I do not want the peace that passeth understanding. I want the understanding which bringeth peace.

- Helen Keller

If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world.

- Thomas Merton

Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.

- Dorothy Thompson

There never was a good war or bad peace.

- Benjamin Franklin

Peace is always beautiful.

- Walt Whitman

Choose
The single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open hand held out and waiting.
Choose:
For we meet by one or the other.

- Carl Sandburg

When my heart is at peace, the world is at peace.

- Chinese Proverb

Nothing that I can do will change the structure of the universe. But maybe, by raising my voice I can help the greatest of all causes - goodwill among men and peace on earth.

- Albert Einstein

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.

- Maria Montessori

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.

- Ernest Newman
If your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt.

- Henry J. Kaiser

There are so many things that we wish we had done yesterday, so few that we feel like doing today.
- Mignon McLaughlin

There is no moment like the present. The man who will not execute his resolutions when they are fresh upon him can have no hope from them afterwards: they will be dissipated, lost, and perish in the hurry and scurry of the world, or sunk in the slough of indolence.

- Maria Edgeworth

An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied.

- Arnold Glasow

The first step binds one to the second.

- French Proverb

Well done is better than well said.

- Benjamin Franklin

Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.

- Brendan Francis

Talk doesn't cook rice.

- Chinese Proverb

All problems become smaller if you don't dodge them but confront them.

- William F. Halsey

We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.

- Calvin Coolidge

The best way out of a problem is through it.

- Author Unknown

Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.

- Peter Marshall

All know the way; few actually walk it.

- Bodhidharma

Be content to act, and leave the talking to others.

- Baltasar Gracian

People may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do.

- Lewis Cass

Success will never be a big step in the future, success is a small step taken just now.

- Jonatan Mårtensson

Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.

- Alfred Adler

As I grow older I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.

- Andrew Carnegie

It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.

- Moliere

The path to success is to take massive, determined action.

- Anthony Robbins

Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask. Everything you want also wants you. But you have to take action to get it.

- Jules Renard

Act as if it were impossible to fail

- Dorthea Brande

Don't wait. The time will never be just right.

- Napoleon Hill

If you only do what you know you can do - you never do very much.

- Tom Krause

If you wait to do everything until you're sure it's right, you'll probably never do much of anything.

- Win Borden

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.

- Malcolm S. Forbes

Change does not necessarily assure progress, but progress implacably requires change. Education is essential to change, for education creates both new wants and the ability to satisfy them.

- Henry Steele Commager

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

- Robert Maynard Hutchins

The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.

- Mortimer Adler

Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.

- Malcolm X

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

- Nelson Mandela

Education is the best provision for old age.

- Aristotle

Remember that our nation's first great leaders were also our first great scholars.

- John F. Kennedy

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.

- Henry B. Adams

An education isn't how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It's being able to differentiate between what you do know and what you don't.

- Anatole France

Only people who die very young learn all they really need to know in kindergarten.

- Wendy Kaminer

A college degree is not a sign that one is a finished product but an indication a person is prepared for life.

- Reverend Edward A. Malloy

Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.

- Josef Albers

It is only the ignorant who despise education.
- Publilius Syrus

Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people may be engaged in.

- Abraham Lincoln

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

- Alvin Toffler

If ever there can be a cause worthy to be upheld by all toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of education.

- Horace Mann

We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.

- Epictetus

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

- William Butler Yeats

The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education.

- Plutarch

Education cannot be taken away - it becomes a part of the person learning something and transforms that person as it happens, bringing self-confidence, curiosity, joy, creativity, and yes, responsibility.

- Nancy L. Brown

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

- Derek Bok

If your plan is for a year, plant rice. If your plan is for a decade, plant trees. If your plan is for a lifetime, educate children.

- Confucius

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

- Benjamin Franklin

An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

- Benjamin Franklin

There is no way to success in our art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If A equal success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y and Z, with X being work, Y play, and Z keeping your mouth shut.

- Albert Einstein

The victory of success is half won when one gains the habit of work.

- Sarah Knowles Bolton

I was made to work. If you are equally industrious, you will be equally successful.
- Johann Sebastian Bach

If you would live your life with ease; do what you ought, not what you please.

- Anonymous

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

- John Calvin Coolidge

Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.

- Woody Allen

The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.

- Vince Lombardi

You can do what you have to do, and sometimes you can do it even better than you think you can.

- Jimmy Carter

The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.

- Roger Bannister

Do a little more each day than you think you possibly can.

- Lowell Thomas

Success usuallly comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.

- Henry David Thoreau

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.

- Robert Collier

It takes 20 years to make an overnight success.

- Eddie Cantor

People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.

- Anne Sullivan

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

- Thomas Edison

You must have the courage of your convictions.

- Julia Child

Willful waste makes woeful want.

- Proverb

Meanness inherits a set of silverware and keeps it in the bank. Economy uses it only on important occasions, for fear of loss. Thrift sets the table with it every night for pure pleasure, but counts the butter spreaders before they are put away.

He who does not economize will have to agonize.

- Confucius

Thrift means that you should always have the best you can possibly afford, when the thing has any reference to your physical and mental health, to your growth in efficiency and power.

- Orison Swett Marden

Frugality may be termed the daughter of Prudence, the sister of Temperance, and the parent of Liberty.

- Samuel Johnson

Cannot people realize how large an income is thrift?

- Cicero

I believe that thrift is essential to well-ordered living.

- John D. Rockefeller

By sowing frugality we reap liberty, a golden harvest.

- Agesilaus

A fool and his money are soon parted.

- Thomas Tusser

If you would be wealthy, think of saving as well as getting.

- Benjamin Franklin

Those who spend too much will eventually be owned by those who are thrifty.

- Sir John Templeton

Waste not, want not.

- proverb

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.

- Charles Dickens (from David Copperfield)

You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.

- Abraham Lincoln

Any fool can waste, any fool can muddle, but it takes something of a man to save, and the more he saves, the more of a man does it make of him.

- Rudyard Kipling

Economy is the art of making the most of life.

- George Bernard Shaw

Budgeting is the art of doing that well with one dollar which any bungler can do with two.

- Arthur Wellington

Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.

- Ben Franklin

Those who have little, if they are good at managing, must be counted among the rich.

- Socrates

Much ingenuity with a little money is vastly more profitable and amusing than much money without ingenuity.

- Arnold Bennett

With money in your pocket, you are wise and you are handsome and you sing well, too.

-- Yiddish proverb

A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Junk is the stuff we throw away. Stuff is the junk we save.

- Frank Tyger

The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.

- Mahatma Gandhi

To secure the greatest amount of pleasure with the least possible outlay should be the aim of all economic effort.

- Francois Quesnay (French economist)

Love conquers all things

- Virgil

Live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove.
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
And all the craggy mountains yields.

- Shakespeare

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,
I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

God gives us love. Something to love
He lends us; but, when love is grown
To ripeness, that on which it throve
Falls of, and love is left alone.

- Tennyson

Married couples who love each other tell each other a thousand things without talking.

- Chinese proverb

A song of love

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That Paddles in a halcyon sea;
My hear is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.

- Christina Rossetti

Missing You

O that 'twere possible
After long grief and pain
To find the arms of my true love
Round me once again!

- Tennyson

Love is All

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Familiar acts are beautiful through love.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Old Love

For those getting married this month, pledging to have and hold "'til death do us part," it is worth noting that love really does get better over time. As Samuel Butler wrote:

All love at first, like generous wine,
Ferments and frets until 'tis fine;
But when 'tis settled on the lee,
And from th' impurer matter free,
Becomes the richer still the older,
And proves the pleasanter the colder.

Open your heart...

...or as William Purkey suggested, "Dance like no one is watching, love like you'll never be hurt, sing like no one is listening, and live like it's heaven on earth."

Everybody now...

"Let those love now, who never lov'd before;
Let those who always lov'd, now love the more."

- Anonymous

Crazy with Love

Or as Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It,

"If thou remember'st not the slightest folly
That ever love did make thee run into,
Thou hast not lov'd."

She who has never lov'd, has never liv'd

So wrote John Gay (1685-1732) in The Captives, expressing how essential love is to the human experience.

June Love

In honor of all June brides, this month's words of wisdom will focus on the theme of romantic love, like this quote from Thomas Moore:

No, the heart that has truly lov'd never forgets,
But as truly loves on to the close,
As the sun-flower turns on her god, when he sets,
The same look which she turn'd when he rose.

"Riches are for Spending"

So said Francis Bacon many years ago. It's a mantra that the American people have always taken to heart, and now that so many of us are cautiously putting our pennies aside instead, the economy struggles to get back on its feet.

The Curse of Procrastination

Dion Boucicault wrote, "Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them." If that isn't an incentive to be productive, I don't know what is!

Anticipation

As we begin to plan our summer vacation, I am reminded of the line from Silas Marner: "Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand." Since we are scheduling a beach getaway - and so good weather will be key - I am slightly fearful that the long-awaited trip might have issues.

Mind Control

Milton wrote, "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." In other words, through the power of positive thinking, you can profoundly change your own experience.

Money is only a tool...

Ayn Rand wrote, "Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver." I agree with her. For me, the most important thing about having financial resources available to you is that it allows you to have choices in all kinds of situations -- choices of where to live, how to spend your time, etc.

Bringing About Change

Why not follow Mahatma Gandi's advice? He said, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

Collaboration

I am excited to see the increase in collaboration among all sorts of people. I've noticed it recently among musical artists -- I remember when Frank Sinatra's "Duets" were news -- it seemed almost revolutionary to have all those musicians singing together. But these days everyone, in all genres, from rappers like Eminem and Asher Roth, to top 40 acts like Beyonce and Shakira, record together. And even if they aren't working together on a specific project, they call out to each other in their songs. And rather than diminishing the efforts of anyone for not producing a solo piece, the collaboration truly works like a wave lifting all boats.

So is this increased collaboration the result of web thinking, akin to wikis and comments on blogs? Will this be an ongoing thing? I hope so.

Good Reasons to Live

I love the music of Susannah McCorkle and was privileged to hear her sing at the Rainbow Room cafe some years ago. I can't help think of her tragic end each time I listen to "I Don't Think I'll End it all Today" (from her From Broadway to Bebop album). And coming across Dorothy Parker's poem "Resume," I thought of her again:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Spineless Yes-men

Years ago, a musician friend confided that he always wanted to name his band "The Spineless Yes-Men." I've always liked the sound of that phrase.

News from Far Away

There is a verse in Proverbs that goes, " As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country." I think this speaks to our love of receiving word from friends and family (be it by snail mail, email, text or twitter) and the popularity of travel writing (one site we particularly like is The Insider Travel Guides).

"We should count time by heart-throbs"

So wrote Philip James Bailey in his voluminous poem, Festus. There is a phrase, common on plaques and t-shirts, that is similar in meaning: "Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take but by the moments that take your breath away." I like Bailey's version better.

A Question of Character

With all the talk about the economic collapse and the possible reasons behind it, I can't help seeing all the finger pointing and thinking, as George Elliot wrote, "character is destiny."

Let Go of Anger

Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone; you are the one who gets burned. -- Buddha

Friendship

No one who has ever had a favorite pet can argue with George Elliot's assertion that "animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms."

The Boys of Summer

As baseball season approaches, I think about former commissioner of baseball A. Bartlett Giamatti's comment about the sport:

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."

Born Again

Having recently read Philip Roth's American Pastoral I can't help but imagine that many folks would have said of Merry, "It was a pity he couldna be hatched o'er again, an' hatched different" as George Eliot wrote in Adam Bede.

The Meaning of Aloha

Paul Theroux wrote, "Hawaii is not a state of mind but a state of grace." We couldn't agree more. The sense of Aloha that permeates the islands contributes to this, of course (note that Aloha, in addition to being used as a way to say "hello" or "goodbye," is also defined as love -- of self, of others, of celebration, and of the natural wonders that Hawaii offers.

Narcissism

Don't we all know someone, of whom it can be said (in George Eliot's words), "he was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow?"

Men and Women

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish; God Almighty made 'em to match the men. - George Eliot

Pooh Logic

Winnie the Pooh said, "If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you." While I understand the sentiment, it also seems sort of unfair that the loved one (who presumably loves you back just as much) has to suffer with a day of sorrow.

Taking Personal Responsibility

Ben Franklin is famous for saying, "God helps those who help themselves." Years later, Calvin Coolidge echoed Franklin, saying, "there is a very definite point beyond which we cannot go. We can only help those who help themselves." Unfortunately, as a nation, we seemed to have moved away from the notion of personal responsibility... it worries me.

Taking Chances

H. Jackson Browne is quoted as saying, "Don't be afraid to go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is." And in these tough times, it is good to realize that while extremely risky behavior is still (always!) a bad idea, it is still necessary to make investments in order to realize returns.

New Discoveries

Marcel Proust wrote, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes." I find this is true in two ways:

1) As a mom, I am constantly exposed to new perspectives as my kids explore the world and share their experiences.

2) As a writer for TheInsiderTravelGuides.com, I often find myself acting as a tourist in my own town. Developing travel stories about places I know well forces me to look at them differently.

Make Your Own Happiness

While the notion of taking responsibility for your own happiness and well-being is old hat among various self-help gurus, I certainly think it bears repeating (again and again) in this era of victimization and buck-passing. So go ahead - take charge of your life and make your own happiness!

Points of View

Adam Savage of Mythbusters likes to say, "I reject your reality and substitute my own" which for me, pretty much sums up how most of us see the world. Everything we see and do is filtered through our own personal perspective -- no two people experience things quite the same way.

New Year's Resolutions

It's been said that all the good things in life "are either immoral, illegal, or fattening." I think that's why so many of us tend to make resolutions each year to avoid those things... and then fail to keep our resolutions because, after all, what good is a life lived without chocolate, after all?