Anaïs Nin: "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

Eleanor Chaffee: " Tact is the ability to describe others as they see themselves.

George Bernard Shaw: "Some men see things as they are and say, "Why?" I dream of things that never were and say, "Why not?"

Pearl S. Buck: "You can judge your age by the amount of pain you feel when you come in contact with a new idea."

Pablo Picasso: "I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it."

Katherine Mansfield: "Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can't build on it; it is only good for wallowing in."

Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small, group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

James Yorke: "The most successful people are those who are good at plan B."

Leo Tolstoy: "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."

Ernest Becker: "When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being."

Helen Keller: "The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next."

Henry Miller: "The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself."
Samuel Smiles : "We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery."

Thomas a Kempis: "Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be."

Barbara De Angelis: "Love is a choice you make from moment to moment."

Blaise Pascal: "The heart has its reasons which reason knows not of."

Tom Robbins: "The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love." Still Life With Woodpecker

Woodrow Wilson: "If you want to make enemies, try to change something."

Erich Fromm:
Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved."
Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love."
Immature love says: "I love you because I need you."
Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."

Anne Morrow Lindbergh: "Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me."

Abraham Lincoln: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew."

Charles Darwin: "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."

Anais Nin: "Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."

Alan Cohen: "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."

Thich Nhat Hanh: "People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle."

Nietzsche: "I have done that,' says my memory. 'I cannot have done that' -- says my pride, and remains adamant. At last -- memory yields."

M. Scott Peck: "The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers."

Confucius: "When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self."

Theodore Roosevelt: "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows achievement and who at the worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

Robert F. Kennedy: "Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."

Helen Keller: "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of humans as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

Vince Lombardi: " Winning is a habit. Unfortunately, so is losing."

Vince Lombardi: "The dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price."

Aldous Huxley: "Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born - the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things."

Winston Churchill: "Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."

Alexander Graham Bell: "When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us."

Sydney J. Harris: "Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."

Albert Schweitzer: "Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful."

Benjamin Franklin: "There are no gains without pains."

Bessie Stanley (adapted; erroneously attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson):

Success

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.

Bruce Feirstein: "The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success."

Elaine Maxwell: "My will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man's doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny."

Elbert Hubbard: "The man who is anybody and who does anything is surely going to be criticized, vilified, and misunderstood. This is part of the penalty for greatness, and evey man understands, too, that it is no proof of greatness."

Franklin D. Roosevelt: "It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."
George Washington Carver: "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 life you will have been all of these."

Helen Keller: "I long to accomplish a great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker."

Henry David Thoreau: "The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer."

Henry Ford: "If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you're right."

Pearl S. Buck: "The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration."

Pearl S. Buck: "The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it."

Pearl S. Buck: "The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible -- and achieve it, generation after generation."

Samuel Smiles: "It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done."

Charles DuBois: "The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become."

Eric Hoffer: "In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."

Epictetus: "It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows."

Edwin H. Friedman: "The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choices words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech."

Percy Bysshe Shelley: "Fear not for the future, weep not for the past."

David Bohm: "Indeed, to some extent it has always been necessary and proper for man, in his thinking, to divide things up, if we tried to deal with the whole of reality at once, we would be swamped. However when this mode of thought is applied more broadly to man's notion of himself and the whole world in which he lives, (i.e. in his world-view) then man ceases to regard the resultant divisions as merely useful or convenient and begins to see and experience himself and this world as actually constituted of separately existing fragments. What is needed is a relativistic theory, to give up altogether the notion that the world is constituted of basic objects or building blocks. Rather one has to view the world in terms of universal flux of events and processes."

Peter F. Drucker: "Society, community, family are all conserving institutions. They try to maintain stability, and to prevent, or at least to slow down, change. But the organization of the post-capitalist society of organizations is a destabilizer. Because its function is to put knowledge to work -- on tools, processes, and products; on work; on knowledge itself -- it must be organized for constant change."