The Wise Woman's Stone

A wise woman who was traveling in the mountains found a precious stone in a stream. The next day she met another traveler who was hungry, and the wise woman opened her bag to share her food. The hungry traveler saw the precious stone and asked the woman to give it to him. She did so without hesitation. The traveler left, rejoicing in his good fortune. He knew the stone was worth enough to give him security for a lifetime. But a few days later he came back to return the stone to the wise woman.

"I've been thinking," he said, "I know how valuable the stone is, but I give it back in the hope that you can give me something even more precious. Give me what you have within you that enabled you to give me the stone."

-Unknown Author

"The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving." -Oliver Wendell Holmes

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." -Andre Gide

"Men are born to succeed, not to fail." -Henry David Thoreau

"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head." -Sally Kempton

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

"You don't have to have drama in your life to make your life dramatic." -Darin Eich

"Once you accept your own death you are free to live." -Saul Alinsky

" If you want a place in the sun, you must leave the shade of the family tree." -Osage Saying

"He not busy being born is busy dying." -Bob Dylan

"This above all: to thine own self be true." -William Shakespeare

"We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves to be like other people." -Arthur Schopenhauer

"If you're just part of the herd, sooner or later you're gonna get milked." -Darin Eich

"Drive thy business, or it will drive thee." -Benjamin Franklin

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

"Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live." -Margaret Fuller

"I always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." -Lily Tomlin

"If you want a quality, act as if you already had it. Try the "as if" technique." -William James

"Every man has the right to risk his own life in order to save it." -Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action. -Frank Tibolt

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. -Thomas Edison

"You can't build a reputation on what you're GOING to do." -Henry Ford

"Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." -Thomas Edison

"Fall seven times, stand up eight." -Japanese Proverb

"No day but today" -RENT

"Just Do It" -Nike

"Positive anything is better than negative nothing." -Elbert Hubbard

"Our grand business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand." -Thomas Carlyle

"The best way out is always through" -Robert Frost

"Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action." -Benjamin Disraeli

"It is by acts and not by ideas that people live." -Anatole France

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." -Theodore Roosevelt

"One meets his destiny often on the road he takes to avoid it." -French Proverb

"Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them up." -James A. Garfield

"Many a man fails because he never tries." -Norman MacEwan

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." -Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"Let him that would move the world, first move himself." -Socrates

"Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power." -Seneca

"For all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might have been!" -John Greenleaf Whittier

"Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work." -Thomas A. Edison

"No man is such a conqueror as the man who has defeated himself." -Henry Ward Beecher

"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Small ills are the fountains of most of our groans. Men trip not on mountains, they stumble on stones." -Chinese Proverb

"You see things and you say 'Why?'; but I dream things that never were and I say 'Why not?'" -George Bernard Shaw

"Our strength grows out of weakness." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Don't tell me that worry doesn't do any good. I know better. The things I worry about don't happen." -Anonymous

"The weakest link in the chain is the strongest because it can break it." -Stanislaw J. Lee

"You can't hold a man down without staying down with him." -Booker T. Washington

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

"Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow." -Helen Keller

“Never despair, but if you do, work on in despair.” -Edmund Burke

“Dream as if you’ll live forever; live as if you’ll die tomorrow.” -James Dean

“I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” -Robert Frost

“Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.” -Thomas Jefferson

“The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.” -Charles du Bois

“The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning.” -Ivy Baker Priest

“You can be greater than anything that can happen to you.” -Norman Vincent Peale

“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” -Will Rogers

“It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” -George Eliot

“When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and the time that the tide will turn.” -Harriet Beecher Stowe

“Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.” -H. Jackson Browne

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” -Henry David Thoreau

“What would it be like if you lived each day, each breath, as a work of art in progress? Imagine that you are a masterpiece unfolding, every second of every day, a work of art taking form with every breath.” -Thomas Crum

“There is no education like adversity.” -Benjamin Disraeli

“Some things have to be believed to be seen.” -Ralph Hodgson

“There is a future that makes itself and a future we make. The real future is composed of both.” -Alain

“All work is a seed sown: It grows and spreads and sows itself anew.” -Thomas Carlyle

“Life is not in holding a good hand but in playing a poor hand well.” -Unknown

“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” -Erich Fromm