“The power of reading a great book is that you start thinking like the author. For those magical moments while you are immersed in the forests of Arden, you are William Shakespeare; while you are shipwrecked on Treasure Island, you are Robert Louis Stevenson; while you are communing with nature at Walden, you are Henry David Thoreau. You start to think like they think, feel like they feel, and use imagination as they would. Their references become your own, and you carry these with you long after you’ve turned the last page. That is the power of literature, of a good play, of music; this is why we constantly want to expand our references.” ~ Anthony Robbins, Awaken the Giant Within
“The enemy is a very good teacher.” ~ the Dalai Lama, via The War of Art
“Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end. They are masters because they realize that there isn’t one. On utterly smooth ground, the path from aim to attainment is in the permanent future.” ~ Sarah Lewis, The Rise
“I discovered at a very early age that life is a classroom. You get the best education in everyday experiences when you take the time to absorb what is happening around you. Life is the best teacher, and if you’re lucky, your education doesn’t end after college – it’s just the beginning.” ~ Cristina Carlino
“To know that you do not know and to be willing to admit that you do not know without sheepishly apologizing is real strength and sets the stage for learning and progress in any endeavor.” ~ Epictetus, The Art of Living
“Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?” ~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
“The Taliban could take our pens and books, but they couldn’t stop our minds from thinking.” ~ Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala
“The mediocre mind has no capacity for understanding. It is stuck somewhere near thirteen years in its mental age, or even below it. The person may be forty, fifty, seventy years old – that does not matter, that is the physical age. He has been growing old, but he has not been growing up. You should note the distinction. Growing old, every animal does. Growing up, only a few human beings manage.”
Osho, The Book of Understanding (page 177)
“The extent to which you learn more about the world increases the depth of your experience. To live smarter means to live fuller. It also means to be aware of how much you can never know. To understand the limits of your knowledge is a wonderful thing. It is our responsibility as human beings to deliberately take advantage of the fact that we are living at a time when valuable information is more accessible than ever before.” ~ Unknown, The Daily Zen
“Unless you’re continually improving your skills, you’re quickly becoming irrelevant.” ~ Stephen M. R. Covey, The Speed of Trust
“Every new level of growth we hope to experience as leaders calls for a new level of change. You cannot have one without the other. If you want to be a better leader, get ready to make some trades.” ~ John C. Maxwell, Leadership Gold
“Something in human nature tempts us to stay where we’re comfortable. We try to find a plateau, a resting place, where we have comfortable stress and adequate finances. Where we have comfortable associations with people, without he intimidation of meeting new people and entering strange situations. Of course, all of us need to plateau for a time. We climb and then plateau for assimilation. But once we’ve assimilated what we’ve learned, we climb again. It’s unfortunate when we’ve done our last climb. When we have made our last climb, we are old, whether forty or eighty.” ~ Fred Smith