"If you demand perfectin of yourself, you'll seldom achieve it. Fear of making a mistake is the biggest single cause of making one. Instead of pushing for perfection, relax and pursue excellence."

--Bud Winter, Track Coach

"Love doesn't make the world go round, love is what makes the ride worthwhile."
--Elizabeth Browning

"Love as hard as you can."
--Tricia Lee

"I'm through accepting limits
'Cuz someone says they're so
Some things I cannot change
But 'till I try, I'll never know
Too long I've been afraid of
Losing love - I guess I have lost
Well, if that's love
It comes at much too high a cost
I'd sooner buy
Defying gravity
Kiss me goodbye
I'm defying gravity
And you can't pull me down... "
-- Elphaba, Wicked - Defying Gravity

"To finish first, you must first finish."
--Rick Mears

"It is good to have an end to journey towards - but it is the journey that matters, in the end."
--Ursula K. Leguin

"Slow down, find the gap between thoughts about the past and the future, and discover the loveliness of an ordinary moment."
--Christina Feldman, Yoga Journal

"... hurrying [has] less to do with how fast I moved and more to do with my agitation and preoccupation with being somewhere I was not"
--Christina Feldman, Yoga Journal

"Whether you think you can, or you think you can't. You are right."
--Henry Ford

"Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned"
--Mark Twain

"The greatest crime in the world is not developing your potential. When you do what you do best, you are helping not only yourself, but the world."
--Roger Williams

"Inside the snow globe on my father's desk, there was a penguin wearing a red-and-white-striped scarf. When I was little my father would pull me into his lap and reach for the snow globe. He would turn it over, letting all the snow collect on the top, then quickly invert it. The two of us watched the snow fall gently around the penguin. The penguin was along in there, I thought, and I worried for him. When I told my father this, he said 'Don't worry ... he has a nice life. He's trapped in a perfect world."
--Alice Sebold

"How strangely sad I feel on seeing a poor man shuffling through the street in a rather worn-out, light yellowish-green coat. I was sorry for him, but the thing that moved me most was that the colour of this coat so vivdly reminded me of my first childish productions in the noble art of painting. This colour was precisely, one of my vital hues. Is it not sad that these colour mixtures, which I still think of with so much pleasure, are found nowhere in life; the whole world thinks them hard, bizarre, suitable only for Nuremberg pictures. Or if one sometimes happens on them, there is always something unpleasent about the encounter, as in the present case. It is always some weak-minded person, or one who has been unfortunate, in short, always someone who feels himself an alien int he world, and whom the world will not recognize. And I, who always painted my heroes with the never-to-be-forgotten yellow-green colouring on their coats! And is it not so with all the mingled colours of childhood? The hues of life once had gradually become too strong, too hard, for our dim eyes."
--Soren Kierkegaard

"Sometimes we feel lonely, to the point of tears and we don't let these tears come because we are not supposed to cry. Or we feel a surge of love for someone, but we don't say anything because we're frozen with fear of what those words might do to the relationship."
-- Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie

Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things that way they are—objective pictures. He mumbled he wasn’t quite sure what that would be. The person who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, “There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is.” Picasso looked at it and said, “She is rather small, isn’t she? And flat?”
--G. Bateson

"If first you don't succeed, you're in great company."
--Elden Peterson

"Just remember that you don't have to be what they want you to be."
--Muhammad Ali

"You don't get to choose how or when you're going to die. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now."
--Joan Baez

"It is often merely for an excuse that we say things are impossible"
-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld.

"Life's journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting "holy shit... what a ride!"
--Anonymous

"Man doesn't fail, he only stops trying."
--Anonymous

"People talk about 'finding' their lives. In reality, your life is not something you find - it's something you create."
--David Phillips

"Life is too short to be little"--Disraeli

"Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. We lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year’s time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings."
--Andre Maurois

"Not much has changed since then. As adults (more or less), we’re enthralled by closed doors and velvet ropes, held at bay by guest-list checkers, gatekeepers and membership committees. What’s the matter with us? Are we social masochists? Is our need to belong so great that it trumps self-respect? Yes, of course! And not just belong, but belong to something just far enough above our regular stations so as to elevate our opinion of ourselves, if not others’"
--Tom Connor

"When we have created a possibility, it’s not something we’re trying to do. Nor is it a matter of in-order-to. Questions like “will it happen or not,” or “do we need to do ‘X’ in-order-to get to ‘Y’,” aren’t really relevant to possibility. When we create a new possibility for ourselves, it does exist. It’s present in the world—not as a physical phenomenon, but as possibility. "
--Dr. Nancy Zapolski

"Today we come across an individual who behaves like an automaton, who does not know or understand himself, and the only person that he knows is the person that he is supposed to be, whose meaningless chatter has replaced communicative speech, whose synthetic smile has replaced genuine laughter, and whose sense of dull despair has taken the place of genuine pain.”
-- Eric Fromm

"If you don't place a high value on your talents, who will? If you don't think highly of yourself, why would anyone?"
--Edge Keynote