Quotes for our Everyday Life

Even though written ages ago, these quotes seem as applicable as ever in our fast-moving way of life. Composed by some of the most intellectual and spiritual seekers, sages, scientists, and artists the world has ever known, they will uplift the spirit and inspire more powerful ways to think.

🌷 Here's some food-for thought that will help many of us change our life: 

• “Greater in battle
  than the man who would conquer
  a thousand-thousand men,
  is he who would conquer
  just one —
  
  Better to conquer yourself
  than others.
  When you've trained yourself,
  living in constant self-control,
  neither a deva nor gandhabba,
  nor a Mara banded with Brahmas,
  could turn that triumph
  back into defeat.”
  ― Gautama Buddha

• “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts and made up of our thoughts. If a man speak or act with an evil thought, suffering follows him as the wheel follows the hoof of the beast that draws the wagon.... If a man speak or act with a good thought, happiness follows him like a shadow that never leaves him.”
  ― Gautama Buddha

• “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
  Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
  Where there is injury, pardon;
  Where there is doubt, faith;
  Where there is despair, hope;
  Where there is darkness, light;
  And where there is sadness, joy.
  
  O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
  to be consoled as to console,
  to be understood as to understand,
  to be loved, as to love.
  
  For it is in giving that we receive,
  It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
  and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
  ― Francis of Assisi

• “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
  ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

• “Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
  ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

• “Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others; to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.”
  ― Dalai Lama XIV

• “Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”
  ― Mahatma Gandhi

• “Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you.”
  ― Walt Whitman