New Year's Eve

New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights.

- Hamilton Wright Mabie

Christmas Gift Suggestions

Christmas gift suggestions:

To your enemy, forgiveness.
To an opponent, tolerance.
To a friend, your heart.
To a customer, service.
To all, charity.
To every child, a good example.
To yourself, respect.
~ Oren Arnold

Life and Love

Life is eternal, and love is immortal,
and death is only a horizon;
and a horizon is nothing
save the limit of our sight.

- Rossiter Worthington Raymond

Christmas Candle

A Christmas candle is a lovely thing;

It makes no noise at all,

But softly gives itself away.

- Eva Logue

Getting More Than We Give

Do not stand on a high pedestal and
take 5 cents in your hand and say,
"here, my poor man",
but be grateful that the poor man is there,
so by making a gift to him you are able to help yourself.

It is not the reciever that is blessed, but it is the giver.

Be thankful that you are allowed to exercise
your power of benevolence and mercy in the world,
and thus become pure and perfect.


- Swami Vivekananda (Indian Spiritual leader)

Hope

When the world says, "Give up,"


Hope whispers, "Try it one more time."

- Author Unknown

Bounces and Bumps

Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life ... this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.

- Salman Rushdie

Last Post

Spats cover
Polluted boots
With a Sam Browne strapped
To a spit and polish belt
Tightened by the sergeant
Holding him there
Completely trapped.

Deathly still
Helmand
Mourning loss
Hobnailed by the flagpole
With a drooping ensign
In a two-minute silence
Like three hours on a cross.

Numb lips
This November
And another year
As the guns die down
In posthumous salute
While the note splits
In the mouth of momentary fear.

The bugle fades
Echoing round

As darkness descends
On Greenwich Mean Time
Across Whitehall
And the sands of an Afghan desert
While Calvary shares the silence.

Crinkled leaves
Float down
On their parachute trip
With legions of poppies
Papered for today
As a tear rolls down
To a stiff upper lip.

Teeth chatter
Feet freeze
With winter ahead
On count-down to Reveille
And the beginning of spring
While sheathed swords
Honour the glorious dead.

- Paul du Plessis

Rise Above

An individual has not started living until he can
rise above the narrow confines
of his individualistic concerns
to the broader concerns
of all humanity.

- Martin Luther King Jr.

Making a Stand

Give me a place to stand and I shall move the world.

- Archimedes

Values

When I was in the military
they gave me a medal for killing two men
and a discharge for loving one.

- Epitaph of Leonard P. Matlovich

Little Things

Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.

- Robert Brault

Shift Towards Peace

Rather than talking about peace or forgiveness,
let's talk about trust, dignity, our shared humanity,
and the one hundred thousand other steps it takes
to finally achieve peace and forgiveness. ...

There is no "magic" square metre, or hilltop, or valley,
that if ceded by one side to the other will bring about
peace in the Middle East.

Peace can only come bout after an internal shift --
on both sides.

What we need is respect, and the inner strength
to refuse to hate.

Then we will achieve peace.

- Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish

Make the Exchange

We cannot change the past, but we can change our attitude toward it.

Uproot guilt and plant forgiveness.
Tear out arrogance and seed humility.

Exchange love for hate ---
thereby, making the present comfortable
and the future promising.

- Maya Angelou

Hope

Hope is that thing with feathers that perches in the soul
and sings the tune without the words
and never stops... at all.

- Emily Dickinson

Perseverance

Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.

- Jacob A. Riis

Courage

Courage doesn't always roar.

Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying,
"I will try again tomorrow".

- Mary Anne Radmacher

Wearing Your Life

Your life feels different on you once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after -- lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.
- Louise Erdrich

Give Meaning to Life

Life is meaningless only if we allow it to be. Each of us has the power to give life meaning, to make our time and our bodies and our words into instruments of love and hope.
- Tom Head

Thanksgiving

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us all be thankful.


- Buddha

Sand and Stone

When someone hurts us,
we should write it down in sand,
where winds of forgiveness can erase it away.

When someone does something good for us,
we must engrave it in stone,
where no wind can ever erase it.

Learn to write your hurts in sand, and to carve your benefits in stone.

- Unknown

Eternal Love

They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it.
Death cannot kill what never dies.
Nor can spirits ever be divided, that love and live in the same divine principle, the root and record of their friendship.
If absence be not death, neither is theirs.
Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still.

- William Penn

Miracles

Photo from Public Domain

I'm not a dreamer, and I'm not saying this will initiate any kind of definitive answer or cure to cancer, but I believe in miracles. I have to.

- Terry Fox

Swahili Proverb

The child of lion is a lion.

- Swahili Proverb

Love

Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another's heart, or its flame burns low.


- Henry Ward Beecher

Eternal

The grand show is eternal.
It is always sunrise somewhere;
the dew is never dried all at once;
a shower is forever falling;
vapor is ever rising.

Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming,
on sea and continents and islands,
each in its turn,
as the round earth rolls.


- John Muir

Abundance

Both abundance and lack exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend... when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that's present - love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature and personal pursuits that bring us pleasure - the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience heaven on earth.

- Sarah Ban Breathnach

The Movement

Women's Equality Day - August 26

Across the world women are joining hands in solidarity and support, in a global women’s movement, sharing knowledge and experience and empowering themselves to build a peaceful and fairer world.


- Marilee Karl

Self Discovery

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.

- Thomas Merton

Kindness

Today I bent the truth to be kind,
and I have no regret,
for I am far surer of what is kind
than I am of what is true.

- Robert Brault

Influence

Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means.


- Albert Einstein

Diamond in the rough

A diamond is merely a lump of coal that did well under pressure.


- Unknown

Purpose

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer,
it sings because it has a song.


- Maya Angelou

Be Yourself

To be yourself in a world
that is constantly trying to make you something else
is the greatest accomplishment.


- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Change and Conflict

Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.
- Saul Alinsky

Love

Love begins by taking care of the closest ones - the ones at home.

- Mother Teresa

Giving

We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.

- Sir Winston Churchill

Female Friendship

There is a kind of quilt called a friendship quilt, but I imagine all of mine, no matter what their pattern, are emblems of female friendship, that essential thread that has so often kept the pieces of my own life together, and from time to time kept me from falling apart.

- Anna Quindlen

Happiness

Happiness

cannot be traveled to,

owned,

earned,

worn or

consumed.

Happiness is

the spiritual experience

of living every minute

with love, grace and gratitude.

- Denis Waitley

Love, Forgiveness, Faith and Hope

To love means loving the unlovable.

To forgive means pardoning
the unpardonable.

Faith means believing the unbelievable.

Hope means hoping when
everything seems hopeless.

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

Choices

You don’t get to choose how you are going to die.
Or when.
You can only decide how you are going to live.
Now.


- Joan Baez

Live simply

Live simply, so others may simply live.


- Gandhi

Fate

Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses.


- Democritus

Potential

A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for.


–William Shedd

Dreams

However vague they are, dreams have a way of concealing themselves and leave us no peace until they are translated into reality, like seeds germinating underground, sure to sprout in their search for the sunlight.

- Lin Yutang

Tranquility

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.


- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Difficulties

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.


-William Ellery Channing

Reason

Like a morning dream, life becomes more and more bright the longer we live, and the reason of everything appears more clear.


- Jean Paul Richter

Follow Your Heart

Follow your heart like a flying stallion
Race with the sun to the edge of night
Form your truth like a gold medallion
Dance in the circle of the love and the light.

- Denver, Henry, Sommers, Weisberg

All Good Things

Fear less, hope more;
Whine less, breathe more;
Talk less, say more;
Hate less, love more;

And all good things are yours.

- Anonymous

Father

He didn't tell me how to live; he lived, and let me watch him do it.

- Clarence Budington Kelland

Beauty

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul's own doing.

- Marie Stopes

Web of Life

The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected, like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.

Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

- Chief Seattle, (US) Divamish Indians

Possibilities

Our aspirations are our possibilities.

- Robert Browning

Purpose of Life

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Dreams

You'll never achieve your dreams if they don't become goals.
- Anonymous


Your dreams come true when you act to turn them into realities.
-Anonymous

Life is about ...

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life’s about creating yourself.

-George Bernard Shaw

Love

What love we've given, we'll have forever. What love we fail to give, will be lost for all eternity.

- Leo Buscaglia

Doing

In this life, we cannot all do great things; we can only do small things with great love.


- Mother Teresa

Challenge

When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.

- Paulo Coelho

Journey

I haven't a clue as to how my story will end. But that's all right. When you set out on a journey and night covers the road, you don't conclude the road has vanished. And how else could we discover the stars?

- Unknown

Your Mission

When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.

- W. Clement Stone

Don't Wait

Don't wait. The time will never be just right.


- Napoleon Hill

Hero

That's what it takes to be a hero, a little gem of innocence inside you that makes you want to believe that there still exists a right and wrong, that decency will somehow triumph in the end.

- Lise Hand

And I Be

I still hear you humming, Mama. The color of your song calls me home. The color of your words saying, "Let her be. She got a right to be different. She gonna stumble on herself one of these days. Just let the child be." And I be, Mama.


- Sonia Sanchez

Heart of a Mother

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

- Honoré de Balzac

Birth of a Mother

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.

- Rajneesh

Start With Yourself

To end the misery that has afflicted the human condition for thousands of years, you have to start with yourself and take responsibility for your inner state at any given moment. That means now.
- Eckhart Tolle

Travel

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.

– Pat Conroy

The Woods

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.


- Henry David Thoreau

In Honour of our Earth

Earth Day Snax
We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

~~~

Sustainability means running the global environment - Earth Inc. - like a corporation: with depreciation, amortization and maintenance accounts. In other words, keeping the asset whole, rather than undermining your natural capital.

- Maurice Strong

~~~

The materials of wealth are in the earth, in the seas, and in their natural and unaided productions.


- Daniel Webster

Living Humanely

Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understands, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not.

- Virginia Satir

Useful Lives

Our lives are to be used and thus to be lived as fully as possible, and truly it seems that we are never so alive as when we concern ourselves with other people.

- Harry Chapin

Reaching Out

I will smile at friend and foe alike and make every effort to find, in him or her, a quality to praise, now that I realize the deepest yearning of human nature is the craving to be appreciated.


- Og Mandino

Prayer

Prayer is only another name for good, clean, direct thinking.
When you pray, think. Think well what you're saying.
Make your thoughts into things that are solid.
In that way, your prayer will have strength,
and that strength will become a part of you,
body, mind, and spirit.

- How Green Was My Valley, Richard Llewellyn

Dreams

The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.

-James Allen

Long View

Aldo Leopold, the early 20th century's Henry David Thoreau, said that we should think like a mountain, with a sense of permanence and a long view.

At the beginning of the 21st century, we are at a peak of human power, wealth and information...

We need to look back at our wonderful natural and human heritage, and cherish and protect the abundant values to be found there.

We need to look out to the sides and see other parts of the world that need our help and can provide good ideas to go forward...

We need to look ahead to be certain that our actions of today will make the world a better and richer and more varied place for our grandchildren and their grandchildren.


- Robert Bateman

Good Marriage

A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude.
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist,
a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Being and Becoming

Life is not in having and getting, but in being and becoming.

- Matthew Arnold

Growing Old

To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

- Henri Amiel

Enemies

I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.

- Abraham Lincoln

Anyway

People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you've got anyway.

- Mother Teresa

Growth

Be not afraid of growing slowly,
be afraid only of standing still.


- Chinese Proverb

Love is a Cure

Love cures people -
both the ones
who give it
and the ones
who receive it.

This intangible thing love...
enters into every theraputic relationship.
It is an element which finds and heals,
which comforts and restores,
which works what we have to call for now,
miracles

- Dr. Karl Menninger

What You Are Made Of

Life is like a grindstone
- whether it grinds you down
or polishes you up depends
on what you are made of.

- Anonymous

Gratitude

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.

It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events.

Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.


- Melodie Beattie

Friendship

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily,
but with the roughest courage.
When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work,
but the solidest thing we know.


- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do Your Job Well

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.


- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Perfect Love

We come to love not by finding a perfect person,
but by learning to see an imperfect person
perfectly.

- Sam Keen

As You Dream So You Shall Become

Dream lofty dreams,
and as you dream,
so you shall become.
Your vision is the promise of what you shall one day be;
your ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.


- James Allen

Circumstances

Your present circumstances don't determine where you can go;
they merely determine where you start.

- Nido Qubein

Peace

When the power of love overcomes the love of power,
the world will know peace.

- Sri Chinmoy Ghose

Someday

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 your life
you will have been all of these.

- George Washington Carver

We Belong to Earth

What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.
This we know: the earth does not belong to man,
man belongs to the earth.

All things are connected like the blood that unites us all.
Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it.
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

- Chief Seattle (1786-1866)

Friendship

I keep my friends as misers do their treasure, because, of all the things granted us by wisdom, none is greater or better than friendship.


- Pietro Aretino

Self Esteem

Well, we all know that self-esteem comes from
what you think of you,
not what other people think of you.


- Gloria Gaynor

Aspirations

To understand the heart and mind of a person,
look not at what he has already achieved,
but at what he aspires to.

- Kahlil Gibran

Love

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.


- Kahlil Gibran

Olympic Idea

The real glory is being knocked to your knees and then coming back.
That's real glory.
That's the essence of it.

- Vince Lombardi

Gift in Aging

In youth we learn,
in age we understand.

- Marie von Ebner- Eschenbach

Love Steps Forth

When our eyes see our hands doing the work of our hearts,
the circle of Creation is completed inside us,
the doors of our souls fly open,
and love steps forth
to heal everything in sight.

- Michael Bridge

Creating Your Future

The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created; created first in the mind and will, created next in activity.

The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination.

- John Schaar

Create the life you want to live ...

Stillness

No thought, no action, no movement, total stillness: only thus can one manifest the true nature and law of things from within and unconsciously, and at last become one with heaven and earth.

- Lao Tzu

Peace

Of all our dreams today there is none more important - or so hard to realise - than that of peace in the world. May we never lose our faith in it or our resolve to do everything that can be done to convert it one day into reality.

The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.

- Lester B. Pearson (14th Prime Minister of Canada)

This Generation

For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.


- Jimmy Carter

Becoming More

What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization…It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.
- Maslow

Blessings

There's no disaster that can't become a blessing, and no blessing that can't become a disaster.


- Richard Bach

Joy

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.

- Rumi

Family

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

- Alex Haley

Writing

If you would not be forgotten,
as soon as you are dead and rotten,
either write things worth reading,
or do things worth the writing.

- Benjamin Franklin

Educate Girls

Once you educate the boys, they tend to leave the villages and go search for work in cities. But the girls stay home, become leaders in the community and pass on what they've learned. If you really want to change a culture, to empower women, improve basic hygiene and health care, and fight high rates of infant mortality, the answer is to educate girls.


- Greg Mortenson (co-author, Three Cups of Tea)

Fear

We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.

- Christian Nevell Bovee

Lessons

Remember, there are no mistakes, only lessons.
Love yourself, trust your choices,
and everything is possible.

- Cherie-Carter Scotts

Growing Up

Youth is a circumstance you can't do anything about.
The trick is to grow up without getting old.

- Frank Lloyd Wright

Opportunities

Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

- Sun Tzu

Hunger

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.


- Mahatma Gandhi

Perspective

One sees great things from the valley,

only small things from the peak.

- G. K. Chesterton

New Beginnings

We must be willing to get rid
of the life we've planned,
so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
The old skin has to be shed
before the new one can come.


- Joseph Campbell