The Finest Hour

I've never known a man worth his salt who in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn't appreciate the grind, the discipline... I firmly believe that any man's finest hour - this greatest fulfillment to all he holds dear - is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle, victorious.

- Vince Lombardi

The Beginning of Change

You don't have to change that much for it to make a great deal of difference. A few simple disciplines can have a major impact on how your life works out in the next 90 days, let alone in the next 12 months or the next 3 years.

- Jim Rohn

A Step Forward

We must move beyond tolerance, beyond acceptance, to celebration of our diversity. Only in celebration do we truly embrace the gifts we each are, and empower our own lives with the gifts of others.

- Jim Chandler

Challenge

Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.

- Peter Marshall

Who We Are

The soul is the same in all living creatures, although the body is different.

- Hippocrates, physician (460-c.377 BCE)

Focus

I endeavour to be wise when I cannot be merry, easy when I cannot be glad, content when I cannot be mended and patient when there be no redress.

- Elizabeth Montagu

Life

Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness and small obligations, given habitually, are what win and preserve the heart and secure comfort.

- Humphry Davy (1778-1829)

Strength

The weakest living creature, by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something; whereas the strongest, by dispersing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything.

- Thomas Carlyle

Love

Love that ends is the shadow of love; true love is without beginning or end.

- Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927)

The Stronger Base

A decision is made with the brain. A commitment is made with the heart. Therefore, a commitment is much deeper and more binding than a decision.

- Nido Qubein

The Highest Ethic

Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages.

- Thomas Edison

The Difference

Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't.

- Pete Seeger

Teachers

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.

- William Arthur Ward

Followers

Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.

- Christian Nevell Bovee

Moving Forward

No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.

- Brian Tracy

Mistakes

If you have made mistakes...there is always another chance for you...you may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.

- Mary Pickford

The Greatest Masterpiece

To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.

- Michel Eyquem de Montaign

Character

Character is always lost when a high ideal is sacrificed on the alters of conformity and popularity.

- William Arthur Ward

Security

The search for static security - in the law and elsewhere - is misguided. The fact is security can only be achieved through constant change, adapting old ideas that have outlived their usefulness to current facts.

- William O. Douglas

Success

Success has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It's what you do for others.

- Danny Thomas

Fullness of Life

Everything that is full of life loves change, for the characteristic of life is movement toward a new goal, and urges toward new pleasures.

- Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979)

Life Stages

You know your children have grown up when they stop asking you where they came from and refuse to tell you where they are going.

- Jim McQain

Responsibility

One of the annoying things about believing in free choice and individual responsibility is the difficulty of finding somebody to blame your problems on. And when you do find somebody, it's remarkable how often his picture turns up on your driver's license.

- P.J. O'Rourke

Environment

We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.

-William R. Inge, clergyman, scholar, and author (1860-1954)

Possibilities

Men are often capable of greater things than they perform. They are sent into the world with bills of credit, and seldom draw to their full extent.

- Horace Walpole, novelist and essayist (1717-1797)

Happiness

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

- Benjamin Disraeli

Success

You don't have to be a fantastic hero to do certain things - to compete. You can be just an ordinary chap, sufficiently motivated to reach challenging goals.

- Sir Edmund Hillary

A Daily Gift

One ought every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Freedom

Freedom's enemies are waste, lethargy, indifference, immorality, and the insidious attitude of something for nothing.

- William Arthur Ward

New Ideas

A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.

- William James (1842-1920)

Work

The man who does not work for the love of work but only for money is not likely to make money nor find much fun in life.

- Charles M. Schwab

Struggle

To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals - this alone is worth the struggle.

- Sir William Osler

Life Value

When you're in your 90s and looking back, it's not going to be how much money you made or how many awards you've won. It's really "What did you stand for? Did you make a positive difference for people?"

- Elizabeth Dole

Instinct

The instinct of a man is to pursue everything that flies from him, and to fly from all that pursue him.

- Voltaire

Life

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

- Agatha Christie

Identity

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Connections

Every man, however obscure, however far removed from the general recognition, is one of a group of men impressible for good, and impressible for evil, and it is in the nature of things that he cannot really improve himself without in some degree improving other men.

- Charles Dickens

Wisdom

True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.

- Akhenaton

Leadership

To act and act wisely when the time for action comes, to wait and wait patiently when it is time for repose, put man in accord with the rising and falling tides (of affairs), so that with nature and law at his back, and truth and beneficence as his beacon light, he may accomplish wonders. Ignorance of this law results in periods of unreasoning enthusiasm on the one hand, and depression on the other. Man thus becomes the victim of the tides when he should be their master.

- Helena Petrova Blavatsky

Perspective

Can there be anything worse than blindness? Oh yes...for the most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.

- Helen Keller

Understanding

Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him.

- Erich Fromm

The source of greatness

Buried deep within each of us is a spark of greatness, a spark than can be fanned into flames of passion and achievement. That spark is not outside of you it is born deep within you.

- James A. Ray

Engagement

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in some sort becoming a tree; or draw a child by studying the outlines of its form merely...but by watching for a time his motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature and can then draw him.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Search for Truth

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

- Rene Descartes

Decisions

It isn't really important to decide when you are very young just exactly what you want to become when you grow up. It is much more important to decide on the way you want to live.

- Golda Meir (1898-1978) Israeli Prime Minister

In Whose Image?

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.

- Voltaire

Paradox

The greater the happiness, the greater could be the sadness. The more exciting the achievement, the more devastating could be the failure. These are the chances we take when we reach for something worthwhile.

- Freddie Mitman

Changing History

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

- Robert F. Kennedy

The next step

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads.

- Erica Jong

Progress

Progress, however, of the best kind, is comparatively slow. Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step.

- Samuel Smiles

Trivia

Between falsehood and useless truth there is little difference. As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which cannot apply will make no man wise.

- Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

What is Valued

What people get admired and appreciated for in community are their soft skills: their sense of humour and timing, their ability to listen, their courage and honesty, their capacity for empathy.

- M. Scott Peck

Perspective

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks.

- Phillips Brooks

Understanding

If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.

- Vincent Van Gogh

Value

No matter what age you are, or what your circumstances might be, you are special, and you still have something unique to offer. Your life, because of who you are, has meaning.

- Barbara De Angelis

Influence

One life stamps and influences another, which in turn stamps and influences another, on and on until the soul of human experience breathes on in generations we'll never even meet.

- Mary Kay Blakely

Doubting Oneself

A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself. He makes his failure certain by himself being the first person to be convinced of it.

- Alexandre Dumas

Understanding

There are some things you don't have to know how it works - only that it works. While some people are studying the roots, others are picking the fruit. It just depends on which end of this you want to get in on.

- Jim Rohn

Which side of the Ledger?

The Bible gives us a list of human stories on both sides of the ledger. One list of human stories is used as examples - do what these people did. Another list of human stories is used as warnings - don't do what these people did. So if your story ever gets in one of these books, make sure they use it as an example, not a warning.

- Jim Rohn

Perspective

The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.

- Maurice Maeterlinck, poet, dramatist, and Nobel laureate (1862-1949)

Creativity

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

- Charles Mingus

Giving Honour

If you roll out the red carpet for a billionaire, they won't even notice it. If you roll out the red carpet for a millionaire, they expect it. If you roll out the red carpet for a thousandaire, they appreciate it. If you roll out the red carpet for a hundredaire, they tell everybody they know.

- Patricia Fripp

Identity

How different our lives are when we really know what is deeply important to us, and keeping that picture in mind, we manage ourselves each day to be and to do what really matters most.

- Stephen Covey

Journeys

The journey to discovery of your strength and your beauty begins as a tiny seed nurtured through the droughts and the harsh winters struggling towards the light to form a single bud which slowly opens its petals to reveal its beauty for the world to gaze in wonder.

Perspective

We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.

- Charles Swindoll

Choices

Keep in mind that you are always saying 'no' to something. If it isn't to the apparent, urgent things in your life, it is probably to the most fundamental, highly important things. Even when the urgent is good, the good can keep you from your best, keep you from your unique contribution, if you let it.

- Stephen Covey

Putting things in order

To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right.

- Confucius

Options

It is better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than to have an opportunity and not be prepared.

- Whitney Young, Jr.

The Cost of Quitting

Have you ever considered the cost of quitting? For a real eye opener...ask Thomas Edison...Steve Jobs...Michael Jordan...or Jim Carrey...ask them how much it would have cost them if they had quit...what about you?

- Doug Firebaugh

Your greatest asset

Your decision to be, have and do something out of ordinary entails facing difficulties that are out of the ordinary as well. Sometimes your greatest asset is simply your ability to stay with it longer than anyone else.

- Brian Tracy

Integrity

Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be, because sooner or later, if you are posing, you will forget the pose, and then where are you?

- Fanny Brice

Greatness

I believe that the first test of a truly great man is his humility. I do not mean by humility, doubt of his own powers. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not in them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.

- John Ruskin (1819-1900)

The value of boredom

You have to allow a certain amount of time in which you are doing nothing in order to have things occur to you, to let your mind think.

- Mortimer Adler

A True Friend

A true friend knows your weaknesses but shows you your strengths; feels your fears but fortifies your faith; sees your anxieties but frees your spirit; recognizes your disabilities but emphasizes your possibilities.

- William Arthur Ward

Mistakes

When you make a mistake or get ridiculed or rejected, look at mistakes as learning experiences, and ridicule as ignorance...Look at rejection as part of one performance, not as a turn down of the performer.

- Denis Waitley

Lest We Forget

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children

- Jimmy Carter

Democracy's Ideal

My idea of democracy is that the weak is improved as much as the strong. Democracy is an impossible thing unless the power is shared by all.

- Mahatma Gandhi

Character

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

- Helen Keller

Capacity

We have not wings we cannot soar; but, we have feet to scale and climb, by slow degrees, by more and more, the cloudy summits of our time.

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Wonder

People travel to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea , at the long courses of rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.

- Saint Augustine

Love of Neighbour

Love of our neighbour consists of three things: to desire the greater good of everyone, to do what good we can when we can, and to bear, excuse and hide others' faults.

- St. John Vianney

Beginnings

A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit

- D. Elton Trueblood

Life

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

- George Bernard Shaw

Money

Money, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it. An evidence of culture and a passport to polite society.

- Ambrose Bierce, writer (1842-1914)

Necessity is the mother of...

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

- William Pitt, British prime-minister (1759-1806)

My Challenge

I expect to pass through this life but once. If, therefore there can be any kindness I can show or any good thing I can do for any fellow being let me do it now...as I shall not pass this way again.

- William Penn

It is time...

Every now and then, somewhere, some place, sometime, you are going to have to plant your feet, stand firm, and make a point about who you are and what you believe in. When that time comes, Pat, you simply have to do it.

- Lee Riley (father of Pat Riley, NBA coach)

An Epitaph

Someone once asked me what I want on my epitaph when I pass away. Just the words - 'I tried.' That's what this game of life is all about. Trying. There's the tryers, the criers, and the liars.

- Mickey Rooney

Growth and change

The 'Inside-Out' approach to personal and self; even more fundamentally, to start with the most inside part of self - with your paradigms, your character, and your motives. The inside-out approach says that private victories precede public victories, that making and keeping promises to ourselves precedes making and keeping promises to others. It says it is futile to put personality ahead of character, to try to improve relationships with others before improving ourselves.

- Stephen Covey

Change

Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For, indeed, that's all who ever have.

- Margaret Mead (1901-1978)

Solitude

Solitude, though it may be silent as light, is like light, the mightiest of agencies; for solitude is essential to man. All men come into this world alone; all leave it alone.

- Thomas De Quincey, writer (1785-1859)

Tragedy or...

Unfortunate events, though potentially a source of anger and despair, have equal potential to be a source of spiritual growth. Whether or not this is the outcome depends on our response

- The Dalai Lama

Joy and struggle

Jesus calls us to recognise that gladness and sadness are never separate, that joy and sorrow really belong together, and that mourning and dancing are part of the same movement. That is why Jesus calls us to be grateful for every moment that we have lived and to claim our unique journey as God’s way to mould our hearts to greater conformity with God’s own. The cross is the main symbol of our faith, and it invites us to find hope where we see pain and to reaffirm the resurrection where we see death. The call to be grateful is a call to trust that every moment of our life can be claimed as the way of the cross that leads us to new life

- Henri Nouwen

A different future

“They have taken the Lord out of his tomb and we do not know where they have laid him,” Mary Magdalene said, and we can say this with her in times of doubt and questioning. Then there’s that last glorious chapter of Saint Luke, where Jesus says, “Why are you so perturbed? Why do questions arise in your minds? Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself. Touch me and see.”
Yes, sometimes it is most surely an exercise of faith for us to see Christ, especially in each other. But it is through such exercise that we grow, and the joy of our calling assures us we are on the right path. Most certainly, it is easier to believe now that the sun warms us, and we know that buds will appear on the sycamore trees in the wasteland across the street, that life will spring out of the dull clods of that littered park. There are wars and rumors of war, poverty and plague, hunger and pain. Still, the sap is rising, again there is the resurrection of spring, God’s continuing promise to us that he is with us always, with his comfort and joy, if we will only ask

- Dorothy Day

Love in the abstract?

It is not love in the abstract that counts. Men have loved a cause as they have loved a woman. They have loved the brotherhood, the workers, the poor, the oppressed – but they have not loved man; they have not loved the least of these. They have not loved “personally.” It is hard to love. It is the hardest thing in the world, naturally speaking. Have you ever read Tolstoy’s Resurrection? He tells of political prisoners in a long prison train, enduring chains and persecution for the love of their brothers, ignoring those same brothers on the long trek to Siberia. It is never the brothers right next to us, but the brothers in the abstract that are easy to love

- Dorothy Day

Resurrection

We pay more attention to dying than to death. We’re more concerned to get over the act of dying than to overcome death. Socrates mastered the art of dying; Christ overcame death as the last enemy. There is a real difference between the two things; the one is within the scope of human possibilities, the other means resurrection

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Salvation begins...

How easy it is to denounce structural injustice, institutionalised violence, social sin! And it is true, this sin is everywhere, but where are the roots of this social sin? In the heart of every human being. Present-day society is a sort of anonymous world in which no one is willing to admit guilt, and everyone is responsible. We are all sinners, and we have all contributed to this massive crime and violence in our country. Salvation begins with the human person, with human dignity, with saving every person from sin

- Oscar Romero

The Greatest Gift

Surrendering to the will of Jesus means becoming one with him and with one another. Jesus fought so hard to surrender his will to the Father’s that he sweated drops of blood. Evil powers surrounded him and tried to cause his downfall, but he remained faithful: his attitude was “Thy will, not my will” (Luke 22:42). This should be our attitude, too, in all questions, even if we are persecuted for our faith. Whatever happens, imprisonment or even death, we should say, “Thy will, not my will.”

- J. Heinrich Arnold

People of the Heart

People with intellectual disabilities are not able to assume important roles of power and of efficacy. They are essentially people of the heart. When they meet others they do not have a hidden agenda for power or for success. Their cry, their fundamental cry, is for a relationship, a meeting heart to heart. It is this meeting that awakens them, opens them up to life, and calls them forth to love in great simplicity, freedom and openness. When those ingrained in a culture of winning and of individual success really meet them, and enter into friendship with them, something amazing and wonderful happens. They too are opened up to love and even to God. They are changed at a very deep level. They are transformed and become more fundamentally human

- Jean Vanier, “More Important Than Winning”

God's Gifts

For God does not give us anything in order that we should enjoy its possession and rest content with it, nor has he ever done so. All the gifts which he has ever granted us in heaven or on earth were made solely in order to be able to give us the one gift, which is himself. With all other gifts he simply wants to prepare us for that gift which is himself. And all the works which God has ever performed in heaven or on earth served solely to perform the one work, that is to sanctify himself so that he can sanctify us. And so I tell you that we should learn to see God in all gifts and works, neither resting content with anything nor becoming attached to anything. For us there can be no attachment to a particular manner of behavior in this life, nor has this ever been right, however successful we may have been.

- Meister Eckhart