“Bring yourself, bring your voice, bring your ideas and fulfill the artist in you before you try to please the world. Don’t get lost in trying to please everyone around you, you will regret it when you look back at what was at your fingertips. Grab it when you can and go!” - Maggie Hudson (italics added)
A grateful heart is the beginning of greatness. -James E. Faust
To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury; and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable; and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasion, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious grow up through the common. This is to be my symphony.
William Henry Channing
“Take this rule: whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off your relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself.”
Susanna Wesley (Letter to her son John Wesley, June 8, 1725)
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
— Calvin Coolidge
Why are we reading, if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness, and press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and which reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. - Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are. - Marianne Williamson
“When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.” ~W. Clement Stone