Brick Walls

"Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want something badly enough. They are there to keep out the other people."
-Randy Pausch (1960-2008)

Art

"Ars Gratia Artis" = "Art for Art's Sake"

Tracks

"Signora, between Austria and Italy, there is a section of the Alps called the Semmering. It is an impossibly steep, very high part of the mountains. They built a train track over these Alps to connect Vienna and Venice. They built these tracks even before there was a train in existence that could make the trip. They built it because they knew some day, the train would come."
-Under the Tuscan Sun

See

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see."
Edward Degas

Pain

"Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.
-Lance Armstrong

Surprise

"There's no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved."
-Charles Morgan

Stretch

"Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Wellspring

"Your heart is the most important leadership tool you have. It is not your experience, knowledge, or skills. It is your heart that matters most of all." -Michael Hyatt

Freedom

"Most people are not really free. They are confined by the 
niche in the world that they carve out for themselves. They 
limit themselves to fewer possibilities by the narrowness of 
their vision." 
--V. S. Naipaul, 2001 Nobel Laureate

Karma

“How people treat you is their karma. How you react is yours.”
Wayne Dyer

Questions

"It's not that I'm so smart. But I stay with the questions much longer."
-Albert Einstein

Try

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the sould be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved."
-Helen Keller

Future

"There’s a line by the Italian writer Carlo Levi that I think is apt here: 'The future has an ancient heart.' I love it because it expresses with such grace and economy what is certainly true—that who we become is born of who we most primitively are; that we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives. I think it’s a useful sentiment for you to reflect upon now, sweet peas, at this moment when the future likely feels the opposite of ancient, when instead it feels like a Lamborghini that’s pulled up to the curb while every voice around demands you get in and drive.
-Sugar

Energy

 "Energy and persistence alter all things."
-Benjamin Franklin

Do it

"You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them."
-Michael Jordan

Ripening

"being an artist means; not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. it does come. but it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. i learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain i am grateful for: patience is everything!"

rainer maria rilke, letters to a young poet

True

"one could, in a few lines, show the soul. one could, if one had the courage. for the world was full of feelings, and there was so much to people that even weak lines of charcoal could enlighten and amaze--not because of what they were, but because of what they showed of the truth."

mark helprin, winter's tale

Enough

"Effort + the courage to show up = enough." 
-Brene Brown

pop

“I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don’t want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines, and sing out loud in the car with the windows open, and wear pink shoes, and stay up all night laughing, and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets, and throw parties, and eat ripe tomatoes, and read books so good they make me jump up and down.”

- Shauna Niequist

Scary

"Anything I've ever done that ultimately was worthwhile... initially scared me to death.
-Betty Bender

Write Again

"If you're going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow." - Louis L'Amour

Super Stories

"i have this idea for a world in which we all wear our stories stitched into superman capes unfurled behind us--emblems of humanity.

i just think it might make understanding and loving and listening to everyone else a little easier.

and, let's be honest, it'd be super fun." 

-Meg Fee