Catalyst Quotes

“Every Day We Slaughter our Finest Impulses” / “Don’t Edit Your Own Soul”

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses.  That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths.  We all derive from the same source.  There is no mystery about the origin of things.  We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”   (Henry Miller)

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“Sometimes life can be very painful.  It gets complicated at the worst of times, and sometimes you have no idea where to go or what to do.  Lots of times people just let themselves get lost. But that’s why we have to keep trying.  We have to push through all that hurts us, work past all our painful memories.  Because sometimes the things that hurt us are the things that make us strongest.  A life without experience, in my opinion, is no life at all. And that’s why I tell everyone that, even when it hurts, never stop yourself from living, from loving, from hoping and dreaming.  You deserve it.”   (Lessons Learned in Life)

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“Good advice is priceless.  Not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear.  Not imaginary, but practical.  Not based on fear, but on possibility.  Not designed to make you feel better, designed to make you better.

Seek it out and embrace the true friends that care enough to risk sharing it.

I’m not sure what takes more guts — giving it or getting it.”   (Seth Godin, Seth’s Blog, 5.15.14)

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“It’s a lot to live up to.  These pressures of achieving.  From the moment you’re born, you’re pounded with the expectations of what you need to actualize in order to become a success.  Go to college.  Get married.  Raise a family.  It’s what you’re supposed to do.  The plans you’re supposed to make. The life you’re supposed to live.  Diverge from the norm and you’re frowned upon.  Questioned.  Shunned.  There’s something wrong with you if you’re not interested in improving yourself.  If you can’t make a commitment of marriage.  If you don’t want to have children.  So people earn a college degree so they can get a good job.  They work at a job they hate just to earn a living.  They spend two months’ salary on an engagement ring. They pop out a couple of kids they don’t really want just so they can fit in.  Because it’s what their parents did.  Because it’s what society expects you to do. Because it’s safer to take the same path everyone else has traveled.  Truth is, no one’s listening to Robert Frost.”   (S.G. Browne)

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“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion.  Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”   (Franz Kafka)

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“You Aren’t Like Them” / “Are You Going to Cluck or Fly?”

“Admit it.  You aren’t like them.  You’re not even close.  You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them; watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like ‘Have a nice day’ and ‘Weather’s awful today, eh?’, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like ‘Tell me something that makes you cry’ or ‘What do you think deja vu is for?’  Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing?  Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger?  Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle.  Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence.  Trust your instincts.  Do the unexpected. Find the others.” (Timothy Leary)

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“Don’t struggle so much, the best things happen when not expected.”   (Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez)

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“You are a fortunate person, indeed, if you can begin each day accepting the fact that during that day there will be ups and downs, good breaks and bad ones, disappointments, surprises, unexpected turns of events.”     (Roy Benjamin)

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“Fortune knocks at every man’s door once in a while, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.”   (Mark Twain)

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“If you hang out with chickens, you’re going to cluck and if you hang out with eagles, you’re going to fly.”   (Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)

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“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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