Quotations

I have found the inspiring words of fellow travelers a source of sustenance in difficult times and confirmation in times of success.

I offer these up in the hope that they bring you some of the comfort and strength they have given me.  Enjoy!

--Joseph

The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

    Joan Didion

Don’t worry about what the world needs.  Ask what makes you come alive and do that.  Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.

    Howard Thurman

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

    Aung San Suu Kyi, Prime Minister-elect, Burma (Myanmar), prisoner-of-conscience

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself.

    Søren Kierkegaard

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.

    Amelia Earhart

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Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

    Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.

    Lucius Annaeus Seneca, writer and philosopher (BCE 3-65 CE)

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

    Anais Nin.

Something we were withholding made us weak

Until we found out that it was ourselves...

    Robert Frost

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The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for.  And the most you can do is to live inside that hope… not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof.

    Barbara Kingsolver

The ultimate purpose of a goal is not to achieve it but to entice ourselves into becoming the person required to accomplish it.

    Dan Peters

Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.

    Anne Sexton

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without it we can't practice any other virtue with consistency.

    Maya Angelou author

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

    Seneca

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...One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires ... causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these -- to be fierce and to show mercy toward others -- both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

    Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D.

The most powerful thing you can do to change the world is to change your own beliefs about the nature of life, people, and reality to something more positive... and begin to act accordingly.

    Shakti Gawain

In a pond koi can reach lengths of eighteen inches. Amazingly, when placed in a lake, koi can grow to three feet long. The metaphor is obvious. You are limited by how you see the world.

    Vince Poscente Olympian (1961- )

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...inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energy striving, but it comes into us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.

    Brenda Ueland (1891-1985) American writer

...there is a contemporary form of 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 demands, to commit oneself 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 his or her work for peace. It destroys one's own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of one's own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

    Thomas Merton contemporary author and theologist