“I am liken to a grain of wheat which faces one of three futures. The wheat can be placed in a sack and dumped in a stall until it is fed to swine. Or it can be ground to flour and made into bread. or it can be placed in the earth and allowed to grow until its golden head divides and produces a thousand grains from one. I am liken to a grain of wheat with one difference. The wheat cannot choose whether it be fed to swine, ground for bread, or planted to multiply. I have a choice and I will not let me life be fed to sine nor will I let it be ground under the rocks of failure and despair to be broken open and devoured by the will of others. Today I will multiply my value a hundredfold.” ~ Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman in the World
“Never will I labor to be happy; rather will I remain too busy to be sad. I will enjoy today’s happiness today. It is not grain to be stored in a box. It is not wine to be saved in a jar. It cannot be saved for the morrow. It must be sown and reaped on the same day and this I will do, henceforth.” ~ Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman in the World
“When I am heavy with heartache I shall console myself that this too shall pass; when I am puffed with success I shall warn myself that this too shall pass. When I am strangled in poverty I shall tell myself that this too shall pass; when I am burdened with wealth I shall tell myself that this too shall pass. Yea, verily, where is he who built the pyramid? Is he not buried within its stone? And will the pyramid, one day, not also be buried under sand? If all things shall pass why should I be of concern for today? I will laugh at the world.” ~ Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman in the World
“I will persist until I succeed. I was not delivered into this world into defeat, nor does failure course in my veins. I am not a sheep waiting to be prodded by my shepherd. I am a lion and I refuse to talk, to walk, to sleep with the sheep. The slaughterhouse of failure is not my destiny. I will persist until I succeed.” ~ Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman in the World
“Yet we are what we read. We are the educators of our own personalities. Certainly we have great influence in the crafting of our children. If we brought half the intelligence to the making of souls that we bring to the making of machines, we would be people of character and imagination. We would be sharp and therefore less inclined to kill and cheat each other. We would know where to find the deep pleasures, so we would be less desperate for shallow entertainments and the ephemeral gratifications of gadgets.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“The way out of the dehumanizing effects of modern capitalism and industrialism is not to change the system but to read good books.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“The capacity for solitude is a prerequisite for intimacy with another. Otherwise, it may well be that the desperate search for a partner is merely the expression of personal emptiness, and if that is the case, any relationship will be founded on weak grounds and will not satisfy the yearning for connection. The expression ‘soul mate’ can mean a partnership in which the soul is engaged, in which one’s own soul connects with another’s. This is no small thing, and it reaches far deeper than the resolution of any superficial search for romance. Part of what we long for in our wish for a soul mate is intimacy with and the expression of our own soul.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“The way to find a soul mate is to be a person with soul.” ~ Thomas Moore, Original Self
“It may be more important to be awake than to be successful, balanced, or healthy. What does it mean to be awake? Perhaps to be living with a lively imagination, responding honestly and courageously to opportunity and avoiding the temptation to follow mere habit or collective values. It means to be an individual, in every instance manifesting the originality of who we are. This is the ultimate form of creativity – following the lead of the deep soul as we make a life.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Care of the soul often means getting out of the way rather than doing something.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“We are a population that is satisfied with sound-bite news, instant and opinionated political analysis, manipulative popular psychology, and insubstantial novels and magazines. At the same time, and understandably, we feel the absence of meaning and are speechless when we learn of atrocities in our society. We don’t know how to think about them because we don’t know how to think, and we don’t know how to think because we don’t believe that thinking for its own sake is worthy of our attention. We educate our children to make a good living rather than to become thinking persons, and often we honor as celebrities those who have not made a genuine contribution to society but who mirror our own madness.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Long life is indeed a blessing, but maybe we overdo our concern for the length of our lives and give insufficient attention to the passion we bring to whatever time we have. The meaning and purpose of life are great mysteries, and in that light a very brief life, of only minutes, can be full and rounded. The soul has appeared in the flesh; then it returns to its home of origin.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“We may come to know our friends and lovers over years of conversation and experience, but we may eventually realize that it is enough to love them without knowing what they are all about. We may not approve of everything they do, and we may not appreciate their eccentric ways, but still we know and appreciate them. We have faith that in the dimness of our ignorance we have the opportunity to give ourselves more fully to their reality. Unconditional love means that we don’t love on the condition that we understand.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Almost every day we are asked to extend the range of our acquaintance with life. It is one of several ways to live intensely, and it is also a way to prepare for death. For death is the ultimate stranger. This is not necessarily a morbid thought, because only by allowing death to play a role in daily life do we really live. Opening to another society or another individual – they are two levels of culture – we die a little death in relation to what has become familiar. But those little deaths create openings to new life.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“When we are living only a portion of what a human being is capable of, our lives are incomplete. I don’t mean that we each have to do everything possible in life, but that the more possibilities we can imagine, the richer our lives will be. Defending ourselves against the stranger is a way of keeping out our own potentiality. The diminishment of our acquaintances is a diminishment of ourselves. The most challenging stranger is life itself, or the soul, the face and source of vitality. Life is always presenting new possibilities ,and we may fear that bountifulness. It may seem safer to be content with what we have and what we are, and so we cling to the status quo. But in these matters there is no convenient plateau. When we refuse a new offering of life, we develop emotional calluses. The habit of acting from fear sets in quickly and becomes steadily more rigid. Refusing life, we become attendants of death.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Memory is potent. It does something to us. It makes us who we are. It gives us depth. It ties our past to our present to overcome the disjunction of a too literal life. It focuses our attention on the imagination of events rather than on events taken literally. Memory is a kind of poetry.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Anxiety is nothing but fear inspired by an imagined future collapse. It is the failure of trust.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“However bright or dim we are, we will still make mistakes. If I kept a diary of all the bad decisions I have made in my life, it would be too thick to carry. But as in most things, it may take a bundle of mistakes to arrive at something sublime, just as it takes thousands of flowers to produce a few drops of perfume.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Living closer to nature helps simplify because nature itself, though complex, keeps us in tune with basic rhythms and pleasures that never change and that provide grounding. When our family moved next to a farm, we found simplicity in the food we ate and in new sources for our entertainment and pleasure. Learning how to ride a horse is a complicated process, but riding is a simple pleasure that offers lasting satisfaction.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Simplifying the externals allows us to cultivate a rich inner and outer life. A cluttered existence may keep us busy, but busyness doesn’t mean that we are fully engaged in what we are going. Usually, just the opposite, we feel busy because we are neurotically active at things that don’t matter much in the long run. It does little good to be successful in a business that requires sixty hours of work a week, while the simple pleasures of home life are neglected. A complicated person can simplify life and in that simplicity find a sharp articulation of values. Complicated lives often do the opposite: they show to what extent the person is lost in the busyness of the world.”
Thomas Moore, Original Self | ★ Featured on this book list.