Catalyst Quotes

“Fear? Take Personal Responsibility”

“Only fear can defeat life… it goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease.  It begins in your mind, always… nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it… if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”       (Yann Martel, author, ‘Life of Pi’)

“The most destructive element in the human mind is fear.  Fear creates aggressiveness….fear grows in darkness; if you think there’s a bogeyman around, turn on the light….only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.”           (Dorothy Thompson)

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when adults are afraid of the light.”           (Plato)

“One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living.  We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon – instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.”      (Dale Carnegie)

“All of us are born with a set of instinctive fears – of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, or speaking before a Rotary Club, and of the words, ‘Some Assembly Required’.”         (Dave Barry)

“You must take personal responsibility.  You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself.”         (Jim Rohn)

“Dreaming and Doing”

“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)

 “If someone says ‘can’t, that shows you what to do.”       (John Cage)

 “You must take personal responsibility.  You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself.”        (Jim Rohn)

 “We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.”       (George Bernard Shaw)

“Some people dream of worthy accomplishments, others stay awake and do them.”       (Unknown Source)

“Hear – See – Do”

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”          (Theodore Roosevelt)

“Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.”       (General Colin Powell)

“It is my daily mood that makes the weather.  I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous.  I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration; I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.  In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized.  If we treat people as they are, we make them worse.  If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”       (J. W. Goethe)

“You have your brush, you have your colors, you paint paradise, then in you go.”       (Nikos Kazantzakis)

“I hear and I forget.  I see and I remember.  I do and I understand.”           (Confucius)

“Alter Your Attitudes, Alter Your Lives”

“My whole life is waiting for the questions to which I have prepared answers.”       (Tom Stoppard)

“Don’t spend your precious time asking ‘Why isn’t the world a better place?’  It will only be time wasted.  The question to ask is ‘How can I make it better?’  To that there is an answer.”       (Leo Buscaglia)

“The real tragedy of life is not that each of us doesn’t have enough strengths, it’s that we fail to use the ones we have.”       (Marcus Buckhingham and Donald O. Clifton, Now Discover Your Strengths)

“Some favorite expressions of small children:

‘It’s not my fault. . . They made me do it. . . I forgot.’ 

Some favorite expressions of adults:

‘It’s not my job. . . No one told me. . . It couldn’t be helped.’

True freedom begins and ends with personal accountability.”       (Dan Zadra)

“The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitude of mind.”       (William James)