If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two-week vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.

 —Dorothy Canfield Fisher

 

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, “Where have I gone wrong?” Then a voice says to me, “This is going to take more than one night.”

—Charlie Brown (in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts)

 

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.

—Alan Cohen

The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.

 —Charles Dubois

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

—Anais Nin

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. 

—Epictetus

Faced with the choice of changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

—John Kenneth Galbraith

The birds are molting. If only man could molt also — his mind once a year its errors, his heart once a year its useless passions.

—James Allen

 

When you are stuck in a spiral, to change all aspects of the spin you need only to change one thing.

 —Christina Baldwin

 

The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choicest words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.

—Edwin H. Friedman