Catalyst Quotes

“Expect Great Things of Yourself”

“Prayer of an Anonymous Abbess:

Lord, thou knowest better than myself that I am growing older and will soon be old.  Keep me from becoming too talkative, and especially from the unfortunate habit of thinking that I must say something on every subject and at every opportunity.

Release me from the idea that I must straighten out other peoples’ affairs.  With my immense treasure of experience and wisdom, it seems a pity not to let everybody partake of it.  But thou knowest, Lord, that in the end I will need a few friends.

Keep me from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point.

Grant me the patience to listen to the complaints of others; help me to endure them with charity. But seal my lips on my own aches and pains — they increase with the increasing years and my inclination to recount them is also increasing.

I will not ask thee for improved memory, only for a little more humility and less self-assurance when my own memory doesn’t agree with that of others.  Teach me the glorious lesson that occasionally I may be wrong.

Keep me reasonably gentle.  I do not have the ambition to become a saint — it is so hard to live with some of them — but a harsh old person is one of the devil’s masterpieces.

Make me sympathetic without being sentimental, helpful but not bossy.  Let me discover merits where I had not expected them and talents in people whom I had not thought to possess any.  And, Lord, give me the grace to tell them so.  Amen.”   (Margot Benary-Isbert)

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“You must expect great things of yourself before you can do them.”   (Michael Jordan)

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“Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless in facing them.  Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.  Let me not look for allies in life’s battlefield but to my own strength.  Let me not cave in.”   (Rabindranath Tagore)

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“Your decision to be, have and do something out of ordinary entails facing difficulties that are out of the ordinary as well.  Sometimes your greatest asset is simply your ability to stay with it longer than anyone else.”   (Brian Tracy)

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“Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through.  Face it.”   (Joseph Conrad)

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“And so another week pretending to be a guru, and no one the wiser.”   (Robert Brault)

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“Congratulations! You’re Not Perfect!

“Some people never go crazy.  What truly horrible lives they must lead.”   (Charles Butkowski)

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“Congratulations!  You’re not perfect!  It’s ridiculous to want to be perfect anyway.  But then, everybody’s ridiculous sometimes, except perfect people.  You know what perfect is?  Perfect is not eating or drinking or talking or moving a muscle or making even the teensiest mistake.  Perfect is never doing anything wrong – which means never doing anything at all.  Perfect is boring!  So you’re not perfect!  Wonderful!  Have fun!  Eat things that give you bad breath!  Trip over your own shoelaces!  Laugh!  Let somebody else laugh at you!  Perfect people never do any of those things.  All they do is sit around and sip weak tea and think about how perfect they are.  But they’re really not one-hundred-percent perfect anyway.  You should see them when they get the hiccups!  Phooey!  Who needs ’em?  You can drink pickle juice and imitate gorillas and do silly dances and sing stupid songs and wear funny hats and be as imperfect as you please and still be a good person.  Good people are hard to find nowadays.  And they’re a lot more fun than perfect people any day of the week.”   (Stephen Manes, Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days!)

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“A Spiritual Samaritan lives knowing that if we were to leave this world tomorrow, we were the best humans we could be and we touched the lives of as many souls as possible.  We are not asked to be perfect.  We are asked to make a difference.”   (Molly Friedenfeld)

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“The most important thing I can add from my own observations is this:  Knowing it started from unremarkable circumstances should be a comfort to us all.  Because it proves that you don’t need much to change the entire world for the better. You can start with the most ordinary ingredients.  You can start with the world you’ve got.”   (‘Pay it Forward’ movie, 2000)

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“It’s not that perfection cannot be achieved.  It’s that it’s so hard to stop there.”   (Robert Brault)

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“The Physics of the Quest / It’s Crazy Not to Believe in Miracles”

“I’ve come to believe that there exists in the universe something I call ‘The Physics of the Quest’ — a force of nature governed by laws as real as the laws of gravity or momentum.  And the rule of Quest Physics maybe goes like this:  ‘If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared – most of all – to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself …  then truth will not be withheld from you.’  Or so I’ve come to believe.”    (Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love)

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“No one’s life should be rooted in fear.  We are born for wonder, for joy, for hope, for love, to marvel at the mystery of existence, to be ravished by the beauty of the world, to seek truth and meaning, to acquire wisdom, and by our treatment of others to brighten the corner where we are.”   (Dean Koontz, Life Expectancy)

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“There’s no limit to what you can dream.  You expect the unexpected, you believe in magic, in fairy tales, and in possibilities.  Then you grow older and that innocence is shattered and somewhere along the way the reality of life gets in the way and you’re hit by the realization that you can’t be all you wanted to be, you just might have to settle for a little bit less.”   (Cecelia Ahern)

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“Trusting God completely means having faith that He knows what is best for your life. You expect Him to keep His promises, help you with problems, and do the impossible when necessary.”   (Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life:  What on Earth Am I Here For?)

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“Good things aren’t supposed to just fall into your lap.  God is very generous, but He expects you to do your part first.”   (Audrey Hepburn)

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“It is just crazy not to believe in the miracles you sit around waiting to happen.”   (Robert Brault)

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“Responsibility to Yourself; Expect Great Things to Happen”

“Each of us lives dependent and bound by our individual knowledge and our awareness.  All of that is what we call reality.  However, both, knowledge and awareness are equivocal.  One’s reality might be another’s illusion.  We all live inside our own fantasies.”   (Itachi Uchiha)

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“People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel like that they don’t deserve them, or that they’ll be unable to achieve them.  We, their hearts, become fearful just thinking of loved ones who go away forever, or of moments that could have been good but weren’t, or of treasures that might have been found but were forever hidden in the sands.  Because, when these things happen, we suffer terribly.”   (Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist)

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“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you … it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger.  It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind.  It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre:  ‘I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.’

Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions — predigested books and ideas … marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems.  It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short. … It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work; insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives.  It means, therefore, the courage to be ‘different’… The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference.  Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.”   (Adrienne Rich)

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“Maybe who we are isn’t so much about what we do, but rather what we’re capable of when we least expect it.”   (Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper)

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“She quietly expected great things to happen to her, and no doubt that’s one of the reasons why they did.”  (Zelda Fitzgerald)

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“When I Do Good, I Feel Good”

“I’d always believed that a life of quality, enjoyment, and wisdom were my human birthright and would be automatically bestowed upon me as time passed. I never suspected that I would have to learn how to live – that there were specific disciplines and ways of seeing the world I had to master before I could awaken to a simple, happy, uncomplicated life.”   (Dan Millman) 

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“There are times in our lives when, momentarily, we are illumined.  We see that everything follows a pattern and that pattern fits together beautifully.

We don’t always feel this way of course.  We all occasionally have ‘one of those days,’ but we also have days, moments and hours in which we see that all the right things have happened, that our lives have unfolded just as they should, that we have been given just what we needed.

This kind of seeing is recognizing the pattern, and this recognition is knowing that, at the center everything is connected, is tied together by love.”    (365 Days of Love, Daphne Rose Kingma, Conari Press)

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“Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes.  Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly.  Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.  What seems nasty, painful, evil can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.  Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.”   (Henry Miller)

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“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself:  ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’  And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”  (Steve Jobs)

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“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror.  I can take the next thing that comes along.’  You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”  (Eleanor Roosevelt)

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“When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.”   (Abraham Lincoln)

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Moving Through Life in a Positive Way With Cookies and Milk”

“I have a friend who, no matter when you ask him what he is doing, will say:  “I’m generally moving through life in a positive way.”

To generally move through life in a positive way is to live in a state of grace, of love, expecting that life will bring you remarkable surprises, and knowing that your effect on life will as gracious as its effect on you.

To move through life in a generally positive way is not only an attitude or an expectation; it is a prayer of thanksgiving to the universe for the pleasure of being alive.”    (365 Days of Love, Daphne Rose Kingma, Conari Press)

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“Think what a better world it would be if we all-the whole world-had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap.  Or if all governments had as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.

And it is still true, no matter how old you are-when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.”   (Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)

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“Trust the one who can see these 3 things in you:

• Sorrow behind your smile,
• Love behind your anger, &
• Meaning behind your silence.”   (Kamari, aka Lyrikal)

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“Don’t rely on someone else for your happiness and self-worth.  Only you can be responsible for that.  If you can’t love and respect yourself – no one else will be able to make that happen.  Accept who you are – completely; the good and the bad – and make changes as YOU see fit – not because you think someone else wants you to be different.”   (Stacey Charter)

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“A best friend is someone who never disturbs your solitude but won’t let your loneliness have a moment alone.”  (Robert Brault)

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“In the end, no thought is unthinkable, no problem unshrinkable, no two strangers unlinkable.”   (Robert Brault)

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“Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing; No ‘Excuse Bag'”

“A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.”   (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

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“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”   (Stephen R. Covey)

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“Every day, think as you wake up, ‘today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it.  I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others, I am going to benefit others as much as I can.’”   (Dalai Lama)

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“Ancient Egyptians believed that upon death they would be asked two questions and their answers would determine whether they could continue their journey in the afterlife.  The first question was, ‘Did you bring joy?’ The second was, ‘Did you find joy?’”   (Leo Buscaglia)

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“Throw away your “excuse bag.”   (J. Meyer)

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“Perhaps the Ten Commandments would be more widely observed if Moses had brought them down on refrigerator magnets.”   (Robert Brault)

“This Is to Be My Symphony”

“Most of the shadows in life are caused by standing in one’s own sunshine.”   (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

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“One of the things I learned in my maddest years was that one could be in a room, with walls and barred windows and locks on the doors, surrounded by other crazy people, or even stuffed into an isolation cell all alone, but that really wasn’t the room one was in at all.  The real room that one occupied was constructed by memory, by relationships, by events, by all sorts of unseen forces.  Sometimes delusions.  Sometimes hallucinations.  Sometimes desires. Sometimes dreams and hopes, or ambitions.  Sometimes anger.  That was what was important:  to always recognize where the real walls were.”     (John Katzenbach, The Madman’s Tale)

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“I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.”   (Thomas Edison)

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“Act the way you’d like to be, and soon you will be the way you act.”   (George W. Crane)

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“To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury; and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable; and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasion, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious grow up through the common.  This is to be my symphony.”   (Ellery Channing)

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“Life – Breathe, Soul Oxygen & Replay”

“There are really only two types of people:

Those you now love.

And, those you will love.

Until, there’s only one type of person … and then we’ll probably hit, “Replay.”

That’s what life’s for.”

(Mike Dooley, Notes from the Universe, July 9, 2013)    

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“Abraham Maslow, the Great-Granddaddy in my spiritual family tree and 20th-century humanistic psychologist who studied the greatest people of his generation (including rock stars like Eleanor Roosevelt, Einstein and Frederick Douglass) tells us that what one ‘can’ be, one MUST be.

As we ascend his hierarchy of needs, taking care of the basics like food/shelter/safety and moving up through love and self-esteem we reach a place where we literally have a need to fully express ourselves — to, in Maslow’s words ‘self-actualize.’

Of course, it will take different forms for different peeps.  But whether it’s a calling to be an exceptional parent or artist or entrepreneur, Maslow tells us that this impulse isn’t a sure-would-be-nice-to-have-fulfilled kinda thing but a fundamental NEED — kinda like that need we have for oxygen.

Powerful stuff.

So, the next time you’re feeling funky, check in and see if you’re really living fully or if you’re only kinda – sorta showing up.

That funkiness is your soul gasping for the oxygen of you truly rockin’ it.

P.S.  Maslow sternly advises us:  ‘If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life’”   Eek.

All good though.  He also reminds us:  ‘It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.’

P.P.S.  So, plunge in!”    (Brian Johnson, Chief Philosopher, “A Philosopher’s Notes”)

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“No matter where you go, there you are.”   (Yogi Berra)