“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth, will destroy you.”
-Gospel of Thomas, Verse 70
“Americans head off to their jobs each day as much for daily meaning as for daily bread.”
-Studs Terkel
“Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.”
-Henry Van Dyke
“In our time, we workers are being called to re-examine our work; how we do it; whom it is helping or hurting; what it is we do, and what we might be doing if we were to let go of our present work and follow a deeper call. We should meditate deeply on Aquinas’ theology, learning that it is Providence itself that is calling us to deeper work. I am meeting people today who are indeed letting go of their work (as well as their jobs) to find new work, or work in the New Creation.”
-Matthew Fox, from the book “Reinvention of Work”
“If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t be calling it research, now would we?”
-Albert Einstein
“When we are pursuing our Right Livelihood, even the most difficult and demanding aspects of our work will not sway us from our course. When others say, ‘Don’t work so hard’, or, ‘Don’t you ever take a break?’, we will respond in bewilderment. What others may see as duty, pressure, or tedium, we perceive as a kind of pleasure. Commitment is easy when our work is Right Livelihood.”
-Marsha Sinetar, from the book Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow
“Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in his (or her) heart.”
-Rumi
“Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.”
-Aristotle
“It is the first of all problems for a man (or woman) to find out what kind of work he (or she) is to do in this universe.”
-Thomas Carlyle
“The will to live in civilized man is a combined biological and psychological drive. As long as we have something to live for, the will to live carries us through the moments of crisis, which are inevitable in every life.”
-Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, from “The Will to Live”
“A man knows he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live, and begins to live.”
-Thomas Merton
“Your life’s work, the work you love, is what awakens within you when you are reminded by your compassion, your desire to give. It will not come to you by focusing a desire to be better than others, by thinking about how you will survive, or by wishing everything in your life were easy. It will come when you hear the call of your innate compassion for all of humankind.”
-Lawrence G. Boldt
“To have a great purpose to work for, a purpose larger than ourselves, is one of the secrets of making life significant, for then the meaning and the worth of the individual overflow his personal borders and survive his death.”
-Will Durent
“Blessed is he who has found his work, let him ask no other blessing.”
-Thomas Carlyle
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
“Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterward. These are games; one must first answer.”
-Albert Camus
“This is the true joy in life, that being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, that being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die. For the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch, which I’ve got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
-George Bernard Shaw
“The Master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play…he hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.”
-A Zen Buddhist text
“Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Idealists—foolish enough to throw caution to the winds…have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.”
-Emma Goldman
“Does this path have a heart? If it does the path is good; if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.”
-Carlos Castaneda.
“The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
-Nietzsche
“Every calling is great when greatly pursued.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
“The fates lead those who will. Those who won’t, they drag.”
-Old Roman saying
“…The kind of work God usually calls you to take is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. …. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
-Frederich Buechner
“Concerning all acts of initiative in creation there is one elemental truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: That the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves, too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never have occurred. All streams of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no one man could have dreamt would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic.
-Goethe
“….Our way, the way, is not a random path. Our way begins from coherent understanding. It is a way that aims at preserving knowledge of who we are, knowledge of the best way we have found to relate each to each, each to all, ourselves to other peoples, all to our surroundings. If our individual lives have a worthwhile aim, that aim should be a purpose inseparable from the way. ….Our way is reciprocity. The way is wholeness.”
-Ayi Kwei Armah, “Two Thousand Seasons”
“The great paradox of the 21st century is that, in this age of powerful technology, the biggest problems we face internationally are problems of the human soul.”
-Ralph Peters, former U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and author of “Fighting for the Future”
“I am not bound to win but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed but I am bound to live up to what light I have.”
-Abraham Lincoln
“A man of knowledge chooses a path with a heart and follows it and then he looks and rejoices and laughs and sees and knows. He knows that his life will be over altogether too soon. He knows that he as well as everybody else is not going anywhere. He knows because he sees…..a man of knowledge endeavors and sweats and puffs and if one looks at him he is just like any ordinary man, except that the folly of his life is under control.”
-Don Juan
“Each man has only one genuine vocation – to find the way to himself….His task is to discover his own destiny – not an arbitrary one- and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else is only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity, and fear of one’s own inwardness.”
-Hermann Hesse
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“To be what we are and to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
“To work is to pray.”
-Benedictine dictum laborate est orare
“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.”
-Abraham Maslow
“Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.”
-Samuel Butler, novelist and satirist
“The greatest danger isn’t that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”
-Unknown
“Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.”
-John F. Kennedy
“True happiness is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”
-Helen Keller
“I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.”
-Helen Keller
“I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should
Burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot,
I would rather be a superb meteor,
Every; atom of me in magnificent glow,
Than a sleepy and permanent planet,
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist,
I shall not waste my days in trying
To prolong them. I shall use my time.”
-Jack London
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”
-e.e. cummings
E-mail: jay@BloomAnew.com
Cell: 503-381-2649
Bloom Anew 