The best of self-help quotations dealing with stress, anger, worry, fear. Positive tips on living healthfully, confidently, happily, peacefully.
Good ideas for life in just a few words from Grampa's personal collection of popular sayings, selected from tens of thousands, tuned to his needs over a lot of years.
Quotes generally can be very dull just because there are so many. Some are trite, stale and similar or are reworded many different times over. There are also some very wise words passed on down through many centuries. Some of these, if contemplated and fixed in the mind, can alter lives in a very positive manner. I know that claiming a few of these words and suggestions on several select topics have improved my life immensely.
Often adopting a new smart living idea will make a strong positive change in a persons well being. And a collection of wise and helpful practices can help turn a dissatisfied life in a new direction, one with valued years filled with joy.
Where are these expressions and which will work?
The most interesting and widely popular ones are common knowledge and they are everywhere. Originally set down in various writings they have been repeated in books, magazines, orated and on the internet. Much has been translated and expressed in different words but with similar meanings. If these quotations were not important, truly wise and useful, why would they be so widely quoted as much as 2000 years later?
Some of these words might seem immediately helpful, others repetitive or dull or seem utterly useless; we all have our personal interests, strengths and weaknesses. For those you feel are of value and worth remembering why not keep them within reach by your morning mirror, on your calendar or PC and eventually in your mind?
Johann von Goethe noted almost 200 years ago; "All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience."
Exactly Johann!
A collection kept close at hand over the past quarter century.
"Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead." - Scottish Proverb
"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life, which is required to be exchanged for it immediately or in the long run." - Henry Thoreau
"The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, not to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly." - Buddha
"If you can solve your problem, then what is the need of worrying? If you cannot solve it, then what is the use of worrying?" - Shantideva
"Friendship improves happiness and abates misery by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief." - Marcus Cicero
"I had the blues because I had no shoes until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet." - Ancient Persian Saying
"Do not look back on happiness or dream of it in the future. You are only sure of today; do not let yourself be cheated of it." - Henry Ward Beecher
"He who seeks revenge should remember to dig two graves." - Chinese proverb
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." - AA Motto
"When you are good to others, you are best to yourself." - Benjamin Franklin
"For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death or hardship." - Epictetus
"If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others." - Duc de Rochefoucauld
"What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. They are but trifles, to be sure, but, scattered along life's pathway, the good they do is inconceivable." - Joseph Addison
"He will succeed if he remains firm in principle and goes beyond selfish considerations to mingle freely with those who do not share his feelings, as well as those who do." - I Ching
"The rule of friendship means there should be mutual sympathy between them, each supplying what the other lacks and trying to benefit the other, always using friendly and sincere words." - Buddha
"Life is mostly froth and bubble; Two things stand like stone: Kindness in another's trouble, Courage in our own." - Adam Gordon
"Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you." - Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The happiest moments of my life have been the few which I have passed at home in the bosom of my family." - Thomas Jefferson
"Life, we learn too late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour." - Stephen Leacock
"There is however, a true music of nature - the song of the birds, the whisper of leaves, the ripple of waters upon a sandy shore, the wail of wind or sea." - John Lubbock
"There's no reason to be the richest man in the cemetery." - Colonel Sanders
"Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out." - Art Linkletter
"The finest lives, in my opinion, are those who rank in the common model, and with the human race, but without miracle, without extravagance." - Michel de Montaigne
"Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission." - Arnold Bennett
"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." - John Milton
A longer list of favorite quotes is available at Signature Quotations
Grampa Ken ~ Author of 32 KEYS About Life and Social Advocacy Articles