Quotes by Speakers - Page 153

Moving forward implies MOTION when in all actuality it may be simply standing STILL and seeing the salvation of the Lord.
John Paul Warren
It's not about what I SEE for our future, or humanity; It's about what I DO for our future and humanity.
Steve Maraboli
YOU are your love of a lifetime.
Steve Maraboli
When you give appreciation IN ORDER TO get something– it's manipulation and people can sense it. Appreciate genuinely.
Marilyn Suttle
Perfection is not a destination it's a never-ending process...Enjoy!
Jim Bouchard
Optimists move through life with a happy exterior. What happens on the inside shows up on the outside.
Marilyn Suttle
Life is now in session. Are you present?
JOHN C MAXWELL
When you depersonalize abrasive behavior and see it as a call for help you become a catalyst for the best kind of change.
Marilyn Suttle
So the next time you see a person with a compose face and a soft voice, remember that inside her mind she might be solving an equation, composing a sonnet, designing a hat. She might, that is, be deploying the powers of quiet.
Susan Cain
Make your life like toilet paper. Long and usefull.
Wolfgang Riebe
Recognize that throughout this beautiful day,you have an incredible amount of opportunities to move your life into the direction you want it to go.
Steve Maraboli
Notice the difference between being in control and needing control.
Marilyn Suttle
Our wounds can so easily turn us into people we don't want to be, and we hardly see it happening. Protect your heart, love yourself, and be with people who love and care for you.
Sue Fitzmaurice
Play to win, not "not to lose".
Dondi Scumaci
No one rises above who he or she has been without first having fallen down. The best time - in fact, the only time - to make a real change in your life is in the moment of seeing the need for it. He who hesitates always gets lost in the hundred reasons why tomorrow is a better day to get started.
Guy Finley
I’m not out to compete with any one, I’m here to complete, by encouraging and inspiring souls through a text at a time
Bernard Kelvin Clive
One does not surrender a life in an instant. That which is lifelong can only be surrendered in a lifetime.
Elisabeth Elliot
They may try to stop you by their words and deeds, but like air you will rise above it all. You are unstoppable
Bernard Kelvin Clive
A Manifesto for Introverts1. There's a word for 'people who are in their heads too much': thinkers.2. Solitude is a catalyst for innovation.3. The next generation of quiet kids can and must be raised to know their own strengths.4. Sometimes it helps to be a pretend extrovert. There will always be time to be quiet later.5. But in the long run, staying true to your temperament is key to finding work you love and work that matters.6. One genuine new relationship is worth a fistful of business cards.7. It's OK to cross the street to avoid making small talk.8. 'Quiet leadership' is not an oxymoron.9. Love is essential; gregariousness is optional.10. 'In a gentle way, you can shake the world.' -Mahatma Gandhi
Susan Cain
Love is forgiving, accepting, moving on, embracing, and all encompassing. And if you’re not doing that for yourself, you cannot do that with anyone else.
Steve Maraboli
Never curse a fall. The ground is where humility lives.
Yasmin Mogahed
The soil in which the meditative mind can begin is the soil of everyday life, the strife, the pain, and the fleeting joy. It must begin there, and bring order, and from there move endlessly. But if you are concerned only with making order, then that very order will bring about its own limitation, and the mind will be its prisoner. In all this movement you must somehow begin from the other end, from the other shore, and not always be concerned with this shore or how to cross the river. You must take a plunge into the water, not knowing how to swim. And the beauty of meditation is that you never know where you are, where you are going, what the end is.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Moods can be contagious. Don't catch or spread a bad mood.
Marilyn Suttle
Be like a postage stamp. Stick to it until you get there
Bob Proctor
We are at our most powerful the moment we no longer need to be powerful.
Eric Micha'el Leventhal
The quality of a man's life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field of endeavor.
Vince Lombardi Jr.
It turned out this man worked for the Dalai Lama. And she said gently-that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once, it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born-and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.
Anne Lamott
The greatest personal limitation is to be found not in the things you want to do and can't, but in the things you've never considered doing.
Richard Bandler
The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan W. Watts
Writing takes a combination of sophistication and innocence; it takes conscience, our belief that something is beautiful because it is right.
Anne Lamott
Writers seek to create order out of the chaos of everyday life, and to extract meaning from both the tragic and the mundane
Hope Edelman
Perfectionism means that you try not to leave so much mess to clean up. But clutter and mess show us that life is being lived.
Anne Lamott
I know that life is busy and hard and that there's crushing pressure to just settle down and get a real job and khaki pants and a haircut. But don't. Please don't. Please keep believing that life can be better, brighter, broader because of the art that you make. Please keep demonstrating the courage that it takes to swim upstream in a world that prefers putting away for retirement to putting pen to paper, that chooses practicality over poetry, that values you more for going to the gym than going to the deepest places in your soul. Please keep making your art for people like me, people who need the magic and imagination and honesty of great art to make the day-to-day world a little more bearable.
Shauna Niequist
Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.
Christina Baldwin
I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.
Anne Lamott
I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do---the actual act of writing---turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
Anne Lamott
But how?" my students ask. "How do you actually do it?" You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively. So you sit down at, say, nine every morning, or ten every night. You put a piece of paper in the typewriter, or you turn on the computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so. You begin rocking, just a little at first, and then like a huge autistic child. You look at the ceiling, and over at the clock, yawn, and stare at the paper again. Then, with your fingers poised on the keyboard, you squint at an image that is forming in your mind -- a scene, a locale, a character, whatever -- and you try to quiet your mind so you can hear what that landscape or character has to say above the other voices in your mind.
Anne Lamott
I want people who write to crash or dive below the surface, where life is so cold and confusing and hard to see.Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth.
Anne Lamott
Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it is time to kick in.
Anne Lamott
You can't judge a book by it's cover but you can sure sell a bunch of books if you have a good one.
Jayce O'Neal
Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
Anne Lamott
I writeNotFor the sake of gloryNot For the sake of fameNotFor the sake of successBut for the sake of my soul
Beth Nimmo
If your wife locks you out of the house, you don't have a problem with your door.
Anne Lamott
The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out.
Anne Lamott
The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead. I don't mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising. Things could not have been more odd and frightening in the Middle Ages. But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes. And this is another reason to write: people need us, to mirror for them and for each other without distortion-not to look around and say, 'Look at yourselves, you idiots!,' but to say, 'This is who we are.
Anne Lamott
Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.
Anne Lamott
The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given- that you are not in a productive creative period- you free yourself to begin filling up again.
Anne Lamott
Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you're conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.
Anne Lamott
I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.
Anne Lamott
Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
Anne Lamott
Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.
Anne Lamott
If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.
Anne Lamott
Remember that you own what happened to you. If your childhood was less than ideal, you may have been raised thinking that if you told the truth about what really went on in your family, a long bony white finger would emerge from a cloud and point to you, while a chilling voice thundered, "We *told* you not to tell." But that was then. Just put down on paper everything you can remember now about your parents and siblings and relatives and neighbors, and we will deal with libel later on.
Anne Lamott
Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.
Anne Lamott
You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won't really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we'll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won't wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be.
Anne Lamott
Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.
Alan W. Watts
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
Anne Lamott
Faith is a powerful tool bestowed on all men by God. However, faith cannot be seen but it can be felt. It cannot be touched but it touches all things. Faith cannot be surmounted but it overcomes all challenges; fear, poverty, heartache, disappointments, pains, difficulties and trials disappear by faith.
Sesan Kareem
You can run from Tokyo to Toronto, from Cairo to Bamako and end your sojourn in Okokomaiko in order to proffer solutions to your life’s challenges, but this will not guarantee you victory. You can decide to be bitter and ignore anything that suggests victory but this will not amount to an ounce of success. However, if you have faith in God; put your trust in Him and rely solely on Him. I assure you that He will take care of your needs and make you a shining light among your peers.
Sesan Kareem
God wants you to bring glory to his name. He desires you to challenge others with your story becoming glory. He aspires to use your exemplary life as a model to today’s and tomorrow’s generations. Yes, He loves to use your life as a beacon of light and a roadmap to achieve extraordinary feat to others. But all He needs you to do is to be faithful with your faith.
Sesan Kareem