• "Whenever this question shall be settled, it must be settled on some philosophical basis. No policy that does not rest upon some philosophical public opinion can be permanently maintained." -Abraham Lincoln
• "Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want." -Dan Stanford
• "Talent is God-given; be humble. Fame is man-given; be thankful. Conceit is self-given; be careful." -John Wooden
• "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." -Aristotle
• "You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should." – from Max Ehrmann's Desiderata
• “Music is a higher revelation than any wisdom or philosophy.” —Ludwig Von Beethoven
• "You can't force yourself to relax, but you can be willing to let it settle in." -Jason Crandell, YogaJournal
• "Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are opened. " -Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
• "That's been one of my mantras, focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains." -Steve Jobs
• "Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save"
• "Be present as the watcher of your mind -- of your thoughts and emotions as well as your reactions in various situations. Be at least as interested in your reactions as in the situation or person that causes you to react. Notice also how often your attention is in the past or future. Don't judge or analyze what you observe. Watch the thought, feel the emotion, observe the reaction. Don't make a personal problem out of them. You will then feel something more powerful than any of those things that you observe: the still, observing presence itself behind the content of your mind, the silent watcher." -Eckhart Tolle
• "The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward." -Amelia Earhart
• "A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees. The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves." -Amelia Earhart
• "Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for kindness." -Seneca
• "Never judge your sucess by how high up the ladder you get, judge it by how high you bounce when you fall off and hit the bottom." -Anon
• "Thoughts lead on to purpose, purpose leads on to action, action forms habits, habits decide character, and character fixes our destiny." -Tyron Edwards
• "We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done." -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• "Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over." -Gloria Naylor
• "Silences make the real conversations between friends. Not the saying but the never needing to say is what counts." -Margaret Lee Runbeck
• "Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." -Anais Nin
• "It is a paradox," Kashkashian says. "For all of us interpreters, we face the paradox of having a given text, which stays the same. It's our job to be true to it and yet to make it new every time we get on stage."
• Kashkashian...admits that violists are always looking for ways to increase what's available for their instrument to play. "We all are, in a sense, missionaries for new music, and most of us are also thieves, because we have to and want to take repertoire from other instruments."
• "Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces people into thinking they can't lose" -Bill Gates
• Christmas: Celebrating an unmarried teenage mom giving birth in a stable, to a baby who grew up to be a prominent activist for peace, love and anti-capitalist values; who preferred the company of honest prostitutes to that of the religious elite; who partook in radical direct action against the banking system, and was publicly executed as an enemy of state. My prayer today is: let his wisdom guide all in this world." --from a post by Oshan Anand, posted by Susana Cook
• http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/health/elderly-experts-share-life-advice-in-cornell-project.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all%3Fsrc%3Dtp&smid=fb-share
• Every aspect of life is a gateway to the Universal—if done in a healthy way with the right intention. -YogaJournal
• If I keep my eyes focused on where I want to go, then I will get there. Think of it like this . . . when do most car accidents happen? When the driver takes their eyes off the road. Do not allow the minor distractions of life to pull you off course from your path. Always keep your eyes focused on the vision in front of you.
• "Education is the grandest accelerant for human potential" - Nicholas Kristof
• “By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond winning.” Lao Tzu
• Not all who wander are lost. -JRR Tolkein
• "Life is a journey, not a race."
• What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
• "There isn’t a single thing in this world that’s made better by starting tomorrow. Everything you care about, everything you are about, needs to begin today or it may never happen.If you don’t want to do it now, you clearly don’t want it bad enough. Momentum comes from pushing, not from planning. Confidence comes from scars and risk, not from indecision." -Julien Smith
• "What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over." -Marina Keegan
• "Do or do not. There is no try." -Yoda
• The wrong decision is better than no decision. (There are no wrong decisions)
• "You don't always get what you wish for. You get what you work for."
• "My own resolute idleness has mostly been a luxury rather than a virtue, but I did make a conscious decision, a long time ago, to choose time over money, since I’ve always understood that the best investment of my limited time on earth was to spend it with people I love. ... Life is too short to be busy." -Tim Krieder http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/?emc=eta1)
• Sorrow looks back,

Worry looks around, But faith looks up! Live simply, love generously, care deeply, speak kindly, and trust in our Creator, who loves us

• http://www.marcandangel.com/2012/07/02/30-traits-happy-people-have-in-common/
• "Nothing ever goes away until it teaches us what we need to know." - Pema Chodron
• "Your beliefs don't make you a better person, your behavior does."
• A good laugh and a long sleep are the two best cures for anything. - Irish proverb
• Don't postpone joy.
• "A painter paints pictures on canvas, but musicians paint their pictures on silence…" - Leopold Stokowski
• “The disturbers of happiness are our desires, our griefs, and our fears.” -Samuel Johnson
• “Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.” -William Butler Yeats
• "In a romantic relationship you hope that you end up experiencing more of the world as a result of linking yourself with another person's world. I think that is what musicians are after in collaboration. You get to experience more of the musical world if you allow yourself to see it through someone else's eyes." -Chris Thile, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE5yHE4H4rM&feature=g-high-rec
• ‎"Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny." -C.S. Lewis
• "May today there be peace within. May you trust that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith in yourself and others. May you use the gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content with yourself just the way you are. Let this knowledge settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of us." - Mother Theresa
• Surrender to what is. Let go of what was. Have faith in what will be. -Sonia Ricotti
• “One lives in the naive notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past.” -Elias Canetti
• “The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself; he who goes away pleased with himself and his own wit is also greatly pleased with you..” -Jean de La Brùyere
• “Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.” -Bertrand Russell
• "Tough times don't last, tough people do."
• "I dabble in the melancholy, but I try not to live there." -Jason Mraz
• "Learn to enjoy the mundane and you can outdistance the pack -- and then life will be anything but boring." - http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121220132804-20017018-what-would-you-tell-the-25-year-old-you?trk=mp-details-rr-rmpost
• Your schedule makes you dumber.

Force yourself outside of your daily schedule. Be curious and take time to learn about worlds outside of the one you live in. Watch the news, read the paper, educate yourself. Don’t be afraid to call people you don’t know, start a conversation, and ask for things you need. At the very least, you’ll be more interesting. At the most, you’ll take your business in new and bigger directions.

• Suffer for 15 minutes to chip away at large projects
• "Passion is not something you follow. It’s something that will follow you as you put in the hard work to become valuable to the world." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/jobs/follow-a-career-passion-let-it-follow-you.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0
• Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you stand still.
• “To be driven by our appetites alone is slavery, while to obey a law that we have imposed on ourselves is freedom.” -Rousseau, The Social Contract
• ‎"You can't change the world if you've never seen it" - Dr. Golightley, guest panelist in NS 2600, 2/21/13
• "Every successful person I know has started before they felt "ready."

Life doesn’t start when all your ducks are in a row; it’s happening right now." -Kris Carr

• "I won’t measure my success as a parent by whether my children share my values, but by whether they act according to their own.", “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/magazine/11foer-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=4&
• “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. . . Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.” -C.S. Lewis
• “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” -Leo Tolstoy
• "Some people are like clouds. When they disappear, it's a brighter day."
• "Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become." - Steve Jobs
• "There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind." - C.S. Lewis
• "Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot." - Vincent van Gogh
• You surround yourself with people who make you laugh, forget the bad, and focus on the good. So, love the people who treat you right. Think good thoughts for the ones who don't. Life is too short to be anything but happy. Falling down is part of LIFE...Getting back up is LIVING
• “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”

-James Baldwin, Paris Review Interviews II

• “A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” -John Steinbeck Travels With Charley
• Values and identities are not passively received, but rather actively constructed. -Jing Jin, Cornell Daily Sun
• "When you yell at someone, who hears it more: you or them? You're only hurting yourself by getting angry." -HONY
• "Living with integrity means: Not settling for less than what you know you deserve in your relationships. Asking for what you want and need from others. Speaking your truth, even though it might create conflict or tension. Behaving in ways that are in harmony with your personal values. Making choices based on what you believe, and not what others believe." Barbara De Angelis
• "The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving." - Oliver Wendell Holmes
• "If you never learn the language of gratitude, you will never be on speaking terms with happiness."
• “I honor the place in you in which the entire Universe dwells, I honor the place in you which is of Love, of Truth, of Light and of Peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are One.” (interpretation of Namaste)
• "The disturbers of happiness are our desires, our griefs, and our fears." - Samuel Johnson
• "On the whole, tho’ I never arrived at the Perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short of it, yet as I was, by the Endeavor, a better and a happier Man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it." - Benjamin Franklin
• "My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been before." - Diane Arbus
• "The true secret of happiness lies in the taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life." - William Morris
• Excuses, excuses: "My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way."
- Virginia Woolf
• I'm reading this as a 20-year-old: "Live as long as you may, the first twenty years are the longest half of your life. They appear so while they are passing; they seem to have been so when we look back on them; and they take up more room in our memory than all the years that succeed them" - Robert Southey
• "Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less." - C.S. Lewis
• "I love to envision love as the dynamic between two independent, creative individuals consciously choosing to support one another in the process of their own actualization. THAT is the ideal to which the relationship is committed. NOT primarily to the other individual 'no matter what.' For true love we need to maintain our commitment to continual becoming—NOT to the attachment we may feel to the other."
• "Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned." - Buddha
• “One lives in the naïve notion that later there will be more room than in the entire past." - Elias Canetti
• “The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself; he who goes away pleased with himself and his own wit is also greatly pleased with you." - Jean de La Brùyere
• "After all, a vacation is not a matter of place or time. We can take a wonderful vacation in spirit, even though we are obliged to stay at home, if we will only drop our burdens from our minds for a while. But no amount of travel will give us rest and recreation if we carry our work and worries with us." - Laura Ingalls Wilder, essay September 1919
• "Forever -- is composed of nows." - Emily Dickinson
• “The feeling of being hurried is not usually the result of living a full life and having no time. It is on the contrary born of a vague fear that we are wasting our life. When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else." - Eric Hoffer
• “A state of affairs which leads to daily vexation is not the right state." - Goethe
• "If you wanna be a change-maker, you first have to be an action-taker." - Kris Carr
• "Worry is a misuse of imagination"
• "Starting is the victory." - Nicole, yoga teacher
• “To be really happy and really safe, one ought to have at least two or three hobbies, and they must all be real." - Winston Churchill
• “When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." - Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
• "Yoga moves us from the dark corridors to open up the passage of life within us." - Tao Porchon-Lynch
• "There is only one way to get what you want. How? Dedicate yourself to it. Set your sights on it. Get it in your crosshairs. ... Make it happen. That's how you get what you want." -MBG article
• “A stumble may prevent a fall." - Thomas Fuller, proverb
• “And there was, in those Ipswich years, for me at least, a raw educational component; though I used to score well in academic tests, I seemed to know very little of how the world worked and was truly grateful for instruction, whether it was how to stroke a backhand, mix a martini, use a wallpaper steamer, or do the Twist. My wife, too, seemed willing to learn. Old as we must have looked to our children, we were still taking lessons, in how to be grown-up." - John Updike, Self-Consciousness
• this poem
• "Chasing meaning is better for your health than avoiding discomfort." - http://reviveprimarycare.com/is-stress-a-friend/
• "At least you’ll understand that waiting longer doesn’t always mean waiting indefinitely. Investing upfront in realistic time frames — and learning to adjust those time frames as new information becomes available — may help us resist the pull of rewards that come too soon. Controlling our sense of the future, in other words, may help us control our behavior in the present." - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/opinion/sunday/youre-so-self-controlling.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131117
• "Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see." - René Magritte
• "Consistency is more important than sporadic quantity" -David Swenson, Ashtanga Yoga teacher
• "Yoga will find in each of us what we need, and help us to fill it ourselves. Yoga can tell us, we don’t need to tell it. That’s how we take yoga off the mat and into the world; not by setting the path, but by following it."
• "the secret to getting ahead is getting started." - Mark Twain
• “You’re not chasing the goal itself, you’re actually chasing a feeling.” - Danielle LaPorte
  • wonder, ease, bliss, humor, energy, simplicity, strength, fearlessness, adventurousness, serendipity, whimsy
• "Spend kindness like it's money. And pretend that you're a billionaire. That's how you become rich."
• We’ve slowly come to accept that, in order to be good leaders, we need to take care of ourselves (and we’ve known it all along). This means getting enough sleep, eating right, moving around, and having time and space to unwind (then recommitting when we lapse, knowing that it’s okay).
• “Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger." - Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea
• "Even in vulnerability, I am beautiful. Everything will be exactly as it is supposed to, in time. Trust that good is around the corner." - Lauren Rudick
• "You are no less perfect than the trees and the flowers and the birds and the bees." - Andrea Beaman
• “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good…Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is." - C.S. Lewis
• “It is often to the wary that the events in life are unexpected. Looser types—people who are not busy weighing and measuring every little thing—are used to accidents, coincidences, chance, things getting out of hand, things sneaking up on them. They are the happy children of life, to whom life happens for better or worse." - Laurie Colwin, “A Mythological Subject,” in The Lone Pilgrim
• "Only a fool would risk failure. Be that fool. Only a fool would work hard when there's no clear objective. Be that fool. Only a fool would deliberately scare himself. Be that fool. Only a fool would disregard his past and future. Be that fool." - Ed Helms, 2014 Cornell Convocation
• "Regret and wonder are at best useless and at worst paralyzing." "Fear is the most potent catalyst for growth." - Ed Helms, 2014 Cornell Convocation
• "The only way to get to Day 500 is to start with Day 1. So forget about the number and focus on doing the work."
• "It’s not easy, but I promise you that your life will be better if you choose to feel uncomfortable and make progress, rather than complain and make excuses. Shift your focus from what is withheld from you to what is available to you."