joy's soul lies in the doing : inspirational quotes

Leonardo da Vinci
"Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind."

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.
Woody Allen


Miss United States Lisa Marie
“The resistance that you fight physically in the gym and the resistance that you fight in life can only build a strong character.”
~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

Body painting art by Craig Tracy
Michael Patrick King
"Seasons change, so do cities. People come into your life and people go, but it's comforting to know: the ones you love are always in your heart and if you're very lucky, a plane ride away."


Bryce Monuments
Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be - Abraham Lincoln
"There is nothing laughable about a clown in the moonlight. " - Lon Chaney, Sr.


Shoshone Falls
I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize - George Bernard Shaw


“The fight is won or lost far away from witnesses — behind the lines, in the gym and out there on the road, long before I dance under those lights.”
~ Muhammad Ali


Floating above the sky. Earth Orbit, 1965

"If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend." - Abraham Lincoln

Netherlands_Downtown_Canal
““When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.””
Paulo Coelho

“Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.” Paulo Coelho

"Attitude... It is of paramount importance that we know how to harness and control this great force." Tom Blandi
“Be determined to handle any challenge in a way that will make you grow.” - Les Brown


Lawana Blackwell
"I've grown to realize the joy that comes from little victories is preferable to the fun that comes from ease and the pursuit of pleasure."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."


Michael Patrick King
"Nothing else exists when art does."

Simone de Beauvoir
"That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing."

Diane Arbus
"My favorite thing is to go where I've never been."

Morrie Schwartz
"The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in."

Eric Hoffer
"It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable."

Matthew Oliphant
"There is no silver bullet and frankly you probably don’t need one. It is far more important to be able to find the right kind of gun, be able to load the gun … and perhaps most importantly, be able to figure out where the werewolf is."

Pete Seeger
"Education is when you read the fine print. Experience is what you get if you don't."

W. Somerset Maugham
"American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers."

Ed Greenwood
"Throughout life, one does not miss any chance to hold onto the things that are really precious, if one is truly wise."

Ingrid Bengis
"For me, words are a form of action, capable of influencing change."

Friedrich Nietzsche
"What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives, acts, and experiences otherwise than we do…?"

Vachel Lindsay
"Never be a cynic, even a gentle one. Never help out a sneer, even at the devil."

Lois McMaster Bujold
"You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one."

Sylvia Robinson
"Some think it's holding on that makes one strong; sometimes it's letting go."

William Wirt
"Seize the moment of excited curiosity on any subject to solve your doubts; for if you let it pass, the desire may never return, and you may remain in ignorance."

Og Mandino
"I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand. Henceforth will I apply ALL my efforts to become the highest mountain of all and I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy."

Demosthenes
"Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master."

Thich Nhat Hanh
"People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must."

Sheila Graham
"Food is the most primitive form of comfort."

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
"A person who forgoes the use of his symbolic skills is never really free."

Chilo
"Be more prompt to go to a friend in adversity than in prosperity."

Dolores Huerta
"If you haven't forgiven yourself something, how can you forgive others?"

Woodrow Wilson
"The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it."

Andy Rooney
"Don't rule out working with your hands. It does not preclude using your head."

Hugh Macleod
"Never compare your inside with somebody else's outside."

Henry David Thoreau
"What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can."

Andre Gide
"Work and struggle and never accept an evil that you can change."

Woody Allen
"Eighty percent of success is showing up."

Miriam Beard
"Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living."

W. Somerset Maugham
"I'm not only my spirit buy my body, and who can decide how much I, my individual self, am conditioned by the accident of my body? Would Byron have been Byron but for his club foot, or Dostoyevsky Dostoyevsky without his epilepsy?"

Robert Louis Stevenson
"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy."

Edgar Allan Poe
"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."

William Saroyan
"Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure."

Tom Blair
"Silence is one of the great arts of conversation, as allowed by Cicero himself, who says, 'there is not only an art, but an eloquence in it.' A well bred woman may easily and effectually promote the most useful and elegant conversation without speaking a word. The modes of speech are scarcely more variable than the modes of silence."

Edward L. Flom
"One of the hardest tasks of leadership is understanding that you are not what you are, but what you're perceived to be by others."


Victor Hugo
"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come."

William Penn
"Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood."

Fritjof Capra
"During [these] periods of relaxation after concentrated intellectual activity, the intuitive mind seems to take over and can produce the sudden clarifying insights which give so much joy and delight."

Mahatma Gandhi
"Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress."

Jeff Mallett
"Do what you love, love what you do, leave the world a better place and don't pick your nose."

Oprah Winfrey
"Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it."

Ben Jonson
"Language most shews a man: Speak, that I may see thee."

Elizabeth Aston
"Mountains inspire awe in any human person who has a soul. They remind us of our frailty, our unimportance, of the briefness of our span upon this earth. They touch the heavens, and sail serenely at an altitude beyond even the imaginings of a mere mortal."

Hugh Macleod
"The creative person basically has two kinds of jobs: One is the sexy, creative kind. Second is the kind that pays the bills. Sometimes the task in hand covers both bases, but not often. This tense duality will always play center stage. It will never be transcended."

Margaret Cho
"When people think the world of you, be careful with them."

Alan Moore
"Part of being a hero is knowing when you don't need to be one anymore."

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."

Coleman Cox
"Keeping your clothes well pressed will keep you from looking hard pressed."

Horace Mann
"Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."

Scott Westerfeld
"A little drama wins more friends than boring."

Henry Bromel
"We all carry around so much pain in our hearts. Love and pain and beauty. They all seem to go together like one little tidy confusing package. It's a messy business, life. It's hard to figure--full of surprises. Some good. Some bad."

William Shakespeare
"Things won are done; joy's soul lies in the doing."

Piero Ferrucci
"Eliminate something superfluous from your life. Break a habit. Do something that makes you feel insecure."

Joseph Addison
"Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honor is a private station."

Robert Bresson
"Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen."

Golda Meir
"Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart, don't know how to laugh either."

Ezra Pound
"Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand."

Hugh Macleod
"The less you can live on, the more chance your idea will succeed. This is true even after you’ve 'made it'."

W. Somerset Maugham
"Follow your inclinations with due regard to the policeman round the corner."

Malcolm Gladwell
"We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction."




Lawana Blackwell
"Youth isn't always all it's touted to be."