There are times when the voices of others shed clear light on ideas and issues we find important. Over the past few years I have collected quotations that illuminate a piece of the power that resides within us all. I hope you will enjoy them and find them useful for meditation or discussion. A few are part of the “What One Person Can Do” conversation and as such may seem familiar to some of you.

We worry about what a child will become tomorrow, yet we forget that he is someone today. – Stacie Tauscher

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children.

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

– Johann Wolfgang Goethe

The war against hunger is truly mankind’s war of liberation. – John F. Kennedy

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

– Theodore Hesburgh

I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.

– D.H. Lawrence

Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight.

– Helen Keller

There is in every true woman’s heart a spark of heavenly fire, which lies dormant in the broad daylight of prosperity; but which kindles up, and beams and blazes in the dark hour of adversity. – Washington Irving

The purpose of life is a life of purpose.

– R. Byrne

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish, little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

– Man & Superman, 1903, George Bernard Shaw

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of man (and woman) as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.

– Helen Keller

It is because we have at the present moment everybody claiming the right of conscience without going through any discipline whatsoever that there is so much untruth being delivered to a bewildered world.

– Mahatma Gandhi

The only tyrant I accept in the world is the “still small voice within.”

– Mahatma Gandhi

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned. However early a man’s (person’s) training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he (she) learns thoroughly.

– Thomas Huxley

The last of the freedoms – to choose one’s attitudes in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

– V. Frankel

The Wright Brothers flew right through the smoke screen of impossibility.

– Charles F. Kettering

The art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of energy in our great men (people).

– Capt. J. A. Hadfield

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.

– George Bernard Shaw

Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you can’t do this or that. That’s nonsense. Make up your mind, you’ll never use crutches or a stick, then have a go at everything. Go to school, join in all the games you can. Go anywhere you want to. But never, never let them persuade you that things are too difficult or impossible.

– Sir Douglas Bader, a British fighter pilot who lost both legs in a flying accident, but still fought in World War II. He was knighted for his work with the disabled, and the quote above is from his talk to a 14-year-old boy who had lost a leg in a car accident.

Trials, temptations, disappointments – all of these are helps instead of hindrances, if one uses them rightly. They not only test the fibre of a character, but strengthen it. Every conquered temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.

– James Buckham

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. – William Morrow

The various religions are like different roads converging on the same point. What difference does it make if we follow different routes, provided we arrive at the same destination? – Mahatma Gandhi

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.

– George Bernard Shaw

Oct 27, 1858, Roland Macy opened Macy’s Department Store in New York City. It was Macy’s eighth business venture – the other seven failed.

The best portion of a good man’s life is the little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love. – William Wadsworth

Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. – Henry Ford

Real heroes are men who fall and fail and are flawed, but win out in the end because they’ve stayed in true to their ideals and beliefs and commitments.

– Kevin Costner

The measure of a man is what happens when nothing works and you got the guts to go on.

– Tex Cobb, Boxer and Actor

Life is not holding a good hand; life is playing a poor hand well.

– Danish Proverb

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you will help them become what they are capable of becoming.

– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The road to happiness lies in two simple principles: find what it is that interests you and that you can do well, and when you find it, put your whole soul into it – every bit of energy and ambition and natural ability you have. – John D. Rockefeller, III

Be the change that you want to see in the world. – Gandhi

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. – Teilhard DeChardin

The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind. – William James

Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you are going to do now and do it. – William Durant,

Founder of General Motors

There is no sensual pleasure in the world comparable to the delight and satisfaction that a good man takes in doing good.

– Tillotson

There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved. – George Sand

Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought. – Anonymous

Progress in every age results only from the fact that there are some men and women who refuse to believe that what they know to be right cannot be done.

– Russell W. Davenport

No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle and good, without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.

– Phillips Brooks

Many men owe the grandeur of their lives to their tremendous difficulties. – Spurgeon

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

– Aristotle

All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom; justice; honor; duty; mercy; hope.

– Sir Winston Churchill

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

– Mother Theresa

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.

– Native American Proverb

A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn’t feel like it.

– Alistair Cooke

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody else expects of you. Never excuse yourself. Never pity yourself. Be a hard master to yourself – and be lenient to everybody else.

– Henry Ward Beecher

Only mortality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to our lives.

– Albert Einstein

The most important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one’s work seriously and taking one’s self seriously. The first is imperative, and the second disastrous. – Margot Fonteyn

Time and money spent in helping men do more for themselves is far better than mere giving. – Henry Ford

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Life is an opportunity, benefit from it. Life is a beauty, admire it. Life is a dream, realize it. Life is a challenge, meet it. Life is a duty, complete it. Life is a game, play it. Life is a promise, fulfill it. Life is sorrow, overcome it. Life is a song, sign it. Life is a struggle, accept it. Life is a tragedy, confront it. Life is an adventure, dare it. Life is luck, make it. Life is life, fight for it.

– Mother Teresa

BOOK BIAS

By: Bill Cumming

The American Soul

By: Jacob Needleman

Part of the wonderful experience of going to college is reading books that are new to you and having the opportunity to debate their significance and importance to our experience of the present with people whose minds you respect. It has been a rare privilege to share exactly that same experience with old and dear friends, Della and Peter Allen, with whom I have exchanged books and ideas over the forty years since the formal process of education was completed.

They have shared the escapist and marvelously biting humor of Carl Hiaason and I have shared The Four Agreements and The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz with them. About a year ago, they gave me the book, The American Soul, by Jacob Needleman. It sat on my “to be read” shelf for a long while because I was not convinced that we, as a society, have access to our soul and shame on me I had never read any of Needleman’s work. The book is a stunning look at the dichotomy of the American soul. How can Jefferson speak of freedom for all and own slaves? When, if ever are we going to truly own what we did to destroy one of the most “soulful” races in all of history? At what point do we truly account for the “economic” advantage we gained in the world literally on the backs of African Americans?

I expected history and philosophy. Jacob Needleman is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. And nothing prepared me for what I would find in its pages: an understanding of where our violence as individuals and as society has its roots.

In the retelling of a native American tale of good and evil he writes:

“No, Atotarho (an evil chief) is evil as inability – incapacity to hope, incapacity to try. The sound of the scream as it echoes through the legend is the sound of the broken heart, of man who internally yearns for good but can see no way it will ever appear.

…Human evil is goodness acting under a wrong thought; human evil is the power of the spirit under the yoke of a despairing master.”

And a few pages later:

“And nothing can overcome this force of evil of violence except the direct experience of Good within oneself, an experience that turns all the energies of man around so that they serve what they are created to serve. Without this central event, all impulses toward peace and inner freedom eventually must fail.”

“An experience of Good within oneself.” Here it was, again, from a completely different source, grounded in history and philosophy. If we do not experience the Good in ourselves, we are bound to never be at peace. The capacity for loving-kindness is within us all, the only question is access. As we experience this to be so for ourselves, we care to share what we know with others. It is impossible as individuals or as a nation to give what we do not experience.