Favorite Quotes for April '06

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."

-- George Eliot

 

"The first step toward change is acceptance.  Once you accept yourself, you open the door to change.  That's all you have to do.  Change is not something you do, it's something you allow."

-- Will Garcia

 

"...self-contempt never inspires lasting change."

-- Jane R. Hirschmann and Carol H. Munter

 

"There is that part of ourselves that feels ugly, deformed, unacceptabe.  That part, above all, we must learn to cherish, embrace, and call by name."

-- Macrina Wiederkehr

 

"It's surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you're not comfortable within yourself, you can't be comfortable with others."

-- Sydney J. Harris

 

"There is no freedom like seeing myself as I am and not losing heart."

-- Elizabeth J. Canham

 

"If we could learn to like ourselves, even a little, maybe our cruelties and angers might melt away."

-- John Steinbeck

 

"I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honorable, to be compassionate. It is, after all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all."

– Leo Rosten

 

"The period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period in one's life."

-- Dalai Lama

 

"Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself." 

-- Erich Fromm

 

"We are not what we know. We are what we are willing to learn."

-- Council on Ideas

 

"Failing to prepare is preparing to fail."

-- Coach John Wooden

 

"When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.'"

-- Theodore Roosevelt

 

"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness."

-- Bertrand Russell

 

"There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up."

-- Booker T. Washington

 

"Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality."

-- George Santayana

 

Although wishing to be rid of misery,
They run toward misery itself.
Although wishing to have happiness,
Like an enemy they ignorantly destroy it.

-- Santideva, "Bodhicaryavatara"

 

"Every achiever that I have ever met says, ‘My life turned around when I began to believe in me.’"

-- Robert H. Schuller

 

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

-- Eleanor Roosevelt

 

"We cannot tell what may happen to us in the strange medley of life. But we can decide what happens in us -- how we can take it, what we do with it -- and that is what really counts in the end."

-- Joseph Fort Newton

 

"Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses and disappointments, but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures."

-- Joseph Addison