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Inspirational Quotations #600

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What a man wants to do he generally can do, if he wants to badly enough.
—Louis L’Amour

Age does not make us childish, as some say; it finds us true children.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German Poet)

Stop judging so that you will not be judged. Otherwise, you will be judged by the same standard you use to judge others. The standards you use for others will be applied to you.
—The Holy Bible (Scripture in the Christian Faith)

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.
—Abraham Maslow (American Psychologist)

Faith is the pierless bridge supporting what we see unto the scene that we do not.
—Emily Dickinson (American Poet)

Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains, losses, and disappointments; but let us have patience, and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.
—Joseph Addison (English Essayist)

It is the business of the future to be dangerous…. The major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
—Alfred North Whitehead (English Mathematician)

Fair and softly goes far.
—Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish Novelist)

Indulge in procrastination, and in time you will come to this, that because a thing ought to be done, therefore you can’t do it.
—Charles Buxton

There is change in all things. You yourself are subject to continual change and some decay, and this is common to the entire universe.
—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

Men shrink less from offending one who inspires love than one who inspires fear.
—Niccolo Machiavelli (Florentine Political Philosopher)

Reframe Your Thinking, Get Better Answers: What the Stoics Taught

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The solution to many a difficult problem can be found merely by reframing the problem, thereby changing or adjusting your perception of the issue.

Reframing is a very effective technique to shift your view of a specific problem, event, or person. When you approach a situation from another perspective, you are likely to reevaluate your intentions and find alternative, acceptable solutions to your situations.

Reframing helps in two ways:

  • Reframing allows you to consider a problem within a positive—rather than a negative—context. For example, if you’re trying out a diet, you can reframe it by asking yourself “What are some foods I like that I should eat more of? What new foods can I experiment with?” rather than wondering, “What foods must I give up?” Reframing can help turn a problem into an opportunity, a weakness into a strength, an impossibility into a work-around, and a conflict into a mere lack of understanding.
  • Reframing can also broaden a problem’s context, thus helping you recognize its systemic contributors. In other words, by reframing, you look at a problem within its larger context. For example, you could reframe an individual issue, “Why won’t Tom gel with our team?” to a systemic problem, “What are the attributes of our team that make Tom feel excluded?”

“Redirect your prayers … and watch what happens”

The great Roman Emperor and Stoic Philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote in “Meditations” (trans. Gregory Hays,)

'Meditations: A New Translation' by Marcus Aurelius (ISBN 0812968255)Either the gods have power or they don’t. If they don’t, why pray? If they do, then why not pray for something else instead of for things to happen or not to happen? Pray not to feel fear. Or desire, or grief. If the gods can do anything, they can surely do that for us.

But those are things the gods left up to me.

Then isn’t it better to do what’s up to you—like a free man—than to be passively controlled by what isn’t, like a slave or beggar? And what makes you think the gods don’t care about what’s up to us?

Start praying like this and you’ll see.

Not “some way to sleep with her”—but a way to stop wanting to.

Not “some way to get rid of him”—but a way to stop trying.

Not “some way to save my child”—but a way to lose your fear.

Redirect your prayers like that, and watch what happens.

Idea for Impact: Reframe, Always Reframe

If you find yourself stuck with a problem or difficult situation, try reframing your view of that problem. Consider alternate perspectives, revise your goals, and reconsider how you see the way forward.

To reframe, simply step back from your present viewpoint and alter the “lens” through which you perceive the reality. Discover your unspoken assumptions, challenge your beliefs, change the attributes of your perception of the problem, and downplay or emphasize various elements of the situation. By “looking at it another way” you can derive new meanings and define different courses of action.

Burt, Bees, and Simple Happiness / The Curious Case of Burt Shavitz

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Narratives of entrepreneurial success and great wealth are fascinating

Today’s high-achieving culture adores people like Elon Musk who dream big, set ambitious goals, stubbornly get things done, and build wealth for themselves.

This scale of purpose, however, is not for everyone. A surprising number of people find their purpose by going the other way—by rejecting the trappings of wealth and pursuing humble, unpretentious, contended lives.

Consider the case of Burt Shavitz, the namesake and co-founder of Burt’s Bees, a prominent beauty-products company. Burt, whose bearded face and scruffy hat grace the tins of the company’s hand salve and ointment, died this summer at age 80.

The small, simple, happy life

Burt Shavitz’s extraordinary reclusive life exemplifies what Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations, “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”

As a young professional photographer in the sixties, Burt grew increasingly disenchanted with city life in his native New York City. He was particularly distressed by the loneliness of an old woman whom he photographed at a home across his apartment—she always looked out sorrowfully from behind dingy curtains and never left her room. “As soon as I took this shot, I knew that that would be me, ninety years old and unable to go outside, if I didn’t get the hell out. I borrowed a van from a former girlfriend, packed up everything I needed—my bed, what clothes I had, an orange crate of books—and disappeared into the declining sun,” Burt recalled in 2014.

Burt left his city life for the backwoods in Maine and started living in a camper van. He led a hippie lifestyle; he had no ambitions and very little money. He took to beekeeping after unintentionally stumbling upon a swarm of bees at a fencepost. One day, while peddling beeswax by the side of the road, he met Roxanne Quimby, a single mother who was hitchhiking to work. Roxanne and Burt soon got romantically involved.

Roxanne had an entrepreneurial mindset: she made candles, lip balm, and hand lotion from a 200lb stash of unsold beeswax and started selling personal care products to tourists and at fairs. Over time, when their business thrived enough, Burt and Roxanne moved to North Carolina to establish a factory. However, Burt missed Maine very much. After a falling out with Roxanne, Burt sold his one-third stake in the company to her for a measly $130,000 and returned to Maine. (In 2007, Roxanne and her associates sold the company to Clorox for $913 million; she claims to have given him $4 million of the proceeds. Burt’s Bees/Clorox continued to pay him an unrevealed amount for continued use of his likeness and his name on its products.)

Idea for Impact: Happiness is mostly a matter of perspective

After returning to Maine, Burt no longer kept bees to make a living. He just enjoyed life—doing what he wanted, when he wanted. He told Flare magazine in 2013, “I’ve always had enough. I never starved to death, and I never went without a meal. I served in the army and went to Germany and slept in snowbanks, and walked 100 miles in the day carrying an 80-pound pack. What was it that I needed? My beekeeping produced enough cash that I could maintain my vehicles and pay my land taxes. What do I need? Nothing. No wife, no children, no TV set, no washing machine. All the pins sort of fell into place my entire life.”

During his later years, Burt lived in a cluttered country home in Maine that had no hot water and liked to watch nature pass by. A 2013 documentary called “Burt’s Buzz” captures his long and unconventional life. This highly recommended documentary (entirely on YouTube) juxtaposes Burt’s ideal day—“when no one shows up and you don’t have to go anywhere”—with the rock star adoration that he received from fans during a visit to Taiwan as the ‘brand ambassador’ of Burt’s Bees products.

In interviews—as in “Burt’s Buzz”—Burt denounced the emptiness of consumerism and extoled the virtues of simple, reclusive living. Evidently, he never regretted missing out on millions, but felt hurt by a three-decade-old business deal with Roxanne gone bad. “I’ve got everything I need: a nice piece of land with hawks and owls and incredible sunsets, and the good will of my neighbors,” he once said. An obituary in The Economist observed,

Settling back in his rocking chair, feet spread to feel the heat of the stove, Burt Shavitz liked to reflect that he had everything he needed. A piece of land first: 40 acres of it, fields and woods, on which he could watch hawks and pine martens but not be bothered, with luck, by any human soul. Three golden retrievers for company. A fine wooden house, 20 feet wide by 20 feet deep, once a turkey coop but plenty spacious enough for him. From the upper storey he could see glorious sunsets, fire off his rifle at tin cans hanging in a tree, and in winter piss a fine yellow circle down onto the snow, and no one would care. … He would wander into the woods or lie on his lawn to watch the baby foxes play, murmuring “Golly dang!” with simple happiness.

The seventeenth century French writer Francois de La Rochefoucauld once wrote, “Happiness does not consist in things themselves but in the relish we have of them; and a man has attained it when he enjoys what he loves and desires himself, and not what other people think lovely and desirable.” If, indeed, contentment consists of liking of what one has and having what one likes, Burt’s humble life illustrates how happiness arises from the harmony between oneself and the life one leads in one’s simple corner of the world.

Inspirational Quotations #588

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The free world must not prove itself worthy of its own past.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (American Head of State)

The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.
—Cesare Pavese

‘Tis the old secret of the gods that they come in low disguises.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

Many of the insights of the saint stem from their experience as sinners.
—Eric Hoffer (American Philosopher)

Old friends, we say, are best, when some sudden disillusionment shakes our faith in a new comrade.
—Gelett Burgess

If life were predictable it would cease to be life, and be without flavor.
—Eleanor Roosevelt (American First Lady)

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
—George Bernard Shaw (Irish Playwright)

Your mind will be like its habitual thoughts; for the soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts. Soak it then in such trains of thoughts as, for example: Where life is possible at all, a right life is possible.
—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

A man is what he thinks about all day long.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

Unless you bear with the faults of a friend you betray your own.
—Publilius Syrus (Syrian-born Latin Writer)

It is easy to be brave when far away from danger.
—Aesop (Greek Fabulist)

In all ages, hypocrites, called priests, have put crowns upon the heads of thieves, called kings.
—Robert G. Ingersoll (American Atheist Politician)

Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Swiss Philosopher)

Inspirational Quotations #584

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Progress is the law of life; man is not a man as yet.
—Robert Browning (English Poet)

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or our unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.
—Wilhelm von Humboldt (German Philosopher)

Anyone is to be pitied who has just sense enough to perceive his deficiencies.
—William Hazlitt (English Essayist)

My interest is in the future because I’m going to spend the rest of my life there.
—Charles F. Kettering (American Inventor)

A good father lives so he is a credit to his children.
—Arnold Glasow (American Businessman)

Unhappy is the man for whom his own mother has not made all other mothers venerable.
—Jean Paul (German Novelist)

We are terrified by the idea of being terrified.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (German Philosopher, Scholar)

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud.
—Walt Whitman (American Poet)

I’m a little wounded, but I am not slain; I will lay me down to bleed a while. Then I’ll rise and fight again.
—John Dryden (English Poet)

Fear makes us feel our humanity.
—Benjamin Disraeli (British Head of State)

People tend to forget their duties but remember their rights.
—Indira Gandhi (Indian Head of State)

Every individual is a center for the manifestation of a certain force. This force has been stored up as the resultant of our previous works, and each one of us is born with this force at our back.
—Swami Vivekananda (Indian Hindu Mystic)

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

Learning passes for wisdom among those who want both.
—William Temple

Time bears away all things, even the mind.
—Virgil (Roman Poet)

In seeking absolute truth we aim at the unattainable, and must be content with finding broken portions.
—William Osler (Canadian Physician)

Inspirational Quotations #298

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Do not anxiously hope for what is not yet to come; do not vainly regret what is already past.
—Chinese Proverb

We have to believe that a creative being lives within ourselves, whether we like it or not, and that we must get out of its way, for it will give us no peace until we do.
—Mary Richards

It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.
—Unknown

It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.
—John Wooden (American Sportsperson)

The man who works need never be a problem to anyone. Opportunities multiply as they are seized; they die when neglected. Life is a long line of opportunities. Wealth is not in making money, but in making the man while he is making money. Production, not destruction, leads to success.
—John Wicker

Men of learning are those who have read the contents of books. Thinkers, geniuses, and those who have enlightened the world and furthered the race of men, are those who have made direct use of the book of the world.
—Arthur Schopenhauer (German Philosopher)

Don’t pray for fewer problems; pray for more skills.|Don’t ask for smaller challenges; ask for greater wisdom.|Don’t look for an easy way out; look for the best possible outcome.
—Steve Goodier

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive—to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.
—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

In loving, you lean on someone to hold them up.
—Rod McKuen

We change, whether we like it or not.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (American Philosopher)

Look upon every man, woman, and everyone as God. You cannot help anyone, you can only serve: serve the children of the Lord, serve the Lord Himself, if you have the privilege.
—Swami Vivekananda (Indian Hindu Mystic)

Have great hopes and dare to go all out for them. Have great dreams and dare to live them. Have tremendous expectations and believe in them.
—Norman Vincent Peale (American Clergyman, Self-Help Author)

There ain’t no rules around here.|We’re trying to accomplish something.|There’s a way to do it better—find it.
—Thomas Edison (American Inventor)

Inspirational Quotations #192

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Love doesn’t make the world go ’round; love is what makes the ride worthwhile.
—Franklin P. Jones

The greatest secret of success in life is for a person to be ready when their opportunity comes.
—Benjamin Disraeli (British Head of State)

Whatever expensive toy you give your little child, they will always like the box better.
—Olive Redmond

Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it.
—Langston Hughes (American Novelist)

There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.
—Henry David Thoreau (American Philosopher)

When we don’t speak up about something through cowardice we must remember, silence is not always golden, sometimes it’s just plain yellow.
—Unknown

We are, each of us, angels with only one wing. And we can only fly embracing each other.
—Luciano de Crescenzo

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.
—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown.
—Denis Waitley (American Motivational Speaker)