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Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themselves.

Leo Tolstoy

Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

William James

Human excellence is a state of mind.

Socrates

It’s not about perfection.

Eshin Godfrey, Zen Master, Zen Centre of Vancouver

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.

Leonardo Da Vinci

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Leonardo Da Vinci

The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

Marcus Aurelius

Stuckness shouldn’t be avoided. It’s the psychic predecessor of all real understanding.

Robert M. Pirsig, from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

The true method of knowledge is experiment.

William Blake

The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

Winston Churchill

Be the change you wish to see.

Mahatma Gandhi

Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

Winston Churchill

An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer.

Max Planck

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Viktor Frankl

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Buckmeister Fuller

You’ll never change your life until you change something that you do daily. The secret to your success is found in your daily routine.

John C. Maxwell

Know Thyself.

Inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi

I have known a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn’t so common.

Ouida

It is impossible for anyone to begin to learn what he thinks he already knows.

Epictetus (Greek philosopher)

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

William Hutchison Murray, Scottish mountaineer

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

Albert Einstein

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Steve Jobs

Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.

Don Herold

In every moment of life you have a choice; to live the life of spiritual practice, or retreat into comfort and security.

Ezra Bayda

The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.

Pablo Picasso

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Socrates

The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.

Albert Einstein

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

Alan W. Watts

You have capacities within you that are phenomenal, if you only knew how to release them.

David Bohm, legendary quantum physicist

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain’t going away.

Elvis Presley

The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time.

Abraham Lincoln

I absolutely believe that people, unless coached, never reach their full potential.

Bob Nardelli, CEO of Home Depot

True effectiveness requires balance.

Stephen R. Covey

All my life I wanted to be somebody. Now I see I should have been more specific.

Lily Tomlin

You were born with potential. You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness. You were born with wings. You are not meant for crawling, so don’t. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly.

Rumi (Sufi poet and mystic)

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.

Albert Einstein

The most dangerous risk of all: The risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet that you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.

Allan W. Watts

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Aristotle

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

Winston Churchill

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

Aldous Huxley

Love, work and knowledge are the wellsprings of our life. They should also govern it.

Dr. Wilhelm Reich – Pioneering Scientist and Psychotherapist

In all activities of life, the secret of efficiency lies in an ability to combine two seemingly incompatible states: a state of maximum activity and a state of maximum relaxation.

Aldous Huxley

When you get rid of your fear of failure, your tensions about succeeding…you can be yourself. Relaxed. You’ll no longer be driving with your brakes on.

Anthony De Mello

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

African proverb

The only Zen you find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there.

Robert M. Pirsig

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn how to surf.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness Expert

Energy is eternal delight.

William Blake

Whatever you are, be a good one.

Abraham Lincoln

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Albert Einstein

This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

Alan W. Watts, Philosopher

The important thing is this: To be ready in every moment to sacrifice who we are for who we could become.

Charles Du Bos

I see no more than you, but I have trained myself to notice what I see.

Sherlock Holmes

It’s not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?

Henry David Thoreau

Each one of you is perfect as you are. And you all could use a little bit of improvement.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Master

We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot

First, say to yourself what you would be; then do what you have to do.

Epictetus

If we did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.

Thomas Edison

If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone.

Marcus Aurelius

That’s essentially what Zen practice is about: functioning from moment to moment.

Charlotte Joko Beck, Zen Master

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Master

Nothing in this world is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

William Shakespeare

Any valid inquiry begins with not-knowing, or else it merely serves to confirm what is already known.

Peter Ralston in “The Book of Not Knowing”

If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?

Rumi, 13th-century Persian poet

For me adventure is when everything goes wrong…that’s when the adventure starts.

Yvon Choinard, Patagonia Founder and CEO

What are you complicating right now?

Dave Robens, Men’s Group Vancouver

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as a derivative of consciousness.

Max Planck, Nobel Price winning theoretical physicist

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

Helen Keller

Power is the ability to control the way others play; strength is the ability to allow others to play as they wish.

James P. Carse (from the book “Finite and Infinite Games”)

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery.

Bob Marley

Besides learning to see, there is another art to be learned – not to see what is not.

Maria Mitchell

What is the hardest thing of all? That which seems easiest for your eyes to see. That which lies before your eyes.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

Albert Einstein

No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.

Voltaire

We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.

Unknown

Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

Steve Jobs

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just isn’t so.

Unknown (but often attributed to Mark Twain)

We’re not who we say we are, we’re not who we want to be. We are the sum of the influence and impact that we have, in our lives, on others.

Carl Sagan

You cannot understand a system unless you change it.

Dr. Otto Scharmer

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

Michael Jordan

If you cannot risk, you cannot grow. If you cannot grow, you cannot become your best. If you cannot become your best, you cannot be happy. And if you cannot be happy, what else matters?

Dr. David Viscott

Birds are not better than the eggs from which they have broken…a bird is one egg’s way of becoming other eggs.

Alan Watts, “The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Why You Are”

Worrying is a misuse of the imagination.

Steve Chandler

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

Abraham Lincoln

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

Henry David Thoreau

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Viktor E. Frankl in “Man’s Search For Meaning”

Life is a perpetual instruction in cause and effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We want to be poets of our life – first of all in the smallest most everyday matters.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.

Arthur Shopenhauer

Often it isn’t the mountains ahead that wear you out, it’s the little pebble in your shoe.

Muhammad Ali

Mastery is practice.

George Leonard

To bankrupt a fool, give him information.

Nassim Taleb

Wisdom begins with wonder.

Socrates

No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don’t have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have.

Seneca

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.

Jonas Salk, discovered one of the first successful polio vaccines

There ain’t no way to find out why a snorer can’t hear himself snore.

Mark Twain

Behind every impossible achievement is a dreamer of impossible dreams.

Robert K. Greenleaf