Shinichi Suzuki

To reason whether one has talent or not is to no avail. Abandon these thoughts, and use your own power to create talent.

from Nurtured by Love: A New Approach to Education. 1969, p 47.

John Daniel

A Prayer among Friends

Among other wonders of our lives, we are alive
with one another, we walk here
in the light of this unlikely world
that isn't ours for long.
May we spend generously
the time we are given.
May we enact our responsibilities
as thoroughly as we enjoy
our pleasures. May we see with clarity,
may we seek a vision
that serves all beings, may we honor
the mystery surpassing our sight,
and may we hold in our hands
the gift of good work
and bear it forth whole, as we
were borne forth by a power we praise
to this one Earth, this homeland of all we love. 

"A Prayer among Friends" by John Daniel, from Of Earth.
© Lost Horse Press, 2012.

Gretchen Reynolds

Every single hour of television watched after the age of 25 reduces the viewer’s life expectancy by 21.8 minutes.

As reported by Gretchen Reynolds in "Get Up, Get Out, Don't Sit", NY Times, 10/17/2012

Miss Piggy

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye. 

Lily Tomlin

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.

Ed Sullivan

If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure. It transcends all barriers.

LBJ

When you put your foot on a man's neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what's he going to do? He's going to knock your block off.

Jens Voigt Facts

Once the CSC team bus broke down and Jens Voigt had to push it. French police pulled them over and detained the team for more than hour before letting Jens go with just a speeding ticket.

Heather McHugh

I have always lived on waterfronts. If you live on the edge of an enormous mountain or an enormous body of water, it's harder to think of yourself as being so important. That seems useful to me, spiritually.

Roger Housden

Day by day, tiny specks of us float away. No matter which exercise or diet regime we follow, no matter which self-help guru or meditation practice we follow, nothing will dispel the reality that we are not built to last. Death is our supreme limitation, the final proof that perfection was never meant to be part of human experience.

A hundred years from now, there will be all new people. Sooner rather than later, we shall not be here: no eyes, no nose, no ears, no tongue, no mind. No you or me. Gone, and who knows where, if anywhere.

Yet knowing the extent of our limitation, feeling our soon-not-to-be-hereness in our bones, is the best condition we can have for waking up to the miracle that we are here now. That is the brilliance of the human design plan; the built-in "defect" is the very thing that can spur us to drink down the full draught as it comes to us. Better to taste this gritty, imperfect life we have than to defer it to some more perfect future that will never come.

From Perfectly Imperfect article.

DK

It's only two layers, but I packed it with chicken.

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones

Whatever the fight, don't be ladylike.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I said if he had stolen a railroad, he would be a United States Senator.

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!

Tina Fey

So my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: "Is this person in between me and what I want to do?" If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you're in charge, don't hire the people who were jerky to you.

--from Bossypants (2011)

Stephen Vincent Benét

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

Kyle Crichton

Life's a pretty precious and wonderful thing. You can't sit down and let it lap around you...you have to plunge into it. And you can't save it, you can't store it up, you can't horde it in a vault. You've got to taste it. You've got to use it. The more you use, the more you have...that's the miracle of it! 

--from The Happiest Millionaire (1956)