Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone
It’s all too easy to get stuck o the easy stuff. But if we want to move forward, we have to push ourselves. Hard!
“To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.”
–Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (German Physicist and Satirist, 1742-1799)
Self Belief
“All men are the same except for their belief in their own selves, regardless of what others may think of them.”
–Miyamoto Musashi (a.k.a. Shinmen Takezō, a.k.a. Miyamoto Bennosuke, a.k.a Niten Dōraku, Japanese Samurai, Swordsman and Founder of the Hyōhō Niten Ichi-ryū or Niten-ryū style of Swordsmanship and Author of The Book of Five Rings (五輪書 Go Rin No Sho), on Strategy, Tactics, and Philosophy, c.1584-1645)
“The Book of Five Rings (Shambhala Classics)” (Miyamoto Musashi)
Contented Living
“Nine requisites for contented living:
- Health enough to make work a pleasure.
- Wealth enough to support your needs.
- Strength enough to battle with difficulties and overcome them.
- Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them.
- Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished.
- Charity enough to see some goods in your neighbor.
- Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others.
- Faith enough to make real the things of God.
- Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.”
–Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (German Poet, Playwright and Philosopher, 1749-1832)
Giving and Taking Advice
“Nothing is less sincere than our mode of asking and giving advice. He who asks seems to have a deference for the opinion of his friend, while he only aims to get approval of his own and make his friend responsible for his action. And he who gives advice repays the confidence supposed to be placed in him by a seemingly disinterested zeal, while he seldom means anything by his advice but his own interest or reputation.”
–François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld (French Writer and Moralist, 1613-1680)
Dream, Focus, Act and Simplify
“I learned this, at least by my experiment: that if you advance confidently in the direction of your dreams, and endeavor to live the life which you have imagined, you will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
You will put some things behind, you will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within you; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in your favor in a more liberal sense, and you will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty, nor weakness.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost, that is what they should be. Now put foundations under them.”
–Henry David Thoreau (American Essayist and Philosopher, 1817-1862)
Giving Back to the Web
“A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.”
–Albert Einstein (German-born American Physicist and, in 1921, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1879-1955)
Surrendering Desire
“The Bhagavad-Gita : Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War (Bantam Classics)” (Bantam Classics)
“When a man surrenders all desires that come to the heart, and by the grace of God finds the joy of God in himself, then his soul has indeed found peace.”
–Bhagavad Gita (Ancient and Sacred Sanskrit Poem Incorporated into the Mahabharata)
The Perception of Time
“In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life.”
–Marcel Proust (French Novelist, 1871-1922)
You Know You’re Getting Older When…
“You know you’re getting older when your supply of brain cells is finally down to a manageable size.”
“You know you’re getting older when you can live without sex but not without glasses.”
“You know you’re getting older when you begin every other sentence with, “Nowadays…”
“You know you’re getting older when the pharmacist has become your new best friend.”
“You know you’re getting older when you sing along with the elevator music.”
“You know you’re getting older when you look for your glasses for half-an-hour, then find they’ve been on your head all the time.”
“You know you’re getting older when the twinkle in your eye is only the reflection of the sun on your bifocals.”
“You know you’re getting older when you finally got your head together, now your body is falling apart.”
“You know you’re getting older when you read more and remember less.”
“You know you’re getting older when your investment in health insurance is finally beginning to pay off.”
Who Wins?
“Life’s battles don’t always go to the stronger or faster man. But sooner or later the man who wins, is the man who thinks he can.”
–Vince Lombardi (American Football Coach, 1913-1970)
