Quotes

Give me the strength that waits upon You in silence and peace.
Give me humility in which alone is rest,
and deliver me from pride which is the heaviest of burdens.
And possess my whole heart and soul with the simplicity of love.
Occupy my whole life with the one thought and the one desire of love,
that I may love not for the sake of merit,
not for the sake of perfection,
not for the sake of virtue,
not for the sake of sanctity,
but for You alone.
For there is only one thing that can satisfy love and reward it,
and that is You alone.
Thomas Merton

I will humble myself under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt me in due time, casting all my anxiety upon Him, because He cares for me.
1 Peter 5:6-7

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.
Colossians 3:23-24 NIV

A gentle answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.
Proverbs 15:1-2

Mystics without study are only spiritual romantics who want relationship without effort.
Calvin Miller

Irredeemable harm does not befall those who willingly live in the will of God.
Dallas Willard

Wherever you are, be all there. Live to the hilt any situation you believe to be the will of God.
Jim Elliott

Union with God does not consist in recreations, experiences or spiritual feelings, but in the one and only living, sensory and spiritual, exterior and interior, death of the Cross.
John of the Cross

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
Antoine de Saint Exupery

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

I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do. That is character!
Theodore Roosevelt

Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters.
Nathaniel Emmons

We first make our habits and then our habits make us.
John Dryden

We are what we repeatedly do.
Aristotle

Acts form habits
habits form dispositions
dispositions form the will
and the rightly formed will is character.
Andrew Murray

And ... I will love myself. For when I do I will zealously inspect all things which enter my body, my mind, my soul, and my heart. Never will I overindulge the requests of my flesh, rather I will cherish my body with cleanliness and moderation. Never will I allow my mind to be attracted to evil and despair, rather I will uplift it with the knowledge and wisdom of the ages. Never will I allow my soul to become complacent and satisfied, rather I will feed it with meditation and prayer. Never will I allow my heart to become small and bitter, rather I will share it and it will grow and warm the earth.
Og Mandino

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
Anais Nin

One of the qualities that you can develop, particularly in your older years, is a sense of great compassion for yourself. When you visit the wounds within the temple of memory, the places where you made bad mistakes and now feel such regret, you should not blame yourself. Sometimes you have grown unexpectedly through these mistakes. Frequently, in a journey of the soul, the most precious moments are the mistakes. They have brought you to a place which you would otherwise have always avoided. If you visit this configuration of your soul with forgiveness in your heart, it will fall into place itself. When you forgive yourself, the inner wounds begin to heal. You come in out of the exile of hurt into the joy of inner being. This art of integration is very precious. You have to trust your deeper, inner voice to know which places you need to visit.
John O'Donohue

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
Thomas Jefferson

If you are going through hell, keep going.
Sir Winston Churchill

I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
Xenocrates (396-314 B.C.)

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Albert Einstein

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
John Milton

Show me a thoroughly satisfied man, and I will show you a failure.
Thomas Edison

Creative thinking may mean simply the realisation that there is no particular virtue in doing things the way they have always been done.
Rudolf Flesch

Life does not consist mainly - or even largely - of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that are forever blowing through one's mind.
Mark Twain

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.
Addison

In this world, which is so plainly the antechamber of another, there are no happy men. The true division of humanity is between those who live in light and those who live in darkness. Our aim must be to diminish the number of the latter and increase the number of the former. That is why we demand education and knowledge.
Victor Hugo

Emotional intelligence (are) abilities such as being able to motivate oneself and persist in the face of frustrations; to control impulse and delay gratification; to regulate one's moods and keep distress from swamping the ability to think; to emphasize and to hope.
Daniel Goleman

Real joy comes not from ease or riches or from the praise of men, but from doing something worthwhile.
Sir Wilfred Grenfell

If you are distressed by something external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Marcus Aurelius

Christianity has not so much be been tried and found wanting, as it has been found difficult and left untried.
GK Chesterton

Opportunity is missed by many people, because it is dressed in overalls and look like work.
Thomas Edison

The cure for loneliness is solitude and silence, for there you discover in how many ways you are never alone.
Dallas Willard

Opportunity, like love, is never attracted by gloom and despair.
Og Mandino

The deepest revelation of our character is what we choose to dwell on in thought, what constantly occupies our mind - as well as what we can or cannot even think of.
Dallas Willard

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.
William James

Surround yourself with people that respect and treat you well.