“I’ve done eight quotation books. I love doing those because people tell me doing one little quote, like this one from Lao Tzu, changes their life. Words are so powerful. So, it’s important to be aware of whatever words we’re feeding ourselves. I’m hoping these books of quotes will give some compost to people’s soil.”
Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.
Lao Tzu (604—531 BC), Chinese Taoist philosopher
and author of the Tao Te Ching
Allen Klein, author of
The Change-Your-Life Quote Book,
The Awe Factor: How a Little Bit of Wonder
Can Make a Big Difference in Your Life, and
Learning to Laugh When You Feel Like Crying:
Embracing Life After Loss
“It’s our job to transform the trials that we endured into the art that we produce. Should the occasion arise, I tell my students this is who you could be. This is how I used to be. I disclose I’m on a journey with you. And, if I can get from there to here, brother, sister, so can you. Let me show you how to do it.”
Most wretched men
Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
Julian and Maddalo: A Conversation (1818–19)
is a poem in 617 lines of enjambed heroic couplets
by Percy Bysshe Shelley published posthumously in 1824
Terry Real is a founder of Relational Life Therapy (RLT) and author of
Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship
“This poem embodies empathy for me. It embodies going to a field, I’ll meet you there, let’s start over again with each other, and let’s make this work this time. It’s a beautiful way to say come with me, here’s my hand, join me, we can be friends together, and work towards our connection. I believe that’s what we need most when there is discord in our personal relationships. And, we need it in the world because we’re putting humankind at great risk unless we learn how to go into this field and have empathy for one another. It is there we can have a beautiful change in humanity and in our personal lives. It is there where we can come together when there is discord or disagreement. It is there we can go into the field, start over again, look our opponent in the eyes, and begin to connect. This poem inspired me from the moment I read it years ago. Even today as I read it, it gives me goosebumps. That’s why I chose to put it at the beginning of my book, The Genius of Empathy, because it means so much to me. I also have the privilege of knowing Coleman, who’s an incredible translator and being. So, I want to honor him, Rumi, and the poem which so beautifully opens my heart over and over again.”
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
Jalaluddin Rumi (1207–1273) The Essential Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne
Judith Orloff, M.D. author of
The Genius of Empathy:
Practical Skills to Heal Your Sensitive Self,
Your Relationships & the World
“This quote moves me so deeply because it’s perplexing and I think the most powerful things are those things that make us have to stretch ourselves to really understand what is being said. This is an invitation to me is to remember that we are constantly transforming and changing and increasing our capacities. We are incapable of knowing who’s going to be on the other side of the courageous action, the risk, the leap that we’re asked to take in our lives. This quote invites me to do the things that are scary, that challenge me to know if I blunder, if I fall, if it’s really difficult, will be a bigger me on the other side than the me who takes the first step.”
Let me fall if I must fall. The one I will become will catch me.
Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760) Jewish mystic and healer,
regarded as the founder of Hasidic Judaism
Kristi Nelson, author of Wake Up Grateful:
The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted
“What is really radical is being willing to look at the magnitude and difficulty of the problems we face and still insist we can solve those problems. The people Alex Steffan refers to are happy to have us on the sidelines. I’m [suggesting that] people get off the sidelines and join in.”
Optimism is a political act. Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy for us to think nothing is going to get any better. In fact, these days, cynicism is obedience.
Alex Steffen: Futurist author of
Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century
Sam Daley-Harris, founder of RESULTS,
a citizen’s lobby and author of
Reclaiming Our Democracy:
Healing the Break Between People and Government
“If people could see themselves and each other and know the presence of both ours and others’ internal protectors that are operating, we would have a lot more compassion and respect for each other. If we could access the self with an X-ray vision and see past the protectors of our enemy, we would be able to have a level of connection with that person beyond the pain that drives them.”
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. . . . But this cannot be seen, only believed and ‘understood’ by a peculiar gift.
Thomas Merton, OCSO (1915-1968) Trappist monk
author of The Seven Storey Mountain
and Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
Richard C. Schwartz, Ph.D. Creator of the therapeutic model
Internal Family Systems [IFS].
And author of No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma,
and Restoring Wholeness with The Internal Family Systems Model
“I love this quote because, although there are 8 billion of us on this planet, being human is a relatively rare experience. There are 10 trillion ants on the planet. So, we 8 billion humans, with our capacity, our thumbs, and our ability to change things, have an obligation to give back to the world that is sustaining us. We aren’t meant to be here just as takers. We’re meant to be here to contribute in our own unique way. It’s not a competition. But it is, I think, a moral requirement for living a good life to make a contribution in some way shape or form to the world that is sustaining us.”
Activism is my rent for living on the planet.
Alice Walker is a Pulitzer Prize novelist
and author of The Color Purple
Omkari L. Williams is the author of Micro Activism:
How You Can Make A Difference In The World
(Without A Bullhorn): Small Actions Equal Big Results
“This quote is a vision for what human beings can be. It’s an expression of an egalitarianism, of the recognition that we really, in the deepest sense, are all equal despite apparent differences in abilities and in wealth and in status. Deep down we will some day be equal in full blown powers and then our general infancy will begin. We’re not human yet. We’re basically a bunch of predatory animals and always have been, Browning is saying. But when we realize our equality with others, then we will become fully human. Then man will be man. The first line of the poem says the current situation is the opposite, man is not man as yet. And until we achieve and recognize our deep equality, we won’t have grown beyond our general infancy. This quote connected with my intuition of equal dignity for all beings.”
In 1835, almost 200 years ago as part of his play Paracelsus, Robert Browning wrote:
“Man is not man as yet,
Nor shall I deem his object served, his end
Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth,
While only here and there a star dispels
the darkness. Here and there a towering mind
O’erlooks its prostrate fellows: when the host
is out at once to the despair of night,
When all mankind alike is perfected,
Equal and full-blown powers – then, not till then,
I say begins man’s general infancy.”
Robert Browning (1812-1889) Part 5. Paracelsus (1835)
Robert Fuller, Ph.D., Educator and
leader of the Dignity Movement,
author of Dignity for All:
How to Create a World without Rankism
and The Theory of Everybody
“I have posted that quote on my bathroom mirror. To me he’s saying wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, I can literally say the fact that I’m breathing is a miracle. The fact that I can smell is a miracle, the fact that flowers happen is a miracle. Even the fact that I’m going to go through another solstice is a miracle. These are all miracles. And appreciating these events prevents cynicism from creeping in. It’s an antidote to deluge of negativity in today’s world. Seeing that everything is a miracle, we’re all miracles is the right way to look at life.”
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) theoretical physicist
Marguerite Callaway is founder and CEO of the Callaway Leadership Institute
“This is a lovely description of what a well lived life is. You’ll have some pain in your life, you’ll have some pleasure. Hopefully those pleasures are more active than passive. But then you also have the appropriate attitude about life that life is only capable of bestowing so much upon you and that’s a really good reminder to be grateful.”
Happiness is not a life of rapture, but moments of such, in an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive, and having as the foundation of the whole, not to expect more from life than it is capable of bestowing.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) English philosopher
David Shapiro, co-author with Richard Leider of
Repacking Your Bags,The Power of Purpose and
Who Do You Want to Be When You Grow Old?
The Path of Purposeful Aging
