Reflections on Life

"Accept the pain, cherish the joys, resolve the regrets; then can come the best of benedictions -- 'If I had my life to live over, I’d do it all the same.'”

--Joan McIntosh

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Reflections on Life

"I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know."

--Joanna Field

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Reflections on Life

"Life, for all its agonies of despair and loss and guilt, is exciting and beautiful, amusing and artful and endearing, full of liking and love, at times a poem and a high adventure, at times noble and at times very gay; and whatever (if anything) is to come after it -- we shall not have this life again."

--Rose Macaulay

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Reflections on Life

"There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved."

--George Sand

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George Bernard Shaw

"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and want to make burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."

--George Bernard Shaw

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Reflections on Life

"Until you make peace with who you are, you’ll never be content with what you have."

--Doris Mortman

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Reflections on Life

"To be successful, the first thing to do is fall in love with your work."

--Sister Mary Lauretta

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Reflections on Life

"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees."

--Dolores Ibarruri

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Reflections on Life

"My mother drew a distinction between achievement and success. She said that achievement is the knowledge that you have studied and worked hard and done the best that is in you. Success is being praised by others, and that’s nice, too, but not as important or satisfying. Always aim for achievement and forget about success."

--Helen Hayes

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Reflections on Life

"No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit."

--Helen Keller

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Reflections on Life

"The idea of strictly minding our own business is moldy rubbish. Who could be so selfish?"

--Myrtie Barker

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Reflections on Life

"We need time to dream, time to remember, and time to reach the infinite. Time to be."

--Gladys Taber

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Reflections on Life

"Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing is to avoid being a bore to oneself."

--Gerald Brenan

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Reflections on Life

"I want money in order to buy time to get the things that money will not buy."

--Carl Sandburg

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Reflections on Life

"The greatest despair is not to become the person you were meant to be."

--Soren Kierkegaard

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Reflections on Life

"The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness."

--Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

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Reflections on Life

"If one only wished to be happy, this could easily be accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are."

--Montesquieu

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Reflections on Life

"We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action."

--Frank Tibolt

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Reflections on Life

"Life is made up of small pleasures. Happiness is made up of those tiny successes. The big ones come too infrequently. And if you don’t collect all these tiny successes the big ones don’t really mean anything."

--Norman Lear

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Reflections on Life

"Adversity is the state in which a man most easily becomes acquainted with himself, being especially free from admirers then."

--Dr. Samuel Johnson

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Reflections on Life

"If only we’d stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time."

--Edith Wharton

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Reflections on Life

"This is my 'depressed stance.' When you’re depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you’ll start to feel better. If you’re going to get any joy out of being depressed, you’ve got to stand like this."

--Charlie Brown

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Reflections on Life

"Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time, to figure out whether you like it or not."

--Virgil Thomson

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Reflections on Life

"Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route."

--Charles Caleb Colton

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Reflections on Life

"It is the feeling that nothing is worthwhile that makes men ill and unhappy."

--Dr. Harold W. Dodds

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Reflections on Life

"To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy not rich; to study hard, think quietly, act frankly; to listen to stars and birds and babes and sages, with open heart, to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the commonplace. This is to be my symphony."

--William Henry Channing

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Reflections on Life

"I believe that the ultimate in self-actualization is when a person is confused about the difference between employment and recreation."

--Ken Blanchard

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Reflections on Life

"If you treat an individual as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be."

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Reflections on Life

"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you too can be great."

--Mark Twain

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Reflections on Life

"If you are called to be a street sweeper, sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.'”

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

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