Joy is not in things; it is in us.
All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.
Let us be about setting high standards for life, love, creativity, and wisdom. If our expectations in these areas are low, we are not likely to experience wellness. Setting high standards makes every day and every decade worth looking forward to.
The most important lesson that I have learned is to trust God in every circumstance. Lots of times we go through different trials and following God’s plan seems like it doesn’t make any sense at all. God is always in control and he will never leave us.
We may have bad weather in Ireland, but the sun shines in the hearts of the people and that keeps us all warm.
Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies – it is the first law of nature.
It is not so much our friends’ help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.
The value and utility of any experiment are determined by the fitness of the material to the purpose for which it is used, and thus in the case before us it cannot be immaterial what plants are subjected to experiment and in what manner such experiment is conducted.
We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.
Panic causes tunnel vision. Calm acceptance of danger allows us to more easily assess the situation and see the options.
Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the limits of the law’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.
People don’t want to go to the dump and have a picnic, they want to go out to a beautiful place and enjoy their day. And so I think our job is to try to take the environment, take what the good Lord has given us, and expand upon it or enhance it, without destroying it.
We have what we seek, it is there all the time, and if we give it time, it will make itself known to us.
The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.
My parents are very hard working people who did everything they could for their children. I have two brothers and they worked dog hard to give us an education and provide us with the most comfortable life possible. My dad provided for his family daily. So, yes, that is definitely in my DNA.
In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.
Everybody born comes from the Creator trailing wisps of glory. We come from the Creator with creativity. I think that each one of us is born with creativity.
The things we truly love stay with us always, locked in our hearts as long as life remains.
Many of us feel stress and get overwhelmed not because we’re taking on too much, but because we’re taking on too little of what really strengthens us.
We have self-centered minds which get us into plenty of trouble. If we do not come to understand the error in the way we think, our self-awareness, which is our greatest blessing, is also our downfall.
What makes a leader great is not the fact that she (or he) has all the answers, but the ability to inspire and empower us to find the answers.
The chances of each of us coming into existence are infinitesimally small, and even though we shall all die some day, we should count ourselves fantastically lucky to get our decades in the sun.
Let us ask ourselves, ‘What kind of people do we think we are?’ And let us answer, ‘Free people, worthy of freedom and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.’
Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.
Most of us start out with a positive attitude and a plan to do our best.
People come to the stadium to forget their lives for 90 minutes, and it’s up to us to give them satisfaction; to get them out of their chairs and to fall asleep with stars in their eyes.
I think it’s important for us as a society to remember that the youth within juvenile justice systems are, most of the time, youths who simply haven’t had the right mentors and supporters around them – because of circumstances beyond their control.
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
Judgements prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.
God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.
Lets have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
We learned about gratitude and humility – that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean… and we were taught to value everyone’s contribution and treat everyone with respect.
There are many things we do not want about the world. Let us not just mourn them. Let us change them.
All we have is the knowledge passed on to us by our elders, experiences we inculcate and hardly negate. But to bridge the generation gap, one needs to adapt to the new while retaining the goodness of the old.
Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.
When we adopt a dog or any pet, we know it is going to end with us having to say goodbye, but we still do it. And we do it for a very good reason: They bring so much joy and optimism and happiness. They attack every moment of every day with that attitude.
Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described – and will be, after our deaths – by each of the family members who believe they know us.
There’s not an American in this country free until every one of us is free.
History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis.
Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.
We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.
Most of us have embraced digital technology, and depend on it more and more in our daily lives, both at home and at work.
Mistakes happen, and they happen to the best of us.
We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.
Every one of us is a perfect human being, deformed by the family, the society and the culture.
Some of our important choices have a time line. If we delay a decision, the opportunity is gone forever. Sometimes our doubts keep us from making a choice that involves change. Thus an opportunity may be missed.
Time has been transformed, and we have changed; it has advanced and set us in motion; it has unveiled its face, inspiring us with bewilderment and exhilaration.
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
I suppose that every one of us hopes secretly for immortality; to leave, I mean, a name behind him which will live forever in this world, whatever he may be doing, himself, in the next.
We all have these shades in our nature: it’s a spectrum within all of us.
How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!
The beauty of dystopia is that it lets us vicariously experience future worlds – but we still have the power to change our own.
Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.
Only our individual faith in freedom can keep us free.
Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it.
The real enemies of our life are the ‘oughts’ and the ‘ifs.’ They pull us backward into the unalterable past and forward into the unpredictable future. But real life takes place in the here and now.
Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones.
