Quotes for May

"There is a time when we must firmly choose the course we will follow, or the relentless drift of events will make the decision for us." Herbert Prochnow

"Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks." Herodotus

"When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened." Winston Churchill

"The history of free men is never really written by chance but by choice; their choice!" Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself." Anna Quindlen

"It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped." Anthony Robbins

"The most dangerous thing in the world is to try to leap a chasm in two jumps." David Lloyd George

"Life's disappointments are harder to take when you don't know any swear words." Calvin & Hobbes

"Be willing to make decisions. That's the most important quality in a good leader. Don't fall victim to what I call the Ready-Aim-Aim-Aim Syndrome. You must be willing to fire." Boone T. Pickens

"In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it." George Bernard Shaw

"The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure." Sven Goran Eriksson

"The love that lasts the longest is the love that is never returned." William Somerset Maugham

"If you don't make mistakes, you aren't really trying." Coleman Hawkings

"To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom." Bertrand Russell

"Every crisis offers you extra desired power." William Moulton Marston

"When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on--series polygamy--until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter." Tom Robbins

"The human mind cannot create anything. It produces nothing until after having been fertilized by experience and meditation; its acquisitions are the gems of its production." Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon

"Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity." Thor-Heyerdahl

"It takes courage to lead a life. Any life." Erica Jong

"Love must be learned, and learned again; there is no end to it." Katherine Anne Porter

"Anybody with a little guts and the desire to apply himself can make it, he can make anything he wants to make of himself." Willie Shoemaker

"All of the significant battles are waged within the self." Sheldon Kopp

"Confidence is preparation. Everything else is beyond your control." Richard Kline

"If your imagination leads you to understand how quickly people grant your requests when those requests appeal to their self-interest, you can have practically anything you go after." Napoleon Hill

"All problems become smaller if you don't dodge them, but confront them." William F. Halsey

"Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Don't be afraid to let her into your heart and when your down, don't try to carry the whole world on your shoulders." Elton John

"Act boldly and unseen forces will come to your aid." Dorothea Brande

"Experience tells you what to do; confidence allows you to do it." Stan Smith

"I find we are growing serious, and then we are in great danger of being dull." William Congreve

"You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind." Mahatma Gandhi

"Love is what makes two people sit in the middle of a bench when there is plenty of room at both ends." Anonymous

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough." Mario Andretti

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

"The heart that truly loves never forgets." Proverb

"We have contributed, each in the time allotted us, our endeavors to render... a permanent blessing to our country." Thomas Jefferson

"Don't let the negativity given to you by the world disempower you. Instead give to yourself that which empowers you." Les Brown

"When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees." Joseph Joubert

"Blessed is the person who sees the need, recognizes the responsibility, and actively becomes the answer." William A. Ward

"Iron rusts from disuse; water loses its purity from stagnation ... even so does inaction sap the vigour of the mind." Leonardo da Vinci

"The first and the best victory is to conquer self." Plato

"I looked always outside of myself to see what I could make the world give me instead of looking within myself to see what was there." Belle Livingstone

"If we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and are patient in them, we shall end in certainties." Francis Bacon

"A contented mind is the greatest blessing a man can enjoy in this world." Joseph Addison

"It is not what you are called, but what you answer to." African Proverb

"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." Dale Carnegie

"One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do. The crossed arms work, the clasped hands act. The eyes upturned to Heaven are an act of creation." Victor Hugo

"You grow up the day you have your first real laugh -- at yourself." Ethel Barrymore

Do Nothing

I had to steal this from Courtney's blog. It's so apropos.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Do Nothing

This is a really hard one. It is hard because it is about cultivating a deep passivity in your emotional life - a tender calm that would probably be very detrimental to other aspects of your existence. So don't start thinking that doing nothing is about whiling away the hours sitting on your settee and eating bonbons. Doing nothing is not the same as being a lazy, useless bum. Doing nothing is about making a conscious decision to not accelerate the drama. It means not booking a flight to Morocco - because good sources have reported that there is no such thing as pain in Marrakesh - when you know you have neither the money nor the time to make this excursion. It means not calling various people in your life to threaten suicide when you know perfectly well that's not what's going to happen.

Doing nothing means calmly asking for help when you need it. Doing nothing is opting for the sweetness of stillness. It is about just sitting with your loneliness, making some effort to accept how bad you feel. It is about taking long, contemplative walks through the park, meeting girlfriends for tea and reading silly self-help books. It means checking out the horoscopes in Elle and Vogue and Marie Claire, and comparing them for common and inconsistent predictions. It is about not pursuing histrionics and hysteria, it is about knowing that only time and peace of mind will make things better.

And doing nothing is not just something you must try in the case of a broken heart. It is the operative rule with office altercations, screaming fights with your mother and unpleasant tiffs with friends and lovers. If you try to force a resolution to some situation that needs only to be left alone to diffuse, you are only going to worry a wound. In a perfect example of stuffy, sensible and unmistakably British wisdom, Dame Rose Macaulay once noted that, "It is a common delusion that you can make things better by talking about them."

So don't pick up the phone so that you can add one last word. Don't go running through the streets late at night, and ring your boyfriend's doorbell with a floral peace offering because you cannot bear the thought that he might never speak to you again. All this activity is simply unnecessary, tiresome and cloyingly manipulative.

I feel it is only right for me to confess here that learning to do nothing has pretty much saved my life. I feel a bit hypocritical telling anyone not to get drunk and drugged and disorderly, or not to go too far, because, God knows, at times that has been the story of my life. But it was exhausting and taxing and eventually enough became enough.

In the time I have wasted making matters worse, I could have easily raised six children. Without a father. Without even a nanny. So just believe me: don't do something about whatever crazy feelings are boxing in your head until you have first tried to just do nothing. You will be amazed to discover that feelings are not facts, and feelings can be trusted to go away. They always do.

taken from one of my favorite "feel better" books by Elizabeth Wurtzel...called "the secret of life" also previously published as "the bitches' rules" I found this chapter especially fitting for today ;)