“The Olympics allow for expression of the human passion that resides, too often dormant, in every moment of life, from the monumental, to the mundane. We watch the games not as spectators but as fellow participants in our hearts. We indulge the fantasy that we have something great in us. The athletes we idolize are masters of the same internal fire that you and I possess. In every facet of life, there is an opportunity to assert the Olympic spirit—the victorious spirit—to push for achievement previously not thought possible and dare to dream.”
Bert R. Mandelbaum, MD, via The Win Within (Page 44)
Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be [Book]
Book Overview: Are you losing your “war of art”? Are you being defeated by a tendency to procrastination, self-doubt, fear, distraction, and perfectionism? Are you self-sabotaging your loftiest artistic entrepreneurial dreams? The antidote is in nine words: Put your ass where your heart wants to be. Can you shift your artistic identity—your “ass”—from the shallow, fearful, superficial ego to the wise, loving, fearless self? Can you commit to your dream for the long haul and for keeps? In this book, best-selling author Steven Pressfield delivers the tough-love inspiration to help you make this life-altering transformation.
“Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (Page 47)
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;
And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.”
“The lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.”
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (Page 30)
“Work is love made visible.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (Page 26)
And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake a bitter bread that feeds but half man’s hunger.
And if you grudge the crushing of the grapes, your grudge distils a poison in the wine. And if you sing though as angels, and love not the singing, you muffle man’s ears to the voices of the day and the voices of the night.”
“She had a fire inside her.
Matt Haig, The Midnight Library (Page 164)
She wondered if the fire was to warm her or destroy her.
Then she realized.
A fire had not motive.
Only she could have that.
The power was hers.”
“Everyone has noted the abundant resources of energy that seem available to those who enjoy what they are doing or find meaning in what they are doing. Self-renewing people know that if they have no great conviction about what they are doing they had better find something that they can have great conviction about. All of us cannot spend all of our time pursuing our deepest convictions. But all of us, either in our careers or as part-time activities, should be doing something about which we care deeply.”
John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal (Page 16)
“Have you ever noticed that when you respond to something totally, with all your heart, there is very little memory? It is only when you do not respond to a challenge with your whole being that there is a conflict, a struggle, and this brings confusion and pleasure or pain.”
J. Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known (Page 36)
“Our misery is that we have forgotten the language of love. The reason we have forgotten the language of love is that we have become too identified with reason. Nothing is wrong with reason, but it has a tendency to monopolize. It clings to the whole of your being. Then feeling suffers—feeling is starved—and by and by you forget about feeling completely. So it goes on shrinking and shrinking, and that dead feeling becomes a dead weight; that feeling becomes a dead heart. Then one can go on pulling oneself along somehow—it will always be ‘somehow.’ There will be no charm, no magic, because without love there is no magic in life. And there will be no poetry either; life will be all prose, flat. Yes, it will have grammar, but it will not have a song in it. It will have a structure, but it will not have substance.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 102)
“Dharma isn’t just passion and skills. Dharma is passion in the service of others. your passion is for you. Your purpose is for others. Your passion becomes a purpose when you use it to serve others. Your dharma has to fill a need in the world.”
Jay Shetty, Think Like A Monk (Page 122)
“My belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The man who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose, will work the best. All trades are now uphill work, & require a man to suffer much disappointment, and this trade more almost than any other. I was at it for years & wrote ten volumes before I made a shilling –, I say all this, which is very much in the guise of a sermon, because I must endeavor to make you understand that a man or woman must learn the tricks of his trade before he [or she] can make money by writing.”
Anthony Trollope
