Marcus Aurelius

Strength and honor.

Henry James

A personal relation was a relation only so long as people either perfectly understood or, better still, didn't care if they didn't.

-The Ambassadors

Lou Holtz

Ability is what you're capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.

Unknown

Four wheels move the body, but two wheels move the soul.

Elbert Hubbard

Conformists die; heretics live forever.

Leigh Ann Black

“This is not where I imagined I’d be when I turned 30, but I feel really inspired being back [home],” she said. “There’s something about being with family and not feeling upset about meeting rent, car payment and groceries every month. Now I have some breathing room.”

--Shevory, Kristina. (2010, January 21). Out of Work Architects Turn to Other Skills. New York Times, D1.

Katie Spotz

Do not make it personal. Here on the ocean weather will do what it wants, equipment will break, things will not go according to “plan”. But it has nothing to do with me. So often I can think and feel that things are happening “for”, “against”, “to” me. Things are just happening and I can choose to accept it or put up the fight.

-on rowing solo across the Atlantic

Katie Spotz

Break it down. You don’t row across an ocean in a day so it’s important for me to break it down into daily, sometimes hourly, goals and focus on that one step ahead. If I lose sight of that one step, I can become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge.

-on rowing solo across the Atlantic (rowforwater.com)

Dietary Suggestions in Therapy of Migraine

Avoid cokes, alcohol, particularly red wines and champagne. 7-Up is ok.
Avoid aged or strong cheese, particularly cheddar cheese.
Avoid chicken livers, pickled herring, canned figs, pods of broad beans, nuts and chocolate.
No monosodium glutamate (MSG).
Avoid cured meats such as hot dogs, bacon, ham, and salami if these cause vascular headaches.
Eat three well-balanced meals per day. Avoid skipping meals, prolonged fasting, or excessive carbohydrates.

Jacqueline Winspear

And more than anything, she wondered if one could take leave of one's senses, even if one had no previous occasions of mental incapacity, simply by being isolated from others. Is that what pushed the man over the edge of all measured thought? Were his thoughts so distilled, without the calibrating effect of a normal life led among others, that he ceased to recognize the distinction between right and wrong, between good and evil, or between having a voice and losing it? And if that were so, might an ordinary woman living alone with her memories, with her work, with the walls of her flat drawing in upon her, be at some risk of not seeing the world as it is?

--Among the Mad: A Maisie Dobbs Novel (2009)

Eknath Easwaran

“We are not nouns,” Buckminster Fuller says pointedly, “we are verbs.” People who are content with rigid images of others are thinking of themselves and others as nouns, as things. Those who keep trying to get closer to others, to understand and appreciate them more all the time, are verbs: active, creative, dynamic, able to change themselves and to make changes in the world they live in.

Eknath Easwaran

Anapekshah means always ready for the unexpected – in other words, ready for anything. It is a very daring attitude, because it means telling life, “I’m not concerned with what you send me. Good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, it doesn’t matter; I can make the best of whatever comes.” The opposite of this is not preparedness, it is rigidity.

-Eknath Easwaran, Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol. II

Cary Tennis

Forgiving him does not mean that you approve of what he did. It means that you unlock the boundless human compassion that lives within you.
--From "Since You Asked" on Salon.com, December 7, 2009

Tom Ford

"I started to sink emotionally, spiritually. I became a little bit lost. Leaving Gucci, it intensified because I had been able to cling to my job and to my work and to my identity as a successful fashion designer, and all of a sudden that was gone. It forced me to really think, Well, what am I, who am I, what am I about? It took me a bit of time to figure that out. I think this happens to most people in their life if they're insightful enough to indulge it and to get through to the other side."

"Most people have a lot of problems. You can define yourself by them, or you can realize that everyone is going through what you're going through and you make the best of it and you get on with your life and you don't necessarily inflict that [on other people], because others probably have that too. They're just not inflicting it on you."

--Tom Ford, on leaving Gucci in 2004

Thomas Jefferson

I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it....I can speak from experience on the subject. From 1793 to 1797, I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came there, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had upon my own mind, and of its direct and irresistible tendency to render me unfit for society, and uneasy when necessarily engaged in it. I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then to see that it led to an antisocial and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punishes him who gives in to it; and it will be a lesson I never shall forget as to myself.

--from a letter included in John Adams by David McCullough