Catalyst Quotes

“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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“We Need You to Make a Ruckus”

“It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, “Always do what you are afraid to do.”      (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

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“To find what you seek in the road of life, the best proverb of all is that which says: “Leave no stone unturned.”     (Edward Bulwer Lytton)

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“All boats leak.

There’s always a defect, always a slow drip, somewhere.  Every plan, every organization, every venture has a glitch.

The question isn’t, ‘is this perfect?’  The question is, ‘will this get me there?’

Sometimes we make the mistake of ignoring the big leaks, the ones that threaten our journey.

More often, though, we’re so busy fixing tiny leaks that we get distracted from the real goal, which is to go somewhere.”     (Seth Godin)

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“The game of life is a game of boomerangs.  Our thoughts, deeds and words return to us sooner or later with astounding accuracy.”    (Florence Scovel Shinn)

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“As our society gets more complex and our people get more complacent, the role of the jester is more vital than ever before.  Please stop sitting around.  We need you to make a ruckus.”  (Seth Godin, Linchpin:  Are You Indispensable?) 

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“The Mind Can Achieve”

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost.”  That is where they should be.  Now put the foundation under them.”     (Henry David Thoreau)

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“Take the first step in faith.  You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”     (Martin Luther King)

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“Believe and act as if it were impossible to fail.”     (Charles F. Kettering)

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“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”     (Lao Tzu)

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“You can be anything you want to be, if you only believe with sufficient conviction and act in accordance with your faith; for whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.”     (Napoleon Hill)

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“The pressure is on for people to perform at their best, so there has never been a greater need for effective coaching.  Everybody’s a coach in some aspect of life.  Regardless of whether you have an official title, there are people out there who need your help.”     (Ken Blanchard)

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“If you wish others to believe in you, you must first convince them that you believe in them.”   (Harvey MacKay)

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“I Want to Gain in Strength”

“I do believe in simplicity.  It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit.  When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all encumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms.  So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real.  Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.”  (Henry David Thoreau)

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“One of the most troublesome things in life is that what you do or do not want has very little to do with what does or does not happen.”   (Lemony Snicket)

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“But that was life:  Nobody got a guided tour to their own theme park.  You had to hop on the rides as they presented themselves, never knowing whether you would like the one you were in line for … or if the bastard was going to make you throw up your corn dog and your cotton candy all over the place.”     (J. R. Ward, Crave)   

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“So I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons.  And maybe we’ll never know most of them.  But even if we don’t have the answer to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.  We can still do things.  And we can try to feel okay about them.”    (The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky)

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“Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.”     (Kahil Gibran)

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“I don’t really want to become normal, average, standard.  I want merely to gain in strength, in the courage to live out my life more fully, enjoy more, experience more.”     (Anaïs Nin)

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“Living”

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

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“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”     (e. e. cummings)

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“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”    (Plato)

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“Life is too important to be taken seriously.”     (Oscar Wilde)

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“From three to four, he planned to stand perfectly still and think of what it was like to be alive.”     (Wilbur the Pig, Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White)

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“May you live all the days of your life.”     (Jonathan Swift)

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