Some Quotations And Poems Relevant To The Courses I Teach:

“What are the gifts that we have been given? To deny that we are gifted is, perhaps, to indulge in false humility which allows us to shirk responsibility for the gift. But the gift is a sacred trust…it asks that we develop it. And it asks that we pass it on.”

-Dena Metzer

“When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.”

-John Ruskin

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

-Howard Thurman

The Silk Worm

By Jalel-e-Din Mohammed Molavi Rumi

I stood before a silk worm one day.

And that night my heart said to me,

“I can do things like that.

I can spin skies,

I can be woven into love that can bring warmth to people;

I can be soft against a crying face,

I can be wings that lift,

And I can travel with my thousand feet throughout the earth,

My sacks filled with the sacred.”

And I replied to my heart,

“Dear, can you really do all those things?”

And it just nodded “Yes.”

So we began and will never cease.

The Summer Day

By Mary Oliver

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean—

The one who has flung herself out of the grass,

The one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

Who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is,

But I do know how to pay attention.

I know how to fall down into the grass,

How to kneel down in the grass,

How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

Which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With you one wild and precious life?

“Tell me what you pay attention to

and I will tell you who you are.”

-Jose Ortega Y Gasset

All changes have their melancholy for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

-Anatole France

“When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.”

-Rabindranath Tagore

“What saves a person is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.”

-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing were a miracle, the other is as if everything is.

-Albert Einstein

Some people think that you are who your are because of what you do,

but we Navajos know that you do what you do because of who you are.

-A Navajo Elder

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

- Confucius

In a world where there is so much to be done, I felt strongly impressed that there must be something for me to do.

- Dorthea Dix

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey which matters, in the end.

- Ursula K. LeGuin

If a man has good corn, or wood, or boards, or pigs to sell, or can make better chairs or knives or church organs than anybody else, you will find a broad, hard-beaten road to his house, though it be deep in the woods.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do that which best stirs you to love.

- St. Teresa of Avila

Every job is a self-portrait of the person who did it. Autograph your work with excellence.

- Anonymous

To love what you do and feel that it matters - how could anything be more fun?

-Katherine Graham

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which that person has overcome.

-Booker T. Washington

The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish almost anything if you’re willing to pay the price.

- Vince Lombardi

If you make your job important, it’s likely to return the favor.

- Anonymous

In a gentle way you can shake the world.

- Mahatma Gandhi

Work is love made visible

- Kahlil Gibran

 For the secret of man’s being is not only to live, but to have something to live for.

- Dostoyevsky

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”

-Gautama The Buddha

Life is no straight and easy corridor

along which we travel free and unhampered,

but a maze of passages,

through which we must seek our way,

at times, lost and confused,

now and again checked in a blind alley.

But always, if we have faith,

a door will open for us,

not perhaps one that we ourselves

would ever have thought of,

but one that will ultimately

prove good for us.

-A. J. Cronin

“People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get."

-Frederick Douglas

My mother said to me, “If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general,

If you become a monk, you’ll end up as the Pope.”

Instead I became a painter, and I wound up as Picasso.

-Pablo Picasso (1881-1971)

“I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know.”

- Joanna Field

 “Since life is short and the world is wide,

the sooner you start exploring it the better.

Soon enough the time will come when you are

too tired to move further than your front step.

Go now.”

-Simon Raven

"Nothing is worth more than this day."

- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"You are the laboratory and every day is an experiment.

Go and find what is new and unexpected."

– John Elkes

“Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle…(or) Einstein’s Theory of Relativity…(or) the Second Theory of Thermodynamics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

“There is nothing noble about being superior to some other person.

The nobility is in being superior to your previous self.”

– Hindu Proverb

“We have come equipped with our own powerful instrument

for charting the vastness of inner space.

It’s called consciousness and it comes factory-installed.

All you have to do is learn to use it.”

- Gay Hendricks

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being.

-Goethe

I am only one,
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

-Edward Everett Hale

"I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs."

-Frederick Douglas

If we value independence, if we are disturbed by the growing conformity of knowledge, of values, of attitudes, which our present system induces, then we may wish to set up conditions of learning which make for uniqueness, for self-direction, and for self-initiated learning.

-Carl Rogers

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living.

-Anais Nin

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

-Marian Wright Edelman

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

-Carl Jung

What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life.

-Leo Buscaglia

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

-John F. Kennedy

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.

-Eleanor Roosevelt

No one should negotiate their dreams. Dreams must be free to flee and fly high. No government, no legislature, has a right to limit your dreams. You should never agree to surrender your dreams.

-Jesse Jackson

The best way out is always through.

-Robert Frost

Try not to become a person of success but rather try to become a person of value.

-Albert Einstein

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

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

-Anne Frank

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

-Epictetus

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.

-Frederick Douglas

Many people have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

-Helen Keller

One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
’Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.

Like the winds of the sea
Are the waves of time,
As we journey along through life,
’Tis the set of the soul,
That determines the goal,
And not the calm or the strife.

-Ella Wheeler Wilcox

One needs something to believe in, something for which one can have whole-hearted enthusiasm. One needs to feel that one's life has meaning, that one is needed in this world.

-Hannah Senesh

If you're going through hell, keep going.

-Winston Churchill

I'm doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I'm really grateful to have something that I'm passionate about and that I think is profoundly important.

-Marian Wright Edelman

But there is suffering in life, and there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it's better to lose some of the battles in the struggles for your dreams than to be defeated without ever knowing what you're fighting for.

-Paulo Coelho

Don't waste life in doubts and fears; spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour's duties will be the best preparation for the hours and ages that will follow it.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The purpose of life is a life of purpose.

-Robert Byrne