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know men and women can banish worry, fear, and various kinds of illnesses, and can transform their lives by changing their thoughts. I
when the only thing that needed changing was the focus of the lens of the camera which was my mind.
O.K. “I can honestly say that I am glad I had the breakdown, because I found out the hard way what power our thoughts can have over our mind and our body.
can make my thoughts work for me instead of against me.
I am deeply convinced that our peace of mind and the joy we get out of living depends not on where we are, or what we have, or who we are, but solely upon our mental attitude.
The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.
“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”
Epictetus, the great Stoic philosopher,
Montaigne, the great French philosopher,
“A man is not hurt so much by what happens, as by his opinion of what happens.”
you can change your mental attitude by an effort of the will?
“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”
what William James was talking about— that it is physically impossible to remain blue or depressed while you are acting out the symptoms of being radiantly happy!
As a Man Thinketh, by James Alien, and here’s what it said:
All that a man achieves is the direct result of his own thoughts.... A man can only rise, conquer and achieve by lifting up his thoughts.
Think and act cheerfully, and you will feel cheerful.
Our hate is not hurting them at all, but our hate is turning our own days and nights into a hellish turmoil.
“If selfish people try to take advantage of you, cross
them off your list, but don’t try...
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Even if we can’t love our enemies, let’s at least love ourselves. Let’s love ourselves so much that we won’t permit our enemies to control our happiness, our health, and our looks. As Shakespeare put it: Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot That it do singe yourself.
‘To be wronged or robbed,” said Confucius, “is nothing unless you continue to remember it.”
There is an old saying that a man is a fool who can’t be angry, but a man is wise who won’t be angry.
No one can humiliate or disturb you and me, either—unless we let him. Sticks and stones may break my bones, But words can never hurt me.
“let’s pity them and thank God that life has not made us what they are. Instead of heaping condemnation and revenge upon our enemies, let’s give them our understanding, our sympathy, our help, our forgiveness, and our prayers.”
“Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation. You do not find it among gross people.”
Here is the first point I am trying to make in this chapter: It is natural for people to forget to be grateful; so, if we go around expecting gratitude, we are headed straight for a lot of heartaches.
really wants is love and attention.
There are thousands of people like her, people who are ill from “ingratitude,” loneliness, and neglect.
the only way in this world that they can ever hope to be loved is to stop asking for it and to start pouring out love without hope of return.
the joy of giving without expecting anything whatever in return!
“takes joy in doing favors for others.”
I am trying to make in this chapter: If we want to find happiness, let’s stop thinking about gratitude or ingratitude and give for the inner joy of giving.
But why should children be thankful—unless we train them to be? Ingratitude is natural—like weeds. Gratitude is like a rose. It has to be fed and watered and cultivated and loved and protected.
We must remember that our children are very much what we make them.
Those children breathed in warmth and radiant human-kindness all during their childhoods.
So let us remember that to raise grateful children, we have to be grateful. Let us remember “little pitchers have big ears”—and watch what we say.
I had the blues because I had no shoes, Until upon the street, I met a man who had no feet.”
“The biggest lesson I learned from that experience,” he said, “was that if you have all the fresh water you want to drink and
all the food you want to eat, you ought never to complain about anything.”
“What in the hell am I worrying about?”
About ninety percent of the things in our lives are right and about ten per cent are wrong. If we want to be happy, all we have to do is to concentrate on the ninety per cent that are right and ignore the ten per cent that are wrong.
“There are two things to aim at in life: first, to get what you want; and, after that, to enjoy it only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.”
read an inspiring book of incredible courage by Borghild Dahl. It is called I Wanted to See.
Count your blessings—not your troubles!
“Nobody is so miserable as he who longs to be somebody and something other than the person he is in body and mind.”
You won’t get anywhere playing the ape. You can’t be a parrot.
“Compared to what we ought to be,” he wrote, “we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, human individuals thus live far within their limits. They possess powers of various sorts which they habitually fails to use.”
Two men looked out from prison bars, One saw the mud, the other saw the stars.
“their power to turn a minus into a plus.”
Harry Emerson Fosdick says in his book, The Power to See It Through,
