“Intelligence is fine, but what really matters is awareness.”
-Phil Jackson, basketball coach from the book Sacred Hoops
“You have your whole life to finish it, you know.”
-Joseph Campbell, to a student complaining about the workload
“A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”
-Alexander Pope
“It is up to us to find our own voice, to choose from our own place of clarity and power.”
-Rick Garow, from the book “Creating the Work You Love”
“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium. It will be lost, the world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is or how valuable, nor how it compares to other expressions. It is your business to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep aware, open directly to the urges that activate you. Keep the channel open.”
-Martha Graham
Real peace will arise spontaneously
When your mind becomes free
Of attachments,
When you know that the objects of the world
Can never give you what you really want.
-Theragatha
“This is not work for the tentative heart. The benefits of it are immeasurable. Yet it requires personal struggle. Only when you change internally will you see those benefits reflected in the outside world. You have to go through a process, and it is painful. You have to show up fearlessly.”
-Author Richard Barrett, interviewed in “Fast Company”
“How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.”
-George Washington Carver
“Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves.”
-Ranier Marie Rilke
“There is only one wisdom: to recognize the intelligence that steers all things.”
-Heraclitus
“Look within—within is the fountain of good, and you will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.”
-Marcus Aurelius
“If I am not I, who will be?”
-Henry David Thoreau
“…everything can be taken from us but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
-Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
“To understand one’s world, one must sometimes turn away from it! To serve better, one must briefly hold it at a distance. Where the necessary solitude can be found, the long breathing space in which the mind gathers its strength and takes stock of its courage.”
-Albert Camus
“I wake up each morning determined both to change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day a little difficult.”
E.B. White
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could, some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day, begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This day is all that is good and fair. It is too dear with its hopes and invitations to waste a moment on the yesterday.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
-Nelson Mandela, 1994 Inaugural Speech
“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by nonviolent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes one’s work for peace. It destroys one’s inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of one’s work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”
-Thomas Merton
“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing. It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you would risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventures of being alive. It doesn’t interest me which planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain—mine or your own—without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it. I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human. It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the causation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. I want to know if you can see the beauty even if it’s not pretty every day, and if you can source your life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the glade and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!” It doesn’t interest me where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children. It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.”
-Oriah Mountain Dreamer, Native American elder
“In the midst of winter, I found there was within me, an invincible summer.”
-Albert Camus
“All birth is unwilling.”
-Pearl S. Buck
Carpe Diem-Seize the Day
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
-Eleanor Roosevelt
“Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.”
-William James
“People should not worry as much about what they do but rather
about what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on
what we do but rather on what we are, for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works.”
-Meister Eckhart
“Your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.”
-Abraham Lincoln
“Not I—not anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.”
-Walt Whitman
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”
-Henry David Thoreau
“A man’s value to the community primarily depends on how far his feelings, thoughts and actions are directed toward promoting the good of his fellows.”
-Albert Einstein
“To be awake is to walk the border between control and abandon.”
-Carlos Castenada
“Know the masculine but keep to the feminine.”
-Lao Tzu
“No man is free who cannot command himself.”
-Pythagorus
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
“To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
-e.e. cummings
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
-Socrates
“If there is no transformation inside each of us, all structural change in the world will have no impact on our institutions.”
-Peter Block
“He who feels punctured must once have been a bubble.”
-Lao Tzu
“Loss, by itself, is not tragic, whereas tragic is the failure to grasp the opportunity which loss presents.”
Robert K. Greenleaf
“In a coming world they will not ask me ‘Why were you not Moses,’ they will ask me ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”
Zusya
“The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong, the amount of work is the same.”
-Carlos Castaneda
“But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Not should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather you should long for the perfection of yourself. The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived not taught.
-Herman Hesse
“For it is not physical solitude that actually separates one from other men, not physical isolation, but spiritual isolation…When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.”
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh
“Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke
“We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities but its own talents.”
-Eric Hoffer
Small Things and Great
He that lets
the small things bind him
leaves the great
undone behind him.
-Piet Hein
That Weary Feeling
Do you know that weary feeling
when your mind is strangely strangled
and your head is like a ball of wool
that’s very, very tangled;
and the tempo of your thinking
must be lenient and mild,
as though you were explaining
to a very little child.
-Piet Hein
T. T. T.
Put up in a place
where it’s easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T. T. T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it’s well to remember that
Things Take Time.
-Piet Hein
“You can talk a great philosophy / but if you can’t be kind to people every day / it doesn’t mean that much to me. It’s the little things you do / it’s the little things you say / it’s the love you give along the way.”
-Ani DiFranco
“Mindfulness refers to keeping one’s consciousness alive to the present reality. IT is the miracle by which we master and restore ourselves.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh
“When we walk to the edge of all the light we have;
And take the step into the darkness of the unknown;
We must believe that one of two things will happen….
There will be something solid for us to stand on,
Or we will be taught to fly.”
-Patrick Overton
“Some of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more fully until we have the courage to do and see and taste and experience much less than usual….There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform.”
-Thomas Merton
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
“Cease trying to work everything out with your minds; it will get you nowhere. Live by intuition and inspiration and let your whole life be a Revelation.”
-Eileen Caddy, Footprints on the Path
“Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer; since to remain constantly at work will cause you to lose power of judgment… Go some distance away because the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance, and lack of harmony or proportion is more readily seen.”
-Leonardo Da Vinci (Guide for the Advanced Soul)
“The outward work can never be small if the inward one is great, and the outward work can never be great if the inward is small or of little worth….All works are surely dead if anything from the outside compels you to work. Even if it were God himself compelling you to work from the outside, your works would be dead. If your works are to live, then God must move you from the inside, from the innermost region of the soul—then they will really live. There is your life and there alone you live and your works live.”
-Meister Eckhart
“I vow to offer joy to one person in the morning and to help to relieve the grief on one person in the afternoon. I vow to live simply and sanely, content with just a few possessions, and to keep my body healthy. I vow to let go of all worries and anxiety in order to be light and free.”
-Thich Nhat Hanh
Hyman’s Seafood’s Motto
“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill. It will make or break a company…a church…a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we embrace for that day. We cannot change our past…we cannot change the fact that people act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude… I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you…we are in charge of our ATTITTUDES.”
-Chuck Swindol, author of “Attitude”
Perfect is being right,
Excellence is willing to be wrong.
Perfection is fear,
Excellence is taking risks.
Perfection is control,
Excellence is spontaneity.
Perfection is taking,
Excellence is giving.
Perfection is doubt,
Excellence is confidence.
Perfection is pressure,
Excellence is natural.
Perfection is focusing on the destination, Excellence is enjoying the journey.
-Unknown
From OH! The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss
“Congratulations!”
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
So be sure when you step
step with care and great tact
and remember that Life’s
a great balancing ACT!”
“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.”
-Alan Cohen
“The only reason we don’t find solutions to our problems is because the answers interfere with our concepts.”
-Samuel Lewis
“Man is the center of a circle that has no circumference except the limitations he sets upon himself.”
-Mahatma Gandhi
Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.
-Albert Einstein
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”
-Dr. Seuss
“Renew thyself completely each day; do it again, and again, and forever again.”
-Chinese inscription cited by Henry David Thoreau in “Walden”
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of discussion.”
-Plato
“….everything can be taken from us but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
-Viktor Frankl
Man’s Search for Meaning
Letting Go
To “let go” does not mean to stop caring, it means I can’t do it for someone else.
To “let go” is not to cut myself off, it’s the realization I can’t control another.
To “let go” is not to enable, but to allow learning from natural consequences.
To “let go” is not to try to change or blame another, it’s to make the most of myself.
To “let go” is not to care for, but to care about.
To “let go” is not to fix, but to be supportive.
To “let go” is not to judge, but to allow another to be a human being.
To “let go” is not to be in the middle of all the outcomes, but to allow others to affect their own destinies.
To “let go” is not to be protective, it’s to permit another to face reality.
To “let go” is not to deny, but to accept.
To “let go” is not to nag, argue or scold, but instead to search out my own shortcomings and correct them.
To “let go” is not to adjust everything to my desires but to take each day as it comes, and cherish myself in it.
To “let go” is not to regret the past, but to grow and live for the future.
To “let go” is to fear less and love more.
Letting go is just like those shadows on the school path. The child and the adult part company, but in our hearts, the shadows hold hands forever.
-Unknown
“The beginning is always today.”
-Mary Wollstonecraft
“Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.”
-Arthur Koestler
“The greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising up every time we fall.”
-Confucius
“It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.”
-Alan Cohen
“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
-Leo Tolstoy
“Not in his goals but in his transactions man is great.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
E-mail: jay@BloomAnew.com
Cell: 503-381-2649
Bloom Anew 