System

"No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it. It must be organized in such a way as to be able to get along under a leadership composed of average human beings."
-Peter Drucker

Talent

"A great deal of talent is lost in the world for want of a little courage...The fact is that to do anything in the world worth doing, we must stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can."
-Sydney Smith

Colors

"As a child you were taught to see the world in geometric shapes and primary colors. It was as if the adults needed to equip you with more accomplishments. ("She knows her colors!") Then you had to spend the rest of your life unlearning them. That was life, as near as she could tell. Making everything simple for the first ten years, which in turn made everything more complicated for the subsequent seventy."
-Ann Brashares  Girls in Pants

Change

"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another."
-Anatole Frances

Friends

"In friendship… we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years difference in the dates of our birth, a few more miles between certain houses, a choice of one university instead of another… —any one of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly, no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “You have not chosen me,but I have chosen you,” can truly be said to every group of Christian friends, “You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.” The friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauty of others."-C.S.Lewis

Height

"You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but on has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know."

~Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue

Beliefs

"A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition."
-Jose Bergamin

Beauty

"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."
-Roald Dahl

Friends

 "You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you."
-Dale Carnegie

Literature

"The study of literature has had what I believe to be a salutary effect on my own character, making me less self-conscious and vain, more empathic and imaginative, maybe even kinder. Perhaps it's an oversimplification, but as I've gotten older I've come to wonder if maybe this is what reading all those great books is really for - to engender and promote charity. Sure, literature entertains and instructs, but to what end, of not compassion?"
-Richard Russo 2007 edition of The Best American Short Stories

Truth

"You can't get to truth by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don't have much truth to express unless we have gong into these rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not to go into."
-Anne Lamont Bird by Bird

Speak

"I realized then and know now that the reason God wanted me to speak wasn't because he had grand plans for me to become a rich and famous author. No, God wanted me to speak for the same rason that I believe he wants all of us to speak, in whatever way that "speaking" expresses itself in our lives: because our world needs truth, and honesty, and beauty, and when human beings speak and other human beings listen, we all devlop charity. And God is a big fan of charity."
-Anglea Hallstrom

Birds

"Humans express their personalities through fashion. There are those who go along with the grain and those whose roots grow outside the field. Wherever we fall on the fashion spectrum, we are all beautiful creatures. We are all pretty birds."
Tamu McPherson

Unknown

"It has been well said that no man ever sank under the burden of the day. It's when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear. Never load yourselves so, my friends. If you find yourselves so loaded, at least remember this: it is your own doing, not God's. He begs you to leave the future to Him and to mind to the present"

Character

"Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are." ~ John Wooden

Battle

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting." -ee cummings

Speed

“The faster we live, the less emotion is left in the world. The slower we live, the deeper we feel the world around us.”

- Stanko Abadžic

Work

“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.”  -Jessica Hische

Vulnerable

"Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable." -C.S. Lewis