“Joy comes when you’re being spontaneous — it’s really hard to be happy when you’re not being yourself.” – Tony Robbins

“The only way to avoid pissing people off is to do nothing important.” — Oliver Emberton

“It’s not about the cards you’re dealt, but how you play the hand.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone, and as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” – Marianne Williamson

“Whatever you do, don’t try and escape from your pain, but be with it. Because the attempt to escape from pain creates more pain.” ~ The Tibetan Book of living and Dying

“Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.” ~ Ossie Davis

“Don’t outsource your self-esteem to only one outcome. Then you are a slave to a future you can’t predict.” – James Altucher

“Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy / And the dogs that talk revolution / Drunk with talk, liars and believers … / Long live freedom, and damn the ideologies.” – Robinson Jeffers

“What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?” – John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’

“We take almost all of the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.” – W. G. Sebald

“It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.”  ~ George Saunders

“Man may have discovered fire, but women discovered how to play with it.”  –Candace Bushnell

“What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it.” – Unknown

“It’s not enough to be nice in life. You’ve got to have nerve.”  – Georgia O’Keeffe

“It is our choices…that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.” — J.K. Rowling

“The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.” — George Eliot

“Claim your space. Draw a circle of light around it. Push back against the dark. Don’t just survive. Celebrate.”  ~ Charles Frazier

“Today I will do what others won’t, so tomorrow I can do what others can’t.” ~ Jerry Rice

“Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success.” ~ Joyce Brothers

“The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.” – Bill Mollison

“Your job is to build your own path to influence, where success may just be right around the corner.” ~ Catherine Haggarty

“Before I can discard the verse, I have to write it… I can’t discard a verse before it is written because it is the writing of the verse that produces whatever delights or interests or facets that are going to catch the light. The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.” – Leonard Cohen