Amy Chua

Nothing is fun until you're good at it.

Do you know what a foreign accent is? It's a sign of bravery.

As a purely mathematical fact, people who sleep less live more.

There are all kinds of psychological disorders in the West that don't exist in Asia.

But just because you love something, I added to myself, doesn't mean you'll ever be great. Not if you don't work. Most people stink at the things they love.

Everything I've ever done that's valuable is something I was afraid to try.

My goal as a parent is to prepare you for the future, not to make you like me.

Be modest, be humble, be simple. Make sure you come in first so that you have something to be humble about.

Never complain or make excuses. If something seems unfair, just prove yourself by working twice as hard and being twice as good.

I’m not holding myself out as a model, but I do believe that we in America can ask more of children than we typically do, and they will not only respond to the challenge, but thrive.

Asa Don Brown

Self-talk reflects your innermost feelings.

All children should be taught to unconditionally accept, approve, admire, appreciate, forgive, trust, and ultimately, love their own person.

Personal responsibility is the willingness to completely accept choices that we have made throughout our life.

Challenge the negative by focusing on the positive of life.

Life is a combination of our positive and negative choices.

Change: How much do you want it? Change: How much do you need it?

Blame and shame are simply mind games.

I, too, have made many mistakes, but one valuable lesson that I have learned is that we cannot allow our mistakes to become our identity.

If you wait to live you will never succeed. Living begins today and it begins within you.

Pure happiness and peace are at their peak when your body is in harmony with itself.

Flow is the ability to be so focused that all of life's obstacles seemingly and smoothly pass you by.

We should be sensitive to the culture with which we live.

Brené Brown

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.

Don't try to win over the haters; you are not a jackass whisperer.

You are imperfect, you are wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging.

I define connection as the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship

Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.

Faith is a place of mystery, where we find the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty.

Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.

Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.

If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief

Osho

Experience life in all possible ways --
good-bad, bitter-sweet, dark-light,
summer-winter. Experience all the dualities.
Don't be afraid of experience, because
the more experience you have, the more
mature you become.

Be — don't try to become.

If you love a flower, don’t pick it up.
Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love.
So if you love a flower, let it be.
Love is not about possession.
Love is about appreciation.

Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That's its balance.

To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.

Friendship is the purest love. It is the highest form of Love where nothing is asked for, no condition, where one simply enjoys giving.

Be realistic: Plan for a miracle.

Life begins where fear ends.

Falling in love you remain a child; rising in love you mature. By and by love becomes not a relationship, it becomes a state of your being. Not that you are in love - now you are love.

Jiddu Krishnamurti 

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.

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.

It is truth that liberates, not your effort to be free.

Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something- and it is only such love that can know freedom.

Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone.

The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end - you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

When I understand myself, I understand you, and out of that understanding comes love. Love is the missing factor; there is a lack of affection, of warmth in relationship; and because we lack that love, that tenderness, that generosity, that mercy in relationship, we escape into mass action which produces further confusion, further misery. We fill our hearts with blueprints for world reform and do not look to that one resolving factor which is love.

Sharon Salzberg

We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.

Life is like an ever-shifting kaleidoscope - a slight change, and all patterns alter.

By engaging in a delusive quest for happiness, we bring only suffering upon ourselves. In our frantic search for something to quench our thirst, we overlook the water all around us and drive ourselves into exile from our own lives.

Restore your attention or bring it to a new level by dramatically slowing down whatever you're doing.

The difference between misery and happiness depends on what we do with our attention.

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.

All beings want to be happy, yet so very few know how. It is out of ignorance that any of us cause suffering, for ourselves or for others.

We don’t need any sort of religious orientation to lead a life that is ethical, compassionate and kind.

It is never too late to turn on the light. Your ability to break an unhealthy habit or turn off an old tape doesn't depend on how long it has been running; a shift in perspective doesn't depend on how long you've held on to the old view. When you flip the switch in that attic, it doesn't matter whether its been dark for ten minutes, ten years or ten decades.  The light still illuminates the room and banishes the murkiness, letting you see the things you couldn't see before. Its never too late to take a moment to look.

John Berger

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

A man's presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you. By contrast, a woman's presence . . . defines what can and cannot be done to her.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.

Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common and widespread emotion.

To be naked is to be oneself.
To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.

Saul Bellow

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.

It's usually the selfish people who are loved the most. They do what you deny yourself, and you love them for it. You give them your heart.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.

A man is only as good as what he loves.

Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.

Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.

We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects, but endless fire

One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.

You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.

I love solitude but I prize it most when company is available.

People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.

You have to fight for your life. That's the chief condition on which you hold it. 

There is no limit to the amount of intelligence invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep.

Alan Wilson Watts

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.

This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.

To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.

The menu is not the meal.

The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.

You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.

You are a function of what the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is a function of what the whole ocean is doing.

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

Douglas Adams II

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.

The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws.

Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.

Reality is frequently inaccurate.

He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.