This week, a smorgasbord of quotations that I hope will provoke, intrigue, captivate and transform. More of my favourite books listed here. Enjoy!
“When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.”
Paulo Coelho – The Alchemist
“If you want the best the world has to offer, offer the world your best.”
Neale Donald Walsch – Conversations With God
“Loving and energizing others is the best possible thing we can do for ourselves.”
James Redfield – The Celestine Prophecy
“The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”
Robert M. Pirsig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world… The premise of the Taker story is ‘the world belongs to man’… The premise of the Leaver story is ‘man belongs to the world’.”
Daniel Quinn – Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit
“This was now a world where, having violently deprived the Goddess and the female half of humanity of all power, gods and men of war ruled. It was a world in which the Blade, and not the Chalice, would henceforth be supreme, a world in which peace and harmony would be found only in the myths and legends of a long lost past.”
Riane Eisler – The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
“And so we see people who are spiritually disconnected, living in boxes and driving in boxes, perhaps once a year going “out to nature” to get a small touch of what was once the daily experience of humans. These people seek escape. They sit in urban and suburban homes and feel miserable, not knowing why, experiencing anxiety and fear and pain that cannot be softened by drugs or TV or therapy because they are afflicted with a sickness of the soul, not of the mind.”
Thom Hartmann – The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It’s Too Late
“Complaining does not work as a strategy. We all have finite time and energy. Any time we spend whining is unlikely to help us achieve our goals. And it won’t make us happier.”
Randy Pausch – The Last Lecture
“I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.”
Hermann Hesse – Siddhartha
“It is only when we have renounced our preoccupation with “I,” “me,” “mine,” that we can truly possess the world in which we live. Everything, provided that we regard nothing as property. And not only is everything ours; it is also everybody else’s.”
Aldous Huxley – The Perennial Philosophy
“In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”
Viktor Frankl – Man’s Search for Meaning
“Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.”
Richard Bach – Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Other Stuff:
Now back from my trip to Arran, and full steam ahead with creating The Sisters, a truly diverse global community of women working together to create the urgent and radical transformation that we need in the world. Exciting times!
My podcast interview with Kimberly Rich of The Bold Live Movement podcast is now live. We had huge fun recording this – I hope you enjoy it!
Intrigued to hear on BBC Radio 4 this morning that famously leftie musician Billy Bragg is off to speak at the Bank of England today. His day got off to a lively start, with an animated debate with an arch-capitalist as to how society can be best served – regulation and redistribution, or the invisible hand unfettered? I’m off into the City tomorrow for my own speaking gig at the Sell-Side Technology Awards, just around the corner from where I used to work at UBS. Back into the belly of the beast…