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

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful after all.
-Michelangelo

A musician must make his music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to ultimately be at peace with himself.
- Abraham Maslow

Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
- Margaret Young

If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know.
- Louis Armstrong

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
- Teddy Roosevelt

Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice: it is not to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
- William Jennings Bryan

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
- Arnold Toynbee

I went into the academic world under the illusion that it was a place where people cared passionately about ideas, about teaching, about discourse, about reflecting critically. What I discovered was a world of small-minded, partisan professionals, many of whom where there because they couldn't figure out what else to do. So I created a life inside the academy that reflected the life I wanted to lead.
- Benjamin R. Barber, author of "Jihad Vs McWorld"

By believing passionately in something that does not yet exist, we create it. The nonexistant is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
- Nikos Kazantzakis

I want my identity back. I don't want to be known as the CEO of AOL Time Warner . . . I'm my own person. I have strong moral convictions. I'm not just a suit. I want poetry back in my life.
- Gerald Levin, former CEO of AOL Time Warner (the world's largest media company)

Why change the world? To me that's what life is about. If you don't do that, you might as well hybernate and sleep. If everyone thinks what you do is "normal" . . . it probably is. Why do that? Do something else!
- Dean Kamen, Inventor of "Ginger," a personal transportation breakthrough

"Quite cleary nature did not tell the honeybee to go out and crosspollinate the vegetation. What nature did was to genetically program the honeybee to go after the honey and inadvertently crosspollinate . . . What nature told humanity (genetically) was, I'm hungry, my kids are hungry; I'm cold, my kids are cold. Go after that food and coat. They cost money--go after the money. They say you have to earn it. OK, I'll earn it. Buzz, buzz, honey-money bee. No human genes are programmed to say-- go make the world work for everybody-- only your creative mind can tell you that."
- Buckminster Fuller

"In America, there's this giant gulf between art and life. It's not part of the ongoing texture of things, something we could encounter when we go to the supermarket. Instead, art is this bizarre thing with people wearing costumes in Lincoln Center. It's all these people watching while all these other people are doing."
- Peter Sellars

We are given in our newspapers and on TV and radio exactly what we, the public, insist on having, and this very frequently is mediocre information and mediocre entertainment.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

"... [I have] a vision of a day when brains become as celebrated in America as brawn . . . that sports [will] remain merely as passtimes and that the world needs the smarts of young people to tackle larger problems. Clean water, clean air, health care, getting people out of ignorance and poverty -
- that's important."
- Dean Kamen,inventor (as quoted in the Washington Post)

"Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it."
- Buddha

"To be nobody-but-yourself---in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else--- means to fight hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."
- e.e. cummings

"I write lustily and humorously. It isn't calculated; it's the way I think. I've invented a writing style that expresses who I am."
- Erica Jong

"We don't see many fat men walking on stilts."
- Bud Miller

"If you go to heaven without being naturally talented for it, you will not enjoy it there."
- George Bernard Shaw

"I had all those cable networks reporting to me, I had a number of windows in my office and I had all the corporate perks you could possibly imagine, but that wasn't what I was about, so I left."
- Geraldine B. Laybourne, resigned as President of cable TV operations for ABC & Walt Disney Co., now with Oxygen Media

"You have to deal with the fact that your life is your life."
- Alex Hailey

"If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting."
- Katherine Hepburn

"A first rate soup is better than a second rate painting."
- Abraham Maslow

My mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general, if you become a monk you'll end up as the pope." Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
- Pablo Picasso

I'm a salami writer. I try to write good salami, but salami is salami.
- Stephen King

Different people have different duties assigned to them by nature; Nature has given one the power or the desire to do this, the other that. Each bird must sing with his own throat.
- Anonymous

One can never consent to creep when one feels the impulse to soar.
- Helen Keller

Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be, because sooner or later, if you are posing, you will forget the pose, and then where are you?
- Fanny Brice

The self is not something that one finds. It's something one creates.
- Thomas Szasz

A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation: "As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.
- Joseph Campbell

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
- Joseph Campbell

"Any human being is really good at certain things. The problem is that the things you're good at come naturally. And since most people are pretty modest instead of an arrogant s.o.b. like me, what comes naturally, you don't see as a special skill. It's just you. It's what you've always done."
- Stephen Jay Gould, evolutionary scientist

"Take someone who doesn't keep score, who's not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing, who has not the slightest interest even in his own personality: He's free."
- Rumi, poet born 1207 in Balkh (what is now Afghanistan)

"How strange is the lot of us mortals. Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people."
- Albert Einstein, 1931

"If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything."
- Michael Evans

"Unless a man has trained himself for his chance, the chance will only make him ridiculous."
- William Matthews

"There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos."
- Jim Hightower

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart."
- Vincent Van Gogh

"He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying."
- Nietzsche

"I think and think for months, for years. Ninety-nine times the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right."
- Albert Einstein

"Remember, If you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter how you get there."
- The Flying Karamazov Brothers

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
- Mohandas K. Gandhi

"We couldn't possibly know where it would lead, be we knew it had to be done."
- Betty Friedan (pioneer of the Women's Movement)

"Dare to be naive."
- R. Buckminster Fuller (inventor & visionary for the most efficient use of Spaceship Earth's resources)

"Men whose trade is rat-catching love to catch rats; the bug destroyer seizes on his bug with delight; the suppressor is gratified by finding his vice."
- Sydney Smith

"Work and Play are words used to describe the same thing under different circumstances."
- Mark Twain

"Starting out to make money is the greatest mistake in life. Do what you feel you have a flair for doing, and if you are good enough at it, the money will come."
- Greer Garson

"To love what you do and feel that it matters--how could anything be more fun?"
- Katharine Graham

"I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I've ever known."
- Walt Disney

"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking . . . is freedom."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

"We spend our time searching for security, and hate it when we get it."
- John Steinbeck

"The unknown is what it is. And to be frightened of it is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions, wars, peace, love, hate, all that . . . Accept that it's unknown, and it's plain sailing."
- John Lennon

"Many of us have created lives that give very little support for experimentation. We believe that answers already exist out there, independent of us. What if we invested more time and attention to our own experimentation? We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us."
- Magaret Wheatley

"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."
- Mark Twain

"When there is no vision, people perish."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"You've got to jump off cliffs, all the time, and build your wings on the way down.
- Ray Bradbury

"There is no perfection in humanity."
- Samuel Montagne

"Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible."
- Abraham Lincoln

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after."
- Henry David Thoreau

"A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval."
- Mark Twain

"This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one: 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."
- George Bernard Shaw

"A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small bundle."
- Benjamin Franklin

"The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up."
- Mark Twain

"Only a life lived for others is a life worth while."
- Albert Einstein

"When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die."
- Eleanor Roosevelt

"One thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve."
- Albert Schweitzer

"There is work that is work and there is play that is play; there is play that is work and work that is play. And in only one of these lie happiness."
- Gelett Burgess

"But" is a fence over which few leap.
- German proverb

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
- Mark Twain

To play it safe is not to play.
- Robert Altman

Heaven and hell is right now . . . You make it heaven, or you make it hell, by your actions.
- George Harrison

Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.
- Abraham Lincoln

We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
- Carlos Castaneda