If you want to enjoy the rainbow, be prepared to endure the storm.

- Warren Wendel Wiersbe

Problems are messages.

- Shakti Gawain

Our attitude in the face of life's challenges determines our suffering or our freedom.

- Tara Brach

I will prepare and someday my chance will come.

- Abraham Lincoln

Hope and change are hard-fought things.

- Michelle Obama

It is not change that causes anxiety; it is the feeling that we are without defenses in the presence of what we see as danger that causes anxiety. (from Immunity to Change)

- Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free.

- Anne Sullivan

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself. If all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

- Simone de Beauvoir

And when that person moves away, someone else arises to take his or her place.

- Parker J. Palmer

I wanted to live the life, a different life. I didn't want to go to the same place every day and see the same people and do the same job. I wanted interesting challenges.

- Harrison Ford

Nature abhors a vacuum.

- Baruch Spinoza

We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe, and the threat is outrunning our response.

- Sam Nunn

We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing -- our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can't hold on to anything -- a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self -- because all things come and go. Lacking any permanent satisfaction, we continuously need another injection of fuel, stimulation, reassurance from loved ones, medicine, exercise, and meditation. We are continually driven to become something more, to experience something else.

- Tara Brach

A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn't feel like it.

- Alistair Cooke

Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.

- Publilus Syrus

Don't be afraid to fail. Don't waste energy trying to cover up failure. Learn from your failures and go on to the next challenge. It's OK to fail. If you're not failing, you're not growing.

- Anne Sullivan

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

- Vincent van Gogh

I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.

- Werner von Braun

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

- Winston Churchill

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

- Abraham Maslow

People of little understanding are most apt to be angry when their sense is called into question.

- Samuel Richardson

Omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt. All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

- Baruch Spinoza

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."

- Sharon Salzberg

Beliefs and values that have held sway for thousands of years will be questioned as never before.

- Carol P. Christ

Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.

- Bernice Johnson Reagon

When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

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

- Harriet Beecher Stowe

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

- Hugh Miller

If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.

- Mary Pickford

The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.

- Warren Bennis

... without darkness
Nothing comes to birth,
As without light
Nothing flowers.

- May Sarton

You may wonder, 'How can I leave it all behind if I am just coming back to it? How can I make a new beginning if I simply return to the old?' The answer lies in the return. You will not come back to the 'same old thing.' What you return to has changed because you have changed. Your perceptions will be altered. You will not incorporate into the same body, status, or world you left behind. The river has been flowing while you were gone. Now it does not look like the same river. [The Book of the Vision Quest]

- Steven Foster

Unity to be real must stand the severest strain without breaking.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

It is surprising what a man can do when he has to, and how little most men will do when they don't have to.

- Walter Linn

That is what Americans do. We face a challenge -- no matter how great -- because we know that on the other side there is always hope.

- John Kerry

The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choices words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.

- Edwin H. Friedman

All rising to great place is by a winding stair.

- Francis Bacon

If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth.

- Mitsugi Saotome

I find working with glass meditative, almost therapeutic. I can leave the world behind, and focus... The simplicity of form, the drama of rich, intense colour, the joy of challenge, and the challenge of endurance... The piece, when it is over, is not what is made, but how it is made.

- Andrew Kuntz

When people keep telling you that you can't do a thing, you kind of like to try it.

- Margaret Chase Smith

What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority.

- Molly Ivins

To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it,
requires brains.

- Mary Pettibone Poole

You don't develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.

- Barbara De Angelis