…for better or worse, our future will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.Share your goals: those realized and those unfulfilled.
-- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention
A Dream DeferredWhat happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
Like a syrupy sweet?Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.Or does it explode?
-- Langston Hughes
Education is not the piling on of learning, information, data, facts, skills, or abilities--that's training or instruction--but is rather a making visible what is hidden as a seed... To be educated, a person doesn't have to know much or be informed, but he or she does have to have been exposed vulnerably to the transformative events of an engaged human life... One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.Describe your own learning style. Share some of your learning experiences.
-- Thomas Moore, The Education of the Heart
Every single one of us can do things that no one else can do--can love things that no one else can love...We are like violins. We can be used for doorstops, or we can make music. You know what to do.
-- Barbara Sher, I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was
When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.Share a regret that you have experienced in your life.
-- Alexander Graham Bell
Looking back, I have this to regret, that too often when I loved, I did not say so.
-- David Grayson.
The chemist who can extract from his heart's elements, compassion, respect, longing, patience, regret, surprise, and forgiveness and compound them into one can create that atom which is called love.
-- Kahlil Gibran
Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.Share memories of your first best friend. Discuss how you make friends has evolved over time. Talk about the meaning of friendship in your life.
-- Anais Nin
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the true source of art, science, and friendship.
-- Albert Einstein
from Singing the Living Tradition #657
from Singing the Living Tradition #692
Give up anger, give up pride, and free yourself from worldly bondage. No sorrow can befall those who never try to possess people and things as their own.
-- Buddha, The Dammapada
Anger is a signal and one worth listening to.
-- Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Anger
Anger is loaded with information and energy.
-- Audre Lorde, "The Uses of Anger" in Sister Outsider
Conquer anger through gentleness, unkindness through kindness, greed through generosity, and falsehood through truth. Be truthful; do not yield to anger. Give freely, even if you have but little. The gods will bless you.
-- Buddha, The Dammapada
The first step in claiming yourself is anger.
-- Jamaica Kincaid, in Donna Perry, ed. Backtalk
At least if I can stay mad I can stay alive.
-- Magdalena Gomez, "Solos Palabras," in Faythe Turner, ed. Puerto Rican Writers at Home in the USA
In thinking about anger, there can be two types. One type of anger can be positive. This would be mainly due to one's motivation. There can be some anger that is motivated by compassion or a sense of responsibility. Where anger is motivated by compassion, it can be used as an impetus or a catalyst for a positive action... All too often, however, even though that kind of anger can act as a protector and bring one energy, that energy is also blind, so it is uncertain whether it will become constructive or destructive in the end.
-- The Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness
Anger is protest.
-- Lillian Hellman, Watch on the Rhine
I have a right to my anger, and I don't want anybody telling me I shouldn't be, that it's not nice to be, and that something's wrong with me because I get angry.
-- Maxine Waters, in Brian Lanker, I Dream a World
I am no longer afraid of anger. I find it to be a creative, transforming force; anger is a stage I must go though if I am ever to get what lies beyond.
-- Mary Kaye Medinger, in Kay Vander Vort, et al., Walking in Two Worlds
The anger she felt within her acted like yeast on bread dough. She felt its rapid rising, flowing into every last recess of her body; like yeast in a small bowl, it spilled over to the outside, escaping in the form of steam through her ears, nose, and all her pores.
-- Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate
Even though under rare circumstances some kinds of anger can be positive, generally speaking, anger leads to ill feeling and hatred. And, as far as hatred is concerned, it is never positive. It has no benefit at all. It is totally negative. We cannot overcome anger and hatred simply by suppressing them. We need to actively cultivate the antidotes to hatred: Patience and tolerance.
-- The Dalai Lama, The Art of Happiness
Anger is its own excuse and its own reward.
-- Anne Rivers Siddons, Outer Banks
I have suckled at the wolf's lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter.
-- Audre Lorde, "The Uses of Anger " in Sister Outsider
Expressing anger is not always the best way to deal with it. In expressing anger we might be practicing or rehearsing it, and making it stronger in the depth of our consciousness. Expressing anger to the person we are angry at can cause a lot of damage.
-- Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step
Grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.
-- Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
Anger as well as love casts out fear.
-- Margaret Dreland, Small Things
Pillow-pounding may provide some relief [for our anger], but it is not very long-lasting. In order to have real transformation, we have to deal with the roots of our anger - looking deeply into its causes. If we don't the seeds of anger will grow again. If we practice mindful living, planting new, healthy, wholesome seeds, they will take care of our anger, and they may transform it without our asking them to do so.
-- Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step
Through anger, the truth looks simple.
-- Jane McCabe, in Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life
People in a temper of say a lot of silly, terrible things they mean.
-- Penelope Gilliatt, in Katherine Whitehorn, View From a Column
He was really very fond of his temper, and rather enjoyed referring to it with tolerant regret as being a bad one and beyond his control - with a manner which suggested that the attribute was the inevitable result of strength of character and masculine spirit.
-- Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Shuttle
We wish to make rage into a fire that cooks things rather than a fire of conflagration.
-- Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run with the Wolves
I don't know if fury can compete with necessity as the mother of invention, but I recommend it.
-- Gloria Steinem, Moving Beyond Words
Many of our problems with anger occur when we choose between having a relationship and having a self.
-- Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Anger
Anger is a tool for change when it challenges us to become more of an expert on the self and less of an expert on others.
-- Harriet Lerner, The Dance of Anger
Anger stirs and wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth.
-- Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.
-- Audre Lorde, "Eye to Eye," Sister Outsider
Anger as soon as fed is dead- /'Tis starving makes it fat.
-- Emily Dickinson, in T.W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, eds., Poems by Emily Dickinson, 2nd series
Anger is like milk, it should not be kept too long.
-- Phyllis Bottome, "The Home-Coming," Innocence and Experience
Bad temper is its own safety valve. He who can bark does not bite.
-- Agatha Christie, title story, The Under Dog
I was so mad you could have boiled a pot of water on my head.
-- Alice Childress, Like One of the Family
Their anger dug out for itself a deep channel, so that future angers might more easily follow.
-- Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
There are so many roots to the tree of anger / that sometimes the branches shatter / before they bear.
-- Audre Lorde, "Who Said It Was Simple," Undersong
When the habitually even-tempered suddenly fly into a passion, that explosion is apt to be more impressive than the outburst of the most violent among us.
-- Margery Allingham, Death of a Ghost
In anger, you look ten years older.
-- Hedda Hopper, From Under My Hat
Beware of anger. It is the most difficult to remove of all the hindrances. But it is the alcohol of the body, you know, and the devil of it is that it deadens the perceptions.
-- Margery Allingham, The Tiger in the Smoke
Anger is the common refuge of insignificance. People who feel their character to be slight, hope to give weight by inflation: but the blown bladder at its fullest distention is still empty.
-- Hannah More, "On the Comparatively Small Faults and Virtues," Practical Piety
The devil-ache of loneliness seldom deserts the bones of the angry.
-- Lucy Freeman, Before I Kill More
Anger makes us all stupid.
-- Johanna Spyri, Heidi
Anger makes dull men witty, but keeps them poor.
-- Elizabeth I, in Francis Bacon, Apophthegms
Go in peace. Live simply, gently, at home in yourselves.
Act justly.
Speak justly.
Remember the depth of your own compassion.
Forget not your power in the days of your powerlessness.Crave peace for all people in the world,
beginning with yourselves,
and go as you go with the dream of that peace alive in your heart.
-- Adapted from Mark L. Belletini
Today, the 'old boy network' may still hamper women's progress. But it is also true that, after more than 30 years of feminism, that women and men often make different choices about work and life. To a large extent, women are still expected to be the primary parents and men the primary breadwinners. Many conservatives believe these traditional preferences are not only natural but essential to healthy families. I'm not so sure. It is often hard to tell where free choice ends and cultural pressure begins. The crazy quilt of old and new norms can cause painful conflicts, frustrating women's professional aspirations and men's desire for a balanced life.
-- Cathy Young, Boston Globe, March 2001
There are girls who grow up strong and bold
There are boys quiet and kind
Some race on ahead, some follow behind
Some go in their own way and time
Some women love women, some men love men
Some raise children, some never do
You can dream all the day never reaching the end
Of everything possible for you."
-- Fred Small "Everything Possible"
The image of women in the media is, as far as I can tell, harmless at best and deadly at worst. Though I am certainly no authority on the subject, I can say without reservation that images of women in the media inevitably affect the self-image of a great number of people, myself included. I think that for many women, this is an inescapable function of living in a society that sexualizes its members to the point where only an idealized body structure is considered satisfactory or acceptable. The American media consistently conveys to its female targets the notion that there is a dangerously limited range of attractive body types, and inundates them with suggestions about how to achieve them.
--Libby Baker
"It's not easy being green." --Kermit the Frog "A person's a person, no matter how small" --Horton the Elephant
The older one gets, the more one is conscious of aging. We can barely remember childhood innocence and exuberance. We are surprised by the youthful vitality and unmarked face when we see earlier photos of ourselves. When we look in the mirror, we reluctantly acknowledge the aging mask. It seems that there is no escaping the marks of life.Every experience that we have, everything that we do and think is registered upon us as surely as the steady embroidery of a tattoo artist. But to a large degree, the pattern and picture that will emerge is up to us. If we go to a tattoo artist, it is we who select the picture. In life, it is we who select what we will become by the actions we perform. There is no reason to go through life thoughtlessly, to let accident shape us. That is like allowing oneself to be tattooed by a blind man. How can you help turn out old and ugly?
Whether we emerge beautiful or ugly is our sole responsibility.
--Deng Ming-Dao
"Age has its compensation. It is less apt to be brow-beaten by discretion. " --Charlie Chaplain
"I'd like to go on being 35 for a long time." --Margaret Thatcher
"If I'd known how old i was going to be I'd have taken better care of myself." --Adolph Zukor
"Is not wisdom found among the aged? Does not long life bring understanding?" -- BIBLE, Job 12:12
"My age is 39 plus tax." --Liberace
"Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward we must believe in age." --Dorothy L. Sayers