Pope John Paul II

An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.

As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.

Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.

From now on it is only through a conscious choice and through a deliberate policy that humanity can survive.
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Steven Hayes

Each of us compares our insides to others’ outsides . . . But what if everyone has a secret? And what if the joke is that we all have the same one? The plain fact is that almost all people are in pain somewhere in their lives much of the time. It is hard to be fully human. Almost all of us struggle and suffer, and we all find that so-called easy methods of feeling good bear little relationship to living a meaningful, valued, vital life.
Steven Hayes

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

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Douglas MacArthur

People grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul. 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. In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber. So long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer and courage, so long are you young. When your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and then only, are you grown old. And then, indeed as the ballad says, you just fade away.

Douglas MacArthur

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Helen Keller Quotations

-It gives me a deep comforting sense that all things seen are temporal and things unseen are eternal.

-Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.

-Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.

-Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

-I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.

-We would never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.

-People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.

-No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.

-The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

-One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

-I long to accomplish a great and noble task but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble…. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shove of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of the honest worker.

-I am only one, but still I am one; I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; I will not refuse to do the something I can do.

Helen Keller

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Family Business Stories & Quotations

They look upon retirement as something between euthanasia and castration.
Leon A Danco, President, Center for Family Business
ATTRIBUTION: On company founders who view “giving up” as tantamount to planning their own funerals, NY Times 11 Jun 86

Successors can’t learn from their mistakes if they’re never allowed to make any.
Leon A Danco, President, Center for Family Business
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Laurence Boldt

-With the voice of conscience as your centre, all the elements of your being are in harmony. When you lose the centre the parts scatter and begin to war with one another.

-To go through life without ever knowing or expressing your talents is the worst form of poverty and self denial.

-A life’s work is created from the inside out, from your innate talents and interests, not by holding your finger up to the wind.
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Joseph Campbell

-We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

-You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning… a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.

-When you follow your bliss… doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn’t be a door for anyone else.
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