He who cannot rest, cannot work;
He who cannot let go, cannot hold on;
He who cannot find his footing, cannot go forward.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Category: Inspirations – Life
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
– T.S.Eliot, an excerpt from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.
– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubt. But if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.
– Francis Bacon
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
– Thomas A. Edison
It always seems impossible until it’s done.
– Nelson Mandela
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
– Voltaire
Then indecision brings its own delays,
And days are lost lamenting over lost days.
Are you in earnest? Seize this very minute:
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Only engage and then the mind grows heated;
Begin and then the work will be completed.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
That which needs to be proved cannot be worth much.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
To dream anything that you want to dream. That is the beauty of the human mind.
To do anything that you want to do. That is the strength of the human will.
To trust yourself to test your limits. That is the courage to suceed.
– Bernard Edmonds
Every man is two men; one is awake in the darkness, the other asleep in the light.
— Khalil Gibran, Sand And Foam
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
– Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
If you can imagine it,
You can achieve it.
If you can dream it,
You can become it.
– William Arthur Ward
Blow, blow, thou winter wind.
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude.
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho, unto the green holly.
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.
Then heigh-ho, the holly.
This life is most jolly.
Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot.
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remembered not.
Heigh-ho, sing heigh-ho, unto the green holly.
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.
Then heigh-ho, the holly.
This life is most jolly.
– William Shakespeare, “Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind” (As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII)
Thus all the actions of men must necessarily be referred to seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, anger, and desire.
– Aristotle, Rhetoric (Book 1, Chapter 10)
Here take my picture; though I bid farewell
Thine, in my heart, where my soul dwells, shall dwell.
‘Tis like me now, but I dead, ’twill be more
When we are shadows both, than ’twas before.
When weather-beaten I come back, my hand
Perhaps with rude oars torn, or sun beams tann’d,
My face and breast of haircloth, and my head
With care’s rash sudden storms being o’erspread,
My body’a sack of bones, broken within,
And powder’s blue stains scatter’d on my skin;
If rival fools tax thee to’have lov’d a man
So foul and coarse as, oh, I may seem then,
This shall say what I was, and thou shalt say,
“Do his hurts reach me? doth my worth decay?
Or do they reach his judging mind, that he
Should now love less, what he did love to see?
That which in him was fair and delicate,
Was but the milk which in love’s childish state
Did nurse it; who now is grown strong enough
To feed on that, which to disus’d tastes seems tough.
– John Donne, “Elegy V: His Picture”
To perceive is to suffer.
– Aristotle
Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.
– Oprah Winfrey
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
– Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere’s Fan
Hope is the companion of power and the mother of success, for those of us who hope strongest have within us the gift of miracles.
– Sydney Bremer
Rainbow of Madness 