'The soul would rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else's."

~ David Whyte

"The world will be either better or worse depending on whether we become better or worse".

~ Paolo Coelho

"Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal, or a window opening on something other than itself."

~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when an adult is afraid of the light."

~ Plato

"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor."

-Robert Louis Stevenson

"The only devils in the world are those running in our own hearts. That is where the battle should be fought."

~ Mahatma Gandhi

"Your current reality is nothing more than a complete reflection of the lessons you most need to learn."

"When the sun shines the brightest that our shadows appear the biggest"

"Every man takes the limits of his field of vision for the limits of the world."

~ Arthur Shopenhauer

"Remember who you are, she said. You're a master."

~ Aniesa Thames

"Those who live nobly, even if in their life they live obscurely, need not fear that they will have lived in vain. Something radiates from their lives, some light that shows the way to their friends, their neighbors, perhaps to long future ages."

~ Bertrand Russel

"We fear our highest possibilities.... We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most perfect conditions, under times of great courage. We enjoy and even thrill in the possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments and yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities."

~ Abraham Maslow

"Thats the way the world works."

"To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die."

~ Thomas Campbell

"The great and glorious masterpiece of human beings is to live to the point. All other things are at most but inconsiderable props and appendages."

~ Eyquem de Montaigne

"The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity, and this passion is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish."

~ A. Edward Norton

"The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved".

~ Victor Hugo

"All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between the average person and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this and stays alert, deliberately waiting, so that when this cubic centimeter of chance pops out, it is picked up."

~ Carlos Castaneda

"Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself. Not whom I want to be, but to who your are."

~ Antonie de Saint-Exupery

"Each man had only one genuine vocation-to find the way to himself.... His task to discover his own destiny-not an arbitrary one-and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a fight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness."

~ Hermann Hesse

"Life management begins with mind management. The quality of your life is influenced by the quality of your thoughts. Your thoughts do form your world. Scarce thoughts create a life of scarcity. Thoughts of abundance lead to abundant circumstances."

- Robin Sharma

“Stand for something higher. Live for something greater.”

-Robin Sharma

Learn, do and then be

In learning any skill, especially the skill of living a life based on loving your journey and living in the moment, there’s a three-step process to get to mastery. First you learn what you need to learn, which might be accomplished by reading the right books about the skill you aim to master. Then you need to allow the learning to settle in and integrate within your life. This happens by experiencing what you’ve learned in the laboratory of your days. That’s the ‘do’ part of the formula. Once that happens, and it might take a long time, you’ll eventually get to the ‘being’ part of your life. That’s where the masters live. They don’t try to live, they just live. And they don’t try to be fully present, they just are.

There are four stages that one must pass through in moving form living like a beginner to living like a master. The first is unconscious incompetence. Sadly this is where most people spend their lives. In this introductory stage we don’t know what we don’t know. We’re essentially unconscious- we’re asleep to who we truly are and what our lives could become. But once we open our eyes and wake up by taking some responsibility for our lives and the creation of our destinies, we rise to the second stage, which is conscious incompetence. Here, we develop a sense of awareness about what we don’t know.

“In other words, we become conscious of our incompetence in the way we run our lives. Once here, if we stay conscious and keep doing the inside work to open up, we’ll get to the next stage: conscious competence. This place is characterized by wonderful results starting to appear in life. We’re consciously creating an extraordinary existence. The only problem is that we’re still trying. There’s still struggle.”

We are consciously competent in the way we conduct our life. That’s the good place to be, but not a truly great place to live. We all should aspire to get to the final highest stage – unconscious competence. This stage in life is the stage of mastery. And it’s not about learning any longer or doing anymore – It’s simply of being.

Learn, do and then be – that’s the master’s path

~ From the snatches of "The saint the surfer and the CEO"

"A man is known by the company his mind keeps."

-Thomas Bailey Aldrich

"As I've gotten older, I've had more of a tendency to look for people who live by kindness, tolerance, compassion, a gentler way of looking at things."

~ Martin Scorsese

"Carpenters bend wood. Fletchers bend arrows. Wise men fashion themselves."

-Buddha

"One of the saddest experiences which can come to a human being is to awaken, grey-haired and wrinkled, near the close of an unproductive career, to the fact that all through the years he has been using only a small part of himself."

-V.W. Burrows

“The thoughts you are thinking today are creating the life you will be leading tomorrow.”

-Robin Sharma

“There can be no happiness if your daily commitments are misaligned with your deepest convictions.”

-Robin Sharma

"There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will."

-Epictetus

Footprints

A man had a dream that he saw himself walking on a beach alongside God. Across the sky flashed various scenes from this man’s life, and for man could see two sets of footprints each scene, the man could see two sets of footprints in the sand. One set was his own and the other belonged to God.

Suddenly the man noticed something fascinating as he surveyed all the scenes of his existence: During certain times, there was only one set of footprints in the sand. And this single set of footprints only appeared during the most difficult and painful times of his life’s journey. So the man confronted God with this observation, expressing his disappointment that he was left alone when he most needed help. God lovingly explained that during the painful times, he carried the man.

~ Margaret Fishback Powers