My friends,
Love is better than anger,
Hope is better than fear,
Optimism is better than despair.
So let us be loving, hopeful, and optimistic
And we'll change the world. ~ Jack Layton (Recently deceased political party leader in Canada.)
Human beings by nature want happiness and do not want suffering. With that feeling everyone tries to achieve happiness and tries to get rid of suffering, and everyone has the basic right to do this. In this way, all here are the same, whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated, Easterner or Westerner, believer or non-believer, and within believers whether Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and so on. Basically, from the viewpoint of real human value we are all the same. ~ Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
I've never met a person, I don't care what his condition, in whom I could not see possibilities. I don't care how much a man may consider himself a failure, I believe in him, for he can change the thing that is wrong in his life anytime he is prepared and ready to do it. Whenever he develops the desire, he can take away from his life the thing that is defeating it. The capacity for reformation and change lies within. ~ Preston Bradley
How can this quote help you to motivate others and yourself?
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down. ~ Robert Frost, "The Mending Wall"
What walls have you constructed....and broken down?
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing. ~ Agatha Christie
Ninety percent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. ~ Sydney J. Harris
This quote is loaded....knowing your abilities, frailties, virtues.... Care to pause a while to think about this? How can you avoid as much of the 'woe' as possible?
As I go through all kinds of feelings and experiences in my journey through life -- delight, surprise, chagrin, dismay -- I hold this question as a guiding light: "What do I really need right now to be happy?" What I come to over and over again is that only qualities as vast and deep as love, connection and kindness will really make me happy in any sort of enduring way. ~ Sharon Salzberg