Word of the Day Challenge: Day Three

 

For this post, I went through my quote-books. These are a series of notebooks in which I write, paste or otherwise incorporate quotes I’ve found particularly motivating or inspiring. These quotes are from stories and poems, songs, interviews, articles, biographies and conversations. I’d really recommend doing this, or something similar – a quote-book is actually a really good way of collecting a lot of what inspires you in one neat and tidy place, easily accessible, readily available and completely personal.

Below are a few quotes I find particularly encouraging when I need reminding of my own potential, power and capability: If you’re reading this, maybe you’ll find them helpful, too.  

 

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

-         Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Change your thoughts and you change your world.

-         Norman Vincent Peale

Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally.

-         Eckhart Tolle

Don’t bother too much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them; when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behaviour.

-         C.S.Lewis

You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you do have charge of.

-         Jim Rohn

I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.

- Carl Jung

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

-         Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

-         George Bernard Shaw

The mind is everything. What you think you become.

-         Buddha

You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won’t discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shame and caging and fearing yourself. The Sufi poet Rumi, writing about birds learning to fly, wrote: “How do they learn it? They fall, and falling, they’re given wings”.

-         Geneen Roth, ‘Women, Food and God’