Work

"Don't change yourself to fit the job, change the job to fit you."

Knowing

"I've been rereading your story. I think it's about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that's okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included. You looked at me long enough to see something mysterioso under all the gruff and bluster. Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them."
-Richard Siken

Games

"A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain."
-Scott Fitzgerald

Comfort

"The lust for comfort murders the passions of the soul."
-Khalil Gibran

Pretty

"How are you ever going to change anything if you only want to look at what's pretty?"
-Bob Dylan

Forward

"There are better things ahead than any we leave behind."
-C.S. Lewis

Fight

"To be a great champion you must believe you are the best. If you're not, pretend you are."
-Muhammad Ali

Sorrow

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o'er-fraught heart, and bids it break.
-William Shakespeare

What

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
-Mary Oliver

Bold

"When you cannot make up your mind which of two eveny balanced courses of action you should take--choose the bolder."
-W.J. Slim

Move

"You can't wait for inspiration; you have to go after it with a club."
-Jack London

No Matter

"Be who you are, and say what you feel, because those that mind don't matter and those that matter don't mind."
-Dr. Seuss

Move

"You can't see anything new until you change where you stand."
-Allie Moss

Fail

"Would you like me to give you a formula for success?  

It's quite simple, really.  Double your rate of failure. 
You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it 
isn't at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can 
learn from it.  So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you 
can. Because remember that's where you will find success." 
--Thomas J. Watson

Act

"The more often a man feels without acting, the less he will ever be able to act, and in the long run, the less he will ever be able to feel."
-C.S. Lewis

Talents

"Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant."
-Horace

In

"The more we are entrained into the outer world in all these new and increasingly rapid ways that our nervous system has never before encuontered, the more important it may be for us to develop a robust counterbalance of teh inner world: one that calms and tunes the nervous system andputs itin the service of living wisley, both for ourselves and for tohers."
-Jon Kabat Zinn

Power

"And I believe it's a shame we collectively bear, the shame of creating a world where too many women opt to trade sex for power because they don't see any other convincing options. All of humanity suffers every time a woman, young or not, uses her body not to express herself, but to secure a self; not to feel pleasure, but to gratify another's; not to share love, but to barter for it."  

-Kathryn Soper found here

Home

"When you are endowed in the House of the Lord, you literally bless the very ground you walk upon."
-Elder Groberg

Do

"No matter what you do, you will get criticized. So do exactly what you want to do."
-Nancy Regan

Creation

 "What every man needs, regardless of his job or the kind of work he is doing, is a vision of what his place is and my be. He needs an objective and a purpose.  He needs a feeling and a belief that he has some worthwhile thing to do. What this is no one can tell him. It must be his own creation."
-Joseph M. Dodge

*

"You marry at the level of your self esteem.  Make sure you have self worth."
-Marie Osmond

Risks

"Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won't suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when the person looks back- she will hear her heart."
-Paulo Coelho

Falling

"You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it."
-Linda A. Lavid

Battles

"There is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for."

-Dona M. Deane, Honor Your Gifts, p. 199

Mistakes

"The two worst strategic mistakes to make are acting prematurely and letting an opportunity slip; to avoid this, the warrior treats each situation as if it were unique and never resorts to formulae, recipes, or other people's opinions."

-Harpreet Kaur Kapoor

Failing

"When you find your path, you must not be afraid. You need to have sufficient courage to make mistakes. Disappointment, defeat, and despair are tools God uses to show us the way."
-Paulo Coelho Brida (1990)

Tipping

"It's much easier, she realized, to be on the verge of something than to actually be it. This would still take time."
-The Book Thief

Greatness

"If you want it badly enough, and are willing to make some changes in your life to cause it to happen, you too can take over the world...or do anything else you really want to do. Yes, you really can have it all. The only things you'll need to give up are assumptions, expectations, and the comfort zone that holds you back from greatness." -Chris Guillebeau

Henry David Thoreau

"I am struck by the fact that the more slowly trees grow at first, the sounder they are at the core, and I think that the same is true for human beings. We do not wish to see children "precocious," like sprouts producing a soft and perishable timber, but rather, better, as if contending gradually with difficulties, they are solidified and gradually perfected."  - from the journal of Henry David Thoreau

Words

Martha's words: http://mostlymarthajane.blogspot.com/2010/11/words.html

"Last week I got to listen to a famous essayist. He calls himself a story addict. He said he tells stories to crack open windows and doors inside him. Not only to let things out, but to let things in. Like laughter. Or tears."

Innerness

"Most of the trouble in the world is due to our inability to imagine the innerness of other lives.” 
-EM Forster

Write Again

"The point is this: As I write my life, I learn my thoughts, whether good or ill, conscious or subconscious. They are my thoughts, and as I come to recognize them I become less and less vulnerable to the Ophelia Syndrome through which others once dictated my life to me."
-Tom Plummer


http://magazine.byu.edu/?act=view&a=2537

Write

"Never ever try to play catch up, or you'll never start writing."

-Louise Plummer

Times

"Those days when I realize that this requires so much more of a better me than I had ever before supposed. And tat this-this me,...is all I have to give."

-Tessa Meyer santiago

Love

"Let the fragments of love be reassembled in you. Only then will you have true courage."

-Hayden Carruth

Words

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs."

paul mcclean, a river runs through it

Wait

"If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin."

ivan turgenev

Risk

"There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they
are far less than the long-range risks and costs of
comfortable inaction." --John F. Kennedy

Fear

“With each recurrence of anger, or jealousy, or fear, you are given the choice to challenge it, or to give into it. Each time you challenge it, it loses power and you gain power. Each time you are tempted to become angry, or jealous, or fearful, and you challenge that feeling, you empower yourself. There would be no accumulation of strength inside if the choices that you make did not require discipline and intention.” -Gary Zukav Seat of the Soul

Solitude

"It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps, with perfect sweetness, the independence of solitude."

Shape

"In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape
ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the 
choices we make are ultimately our responsibility."

Eleanor Roosevelt

God

from http://blog.cjanerun.com/2010/10/in-response.html

"I am a Mormon because I believe in revelation, both revelation from a prophet of God and personal revelation, the kind that feels right in my heart. I believe in what has been revealed, what is now revealed and what will be revealed. Because of revelation, the gospel of Jesus Christ is empowering to me, it calls me up and pushes me beyond. I am a Mormon because it brings light to my life.

I am Mormon not because it provides me all the answers. I don't know why I was infertile for five years and one day I wasn't. I don't know why good things happen to bad people. I don't know why some of us are attracted to the same gender. I don't know why some of us are attracted to both genders. I don't know why we once practiced polygamy and now we do not. I don't know a lot of things, but that is not why I am a Mormon.

I am Mormon because it allows me to seek out truth. And some truths take a lifetime (or beyond) to understand.

I am a Mormon because I believe all that God has revealed to me about me, all that He does now reveal to me about me, and I believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to me about me. Like how I can be a better mother, or friend or example of Christ. Like how to love others in a way that they need to be loved. I can never be settled about what any of those things mean, they constantly evolve. And just when I have decided on one certainty it will change. So I have given up on saying anything is definite. Especially my momentary opinions, because they change the most.

And that is why I am Mormon, I believe in the nearness of God and the improbability of the permanent."

Luxury

“Luxury is the opposite of vulgarity. Luxury is the opposite of status. It is the ability to make a living by being oneself. It is the freedom to refuse to live by habit. Luxury is liberty. Luxury is elegance. True elegance is refusal.”

Coco Chanel

Catcher

"Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them - if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry."

Catcher in the Rye

Simply

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." -Leonardo DaVinci

Write

"Oddly I know what I believe because of what I've written." -JK Rowling

Fear

Fear is not what’s important, it’s how you deal with it. It would be like asking a marathon runner if they feel pain. It’s not a matter of whether you feel it, it’s how you manage it.

James Nachtwey

Judge

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we
should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough
to disarm any hostility."                      
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Job

"What every man needs, regardless of his job or the kind of
work he is doing, is a vision of what his place is and may
be. He needs an objective and a purpose.  He needs a feeling
and a belief that he has some worthwhile thing to do. What
this is no one can tell him.  It must be his own creation." 
--Joseph M. Dodge 

See

"People only see what they are prepared to see." -Emerson

Do

"No matter what you do, you will get criticized. So do
exactly what you want to do."
-- Nancy Reagan

Now

FEEL THE FEAR AND DO IT ANY WAY! This is what she lived by. This was her daily motto. May you take it into your own lives. May you step out of the box and try new things. May you run and not walk to find your happiness. May you find who you really are. May you know that she never said it would be easy but that it would be WORTH it. I love you all. -Anne Marie Barton

Reaction

"A life of reaction is a life of slavery.  Intellectually
and spiritually one must fight for action and not reaction." 
–Rae 

Write

You write in order to change the world…. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” -James Baldwin

Potential

"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet
must write if he is to be a peace with himself.  One must
be what one can be."
--Abraham Maslow

Purpose

"Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and
know that everything has a purpose."
--Elizabeth Kublar Ross

See

"Make visible what without you might never be seen." 
--Rob Bresson

Drive

“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” ~ Ayn Rand

*

"People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. What you do serves as the proof as what you believe." -Simon Sinek from Ted.com speech

Eliot

"Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" T.S. Eliot

Purpose

"I've come to believe that each of us has a personal calling
that's as unique as a fingerprint – and that the best way
to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way
to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard,
and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you."
--Oprah Winfrey

Broaden

"If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail."

Love

"Never love anybody who treats you like you're ordinary." -Oscar Wilde

Let there be light

"Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish."

— Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

Happy

"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’"

—

Kurt Vonnegut

Dark

"One's best success comes after his greatest
disappointments."
--Henry Ward Beecher

Books

Of e-books she wrote, "Some things should happen on soft paper, not cold metal." -Harper Lee

Action

"There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they
are far less than the long-range risks and costs of
comfortable inaction." --John F. Kennedy

More

"It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure."

albert einstein

Through

"If nothing else, one day you can look someone straight in the eyes and say, ‘But I lived through it. And it made me who I am today.’"

Waitress

"I hope that someday, somebody wants to hold you for twenty minutes straight, and that’s all they do. They don’t pull away. They don’t look at your face, they don’t try to kiss you. All they do is wrap you up in their arms, without an ounce of selfishness in it."

— Waitress

Miscellany

Think big and act soon. Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance. All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move. --Benjamin Franklin Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get. -- Ray Kroc

Give

"You make a living by what you get.  You make a life by
what you give."

--Winston Churchill

Solid

"Rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I stood." -JK Rowling

Possibility

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for
wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the
potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees
the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And
what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so
intoxicating, as possibility!

Søren Kierkegaard 

Words

“Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.”- Edward Thorndike (1874-1949), American psychologist

"Learning colors a man more than the deepest dye."
- Chinese Proverb

"Only the educated are free."
- Epictetus (55-135), stoic Greek philosopher

Memory

"Memory is a giggling sprite and will not be tamed. She takes flight the moment the present becomes the past."

— Real Live Preacher

Writing

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain

Desire

You’ve been walking in circles, searching. Don’t drink by the water’s edge. Throw yourself in. Become the water. Only then will your thirst end.

— Jeanette Berson

Dreams

It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting……Before a dream is realized, the Soul of the World tests everything that was learned along the way. It does this not because it is evil, but so that we can, in addition to realizing our dreams master the lessons we have learned as we have moved toward that dream. That’s the point at which most people give up…. [At this point] Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.

— Paulo Coelho

Love

Love grows by giving. The love we give away is the only love we keep. The only way to retain love is to give it away.

— Elbert Hubbard

Summer

"Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screeneed porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the treehouse; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape."

— Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Change

"I can’t go back to yesterday, because I was a different person then."

— Lewis Carroll

Second

"It may have just been a moment to you, but it changed every single one that followed for me."

— I Wrote This For You

Cracks

"There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.
It’s a perfectly simple idea—a sage lyric from Leonard Cohen—but I’m not sure I never thought about the cracks in things or in ourselves quite like that. The idea that the cracks actually bring the gift of illumination is a huge sigh of relief.
I repeat the lines in my head over and over again and I feel liberated. Why try to hide an imperfection that brings with it light? Imagine, if we begin to see the cracks like this, what happens to the rest of our fractures and flaws? There must be a silver lining to more of the less-than-perfect traits that we too often try to cover/mask/hide.
As I muse on the idea of celebrating my own imperfections, I encourage you to do the same. Let’s turn self-consciousness on its ear and willingly reveal the fissures that run through each of us. Perhaps if we begin to look at the cracks under a new, gentler, more tolerant lens, perhaps we can bring to light all the beauty—the big perfectly imperfect picture—of who we are."

Find

a person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.

albert camus

Peace

I want you to find the poor here….
right here in your own home first. Be the good news to your own people first. Very often we are all smiles outside, but we are all sad inside and when we come home we have no time to smile.

— Mother Theresa

Dreams

"I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind."

— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Height

Essence

"A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely."

— Ronald Dahl

Now

"Forever is composed of nows."

Emily Dickinson

Summer

"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Moon

"The moon is whole all the time, but we can’t always see it. What we see is an almost moon or a not-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there’s only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides."

—

Alice Sebold, The Almost Moon

Next

"The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you."

— Tennessee Williams

Doubts

"Our doubts are traitors,
And makes us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt."

—

Lucio of “Measure for Measure” by William Shakespeare

Night

"I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars."

— Og Mandino

Under

"What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well."

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

More

"‘You know, you’re a little complicated after all.”
“Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really - I’m just a - I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.’"

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night

Live

"You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance and write poems and suffer and understand, for all of that is life."

— J. Krishnamurti

Light

"But you know happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, when one only remembers to turn on the light."

— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Now

You will never meet anyone who has done something great who waited for permission to do something great.

http://www.iwrotethisforyou.me/

*

I wondered if every road was connected to every other road. I wondered if I touched it, if maybe somewhere, you would know.

http://www.iwrotethisforyou.me/

Immortal

"The human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. that death doesn’t just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed."

— Mitch Albom

Authentic

"The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere."

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Yourself

"If we never met again in our lives I should feel that somehow the whole adventure of existence was justified by my having met you."

— Lewis Mumford

Choice

"Let will be that reason."

Fire

there is in every true woman's heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up and beams and BLAZES in the dark hour of adversity.

washington irving

Love

i love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

pablo neruda

Style

"It is not money that makes you well dressed, it is understanding." -Christian Dior

Sophie Rose

I HEAR I'TS BEAUTIFUL WHERE YOU'RE GOING. WITH A SHINING OF LIGHT AND A CIRCLE OF BLUE. I'TS COLD TODAY AND IT'S BEEN SNOWING. I THINK THE WORLD SHOULD WALK WITH YOU. TAKE MY HAND AND SHOW ME WHERE YOU'RE GOING NOW WE WALK AWAY WALK AWAY... SHOW ME WHERE YOU ARE AND WALK WITH ME.. THE YEARS WILL PASS AND ILL BE WAITING FOR WHEN YOU'LL WALK RIGHT THROUGH MY DOOR......

Radiate

“There is one responsibility which no man can evade and that responsibility is personal influence. Man's unconscious influence, unconscious influence, the silent, subtle radiation of his personality. The effect of his words and acts. These are tremendous. Every moment of life he is changing to a degree the life of the whole world. Every man has an atmosphere which is affecting every other. Man cannot escape for one moment from this radiation of his character. This constantly weakening of strengthening of others. He cannot evade the responsibility by saying it is an unconscious influence. He can select the qualities he would permit to be radiated. He can cultivate sweetness, calmness, trust, generosity, truth, justice, loyalty, nobility, and make them vitally active in his character. By these qualities he will constantly affect the world. This radiation to which I [4] refer comes from what a person really is, not from what he pretends to be. Every man by his mere living is radiating sympathy, sorrow, or morbidness, cynicism, or happiness or hope, or any other hundred qualities. Life is a state of radiation and absorption. To exist is to radiate. To exist is to be the recipient of radiation.” David O. McKay (http://education.byu.edu/mckay/48apr27.html )

Heal

HEALING MAY NOT BE SO MUCH ABOUT GETTING BETTER, AS ABOUT LETTING GO OF EVERYTHING THAT ISN'T YOU - ALL OF THE EXPECTATIONS, ALL OF THE BELIEFS - AND BECOMING WHO YOU ARE. -- RACHEL NAOMI REMEN

Life

Want

Change

Water

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs."

Still

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” –Franz Kafka

Yourself

LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

Friends