I’ve compiled these quotes by Martin Luther King Jr. to celebrate the birthday of a man whose courage, vision and greatness touched countless lives with the gift of a deeply powerful, eternally relevant message. The message is one of pure truth, love, peace and respect for all of humanity.

Quotes by Martin Luther King Jr.

1. We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love.

2. Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

3. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

4. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war but the positive affirmation of peace.

5. The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

6. Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

7. An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

8. Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable… Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

9. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

10. An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

11. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

12. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

13. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.

14. Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.

15. We must combine the toughness of the serpent with the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.

16. The chain reaction of evil – hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars – must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

17. The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

18. A lie cannot live.

19. If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.

20. History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

21. I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

22. If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.

23. Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.

24. Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one’s soul.

25. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

26. We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

27. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for others?”

28. Hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates.

29. Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

30. Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

I hope you enjoyed these 30 Martin Luther King Jr. quotes, and that you found them reflective of who he was and what he stood for.  He gave his life for the dream that he so deeply believed in- a dream that included you, me and everyone around us.  Join me in paying it forward by seizing opportunities to keep that dream alive.

It’s comment time. What can be done? What do you stand for? What will you do?

Nea Justice

Nea is a Transformational Life Coach whose mission is to help you love your life.

If you desire the “good life” and you want to know how Nea can help you attain it, contact her now.

    

Life is amazing. Every single day is filled with sources of inspiration; but sometimes we need a little help tapping into that.  That’s the goal of Self Improvement Saga’s weekly inspirational thoughts segment- to help you start your week off fully tuned in, tapped in and turned on to the sheer beauty of your existence on this Earth.

This week’s inspirational thoughts include 25 awesome, inspirational self improvement quotes. You’ll find quotes on life in general, as well as, quotes about character, success, love, humanity and much more. I wish you a fabulous week filled with little miracles that don’t escape your awareness.

Inspirational Self Improvement Quotes

1.) “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.”
~ Edwin H. Friedman

2.) “You’re wanting to allow your Well-being, not achieve it. It’s not something that you need to earn. All you have to do is decide what it is you would like to experience, and then allow it in order to achieve it. It isn’t something you have to struggle for or try for. You are all worthy beings. You are deserving of this Well-being.”
~ Abraham

3.) “Everything can be taken from a man but … the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
~ Victor Frankl

4.) “If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn’t matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years — we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on.”
~ Sharon Salzberg

5.) “Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.”
~ Rachel Naomi Remen

6.) “Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well.”
~ Vincent van Gogh

7.) “The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”
~ Henry Miller

8.) “Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.”
~ William James

9.) “Our fears are more numerous than our dangers, and we suffer more in our imagination than in reality.”
~ Seneca

10.) “The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy.”
~ Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

11.) “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”
~ M. Scott Peck

12.) “Contrary to popular thinking, being worthy isn’t something you earn, it’s something you recognize.”
~ Mike Dooley

13.) “Whether one sees the world as God’s creation or as a secular mystery that science is on the way to figuring out, there is no denying the beauty and majesty of everything from mountain ranges, deserts, and rain forests to the exquisite details in the design of an ordinary mosquito.”
~ Robert C. Solomon

14.) “A thoroughly good relationship with ourselves results in being still, which doesn’t mean we don’t run and jump and dance about. It means there’s no compulsiveness. We don’t overwork, overeat, oversmoke, overseduce. In short, we begin to stop causing harm.”
~ Pema Chodron

15.) “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create.”
~ Albert Einstein

16.) “The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”
~ Tom Robbins

17.) “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”
~ Richard Bach

18.) “Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars, every place is the center of the world. Stand in your own dooryard and you have eight thousand miles of solid ground beneath you, and all the sidereal splendors overhead.”
~John Borroughs

19.) “Live your daily life in a way that you never lose yourself. When you are carried away with your worries, fears, cravings, anger, and desire, you run away from yourself and you lose yourself. The practice is always to go back to oneself.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh

20.) “There is no such thing as a “self-made” man. We are made up of thousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our success.”
~ George Matthew Adams

21.) “Any fool can criticize, condemn, and complain but it takes character and self control to be understanding and forgiving.”
~ Dale Carnegie

22.) “People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh

23.) “In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins- not through strength but by perseverance.”
~H. Jackson Brown

24.) “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for
they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
~Thomas Edward Lawrence

25.) “Few men during their lifetime come anywhere near exhausting the resources dwelling within them. There are deep wells of strength that are never used.”
~Richard E. Byrd

I hope you enjoyed this collection of inspirational quotes. If there is a favorite quote that you’d like to add, please feel free to do so in the comment section below.

Photo credit: Greg Marmai

Related Inspirational Self Improvement Quotes

• 31 Quotes on Failure and Success
• 25 Quotes About Happiness to Brighten Your Day

Nea Justice

Nea is a Transformational Life Coach whose mission is to help you love your life.

If you desire the “good life” and you want to know how Nea can help you attain it, contact her now.

    

This week’s self improvement ideas have focused on important aspects of how to live life to the fullest.  If you haven’t yet read the posts on letting go and moving forward at a crossroad in life, I hope you’ll check them out along with these 25 live life quotes I’ve carefully compiled as reminders of our purpose in this world: to truly, fully, enthusiastically LIVE.

Inspiring Life Quotes to Live By

1. “It’s better to be an authentic loser than a false success, and to die alive than to live dead.”
–William Markiewicz

2. “Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life… Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.”
– Viktor Frankl

3. “Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.”
–Kahlil Gibran

4. “One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon-instead of enjoying the roses blooming outside our windows today.”
– Dale Carnegie

5. “Challenges come so we can grow and be prepared for things we are not equipped to handle now. When we face our challenges with faith, prepared to learn, willing to make changes, and if necessary, to let go, we are demanding our power be turned on.”
–Iyanla Vanzant

6. Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.
–Nicolas de Chamfort

7. “Nobody gets to live life backward. Look ahead; that is where your future lies.”
–Ann Landers

8. “Circumstances and situations do color life but you have been given the mind to choose what the color shall be.”
–John Homer Miller

9. “You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.”
–Jiddu Krishnamurti

10. “Whatever you want in life, start today. Not tomorrow – today. Let it be a small beginning – a tiny beginning. Your happiness depends on starting today – every day.”
–Jonathan Lockwood Huie

11. “The only difference between an extraordinary life and an ordinary one is the extraordinary pleasures you find in ordinary things.”
–Veronique Vienne

12. “For most of life, nothing wonderful happens. If you don’t enjoy getting up and working and finishing your work and sitting down to a meal with family or friends, then the chances are you’re not going to be very happy. If someone bases his or her happiness on major events like a great job, huge amounts of money, a flawlessly happy marriage or a trip to Paris, that person isn’t going to be happy much of the time. If, on the other hand, happiness depends on a good breakfast, flowers in the yard, a drink or a nap, then we are more likely to live with quite a bit of happiness.”
–Andy Rooney

13. “The three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love and something to hope for.”
–Addison

14. “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

15. “Life is not a journey to the grave with intentions of arriving safely in a pretty well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out and loudly proclaiming … WOW! What a ride!”
–Unknown

16. “To live with the conscious knowledge of the shadow of uncertainty, with the knowledge that disaster or tragedy could strike at any time; to be afraid and to know and acknowledge your fear, and still to live creatively and with unstinting love: that is to live with grace.”
–Peter Abrahams

17. “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life… I think that what we’re really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
–Joseph Campbell

18. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover”
–Mark Twain

19. “Don’t be fooled by the calendar. There are only as many days in the year as you make use of.”
–Charles Richards

20. “Live life fully while you’re here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You’re going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process.”
–Anthony Robbins

21. “It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived –forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backward-looking position.”
–Soren Kierkegaard

22. “For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”
–Fr. Alfred D’Souza

23. “I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”
–Jack London

24. “Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen hard. Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Appreciate your friends. Continue to learn. Do what you love. Live as if this is all there is.”
–Mary Anne Radmacher

25. “When we are motivated by goals that have deep meaning, by dreams that need completion, by pure love that needs expressing, then we truly live life.”
–Greg Anderson

It’s comment time. Do you have a favorite from this list of live life quotes? Do you have any inspiring life quotes of your own that you’d like to share?

Related Self Improvement Blog Posts

• Where to Turn At a Crossroad In Life
• Letting Go Of This, Moving On From That

Photo credit: Colleen Finlayson

Nea Justice

Nea is a Transformational Life Coach whose mission is to help you love your life.

If you desire the “good life” and you want to know how Nea can help you attain it, contact her now.

    

I carefully picked these 25 quotes about respect and admiration to drive home the principles in this week’s article on the subject.

If you haven’t yet read 16 Ways to Get the Respect and Admiration You Deserve, it’s definitely worth a few moments of your time.

Enjoy the quotes and feel free to tell me what you think or to share your own favorite quotes in the comment section.

Quotes About Respect and Admiration

1. “When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.” – Lao Tzu

2. “Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.” –Aristotle

3. “The best philosophy is to do one’s duties, take the world as it comes, submit respectfully to one’s lot; bless the goodness that has given us so much happiness with it,” – Horace Walpole

4. “People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.” -James Baldwin

5. “Respect is love in plain clothes.” -Frankie Byrne

6. “If you have some respect for people as they are, you can be more effective in helping them to become better than they are.” -John W. Gardner

7. “Be honorable yourself if you wish to associate with honorable people.” – Welsh Proverb

8. “Blessed is he who has learned to admire but not envy, to follow but not imitate, to praise but not flatter, and to lead but not manipulate” – William Ward

9. “To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.” – Unknown

10. “In my day, we didn’t have self-esteem, we had self-respect, and no more of it than we had earned.” -Jane Haddam

11. “Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won’t taste good.” – Joe Paterno

12. “Respect for ourselves guides our morals, respect for others guides our manners.” -Laurence Sterne

13. “This world of ours… must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

14. “The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.” – Richard Bach

15. “You should be able to voice your opinion and respect the voice of the other side. You should be willing to educate yourself and know what it is you’re dealing with.” – Steve Nash

16. “There is no respect for others without humility in one’s self.” – Henri Frederic Amiel

17. “Knowledge will give you power, but character respect. “ – Bruce Lee

18. “Manners are like the shadows of virtues, they are the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow creatures love and respect.” – Sydney Smith

19. “You have to have personality and show that you are respectful and that you have responsibility and dedication to what you are doing.” – Amber Allison

20. “He who wants a rose must respect the thorn.”– Persian Proverb

21. “You should respect each other and refrain from disputes; you should not, like water and oil, repel each other, but should, like milk and water, mingle together.” – Buddha

22. “We ought not to treat living creatures like shoes or household belongings, which when worn with use we throw away.” – Unknown

23. “Tell me who admires you and loves you, and I will tell you who you are.” – Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

24. “If you’re respectful by habit, constantly honoring the worthy, four things increase: long life, beauty, happiness, strength.” – Buddha

25. “Humans are ambitious and rational and proud. And we don’t fall in line with people who don’t respect us and who we don’t believe have our best interests at heart. We are willing to follow leaders, but only to the extent that we believe they call on our best, not our worst.” – Rachel Maddow

I hope you agree that these quotes about respect exemplify what it means to be both respectable and respectful. If you have a favorite quote to add, please do so in the comment section.

I hope to ‘see’ you back here soon for more quotes, inspirational thoughts and self improvement ideas.

Respect yourself, respect others, and remember that what goes around comes around.

Related Self Improvement Information

• 16 Ways to Get the Respect and Admiration You Deserve
• Self Doubt is Out, Self Confidence is In
• Valuing Diversity

Photo credit: Bright Fizz

Nea Justice

Nea is a Transformational Life Coach whose mission is to help you love your life.

If you desire the “good life” and you want to know how Nea can help you attain it, contact her now.

    

I hope these quotes on change bring you the inspiration, motivation and encouragement needed to tap into your best self.

You’ve been an amazing, empowered gift to the world from the moment of your conception.  That hasn’t changed and it will never change.  It is your vision of yourself that needs to catch up with who you truly are, so that you may change your life-experience to one of sheer bliss.

Quotes on Change

1.    “Change will only come about when each of us takes up the daily struggle ourselves to be more forgiving, compassionate, loving, and above all joyful in the knowledge that, by some miracle of grace, we can change as those around us can change too.”
—Mairead Maguire

2.     “God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know it’s me.”
—Unknown

3.    “Begin challenging your own assumptions. Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in.”
—Alan Alda

4.    “Continuity gives us roots; change gives us branches, letting us stretch and grow and reach new heights.”
—Pauline R. Kezer

5.    “It seldom happens that a man changes his life through his habitual reasoning. No matter how fully he may sense the new plans and aims revealed to him by reason, he continues to plod along in old paths until his life becomes frustrating and unbearable—he finally makes the change only when his usual life can no longer be tolerated.”
—Leo Tolstoy

6.    “A competitive world offers two possibilities. You can lose. Or, if you want to win, you can change.”
—Lester Thurow

7.    “If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”
—Lao Tzu

8.    “No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

9.    “The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.”
—Oprah Winfrey

10.    “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
—Alan Watts

11.    “He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.”
—Harold Wilson

12.    “The circumstances of the world are so variable that an irrevocable purpose or opinion is almost synonymous with a foolish one.”
—William H. Seward

13.    ”A great wind is blowing and that gives you either imagination or a headache”
—Catherine the Great

14.     “No one is in control of your happiness but you; therefore, you have the power to change anything about yourself or your life that you want to change.”
—Barbara de Angelis

15.    “The real problem for the creative person is getting over the resistance of those who don’t want to change.”
—Unknown

16.    “If we fall, we don’t need self-recrimination or blame or anger – we need a reawakening of our intention and a willingness to re-commit, to be whole-hearted once again.”
—Sharon Salzberg

17.    “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
—Barack Obama

18.    “There are no prescriptive solutions, no grand designs for grand problems. Life’s solutions lie in the minute particulars involving more and more individual people daring to create their own life and art, daring to listen to the voice within their deepest, original nature, and deeper still, the voice within the earth.”
—Stephen Nachmanovitch

19.     “New insights fail to get put into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works … images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting.”
—Peter Senge

20.    “I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.”
—Georg C. Lichtenberg

21.    “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.”
—M. Scott Peck

22.    “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”
—Epictetus

23.    “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

24.    “In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
—Eric Hoffer

25.    “The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”
—James Baldwin

26.    “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

27.    “What we think determines what happens to us, so if we want to change our lives, we need to stretch our minds.”
—Wayne Dyer

28.     “It’s not so much that we’re afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it’s that place in between that we fear . . . . It’s like being between trapezes. It’s Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There’s nothing to hold on to.”
—Marilyn Ferguson

29.     “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; But often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.”
—Helen Keller

30.    “We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance.”
—Harrison Ford

31.    “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.”
—Maya Angelou

32.    “Today is not yesterday: we ourselves change; how can our works and thoughts, if they are always to be the fittest, continue always the same? Change, indeed is painful; yet ever needful; and if memory have its force and worth, so also has hope.”
—Thomas Carlyle

33.    “Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”
—Maria Robinson

34.    “Change is the essence of life. Be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.”
–Unknown

35.    “The great thing is, if one can, to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions in one’s ‘own’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.”
—C.S. Lewis

36.    “A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”
—Winston Churchill

37.    “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
—John F. Kennedy

38.    “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.”
—John Wooden

39.    “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
—Wayne Dyer

40.    “You can change your world by changing your words… Remember, death and life are in the power of the tongue.”
—Joel Osteen

41.    “You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.”
—Jim Rohn

42.    “It doesn’t matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn’t matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years – we turn on the light and it is illuminated.”
—Sharon Salzberg

43.    “No one is in control of your happiness but you; therefore, you have the power to change anything about yourself or your life that you want to change.”
—Barbara de Angelis

44.    “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith

45.    “Change is inevitable; we will always exist in the midst of it. It is our choice whether we will be its victim or its architect.”
—Merikay McLeod

46.    When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves
—Victor Frankl

47.    “Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.”
—King Whitney Jr.

48.     “The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change.”
—Bill Clinton

49.    “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
—George Bernard Shaw

50.    “Whether by accident or design, these are the moments when, because of a readiness within us and a collaboration with events occurring around us, we are forced to seriously reappraise ourselves and the conditions under which we live and to make certain choices that will affect the rest of our lives.”
—Frederick F. Flack

I hope at least one of these quotes on change has touched you in some way that reminds you of your ability and responsibility to change life according to your greatest desires.

Related Self Help Blog Posts

• You Can Change, I Can Change, We Can Change
• 31 Quotes on Failure and Success

Photo credit: Elisa Ursalas

Nea Justice

Nea is a Transformational Life Coach whose mission is to help you love your life.

If you desire the “good life” and you want to know how Nea can help you attain it, contact her now.

    

It’s an understatement to say that motherhood is the greatest gift ever bestowed upon me.  The rewards, however intangible, make every single teardrop so very worthwhile.

So, what do I want as a Mother’s Day gift?

I want what every other loving, caring, true mother wants. I want to see the absolute best for my child.  I want the comfort of knowing that I’ve done my job as a mother to the best of my ability; and I want to stand in awe at the fruit of my hard work.  I have that gift.  Her name is Brandye—my only child.  She’s my walking, talking, living, breathing Mother’s Day gift.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers out there. May Mothers Day 2011 be your best yet. Enjoy the quotes!

Quotes for Mothers Day to Every Mother in the World

1.       “A mother laughs our laughter, sheds our tears, returns our love,fears our fears. She lives our joys, cares our cares, and all our hopes and dreams she shares.”
~Julia Summers

2.       “Motherhood brings as much joy as ever, but it still brings boredom, exhaustion, and sorrow too. Nothing else ever will make you as happy or as sad, as proud or as tired, for nothing is quite as hard as helping a person develop his own individuality especially while you struggle to keep your own.”
~Marguerite Kelly

3.       “It’s not only children who grow.  Parents do too.  As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours.  I can’t tell my children to reach for the sun.  All I can do is reach for it, myself.”
~Joyce Maynard

4.       “She was the archetypal selfless mother: living only for her children, sheltering them from the consequences of their actions — and in the end doing them irreparable harm.”
~Marcia Muller

5.       A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.
~Tenneva Jordan

6.       Being a full-time mother is one of the highest salaried jobs in my field, since the payment is pure love.
~Mildred B. Vermont

7.       When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts.  A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.
~Sophia Loren,

8.       Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother.  A child is a child.  They get bigger, older, but grown?  What’s that suppose to mean?  In my heart it don’t mean a thing.
~Toni Morrison, Beloved

9.       “I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best I could bring to it.”
~Rose Kennedy

10.   “A daughter is a mother’s gender partner, her closest ally in the family confederacy, an extension of her self.  And mothers are their daughters’ role model, their biological and emotional road map, the arbiter of all their relationships.”
~Victoria Secunda

11.   “The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.”
~Theodore Hesburgh

12.   “The mother loves her child most divinely, not when she surrounds him with comfort and anticipates his wants, but when she resolutely holds him to the highest standards and is content with nothing less than his best.”
~Hamilton Wright

13.   “To nourish children and raise them against odds is any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.”
~Marilyn French

14.   “The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.”
~Honoré de Balzac

15.   “A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.”
~Dorothy Canfield Fisher

16.   “It kills you to see them grow up.  But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.”
~Barbara Kingsolver

17.   “The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother’s side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother, and to become fully independent.”
~Erich Fromm

18.   “It will be gone before you know it. The fingerprints on the wall appear higher and higher. Then suddenly they disappear.”
~Dorothy Evslin

19.   “Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist.”
~Michael Levine

20.   “And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see — or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.”
~Alice Walker

21.   “Though motherhood is the most important of all the professions — requiring more knowledge than any other department in human affairs — there was no attention given to preparation for this office.”
~Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Photo credit: John Dalki

Nea Justice

Nea is a Transformational Life Coach whose mission is to help you love your life.

If you desire the “good life” and you want to know how Nea can help you attain it, contact her now.

    

These inspirational quotes on failure and success are a follow up to Wednesday’s post, 7 Ways to Make the Most of Failure.  If you didn’t get a chance to check it out, just follow one of the links above.

What I hope you’ll get from this week’s focus on failure and success is a healthy dose of the motivation that we so often need in order to keep going.  Instead of running from failure, it’s time to wake up and realize that failure and success are team.  I hope these quotes will help you to embrace them both.

31 Quotes on Failure and Success

1. “Failure is, in a sense, the highway to success, inasmuch as every discovery of what is false leads us to seek earnestly after what is true, and every fresh experience points out some form of error which we shall afterwards carefully avoid.”
–John Keats

2. “Success is the child of audacity.”
–Benjamin Disraeli

3. “To fail is a natural consequence of trying, to succeed takes time and prolonged effort in the face of unfriendly odds. To think it will be any other way, no matter what you do, is to invite yourself to be hurt and to limit your enthusiasm for trying”
–David Viscott

4. “Success, or failure, very often arrives on wings that seem mysterious to us.”
–Dr. Marcus Bach

5. “The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.”
–Napoleon Hill

6. “Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.”
–William Feather

7. “To succeed it is necessary to accept the world as it is and rise above it.’
–Michael Korda

8. “We must be the epitome – the embodiment – of success. We must radiate success before it will come to us. We must first become mentally, from an attitude standpoint, the people we wish to become.”
–Earl Nightingale

9. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”
–Winston Churchill

10. “If you’re doing your best, you won’t have any time to worry about failure.”
–H. Jackson Brown

11. “I have not failed.  I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
–Thomas Edison

12. “We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.”
–Amos Alcott

13. “The truth of the matter is that there’s nothing you can’t accomplish if: (1) You clearly decide what it is that you’re absolutely committed to achieving, (2) You’re willing to take massive action, (3) You notice what’s working or not, and (4) You continue to change your approach until you achieve what you want, using whatever life gives you along the way.”
–Anthony Robbins

14. “When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.”
–Mary Kay Ash

15. “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
–Henry Ford

16. “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”
–Colin Powell

17. “There are no failures – just experiences and your reactions to them.”
–Tom Krause quotes

18. “The trouble comes when we try to fashion our success to the outside world’s specifications even though these are not the specifications drawn up in our own hearts.”
–Howard Whitman

19. “Success is sweet and sweeter if long delayed and gotten through many struggles and defeats.
–Amos Alcott

20. “Try and fail, but don’t fail to try.”
–Stephen Kaggwa

21. “My imperfections and failures are as much a blessing from God as my successes and my talents; and I lay them both at his feet.”
–Mahatma Gandhi

22. “Failure doesn’t mean you are a failure… it just means you haven’t succeeded yet.”
–Robert Schuller

23. “Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.”
–Zig Ziglar

24. “Success doesn’t mean the absence of failures; it means the attainment of ultimate objectives. It means winning the war, not every battle.”
–Edwin C. Bliss

25. “We seem to gain wisdom more readily through our failures than through our successes. We always think of failure as the antithesis of success, but it isn’t. Success often lies just the other side of failure.”
–Leo F. Buscaglia

26. “Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities”
–Napoleon Hill

27. “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

28. “When a man has done his best, has given his all, and in the process supplied the needs of his family and his society, that man has made a habit of succeeding.”
–Mack R. Douglas

29. “Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose – not the one you began with perhaps, but one you’ll be glad to remember.”
–Anne Sullivan

30. “Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.”
–T.S. Eliot

31. “Don’t fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.”
–Louis Boone

That’s the end of today’s quotes on failure and success.  Oh…and I’m reminding you again to check out 7 Ways to Make the Most of Failure if you missed it.

As you move forward with the rest of your week, I hope some, if not all, of these quotes inspire you to overcome any obstacle that gets in your way.  Follow your dreams fervently and with the confidence that you deserve to have in yourself.   Remember, failure and success are the best of friends.

It’s comment time…What did you think of the quotes on failure and success? Do you have a favorite or would you like to add a quote that you love?

Nea Justice

Nea is a Transformational Life Coach whose mission is to help you love your life.

If you desire the “good life” and you want to know how Nea can help you attain it, contact her now.

    

Dr. Wayne Dyer

Some people just seem to have a knack for inspiring, motivating and bringing out the best in others.  That is definitely the case with Dr. Wayne Dyer.

As a self improvement guru, inspirational speaker, and author, Wayne Dyer touches the lives of people all over the world.

His positive teachings jolt those who have forgotten their greatness, serving as the ultimate reminder of the personal power that lives within us all.

Wayne Dyer has published more than 30 self help books, including the New York Times bestsellers 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace, The Power of Intention and (one of my personal favorites) Change Your Thoughts—Change Your Life. You may have even seen him on PBS where several of his books are featured as a national public television special.

His successes and his strategies for helping others to achieve success, are even more inspiring when you consider that Wayne Dyer spent his childhood in orphanages and foster homes. He is an amazing inspiration to the disadvantaged and to anyone who has ever felt hopeless.

I hope you find this collection of my favorite Wayne Dyer quotes as inspiring as I do.

Quotes from Wayne Dyer, PhD.

1. Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.
2. When you stop needing more of everything, more of what you desire seems to arrive in your life.
3. When you stop needing more of everything, more of what you desire seems to arrive in your life.
4. Begin to see yourself as a soul with a body rather than a body with a soul.
5. Conflict cannot survive without your participation.
6. Deficiency motivation doesn’t work. It will lead to a life-long pursuit of try to fix me. Learn to appreciate what you have and where and who you are.
7. With everything that has happened to you, you can either feel sorry for yourself or treat what has happened as a gift. Everything is either an opportunity to grow or an obstacle to keep you from growing. You get to choose.
8. You cannot solve a problem with the mind that created it. First you must change the mind.
9. Doing what you love is the cornerstone of having abundance in your life.
10. Everything you are against weakens you. Everything you are for empowers you.
11. Freedom means you are unobstructed in living your life as you choose. Anything less is a form of slavery.
12. If you are living out of a sense of obligation you are slave.
13. If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
14. Judgments prevent us from seeing the good that lies beyond appearances.
15. You may succeed in making another feel guilty about something by blaming him, but you won’t succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy.
16. Only the insecure strive for security.
17. Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.
18. Successful people make money. It’s not that people who make money become successful, but that successful people attract money. They bring success to what they do.
19. The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of the state of your mind.
20. What we think determines what happens to us, so if we want to change our lives, we need to stretch our minds.
21. Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy.
22. Heaven is a state of mind, not a location.
23. The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don’t know anything about.
24. There is no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love; there’s only scarcity of resolve to make it happen.
25. What comes out of you when you are squeezed is what is inside of you.
26. When you judge another, you do not define them, you define yourself.
27. When I chased after money, I never had enough. When I got my life on purpose and focused on giving of myself and everything that arrived into my life, then I was prosperous.
28. You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.
29. You’ll see it when you believe it.
30. A mind at peace, a mind centered and not focused on harming others, is stronger than any physical force in the universe.

More Self Improvement Quotes

• Joseph Campbell Inspirational Sayings
• Neale Donald Walsch Inspirational Sayings

note:modified re-post from archives

Nea Justice

Nea is a Transformational Life Coach whose mission is to help you love your life.

If you desire the “good life” and you want to know how Nea can help you attain it, contact her now.

    

This week, my focus has been on being happy.  Not being happy because of someone or something, but experiencing the true happiness that comes from within.

So, I’ve decided to follow up this week’s article on Pollutants to a Happy Life with anlist of awesome quotes about happiness.  I hope they bring you smiles, pleasure, and of course, happiness.

25 Quotes about Happiness

1. “Happiness is not a brilliant climax to years of grim struggle and anxiety. It is a long succession of little decisions simply to be happy in the moment.” -J. Donald Walters
2. “What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but, scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.” –Joseph Addison
3. “Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.” –Hosea Ballou
4. “Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.” - Denis Waitley
5. “Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections.” -Unknown
6. “A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.” -George Santayana
7.“There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.” -Freya Stark
8. “Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” - Buddha
9. “He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.” -Alexandre Dumas
10. “There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” -Carl Jung
11. “When I meet people from other cultures I know that they too want happiness and do not want suffering, this allows me to see them as brothers and sisters.” -Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso
12. “Gratefulness is the key to a happy life that we hold in our hands, because if we are not grateful, then no matter how much we have we will not be happy — because we will always want to have something else or something more.” -David Steindl-Rast
13. “People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they’re not on your road doesn’t mean they’ve gotten lost.” -H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
14. “If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy.” – Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
15. “No one is in control of your happiness but you; therefore, you have the power to change anything about yourself or your life that you want to change.” -Barbara De Angelis
16. “A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.” -Hugh Downs
17. “Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.” - James M. Barrie
18. “No matter how much madder it may make you, get out of bed forcing a smile. You may not smile because you are cheerful; but if you will force yourself to smile, you’ll end up laughing. You will be cheerful because you smile. Repeated experiments prove that when man assumes the facial expressions of a given mental mood–any given mood–then that mental mood itself will follow.” -Kenneth Goode
19. “The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.” - Anne Frank
20. “Happy are those who dream dreams and are willing to pay the price to make them come true.” -Unknown
21. “The greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions, and not on our circumstances. We carry the seeds of the one or the other about with us in our minds wherever we go.” -Martha Washington
22. “Happiness consists not in having, but of being, not of possessing, but of enjoying. It is the warm glow of a heart at peace with itself.”-Norman Vincent Peale
23. “People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within.” - Ramona L. Anderson
24. “Whoever does not regard what he has as most ample wealth, is unhappy, though he be master of the world.” -Epictetus
25. “Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world.” -William Lyon Phelps

So, what did you think about these quotes of happiness? What are your thoughts on the topic of being happy? Do you have any favorite happy quotes you’d like to add?

I await your responses in the comment section below.

Related Self Improvement Blog Posts

Top 10 Pollutants to a Happy Life

Happiness: By Chance or By Choice

Nea Justice

Nea is a Transformational Life Coach whose mission is to help you love your life.

If you desire the “good life” and you want to know how Nea can help you attain it, contact her now.

    

After finally getting over the fact that I am no longer 23, I can say with pride that today is my 34^th birthday.

None of us are getting any younger, so I thought I’d use this occasion as an opportunity to share a few positive aging and birthday quotes with my wonderful readers.  Whether you are 21 or 101, I hope these quotes bring you smiles, laughs and appreciation for every birthday to come.

Aging and Birthday Quotes

“Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years.  We grow old by deserting our ideals.  Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.”  -Samuel Ullman

“At age 20, we worry about what others think of us. At 40, we don’t care what they think of us. At 60, we discover they haven’t been thinking of us at all.” -Ann Landers

“Maturity has more to do with what types of experiences you’ve had, and what you’ve learned from them, and less to do with how many birthdays you’ve celebrated.” -Unknown

“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” -Abraham Lincoln

“It takes a long time to grow young.” -Pablo Picasso

“We turn not older with years, but newer every day.” – Emily Dickinson

“One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.” -Virginia Woolf

“May you live all the days of your life.” -Jonathan Swift

“Old people are fond of giving good advice; it consoles them for no longer being capable of setting a bad example.” -Francois De La Rochefoucauld

“Thirty-five is when you finally get your head together and your body starts falling apart.” -Caryn Leschen

“The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn’t commit when he had the opportunity.” – Helen Rowland

“You are as young as your faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fear; as young as your hope, as old as your despair.”  -Douglas MacArthur

“Youth is a wonderful thing.  What a crime to waste it on children.”  -George Bernard Shaw

“Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle.” -Bob Hope

“Middle age:  The time when you’ll do anything to feel better, except give up what is hurting you.” -Robert Quillen

“Growing old is a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form.”  -Andre Maurois

“You can’t turn back the clock.  But you can wind it up again.” -Bonnie Prudden

“In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.” -Edith Wharton

“For the first half of your life, people tell you what you should do; for the second half, they tell you what you should have done.” Richard Needham

“The years teach much which the days never knew.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A man’s age is something impressive, it sums up his life:  maturity reached slowly and against many obstacles, illnesses cured, griefs and despairs overcome, and unconscious risks taken; maturity formed through so many desires, hopes, regrets, forgotten things, loves.  A man’s age represents a fine cargo of experiences and memories.”  -Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“There is no pleasure worth forgoing just for an extra three years in the geriatric ward.” John Mortimer

“We are happier in many ways when we are old than when we were young. The young sow wild oats. The old grow sage.” -Sir Winston Churchill

“Men are like wine: some turn to vinegar, but the best improve with age.” –Pope John XXIII

“Though we seem grieved at the shortness of life in general, we are wishing every period of it at an end. The minor longs to be at age, then to be a man of business, then to make up an estate, then to arrive at honors, then to retire.” -Joseph Addison

“You have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.” -James Barrie

I value every single moment that I am here creating, living and experiencing life; but these positive quotes on aging served as a wonderful reminder that getting older IS a beautiful blessing.

Hope you enjoyed the birthday quotes!

Nea Justice

Nea is a Transformational Life Coach whose mission is to help you love your life.

If you desire the “good life” and you want to know how Nea can help you attain it, contact her now.