Anger

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.

- Buddha

To be Yourself

To be nobody but

yourself in a world
which is doing its best day and night to make you like
everybody else means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

E.E. Cummings

Simple Life

To find the universal elements enough;
to find the air and the water exhilarating;
to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter...
to be thrilled by the stars at night;
to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring -
these are some of the rewards of the simple life.

- John Burroughs

Risks

A ship is safe in harbor; but that's not what ships are for.

- John Shedd

What I Learned from my Mother

I learned from my mother how to love the living... to look in their eyes and offer sympathy. I learned that whatever we say means nothing, whatever anyone will remember is that we came.  I learned to create from another's suffering my own usefulness, and once you now how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter you must offer healing, a chocolate cake you baked yourself, the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

In honour of all mothers, today, and every day.

Excerpts from  the poem, What I learned from my mother by Julia Kasdorf

Living Through Difficulty

Right in the difficult we must have our joys,
our happiness, our dreams:
there against the depth of this background,
they stand out,
there for the first time we see
how beautiful they are.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Gardeners

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy;
they are the charming gardeners
who make our souls blossom.

- Marcel Proust

No Mistakes

There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.


- Richard Bach

Wisdom

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past,
but by the responsibility for our future.

- George Bernard Shaw

Fearless

Don't fear failure so much that you refuse to
try new things.
The saddest summary of a life
contains three descriptions:
could have,
might have, and
should have.

- Louis E. Boone

Wisdom

The greatest wisdom is in simplicity.

Love, respect, tolerance, sharing, gratitude, forgiveness.

It's not complex or elaborate.

The real knowledge is free.

It's encoded in your DNA.

All you need is within you.

Great teachers have said that from the beginning.

Find your heart, and you will find your way.

- Carlos Barrios, Mayan elder

It's International Women's Day

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deep fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves,
"Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?"
Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world!
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that
other people won't feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It is not just in some of us
It is in everyone!

As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fears, our presence automatically liberates others.

- Marianne Williamson (for Nelson Mandela's inaugural speech)

Women

Women should be tough, tender, laugh as much as possible, and live long lives.

The struggle for equality continues unabated,

and the woman warrior who is armed with

wit and courage

will be among the first to

celebrate victory.

- Maya Angelou

How to Live

This is what you shall do;
Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

 ― Walt Whitman

Tranquility

What is first seen as a loss is now seen as a gain. For he finds solitude, not in far off, quiet places; he creates it out of himself, spreads it around him, wherever he may be, because he loves it and slowly he ripens in this tranquility. For the inner process is beginning to unfold, stillness is extraordinarily important.

- Janwillem van de Wetering

Small vs Big

I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.

- William James

Courage

With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity. - Keshavan Nair

Attitude

Whenever you're in conflict with someone,
there is one factor that can make the difference
between damaging your relationship
and deepening it.
That factor is attitude.

- William James

Anger

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.

-  Ambrose Bierce

Woman Power

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

- Anaïs Nin