Spread love everywhere you go: first of all in your own house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor… let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eye, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.
—Mother Teresa (1910–97) Roman Catholic Missionary, Nun
Synergy is everywhere in nature. If you plant two plants close together, the roots commingle and improve the quality of the soil so that both plants will grow better than if they were separated. If you put two pieces of wood together, they will hold much more than the total weight held by each separately. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One plus one equals three or more.
—Stephen Covey (1932–2012) American Self-help Author
It’s better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than to have an opportunity and not be prepared.
—Whitney Young (1921–71) American Civil Rights Leader
Too many of those with unrealized aspirations have set them aside due to fear of failure. The bigger the dream, the greater the fear. Doing less than our best allays this fear. I could have done better if I’d tried, we assure ourselves. Among the least appreciated reasons for doing superficial, second-rate work of any kind is the comfort of knowing it’s not our best that’s on the line. By not trying too hard, we avoid learning what our true potential is, and having to fulfill it. Doing our best can be deeply threatening. It forces us to consider what we’re actually capable of accomplishing. Once we learn that lesson, we can’t unlearn it. Our true potential becomes both a shining light we can follow and an oppressive burden of expectation that might, or might not, be met.
—Unknown
Never make your appeal to a man’s better nature; he may not have one. Always make your appeal to his self-interest.
—Robert A. Heinlein (1907–88) American Science Fiction Writer
The Work reveals that what you think shouldn’t have happened should have happened. It should happened because it did, and no thinking in the world can change it. This doesn’t mean that you condone it or approve of it. It just means that you can see things without resistance and without the confusion of your inner struggle. No one wants their children to get sick, no one wants to be in a car accident; but when these things happen, how can it be helpful to mentally argue with them? We know better than to do that, yet we do it, because we don’t know how to stop.
—Byron Katie (b.1942) American Speaker, Author
Your automatic creative mechanism is teleological. That is, it operates in terms of goals and end results. Once you give it a definite goal to achieve, you can depend upon its automatic guidance system to take you to that goal much better than “you” ever could by conscious thought. “You” supply the goal by thinking in terms of end results. Your automatic mechanism then supplies the means whereby.
—Maxwell Maltz (1899–1975) American Surgeon, Motivational Writer
Sacrifice is giving up something good for something better.
—Unknown
The purpose for the passage of time is to allow a person to become better, wiser, to express more and more of one’s beingness.
—Marlo Morgan (1937–98) American Novelist, Author
I can find only three kinds of business in the universe: mine, yours and God’s. Much of our stress comes from mentally living out of our business. When I think, “You need to get a job, I want you to be happy, you should be on time, you need to take better care of yourself,” I am in your business. When I’m worried about earthquakes, floods, war, or when I will die, I am in God’s business. If I am mentally in your business or in God’s business, the effect is separation.
—Byron Katie (b.1942) American Speaker, Author
The greatest stock market you can invest in is yourself. Finding this truth is better than finding a gold mine.
—Byron Katie (b.1942) American Speaker, Author
Four be the things I’d been better without: Love, curiosity, Freckles and doubt.
—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American Humorist, Journalist
Whatever you habitually think yourself to be, that you are. You must form, now, a greater and better habit; you must form a conception of yourself as a being of limitless power, and habitually think that you are that being. It is the habitual, not the periodical thought that decides your destiny.
—Wallace Wattles (1860–1911) American New Thought Author
The person who doesn’t read is no better off than the person who can’t read.
—Unknown
Doing more of what doesn’t work won’t make it work any better.
—Charles J. Givens (1941–98) American Self-Help Writer
Don’t wish it were easier. Wish you were better.
—Jim Rohn (1930–2009) American Entrepreneur, Author, Motivational Speaker
Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style; pervasiveness and permanence. Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation. On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors. Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair… The optimistic style of explaining good events is the opposite of that used for bad events: It’s internal rather than external. People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.
—Martin Seligman (b.1942) American Psychologist, Author
He who stops being better stops being good.
—Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) British Head of State, Military Leader
It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) English Biologist
It is easier to act yourself into a better way of feeling than to feel yourself into a better way of action.
—Orval Hobart Mowrer (1907–82) American Psychologist, Academic
Better to ask twice than to lose your way once.
—Danish Proverb
An empty house is better than a bad tenant.
—Irish Proverb
To live differently, to love differently, to think differently, or to try to. Is the danger of beauty so great that it is better to live without it (the standard model)? Or to fall into her arms fire to fire? There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.
—Jeanette Winterson (b.1959) English Novelist, Journalist
If we are to find our way across toubled waters, we are better served by the company of those who have built bridges, who have moved beyond despair and inertia.
—Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American Author, Editor, Orator
Well done is better than well said.
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) American Political Leader, Inventor, Diplomat
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
—Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American Head of State, Political leader, Historian, Explorer
A heart free from care is better than a full purse.
—Arabic Proverb
So, instead of wanting to throttle your loved ones when they give you a hard time, it is better to look at them as mirrors of what you still need to work on in terms of our personal growth.
—Susan Jeffers (1938–2012) American Psychologist, Self-Help Author
‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92) British Poet
True nobility isn’t about being better than someone else. It’s about being better than you used to be.
—Wayne Dyer (1940–2015) American Self-Help Author