The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.
~ Mark Twain

The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
~Charles DuBois

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

I think the person who takes a job in order to live — that is to say, (just) for the money — has turned himself into a slave.
~Joseph Campbell

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you're still a rat.
~Lily Tomlin

Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect of one of Goethe's couplets: Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
~W.H. Murray

Physical concepts are the creation of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, determined by our external world. In our endeavor to understand reality, we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He can see the hands move and hear its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious, he may form some picture of the mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he will never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observation. He will never be able to compare his pictures with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.
~Albert Einstein

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.
~ Joseph Campbell

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
~Henry David Thoreau

When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.
~Seneca

A vision without a task is but a dream, a task without a vision is drudgery, a vision and a task is the hope of the world.
~From a church in England, 1730

Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
~ Shakespeare

A first rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.
~ Abraham Maslow

When the sun rises, I go to work.
When the sun goes down, I take my rest,
I dig the well from which I drink,
I farm the soil which yields my food,
I share creation. Kings can do no more.
~from ancient China, 2500 BC

May you live all the days of your life.
~ Jonathon Swift

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.
~ Sid Gautama

A happy life is one which is in accord with its own nature.
~ Seneca

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then throwing them back again, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now.
~Henry David Thoreau

In a river mist, if another boat knocks against yours, you might yell at the other fellow to stay clear. But if you notice then, that it's an empty boat, adrift with nobody aboard, you stop yelling. When you discover that all the others are drifting boats, there's no one to yell at. And when you find out you are an empty boat, there's no one to yell.
~Chuang Tzu

Let everything be allowed to do what it naturally does, so its nature will be satisfied.
~Chuang Tzu

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions.
~Daniel Boorstein

Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
~Norman Cousins

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
~Henry David Thoreau

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
~Mark Twain

Don't tell lies, and don't do what you hate, for all is revealed in the presence of the sky.
~ Yeshua, (translation by N. Lore)

Do or do not. There is no try.
~Yoda

I think and think for months and years. Ninety—nine times, the conclusion is false. The hundredth time I am right.
~ Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

The master in the art of living draws no distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves it to others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he is always doing both.
~Susan Fowler Woodring

We're taught to value ourselves not by the good we do but by the shoes we wear.
~ Laurel Mellin

It is very important that you only do what you love to do. You may be very poor, you may go hungry, you may lose your car, you may have to move into a shabby place to live. But you will totally live. And at the end of your days, you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do. Otherwise, you will live as a prostitute. You will do things only for a reason-to please other people-and you will not have lived. And you will not have a pleasant death.

If, on the other hand, you listen to your own inner voice, to your own inner wisdom, which is far greater than anyone else's as far as you are concerned, you will not go wrong, and you will know what to do with your life. Then time is no longer relevant.
~ Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Death Is of Vital Importance

The school system only recognizes one type of intelligence. There are so many different types of intelligence."
~Bruce Springsteen

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
~ Mark Twain

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

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

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
~ John Gardner

A passionately lived life is not always comfortable. Going for it involves being open to all of life — the joys, the sorrows, the mundane as well and the magic, the splendid victories, the most abject defeats. You might even stop closing your eyes during the scary parts of the movie.
~ Nicholas Lore quoted in Designing Your Life

It takes committed, high energy, full-tilt boogie participation to have the kind of life you want.
~ Nicholas Lore quoted in Designing Your Life

True independence means being free from the domination of your own internal automatic behaviors, not doing what you feel like when the urge strikes.
~ Nicholas Lore quoted in Claws

Go for vitality, not comfort
~ Nicholas Lore quoted in Entrepreneur Magazine

The secret to perseverance is a simple one: have a bigger commitment to getting the job done than to attempting to control your inner feelings and sensations.
~ Nicholas Lore quoted in Coachnet

If you make the wrong decision, you make the wrong decision. That's all there is to it. There are few guarantees in life. One of them is that you will make lots of mistakes. The worst thing you can do is wimp out and spend your life in suspended animation, refusing to make a choice because it may not be a perfect one.
~ Nicholas Lore quoted in The Chicago Tribune

Everyone else on the planet, from the lowest amoeba to the great blue whale, expresses all their component elements in a perfect dance with the world around them. Only human beings have unfulfilled lives.
~ Nicholas Lore quoted in Wholeliving

The secret of creating anything new in your life consists of creating new commitments and then holding the tiller to your new course until it becomes established as a behavior.
~ Nicholas Lore quoted in The Coach

Pathfinder author Nicholas Lore has a very interesting discussion titled "Get to know the realm of possibility" in which he compares "options" and "possibilities." He says, "Everyone has options. They are a fixed set of predetermined scenarios, points of view, perceived limitations that already reside in your data bank. If you depend on your options to formulate your future, that future will be no more than a rearrangement of your past. Then he says, "Possibilities are completely different. When you ask 'what is possible?' you must stretch your imagination out of the confines of the familiar. To live a life beyond the mediocre, ask not 'what are my options?' but 'What is possible?'"
~ Nicholas Lore quoted in Network World Fusion Focus on Careers