Catalyst Quotes

“Who Is Going to Stop Me”

“Go out into the world where your heart calls you.  The blessings will come, I promise you that.  I wish for you the insight to recognize the blessings as such, and sometimes it’s hard.  But you’ll know it’s a blessing if you are enriched and transformed by the experience.”     (Sly Montgomery)

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“If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way.  If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse.”     (Jim Rohn)

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“You tell yourself you aren’t something or that you can’t be something and you know what?  It will become true.  You have to decide who you are and what you can do and then go after what you want.  Because believe me, no one is going to give it to you.”     (Elizabeth Scott, Perfect You)

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“If you want your life to be a magnificent story, then begin by realizing that you are the author and everyday you have the opportunity to write a new page.”     (Mark Houlahan)

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“Don’t try to be different.  Just be good.  To be good is different enough.”    (Arthur Freed)

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“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”    (Ayn Rand)

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“Boxes of Crayolas – Be Brave -Unfold Your Own Myth”

Please excuse the first quotation because of the word ‘bomb’ and the images that it may conjure up because of what happened recently in Boston. We may still be jittery and sensitive about the events in Boston; however, there is no bad intent on my part nor do I take lightly what happened. My thoughts and prayers go out to the families of those who died and also to those who were injured. Nonetheless, I saw the following quote and believed that the message would’ve been much better than what happened. ~ Alex Pena

“Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air – explode softly – and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth – boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap, either – not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination.” (Robert Fulghum)

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“’It is very hard to be brave,’ said Piglet, sniffing slightly, ‘when you’re only a Very Small Animal.’
Rabbit, who had begun to write very busily, looked up and said: ‘It is because you are a very small animal that you will be Useful in the adventure before us.’” (Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Piglet)

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“Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” (Rumi)

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“Day Is Too Dear – Just Listen – Give Me A Call – Believe”

“Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”      (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations)

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“The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen.  Just listen.  Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.   A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.”     (Rachel Naomi Remem)

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“I don’t want to live in a world where the strong rule and the weak cower.  I’d rather make a place where things are a little quieter.  Where trolls stay the hell under their bridges and where elves don’t come swooping out to snatch children from their cradles.  Where vampires respect the limits, and where the faeries mind their p’s and q’s.  My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden.  Conjure by it at your own risk.  When things get strange, when what goes bump in the night flicks on the lights, when no one else can help you, give me a call.  I’m in the book.”      (Jim Butcher, Storm Front)

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“If you believe in yourself and with a tiny bit of magic, all your dreams can come true.”     (SpongeBob SquarePants)

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“Imagination Has No Age”

“Nobody goes “AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!” when they sing it. Maybe because it puts the life adventure in such clear and simple terms.  The small creature is alive and looks for adventure.  Here’s the drainpipe — a long tunnel going up toward some light.  The spider doesn’t even think about it — just goes. Disaster befalls it — rain, flood, powerful forces.  And the spider is knocked down and out beyond where it started.  Does the spider say, ‘To hell with that’?    No.    Sun comes out — clears things up — dries off the spider. And the small creature goes over to the drainpipe and looks up and thinks it really wants to know what is up there.”     (Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)

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“Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?  Proving nature’s laws wrong, it learned to walk without having feet.  Funny, it seems to by keeping its dreams; it learned to breathe fresh air.  Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else even cared.”   (Tupac Shakur, The Rose That Grew from Concrete)

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“If only the scientific experts could come up with something to get it out of our minds.  One cup of fixit fizzle that will lift the dirt from our lives, soften our hardness, protect our inner parts, improve our processing, reduce our yellowing and wrinkling, improve our natural color, and make us sweet and good.”     (Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)

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“Laughter is timeless.  Imagination has no age.  And dreams are forever.”

 (Walt Disney Company)

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“Come In! Let’s Think the Unthinkable.

“If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If you’re a pretender com sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!”      (Shel Silverstein)

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“If you’re going to try, go all the way.  Otherwise, don’t even start.  This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind.  It could mean not eating for three or four days.  It could mean freezing on a park bench.  It could mean jail.  It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation.  Isolation is the gift.  All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it.  And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine.  If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that.  You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire.  You will ride life straight to perfect laughter.  It’s the only good fight there is.”      (Charles Bukowski, Factotum)

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“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back.  That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads – at least that’s where I imagine it – there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library.  And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards.  We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases.  In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.”     (Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore)

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“Without realizing it, we fill important places in each other’s lives.  It’s that way with the guy at the corner grocery, the mechanic at the local garage, the family doctor, teachers, neighbors, coworkers.  Good people who are always “there,” who can be relied upon in small, important ways.  People who teach us, bless us, encourage us, support us, uplift us in the dailiness of life. We never tell them.  I don’t know why, but we don’t.
And, of course, we fill that role ourselves.  There are those who depend in us, watch us, learn from us, take from us.  And we never know.
You may never have proof of your importance, but you are more important than you think. There are always those who couldn’t do without you.  The rub is that you don’t always know who.”      (Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten)

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“Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable.  Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not ‘eff’ it after all.”      (Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency)

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“Eat Cake Like It’s the Only One Left”

“There is some kind of a sweet innocence in being human – in not having to be just happy or just sad – in the nature of being able to be both broken and whole, at the same time.”     (C. JoyBell C.)

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“She would consider each day a miracle – which indeed it is, when you consider the number of unexpected things that could happen in each second of our fragile existences.”     (Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die

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“I am fundamentally an optimist.  Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say.  Part of being optimistic is keeping one’s head pointed toward the sun, one’s feet moving forward.  There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair.  That way lays defeat and death.”      (Nelson Mandela, ManLong Walk to Freedom:  Autobiography of Nelson Mandela)

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“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.  Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”     (Franklin Delano Roosevelt)

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“You’ve got this life and while you’ve got it, you’d better kiss like you only have one moment, try to hold someone’s hand like you will never get another chance to, look into people’s eyes like they’re the last you’ll ever see, watch someone sleeping like there’s no time left, jump if you feel like jumping, run if you feel like running, play music in your head when there is none, and eat cake like it’s the only one left in the world!”     (C. JoyBell C.)

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“Give yourself time today in silence and aloneness.  Something deeper and truer will be revealed to you.”     (365 Days of Love, Daphne Rose Kingma, Conari Press)

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“To Have Faith is to Have Wings”

 “The story so far:

In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”      (Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

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“If you don’t like something, change it.  If you can’t change it, change your attitude.  Don’t complain.”     (Maya Angelou)

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“The reason birds can fly and we can’t is simply because they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have wings.”    (J. M. Barrie, The Little White Bird)

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“I have come to accept the feeling of not knowing where I am going.  And I have trained myself to love it. Because it is only when we are suspended in mid-air with no landing in sight, that we force our wings to unravel and alas begin our flight.  And as we fly, we still may not know where we are going to.  But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings.  You may not know where you’re going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you.”     (C. JoyBell C.) 

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“Always do what you are afraid to do.”    (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

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“In the end

these things matter most:

How well did you love?

How fully did you live?

How deeply did you let go?”     (Gautama Buddha)

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“Faith and Trust and Pixie Dust”

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination, call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.”     (Mary  Oliver) 

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“You must make a decision that you are going to move on.  It won’t happen automatically.  You will have to rise up and say, ‘I don’t care how hard this is, I don’t care how disappointed I am, I’m not going to let this get the best of me. I’m moving on with my life.”     (Joel Osteen, Your Best Life Now:  7 Steps to Living Your Full Potential)

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“Forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.  Give everyone a smile.  Spend so much time improving yourself that you have no time left to criticize others.  Be too big for worry and too noble for anger.”     (Norman Vincent Peale) 

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“None of us knows what might happen even the next minute, yet still we go forward.  Because we trust. Because we have Faith.”     (Paolo Coelho, Brida)     

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“All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.”     (J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan)

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“Be Happy; Participate Relentlessly.”

“Life is a series of collisions with the future.  It is not the sum of what we have been but what we yearn to be.”     (Jose Ortega y Gassett)

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“To imagine that you have already arrived, that you are already completely yourself, that there is nothing more to discover, no more to go through, is to live your life unconsciously, to miss out on the pleasures and lessons of life.  It is, in fact to miss out on life itself.

If, without quiet intending to, you have been living this static, swamp-like semblance of a life, ask yourself right now what you’re missing, or, more important, what you would feel you had missed, if this were the last day of your life.

And then start doing something about it right this minute!”     (365 Days of Love, Daphne Rose Kingma, Conari Press)

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“Find something that you love.  Something that gets you excited you can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning.  Forget about money.  Be happy.     (‘The Pursuit of Happyness’ by Chris Gardner)

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“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.  When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”    (John Lennon)

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“People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descend like fine weather if you’re fortunate. But happiness is the result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly.”  (Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love)

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“Twenty Seconds of Insane Courage”

“Each day means a new twenty-four hours.  Each day means everything’s possible again.”    (Marie Lu, Legend)

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“Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes.  Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow.  Let reality be reality.  Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”    (Lao Tzu)

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“Just remember who you are.  The world will try to change you into someone else.  Don’t let them.  That’s the best advice anyone can give you.”     (Cinda Williams Chima, The Warrior Heir)

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“Sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage, just literally twenty seconds of embarrassing bravery.  And I promise you, something great will come of it.”     (Benjamin Mee, We Bought a Zoo)

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“Waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel?  Well stride down there and light the damn thing yourself.”     (Samantha O’Connor)

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“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”     (Henry David Thoreau)

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