know; it is our familiar funk.   Suffering is our drama, and we put everything we have into our drama... The price of this familiarity is high.   We wind up adopting the viewpoint of our suffering, taking our drama to be real, renouncing hope, and forgetting we have done so.”   --James Thornton, A Field Guide to the Soul

“Whereas pain is a fact about being embodied in the world, suffering is a torture we manufacture for ourselves by holding onto our pain, and making our happiness dependent on it.”   --James Thornton, A Field Guide to the Soul

“As long as we want the world to change to suit us, and make our happiness contingent upon such change, we will suffer... If we refuse to be happy until the world is different, we are simply refusing to be happy.   We are also, perhaps, not being fully honest with ourselves.   We can easily use the problems of the world as a screen to hide behind.”   --James Thornton, A Field Guide to the Soul

“The sun shines not on us, but in us.”   --John Muir

Only those who are able to relax can create, and then ideas reach the mind like lightning.”   --Cicero

“We are not our thoughts.   Seeing this, we have the beginnings of a radical change of perspective.   In watching our thoughts, we adopt the perspective of the soul.”   --James Thornton, A Field Guide to the Soul

“We identify closely with our emotions, perhaps even more closely than with our thoughts.   And yet, we are not our emotions.   Our misidentification with our emotions is one of the primary blocks to a more expansive and accurate view of who we are....We need not feel guilty or ashamed for every feeling that enters us.   We are not responsible for every feeling that enters awareness.   Feelings just enter.   We are responsible for what we do with them... The same is true of thoughts.   Thoughts and feelings are like guests.   Although we are fully responsible for how we entertain them, we are not responsible for   the fact that they showed up at our door.   When we see this, we can begin to shed a great part of the burden of our guilt.” --James Thornton, A Field Guide to the Soul

Confidence never comes from having all the answers; it comes from being open to all the questions.

“You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.”   --Mark Twain

“Once you have taken a moment to notice the stress in your body, you become acutely aware that you would prefer to let the stress go.   Offering it is a powerful way to do that... It acknowledges that we are more than our stress and that our reach is broader than the annoyance of the moment.   It allows us to transform a situation that is stressful into one that connects us with the source of our being.”   --James Thornton, A Field Guide to the Soul

Never test the depth of the water with both feet.

“Violence is done by people who do not let their feelings arise into view and so take care of them.   When we take care of them, feelings cannot harm us or take control of us.”   --James Thornton, A Field Guide to the Soul

“You have the power to tear down the prisons of your unconscious.   We build our prisons, we can tear them down.   Vive la Revolution!   This work is the spiritual enterprise...   Until we know our beasts, we can put whatever illuminations we gain in their hands without ever knowing it... We can end this willful blindness only by desiring the true knowledge of who we are above all else and committing ourselves completely to the guidance of the soul.”   --James Thornton, A Field Guide to the Soul

“The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.”   --John Milton

“There is a great deal of unmapped country within us.”   --George Eliot

“May you live all the days of your life.”   --Jonathan Swift

“To exist is to change; to change is to mature; to mature is to create oneself endlessly.”   --Henri Bergson

“The experience of peace and joy is your inalienable birthright.   You were born with it.   It can never be taken away, and all you have to do is discover it, not achieve it.   Meditation simply helps you do just that.”   --Taylor & Crain, Optimystic Handbook

“We wouldn't shift directly from first to fourth gear in our car; we have to go through second and third to get to fourth.   An imagination shift happens the same way.   Think of the intellect as first gear, the heart as second gear, the spirit as third gear, the soul as fourth gear.   We typically live in our intellect, using the information it gives us to make our daily decisions.   As we move into the region of the heart, we begin operating from a feeling level, where we experience the first inklings of true compassion, true meaning.   From the heart we can proceed to the spirit, the place of inner fire, inspiration, of creative linking to our higher selves.   And when we shift into the realm of the imagination, we are in the realm of the soul, a state of oneness not only with the various dimensions of our fragmented selves, but with all the universe.”   --Taylor & Crain, Optimystics Handbook

“Knowing how to win is the first step.   We must also know how to make use of our victories.”   --Polybius

The biggest mistake you can make is to believe you work for someone else.

“All that is needed to make a happy life is within yourself, in your way of thinking.” --Marcus Aurelius

“We focus our attention on everything that is far from ourselves—the farther from our true selves, the more important we think it is.   We value our possessions and bodies above our minds, our appearance above our health, our careers over our home life.   We accumulate possessions for our homes but do not take care of our minds and bodies, although the most important conditions for a home life are a happy mind and healthy body.”   --Tulku Thondup Rinpoche, The Healing Power of Mind, as quoted in Taylor & Crain, Optimystics Handbook

“Talent develops in quiet, alone; character is sharpened in the torrent of the world. --Goethe

“Do your duty and a little bit more, and the future will take care of itself.”   --Andrew Carnegie

“Resolve to perform what you ought, the perform without fail what you resolve.”   --Franklin

“The difficulty in life is choice.”   --George Moore

“I shall take my voice wherever there are those who want to hear the melody of freedom or the words that might inspire hope and courage in the face of despair and fear.   My weapons are peaceful, for it only by peace that peace can be attained.   The song of freedom must prevail.”   --Paul Robeson

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save:   so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.”   Adrienne Rich

“What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters, compared to what lies within us.”   --Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Peace within makes beauty without.”   --English Proverb

Look backward with gratitude and forward with confidence.

“It is eternity now.   I am in the midst of it.   It is about me, in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly in the light-laden air.   Nothing has to come, it is now.   Now is eternity, now is the immortal life.”   --Richard Jeffries

“To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.   To weep is to risk appearing the sentimental.   To reach out for another is to risk exposing our true self.   To place our ideas—our dreams— before the crowd is to risk loss.   To love is to risk not being loved in return.   To hope is to risk despair.   To live is to risk dying.”   (anonymous)

“It is startling that we desperately hold on to what makes us miserable.   Our own woundedness becomes a source of perverse pleasure and fixes our identity.   We do not want to be cured, for that would mean moving into the unknown.   Often it seems we are destructively addicted to the negative.   What we call the negative is usually the surface form of contradiction.   If we maintain our misery at this level, we hold off initially threatening but ultimately redemptive and healing transfiguration that comes through engaging our inner contradiction.   We need to revalue what we consider to be negative…Our lives would be immeasurably enriched if we could bring the same hospitality in meeting the negative as we bring to the joyful and pleasurable.   In avoiding the negative, we encourage it to recur.   We need a new way of understanding and integrating the negative.   The negative is one of the closest friends of your destiny.   It contains essential energies that you need and that you cannot find elsewhere.”   --John O'Donahue, Anam Cara

“When we notice something immoral, we normally tend to be harsh with ourselves and employ moral surgery to remove it.   In doing this, we are only ensuring that it remains trapped within.   We merely confirm our negative view of ourselves and ignore our potential for growth.   There is a strange paradox in the soul: If you try to avoid or remove the awkward quality, it will pursue you.   In fact, the only effective way to still its unease is to transfigure it, to let it become something creative and positive that contributes to who you are.”   --John O'Donahue, Anam Cara

“If your soul is awakened, then you realize that this is the house of your real belonging… Longing is a precious instinct in the soul.   Where you belong should always be worthy of your dignity.”   --John O'Donahue, Anam Cara

“Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission” –Eleanor Roosevelt