Mike > Mike's Quotes

“Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”
― Clive James

“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions.”
― Margaret Wheatley

“In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn.”
― Phil Collins

“I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
― Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven: Poems

“Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony.”
― Orison Swett Marden

“The goal is to balance a life that works with a life that counts.”
― Peter Block

“Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.

[Undelivered remarks for Dallas Trade Mart, November 22 1963]”
― John F. Kennedy

“You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.”
― Ray Bradbury

“In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
― Bertrand Russell

“My ideas sometimes get the better of me. Before I clearly explain one, another comes to mind and seizes my attention....”
― Ellen Langer

“...anyone who chooses to make fishing his occupation solely for the money is in the wrong business. If no thrill is experienced in catching fish, no satisfaction in going to sea and returning to shore, no pride in exclaiming "I am a fisherman," then a life on the water will be unfulfilling, perhaps even unbearable. Among the unhappy with whom I am acquainted, perhaps the most miserable people are those who fish out of necessity rather than out of a love of the sea and the seafaring life. I have always maintained that when I no longer feel a thrill, satisfaction, and pride from fishing, I will start a new career. (pp. 248-249)”
― Linda Greenlaw, The Hungry Ocean: A Swordboat Captain's Journey

“To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most.”
― Michel de Montaigne

“In order to understand what another person is saying, you must assume it is true and try to imagine what it might be true of.”
― George Mitchell

“We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there "is" such a thing as being too late. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.”
― Bob Dylan

“I don't divide the world into the weak and the strong, or the successes and the failures, those who make it or those who don't. I divide the world into learners and non-learners.”
― Benjamin Barber

“Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue.”
― Eugene O'Neill

“Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower where I thought a flower would grow.”
― Abraham Lincoln

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up

“It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.”
― Maya Angelou

“If people but knew their own religion, how tolerant they would become, and how free from any grudge against the religion of others.”
― Hazrat Inayat Khan, The bowl of saki: Thoughts for daily contemplation from the sayings and teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan

“The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

~ William Stafford ~”
― William Stafford

“I embrace emerging experience.
I participate in discovery.
I am a butterfly.
I am not a butterfly collector.
I want the experience of the butterfly.”
― William Stafford

“A journey or pilgrimage also follows the parabolic curve of an arch: it swings out from a known point and returns symmetrically to a point on the same line or plane, but farther along. For this reason, ancient philosophers chose the arch as a symbol for the process of interpretation. That is why teaching stories, such as those of Jesus or Buddha, are known as parables.”
― John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City

“Etymologically, a homestead is a home place, the focus of a story. And the word "home" derives from the ancient root for bed or couch, the place where we lie down to rest. The journey begins, then, in repose, unconsciousness, or sleep. We go out to awaken, hoping to return both wiser and more refreshed. The path soars outward, then bends back, inscribing its parabolic arc.”
― John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City

“....The important thing is not where we die but how we live. Being native to a place is a labor of love and a life's work. It means stitching your life to that of a place with a thread spun from mindfulness, attentiveness, husbandry, pilgrimage, and witness. Stories knit these components of practice together. Flung outward, they clothe our relationships; flung inward, they map the soul. Stories enable us to enter and dwell attentively in a place; they enable us to travel and return, then eventually to leave for good. We need stories to stay alive spiritually: without them we would all turn into hungry ghosts. Stories are the only things we can take with us out of this world. They are the wings that bear us up or the chains that drag us down. In the end, it is stories that enable us to die.”
― John Tallmadge, The Cincinnati Arch: Learning from Nature in the City

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
― Howard Thurman