Catalyst Quotes

“Take Fate By the Throat and Shake a Living Out of Her”

“Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you?  Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you and disputed passage with you?”    (Walt Whitman)

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“I know how hard it is in these times to have faith.

But maybe if you could have the faith to start with, maybe the times would change.

You could change them.  Think about it.  Try.  And try not to hurt each other.”    (‘Oh, God!’ the movie)

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“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 Coelo)

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“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.  Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”  (George Bernard Shaw)

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“At bottom, every man knows perfectly well that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.”    (Nietzsche)

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“Resolve to take fate by the throat and shake a living out of her.”    (Louisa May Alcott)

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“Failures – Dream and Awaken”

“When the morning’s freshness has been replaced by the weariness of midday, when the leg muscles give under the strain, the climb seems endless, and suddenly nothing will go quite as you wish – it is then that you must not hesitate.”      (Dag Hammarskjöld)

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“I believe in the power of important quotations.  I always keep a few in my mind to think about.…  I can always join the best minds of the centuries.  In their great thoughts I can find the courage to believe in the best that I can find in myself.”     (Elmer G. Letterman)

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“Teacher, student, factory worker, salesperson, executive, parent, coach, athlete, doctor, lawyer – whatever challenges you accept in this life, whatever task you must perform for your daily bread … never, never neglect the little things.

You are a special creation of God.  Never allow anything that originates with you, in deeds or materials or effort or kindness, to be less than your best.  Only the failures and the mediocrities neglect the little things.”      (Og Mandino)

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“You build on failure.  You use it as a stepping stone.  Close the door on the past.  You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it.  You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”  (Johnny Cash)

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“Although the world is very full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”   (Helen Keller)

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“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart.  Who looks outside, dreams.  Who looks inside, awakens.”    (Carl Jung)

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“Life – Living, Dreaming and Dying”

“Dalai Llama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, said:  “Man.  Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.  Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health.  And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”    (Unknown Author)

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“If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say?  And why are you waiting?”    (Stephen Levine)

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“Life is like a game of chess.  To win you have to make a move.  Knowing which move to make comes with IN-SIGHT and knowledge, and by learning the lessons that are accumulated along the way.  We become each and every piece within the game called life!”    (Allan Rufus, The Master’s Sacred Knowledge)

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“The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or a curse.”    (Don Juan)

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“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential – for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible.  Pleasure disappoints; possibility never.”    (Soren Kierkegaard)

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“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”     (Eleanor Roosevelt)

“It’s Not Your Aptitude, It’s Your Attitude”

“Unless the distant goals of meaning, greatness, and destiny are addressed, we can’t make an intelligent decision about what to do tomorrow morning.   Nothing is more practical than for people to deepen themselves.”    (Peter Koestenbaum)

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“Don’t wait for extraordinary opportunities.  Seize common occasions and make them great.”    (Orison Swett Marden)

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“The most successful people are those who don’t have any illusions about who they are.  They know themselves well and they can move in the direction of their best talents.  They know the kind of culture they thrive in and how they can benefit from that culture. Unfortunately, most people don’t understand themselves.  Most people don’t want to lose their illusions about themselves, although they say they want to take charge of their career.”   (Bud Bray, quoted in Is It Too Late to Run Away and Join the Circus?)

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“It is not your aptitude, but your attitude, that determines your altitude.”    (Zig Ziglar)

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“We all have ability.  The difference is how we use it.”    (Stevie Wonder)

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“It isn’t bragging if you can do it.”    (Dizzy Dean)

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“Become a New Person / Be True to Yourself”

“If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character… would you slow down?  Or speed up?    (Chuck Palahniuk)

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“The purpose of life is not to be happy.  It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”    (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

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“The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this.  I did not live in the moment enough.  This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs.”    (Anna Quindlen, Loud and Clear)

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“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”    (Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera)

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“Sometimes you have to kind of die inside in order to rise from your own ashes and believe in yourself and love yourself to become a new person.”    (Gerard Way)

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“This above all, to thine own self be true.”    (William Shakespeare)

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“Find That Way, Follow the Connection”

“We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers – but never blame yourself.  It’s never your fault.  But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted to change, you’re the one who has got to change.”     (Katherine Hepburn, Me:  Stories of My Life)

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“You are the only person who is in charge of how you feel about yourself.  Nobody else can possibly do that.  You get to decide if you believe you are beautiful or not, and nobody can take it away from you.  If someone suggests that you aren’t beautiful, you can consider how sad it is that they have such a limited view of beauty.  You can consider how unfortunate it is that they have such an exaggerated sense of self-importance that they think you should care about what they think.  You can also choose to realize that it has nothing at all to do with your beauty and everything to do with their limitations.”    (Ragen Chastain)

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“When it comes to being gentle, start with yourself.  Don’t get upset with your imperfections.  Being disappointed by failure if understandable, but it shouldn’t turn into bitterness or spite directed at yourself.  It’s a great mistake because it leads nowhere – to get angry because you are angry; upset at being upset; disappointed because you are disappointed.”   (St. Frances de Sales)

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“I tried to drown my sorrows, but those bastards learned how to swim.”    (Frida Kahlo)

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“Don’t you ever let a soul in the world tell you that you can’t be exactly who you are.”   (Lady Gaga)

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“Whatever you desire is already connected in some way to who you are and what you now have.  Find that way, follow the connection.”    (Ralph Marston)

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“Time … Must Be Lived Forward”

“There’s only one day at a time here, then it’s tonight and then tomorrow will be today again.”    (Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Vol. 1)

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“Live today.  Not yesterday.  Not tomorrow.  Just today.  Inhabit your moments.  Don’t rent them out to tomorrow.  Do you know what you’re doing when you spend a moment wondering how things are going to turn out …?  You’re cheating yourself out of today.  Today is calling to you, trying to get your attention, but you’re stuck on tomorrow, and today trickles away like water down a drain.  You wake up the next morning and that today you wasted is gone forever.  It’s now yesterday.  Some of those moments may have had wonderful things in store for you, but now you’ll never know.”     (Jerry Spinelli, Love, Stargirl)

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“A very small percentage of the people in this world will actually experience and live today. So many people will be stuck on another day, another time that traumatized them and caused them to spiritually stutter so they miss out on this day.”    (Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You:  Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)

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“I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it.  I want to have lived the width of it as well.”    (Diane Ackerman)

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“You can shed the past.  You can’t shake it, but you can certainly get new skin.  You can grow old and become stronger.”    (Lesra Martin)

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“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”    (Sören Kierkegaard)

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