Quotes

As you may know, I have a wee obsession with quotes. Here are some of my favourites. Check back often as I will be updating this page frequently.

“Beauty is how you feel inside and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.” ~Sophia Loren

“You can do anything, but not everything.”~David Allen

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

“Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life- it gave me me. It provided me the time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped me step into the shape that had been waiting for me all my life.” ~ Molly Ivins, writer

“No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.” ~Unknown

“I think most of us become nicer as we get older, less judgmental, less full of certitude; life tends to knock a few corners of us as we go through. Cancer, divorce, teenagers, and other plagues make us give up on expecting ourselves – or life – to be perfect, which is a real relief.” ~Molly Ivins, writer

“I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” ~Mark Twain

“We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.“~Bill Vaughan

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.”~Ambrose Redmoon

“Bow to your highest and holiest teacher, yourself.” ~Yoga instructor

“Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you’ll be criticized anyway. You’ll be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

“The richest man is not he who has the most, but he who needs the least.”~Unknown Author

“One day my husband saw me take a green monster out of the fridge and drink it- he said “OMG you drink that stuff? I thought it was for cleaning!!” So needless to say -I have no tips on getting your hubby to drink one.”~Sminnick (OSG reader)

“Growth and self-transformation cannot be delegated.” ~ Lewis Mumford

“Whatever someone did to you in the past has no power over the present” ~Oprah

“I have created a life by stepping out of the box of people’s limitations. I call it zigging when others are zagging.” ~Oprah

“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”~ Ivan Turgenev

“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings’.” ~Unknown

 “Sometimes you have to make your own opportunities and that’s why I’m on TV. I wasn’t going to sit around anymore, waiting patiently for the damn phone to ring. I had to create my own place- I’ve always done that.” ~ Bette Midler

“Watch your thoughts; they become words.
Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.”~Lao-Tze

“When I was young, I thought confidence could be earned with perfection. Now I know that you don’t earn it; you claim it. And you do that by loving the wacky, endlessly optimistic, enthusiastically uninhibited free spirit that is the essence of style, the quintessence of heart, and uniquely YOU.” ~ Cecelie Berry, writer

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” ~John Quincy Adams

“It is part of the cure to wish to be cured.”~Normal Cousins

“Right now, make a list of what you admire about yourself- don’t stop until you’ve filled a page. Sit and relish each quality and accomplishment. When you remember how much you have to be proud of, you don’t need to envy others. Instead of wallowing in your jealousy, use your friends’ accomplishments as inspiration to pursue the life you want.” ~Phil McGraw

“Awake before the sun is risen, I call for my pen and papers and desk.” ~Christopher Smart

“It isn’t necessary to know exactly how your ideal life will look; you only have to know what feels better and what feels worse…Begin making choices based on what makes you feel freer and happier, rather than on how you think an ideal life should look. It’s the process of feeling our way toward happiness, not the realization of the Platonic ideal, that creates our best lives.” ~Martha Beck, life coach

“Many of us have spent a lifetime trying to be what we’re not, feeling lousy about ourselves when we fail, and sometimes when we succeed. We hide our differences when, by accepting and celebrating them, we could collaborate to make every effort more exciting, productive enjoyable, and powerful. Personally, I think we should start right now.” ~Martha Beck

“Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time, to figure out whether you like it or not.“~ Virgil Garnett Thomson

“People believe themselves to be dependent on what happens for their happiness. They don’t realize that what happens is the most unstable thing in the universe.” ~Eckhart Tolle, spiritual teacher

“You never know what you can do before you try it. And each time you go out, it’s an experiment, a work in progress. You learn an awful lot about yourself- about your limits, your endurance, your capabilities…I think that everybody has a certain level of fear. The question is how we manage it. And I have managed to be able to control it enough in order to do my job.” ~Christiane Amanpour, international correspondent

“What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.“~John Ruskin

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.” ~John Lubbock

“If it makes perfect sense to you, that means it won’t make any sense to anyone else.” ~DH

“If anything is worth trying at all, it’s worth trying at least 10 times.”
~Art Linkletter

“If you only do what you know you can do- you never do very much.” ~Tom Krause

“I have to exercise in the morning before my brain figures out what I’m doing.” ~Marsha Doble

My Favourite Eat Pray Love Quotes:

Quote 1:

“For years, I’d wished I could speak Italian- a language I find more beautiful than roses- but I could never make the practical justification for studying it…What was I going to do with Italian? It’s not like I was going to move there. It would be more practical to learn how to play the accordion. But why must everything have a practical application? I’d been such a diligent soldier for years- working, producing, never missing a deadline, etc. Is this lifetime supposed to be only about duty?…It’s not like I was saying at age 32, ‘I want to become the principal ballerina for the NYC ballet.” Studying a language is something you can actually do. So I signed up for classes at one of those continuing education places. My friends thought this was hilarious…But I loved it.” [Discussion found here]

Quote 2:

“It was in a bathtub back in New York, reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary, that I first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn’t have picked me out from a police line-up. But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt- this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.I came to Italy pinched and thin. I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don’t know fully what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late- through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures- into somebody more intact. The easiest, most fundamentally human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist more now than I did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I will leave with the hope and the expansion of one person- the magnification of one life- is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody’s but my own.” pp. 115 [Discussion found here]

Quote 3:

“She writes: “This is what I find myself writing to myself on the page: ‘I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long. I will stay with you…There is nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.’Tonight, this strange interior gesture of friendship- the lending of a hand from me to myself- reminds me of something that happened to me in New York City. I walked into an office building and dashed into the elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glimpse of myself in the mirror. In that moment my brain did an odd thing- it fired off this split-second message: ‘Hey! You know her! That’s a friend of yours!” And I actually ran forward toward my own reflection with a smile, ready to welcome that girl whose name I had lost but whose face was so familiar. In a flash instant, of course, I realized my mistake and laughed in embarrassment at my almost doglike confusion over how a mirror works. But for some reason that incident comes to mind again tonight during my sadness in Rome and I find myself writing this comforting reminder at the bottom of the page: Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.” pp. 54 [Discussion found here]

Quote 4:

Elizabeth says: “There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under my jurisdiction…I can select what I eat and read and study. I can choose how I’m going to to view unfortunate circumstances in my life- whether I will see them as curses or opportunities (and on the occasions when I can’t rise  to the most optimistic viewpoint, because I’m feeling too damn sorry for myself, I can choose to keep trying to change my outlook). I can choose my words and the tone of my voice in which I speak to others.

And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.

This last concept is a radically new idea for me. Richard from Texas brought it to my attention recently when I was complaining about my inability to stop brooding. He said, ‘Groceries, you need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you’re gonna wear everyday. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you can’t learn to master your thinking, you’re in deep trouble forever.”

On first glance, this seems a nearly impossible task. Control your thoughts? Instead of the other way around? But imagine if you could? This is not about repression or denial. Repression and denial set up elaborate games to pretend that negative thoughts and feeling are not occurring. What Richard is talking about is instead admitting to the existence of negative thoughts, understanding where they come from and why they arrived, and then- with great forgiveness and fortitude – dismissing them. This is a practice that fits hand in glove with any psychological work you do during therapy.

It’s a sacrifice to let them go of course. It’s a loss of old habits, comforting old grudges and familiar vignettes. Of course, this all takes practice and effort. It’s not a teaching that you can hear once and then expect to master it immediately. It’s constant vigilance and I want to do it. I need to do it for my strength.

So I’ve started being vigilant about watching my thoughts all day, and monitoring them. I repeat this vow about 700 times a day: “I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore.” [p. 177-179] [Discussion found here]