Rumi: The Guest House

This being human is a guest-house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you
out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Say I Am You: Poetry Interspersed with Stories of Rumi and Shams, Translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks, Maypop, 1994.

Be Here Now

LOST

Stand still.
The trees ahead and the bushes beside you Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows Where you are.
You must let it find you.

An old Native American elder story rendered into modern English by David Wagoner, in The Heart Aroused - Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte, Currency Doubleday, New York, 1996.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, Dream Work, Grove Atlantic Inc., 1986 & New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press, 1992.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-- the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver, The House Light Beacon Press Boston, 1990.

The JOURNEY

The greatest things on Earth have been created little by little; one step at a time, so start putting one foot in front of the other.

urney

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations, though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
but little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do-
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver, Dream Work, Grove Atlantic Inc., 1986 & New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press, 1992.

 or watch Mary Oliver read her poem.



http://blip.tv/mariashrivercom/mary-oliver-recites-percy-about-her-dog-the-journey-5089143

Theodore Roosevelt

THE MAN IN THE ARENA

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

-T. R.

Excerpt from the speech "Citizenship In A Republic"

delivered at the Sorbonne, in Paris, France on 23 April, 1910 

 "I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life; I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well."

- T. R.

"The first essential here in the United States is that we shall be one nation... In such a nation there can be no fifty-fifty allegiance. There is not such a thing as being loyal to any other power. It is just as impossible for a man to be loyal to his wife and also equally loyal to some other woman.... If a man behaves as an American it is an infamy to hold his creed or his national origin against him, or to fail in any way to give him the square deal as an American."

- T.R. speech at Wittenberg College in Ohio on 25 May 1918

Quotes

"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."
- Helen Keller



A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men.
- Bertrand Russell

He who is not contented with what he has will not be contended with what he doesn't have.  - Socrates

When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? - Henry David Thoreau

“Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.”

 Octavio Paz

Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another. - Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis 

In the order of nature we may behold the ways of the Eternal. - John Burroughs

Quotes: HOMER

“Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the
 earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.”
― Homer, The Odyssey


“How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!”
― Homer


“Even a fool learns something once it hits him.”
― Homer, Iliad


“…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.”
― Homer, The Iliad


“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.”
― Homer, The Iliad


“For a friend with an understanding heart is worth no less than a brother”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.”
― Homer, The Odyssey


“The difficulty is not so great to die for a friend as to find a friend worth dying for.”
― Homer

“There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.”
― Homer, The Odyssey


“Everything is more beautiful
because we’re doomed.
You will never be lovelier than you are now.
We will never be here again.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“I didn't lie! I just created fiction with my mouth!”
― Homer

“Sleep, delicious and profound, the very counterfeit of death”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.”
― Homer, The Iliad







“Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“How prone to doubt, how cautious are the wise!”
― Homer

“Even a fool learns something once it hits him.”
― Homer, Iliad

“…There is the heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the lover’s whisper, irresistible—magic to make the sanest man go mad.”
― Homer, The Iliad
tags: classics, greece, longing, love, lovers 171 people liked it like
“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.”
― Homer, The Iliad


“For a friend with an understanding heart is worth no less than a brother”
― Homer, The Odyssey



“A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“The difficulty is not so great to die for a friend as to find a friend worth dying for.”
― Homer

“There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.”
― Homer, The Odyssey



“Everything is more beautiful
because we’re doomed.
You will never be lovelier than you are now.
We will never be here again.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“I didn't lie! I just created fiction with my mouth!”
― Homer

“Sleep, delicious and profound, the very counterfeit of death”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“[I]t is the wine that leads me on,
the wild wine
that sets the wisest man to sing
at the top of his lungs,
laugh like a fool – it drives the
man to dancing... it even
tempts him to blurt out stories
better never told.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“If you serve too many masters, you'll soon suffer.”
― Homer

“Let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth, now the living timber bursts with the new buds and spring comes round again. And so with men: as one generation comes to life, another dies away.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“The journey is the thing.” 
― Homer

“Ah how shameless – the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone they say come all their miseries yes but they themselves with their own reckless ways compound their pains beyond their proper share.”
― Homer, The Odyssey


“Sing, O muse, of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Life is largely a matter of expectation. ”
― Homer

“Why so much grief for me? No man will hurl me down to Death, against my fate. And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you - it’s born with us the day that we are born.”
― Homer, The Iliad


“youth is quick in feeling but weak in judgement.”
― Homer

“Each man delights in the work that suits him best.”
― Homer, The Odyssey



“There will be killing till the score is paid.”
― Homer, The Odyssey



“some things you will think of yourself,...some things God will put into your mind”
― Homer, The Odyssey


“Now from his breast into the eyes the ache
of longing mounted, and he wept at last,
his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,
longed for as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down
under Poseidon's blows, gale winds and tons of sea.
Few men can keep alive through a big serf
to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches
in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:
and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,
her white arms round him pressed as though forever.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“No one can hurry me down to Hades before my time, but if a man's hour is come, be he brave or be he coward, there is no escape for him when he has once been born.”
― Homer, The Iliad


“...like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.”
― Homer, The Iliad



READ MORE:  http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/903.Homer?page=2

The Road to Optimism: Change Your Language-Change Your Life!

The Road to Optimism: Change Your Language-Change Your Life! [Hardcover]

J. Mitchell Perry (Author), Richard E. Griggs (Collaborator)

The pioneering book shows you how to build optimism, a crucial factor in achieving personal and professinal well-being. Chapter discussions on making choices, unlearning limiting behavior, achieving forward momentum, managing anger, coping with loss and paying your dues also provide a roadmap for change. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to "focus on the good stuff, the choices you can make in your workds that will lead you to the uplifting results you desire."

About the Author

Dr. J. Mitchell Perry has been a professional speaker, organizational psychologist, and entrepreneur since 1976. He is president of JM Perry Corporation, which works with large and small companies on strategic planning, conflict resolution, corporate relations, and business development.

Richard E. Griggs writes books and teaches courses about reaching personal career, and corporate goals withsound principles of balanced achievement.

http://www.jmperry.com/

In the Zone: Achieving Optimal Performance …

› J. Mitchell Perry

http://www.amazon.com/The-Road-Optimism-Change-Language-Change/dp/0922530025

To Do List

1- Study less, more.

2-get organized.  What comes first, Priorities or vision?

3-Space is the new luxury; minimalism  

4-keep it simple  

5-set smart goals: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound

6 - practice and repetition

7. Remember to seek progress over perfection and

8. -do a little every day to achieve your goals.

Funny Quotes

Confucius say: It is okay to let a fool kiss you:
                           but don't let a kiss fool you.



 Marriage is a relationship in which one person is always right and the other is the husband!


 Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.

Marriage is give and take. You'd better give it to her or she will take it anyway.

Those who can't laugh at themselves leave the job to others.


It is no exaggeration to say that the undecided could go one way or
another.

Going into the unknown is how you expand what is known.














Source: http://instacanv.as/alskye1/piece/454922557792550783_261440606

http://itshumour.blogspot.com/2010/06/twenty-hilarious-funny-quotes.html

Controversial Wife Beater Shirt

Men Tank Top Wife Beater A-Shirt Undershirt

'Wife Beater' Shirts Spark Outcry

By Oliver Yates Libaw
April 25


A Web site selling "Wife Beater" logo T-shirts and offering a special discount to convicted abusers is vowing to stay in business, despite outrage from anti-domestic violence groups.

James Doolin, a 30-year-old entrepreneur from Texas, created his site several months ago, offering men's and women's tank tops imprinted with the words "Wife Beater."

"Wife Beater" is a popular slang reference to ribbed white cotton sleeveless undershirts, like the one worn by Marlon Brando when he played Stanley Kowalski in the movie A Streetcar Named Desire.

Doolin says he dreamed up the idea for his products after watching the television show Cops, which has often shown footage of men being arrested on domestic violence charges, who happen to be wearing the sleeveless Ts.

His wife-beaters Web site also has a host of other features that have drawn the ire of anti-domestic violence groups. The order form lets buyers customize the shirts with beer, motor oil and other stains.

It also offers shirts at half price for "convicted wife beaters" able to document their offense and conviction. 

Full price for a regular "Wife Beater" shirt is $20.








Source:  http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93475&page=1#.UZr5v7U3uyA

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HANES-Men-Tank-Top-Wife-Beater-A-Shirt-Undershirt-/260879556053

Quotes: Mark Twain

The Best Of Mark Twain

The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivalry of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.

Faith is believing what you know ain't so.

Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your honor. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.

A mine is a hole in the ground owned by a liar. 

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

Never let your schooling interfere with your education.

Be careful about reading Health books, you may die of a misprint.

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.

Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it.

Sacred Cows make the best hamburgers

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. 

No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great ones make you feel that you too, can become great.

Get the facts first. You can distort them later.

If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Do something every day that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.

Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear not absence of fear.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read.

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it - namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.

A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.

Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal their private real opinions from the world and give out fictitious ones in their stead for general consumption.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

Victor E. Frankl: Core Principles of Logotherapy

Learn how to bring personal meaning and fulfillment to your work and everyday life and achieve your highest potential by applying the therapeutic system of psychiatrist and philosopher, Victor Emil Frankl.

Core Principles

1. Exercise the freedom to choose your attitude - in all situations, no matter how desperate they may appear or actually be, you always have the ultimate freedom to choose your attitude.

2. Realize your will to meaning - commit authentically to meaningful values and goals that only you can actualize and fulfil.

3.  Detect the meaning of life's moments- only you can answer for your own life by detecting the meaning at any given moment and assuming responsibility for weaving your unique tapestry of existence.

4.  Don't work against yourself- avoid becoming so obsessed with or fixated on ann intent or outcome that you actually work against the desired result.

5.  Look at yourself from a distance- only human beings possess the capacity to look at themselves out of some perspect6ive or distance, including the uniquely human trait known as your "sense of humor."

6.  Shift your focus of attention- deflect your attention from the problem situation to something else and build your coping mechanisms for dealing with stress and change.

7.  Extend beyond yourself- manifest the human spirit at work by relating and being directed to something more than yourself











Source: Prisoners of our Thoughts by Alex Pattakos. Ph. D.

Quotes

Nothing is complete and thus nothing is exempt from criticism.
- James Luther Adams


"The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing
you will make one."
- Elbert Hubbard




By learning you will teach; by teaching you will learn.
 Latin Proverb


If the wind will not serve, take to the oars.
-Latin Proverb


It is honourable to be accused by those who deserve to be accused.
- Latin Proverb

It is the part of a good shepherd to shear his flock, not to skin it.
- Latin Proverb
  

Never give a child a sword.
- Latin Proverb