Catalyst Quotes

“Power to Choose Our Response / Sit Down to a Banquet of Consequences”

“Of all the questions I have asked my readers this is the most important: What would you do if you weren’t afraid?  When you finally give wings to that answer then you have found your life’s purpose.”   (Shannon L. Alder)

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“I’m terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I ‘do’ anything or not.  In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on ‘time’ – it doesn’t of course.  It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn’t matter if you’ve done anything or not.”   (Philip Larkin)

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“Between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom … when we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.”   (Viktor Frankl)

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“I want to remind us all that the world is listening, all the time.  How we are ripples out from us into the world and affects others.  We have a responsibility – an ability to respond – to the world.  Finding our particular way of living this responsibility, of offering who we are to the world, is why we are here.  We are called because the world needs us to embody the meaning in our lives.”   (Oriah Mountain Dreamer)

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“Figure out your passion.  What floats your boat, rings your bell, lights your tree?  A life without passion is possible, but not desirable.  Have you really lived at all if you have not lived with passion?  Without it would a masterpiece be possible?  I don’t think so.  With purpose, cause and passion, there is no way the end you envision will not become the reality you live.”   (Toni Sorenson)

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“Good at the beginning

…is another word for lucky.  Someone needs to get lucky, and  it might even be you, but luck is not a strategy.

Becoming good in the long run, that’s the result of effort and tenacity and smart practice.

Not just the individual, the kid who doesn’t learn to walk the first day, or the violinist who doesn’t win a competition at the age of eight, but organizations and their projects as well.

The people who are good in the long run fail a lot, especially at the beginning.  So, when you fail early, it might be worth realizing that this is part of the deal, the price you pay for being good in the long run.

Every rejection is a gift.  A chance to learn and to do it better next time.  An opportunity to figure out how to bounce, not break.  Don’t waste them.

Sometimes, getting lucky at the start means that you fail to learn resilience and tenacity, and you lack the tools to get better.  The long run is a lot longer than the start is.”   (Seth Godin, Seth’s Blog, 5.8.14)

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“Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.”   (Robert Louis Stephenson)

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“Don’t Diminish Your Soul by Being Mediocre”

“There are so many things that we wish we had done yesterday, so few that we feel like doing today.”   (Mignon McLaughlin)

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“Don’t aim at success.  The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.  For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.  Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success:  you have to let it happen by not caring about it.  I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge.  Then you will live to see that in the long-run — in the long-run, I say! – success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”   (Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning)

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“But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something?  Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you.  Mediocrity’s a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.”  (Tom Robbins)

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“The year you were born marks only your entry into the world.  Other years where you prove your worth, they are the ones worth celebrating.”   (Jarod Kintz)

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“The limits on your enlightenment come not from the age you stopped going to school but from the age you stopped being curious.”   (Neil deGrasse Tyson)

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“No matter how strongly a thing may be believed, strength of belief is no criterion of truth. But what is truth?  Perhaps a kind of belief that has become a condition of life?”   (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power)

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“Our Capacity to Love Gives Meaning to the Indifferent Universe”

“Visions haunt the mind of unforeseen things of the future.  Action is of no possibility, but meandering doubts of a stoic nature made real by the mind are persuasive enough to destroy hope.

It’s the overly-broad confusion, but not knowing what to be confused about that is the most perplexing.  Whether it is the future, the present or the past, all of the answers will never come. The uncertainty lies not in the answer, but not knowing what question to ask.

Life must have meaning, but God – if there is such a thing – is having too much fun not telling me what that is.”   (Brian Krans, A Constant Suicide)

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“If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more.  If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough.”   (Oprah Winfrey)

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“Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly, human happiness does not seem to be included in the design of creation.  It is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe.  And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even try to find joy from simple things, like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more.”   (Woody Allen)

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“All I ask is one thing, and I’m asking this particularly of young people:  please don’t be cynical.  I hate cynicism, for the record, it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere.

Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get.  But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”   (Conan O’Brien)

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“The simple things are also the most extraordinary things, and only the wise can see them.”   (Paulo Coelho)

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“Two rules of success in life:            

1. Don’t tell people everything you know.”   (Anonymous)

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“Create More Urgency – Shake Up the Scene – Celebrate Everyone’s Uniqueness”

“‘I didn’t have time.’

This actually means, ‘it wasn’t important enough.’  It wasn’t a high priority, fun, distracting, profitable or urgent enough to make it to the top of the list.

Every few days, Twitter and Facebook soak up a billion hours of ‘spare’ time.  Where did that time come from?  What did we do before social media was here?  Weren’t we busy five years ago?

Running out of time is mostly a euphemism, and the smart analyst realizes that it’s a message about something else.  Time is finite, but, unlike money, time is also replenished every second.

The people you’re trying to reach are always recalibrating which meetings they go to, which shows they watch, which books they don’t read.  The solution has nothing to do with giving people more time (you can’t) and everything to do with creating more urgency, more of an itch, more desire.”   (Seth Godin, Seth’s Blog, April 30, 2014)

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“Go be that starving artist you’re afraid to be.  Open up that journal and get poetic finally.  Volunteer.  Suck it up and travel.  You were not born here to work and pay taxes.  You were put here to be part of a vast organism to explore and create.  Stop putting it off.  The world has much more to offer than what’s on 15 televisions at TGI Fridays.  Take pictures.  Scare people.  Shake up the scene.  Be the change you want to see in the world.  You’ll thank yourself for it.”   (Jason Mraz)

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“Mom always tells me to celebrate everyone’s uniqueness.  I like the way that sounds.”   (Hillary Duff)

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“Let others lead small lives, but not you.  Let others argue over small things, but not you.  Let others cry over small hurts, but not you.  Let others leave their future in someone else’s hands, but not you.”   (Jim Rohn)

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“We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.”   (Carl Sagan)

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“Searching for the Truth – Challenged to Change Ourselves”

“I am one of the searchers.  There are, I believe, millions of us.  We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content.  We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret.  We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand.  We like to walk along the beach; we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty.  We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well.  Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter.  To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know – unless it be to share our laughter. We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide.  Most of all we love and want to be loved.  We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give.  We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love.

For wanderers, dreamers, and lovers, for lonely men and women who dare to ask of life everything good and beautiful.  It is for those who are too gentle to live among wolves.”   (James Kavanaugh, There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves)

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“Faith is universal.  Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles.  In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.”   (Dan Brown, Angels & Demons)

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“We live in an age fit for heroes.  No time has ever offered such perils or prizes.  Man can provide a full life for humanity – or he can destroy himself with the problems he has created. The test … will be whether man confuses the growth of wealth and power with the growth of spirit and character.”   (Vince Lombardi)

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“The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing.”   (Ernest Hemingway)

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“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.  And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”   (Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist)

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“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”   (Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning)

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