Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
When you're stuck
You know the step. Starting is the hard part. A line here is for the pause before you begin.
314 quotes
The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.
Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
I'm not superstitious, but I am a little stitious.
I told my wife she was drawing her eyebrows too high. She looked surprised.
The trouble with a kitten is that it eventually becomes a cat.
The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking spaces.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.
A word after a word after a word is power.
Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.
Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.
Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?
The breezes at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep.
No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.
People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.
Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness.
We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize.
Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.
To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.
This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it's with us wherever we are.
Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already.
Start where you are.
Life is the dancer and you are the dance.
Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on.
Awareness is the greatest agent for change.
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them; that only creates sorrow.
When you know how to listen, everybody is the guru.
In any moment we can begin again.
You carry within you a thousand gifts, but you are holding on to the one thing that keeps them hidden.
The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of boundless change.
Step into the fire of self-discovery. This fire will not burn you, it will only burn what you are not.
Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth.
Stop trying to change the moment. Allow the moment to change you.
Freedom is not something you acquire. It's something you uncover.
Respond to every call that excites your spirit.
Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him.
You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy.
Be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the Lord.
Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.
In all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.
Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and he will establish your plans.
As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps.
Many are the plans in a person's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails.
But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles.
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.
Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.
With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.
Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move.
Everything is possible for one who believes.
For no word from God will ever fail.
What is impossible with man is possible with God.
I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
I can do all this through him who gives me strength.
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.
If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.
Be steadfast in the performance of your duty, O Arjun, abandoning attachment to success and failure. Such equanimity is called Yog.
There are those who always think of Me and engage in exclusive devotion to Me. To them, whose minds are always absorbed in Me, I provide what they lack and preserve what they already possess.
The time is always right to do what is right.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.
The first step toward finding God is to stop telling God what you think God should be doing.
Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.
Patience obtains all things. Whoever has God lacks nothing; God alone suffices.
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.
We cannot change anything until we accept it.
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.
The neurotic is unable to tolerate not only his own weaknesses, but also his own strengths.
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.
We don't laugh because we're happy — we're happy because we laugh.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change.
The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.
Growth occurs when individuals confront problems, struggle to master them, and through that struggle develop new aspects of their skills and capacities.
What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see.
A failure is not always a mistake; it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
What we call the personality is often a patchwork quilt of compensations and cover-ups.
Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as hard as spending our lives running from it.
Unlike self-criticism, which asks if you're good enough, self-compassion asks what's good for you.
What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.
One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.
If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.
It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words.
The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.
We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them shapes our future.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is.
The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.
The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president.
You largely constructed your depression. It wasn't given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.
Becoming is better than being.
The view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.
The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect.
Where attention goes, neural firing flows, and neural connection grows.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.
Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
The only source of knowledge is experience.
It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.
What I cannot create, I do not understand.
I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.
We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.
Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.
The pleasure of finding things out is the prize.
Fall in love with some activity, and do it.
The worthwhile problems are the ones you can really solve or help solve, the ones you can really contribute something to.
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.
The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good.
I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.
We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves.
Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.
The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.
Knowing where you came from is no less important than knowing where you are going.
I know of no time in human history where ignorance was better than knowledge.
What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'
Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.
An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution.
You are capable of more than you know.
Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.
An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.
Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.
Lost time is never found again.
Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.
A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.
The cow is of the bovine ilk; one end is moo, the other, milk.
Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.
People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.
Marriage is the alliance of two people, one of whom never remembers birthdays and the other who never forgets them.
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold.
Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.
The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to bed with reluctance, yet once there, we do not want to leave.
To keep your marriage brimming, with love in the loving cup, whenever you're wrong, admit it; whenever you're right, shut up.
Oh, what a tangled web do parents weave when they think that their children are naive.
If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.
You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.
That would be a good thing for them to cut on my tombstone: Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.
Take care of the luxuries and the necessities will take care of themselves.
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
You can't teach an old dogma new tricks.
Hollywood is the one place where you can die of encouragement.
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not.
It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.
The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.
The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.
There are three kinds of men. The ones that learn by readin'. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to touch an electric fence.
The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it in your back pocket.
Insanity is hereditary: you can get it from your children.
Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.
When your mother asks, 'Do you want a piece of advice?' it is a mere formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to get it anyway.
One thing they never tell you about child raising is that whatever would get you grounded then gets you cheered now.
Shopping is cheaper than a psychiatrist.
In general my children refuse to eat anything that hasn't danced on television.
When a child is locked in the bathroom with water running and he says he is doing nothing, the probability is he is not taking a shower.
I used to be indecisive. Now I'm not sure.
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.
I don't care to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution?
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.
I can resist everything except temptation.
I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.
While we wait for life, life passes.
Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.
If you really want to escape the things that harass you, what you're needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person.
Associate with people who are likely to improve you.
Life is long if you know how to use it.
Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.
Don't explain your philosophy. Embody it.
No man is free who is not master of himself.
Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens.
If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.
Circumstances don't make the man, they only reveal him to himself.
Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.
To find yourself, think for yourself.
Let him who would move the world first move himself.
The beginning is the most important part of the work.
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
The energy of the mind is the essence of life.
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die.
He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.
It belongs to the imperfection of man that he often chooses what is worse because it is easier.
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.
The man who asks a question is a fool for a minute; the man who does not ask is a fool for life.
When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don't adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.
Wherever you go, go with all your heart.
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
By letting go it all gets done.
Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small.
Begin anywhere.
If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
I dream my painting and I paint my dream.
I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.
Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.
Everything you can imagine is real.
It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.
I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.
You can't use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
You did in your twenties what you knew how to do, and when you knew better you did better.
A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human words as possible.
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice.
Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.
Don't only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart.
A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity.
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.
Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself.
Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap.
I rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.
We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.
Good prose is like a windowpane.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
You write in order to change the world.
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
The poet or the revolutionary is there to articulate the necessity.
To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.
Feet, what do I need them for if I have wings to fly?
Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?
Creativity takes courage.
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
The best of artists hath no thought to show which the rough stone in its superfluous shell doth not include; to break the marble spell is all the hand that serves the brain can do.
A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
Learning never exhausts the mind.
Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.
Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.
There is no must in art because art is free.
Inside you there's an artist that you don't know about.
The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self.
Ring the bells that still can ring.
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
The best way out is always through.
If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.
You do not have to struggle to reach God, but you do have to struggle to tear away the self-created veil that hides Him from you.
Environment is stronger than willpower.
If you really want to find happiness, dig into your path, go deeper in your path, and you will find happiness.
As long as one does not surrender the mind, one is a slave of the mind.
Make the ultimate goal of your life Divine love, and surrender to it.
I am confused about my duty, and am besieged with anxiety and faintheartedness. I am Your disciple, and am surrendered to You. Please instruct me for certain what is best for me.
Working in this state of consciousness, there is no loss or adverse result, and even a little effort saves one from great danger.
Content with whatever gain comes of its own accord, and free from envy, they are beyond the dualities of life. Being equipoised in success and failure, they are not bound by their actions, even while performing all kinds of activities.
O mighty-armed son of Kunti, what you say is correct; the mind is indeed very difficult to restrain. But by practice and detachment, it can be controlled.
Better than mechanical practice is knowledge; better than knowledge is meditation. Better than meditation is renunciation of the fruits of actions, for peace immediately follows such renunciation.
One should not abandon duties born of one's nature, even if one sees defects in them, O son of Kunti. Indeed, all endeavors are veiled by some evil, as fire is by smoke.
If you always remember Me, by My grace you shall overcome all obstacles and difficulties.