Don’t be like the preacher who thought about praying while making love with his life and thought about love while praying.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Love, Life, Yin
Avoid fragmentation: Find your focus and seek simplicity. Purposeful living calls for elegant efficiency and economy of effort—expanding the minimum time and energy necessary to achieve desired goals.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Desire, Simplicity, Focus, Purpose, Effort, Economy, Energy, Achieve, Goals
Money is neither my god nor my devil. It is a form of energy that tends to make us more of who we already are, whether it’s greedy or loving.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Money
Responsibility is a grace you give yourself not an obligation.
—Dan Millman
Find the heart of it. Make the complex simple, and you can achieve mastery.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Master, Heart, Mastery, Achieve
It may be true that the unexamined life is not worth living—but neither is the unlived life worth examining.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Life, Action
There are no ordinary moments.
—Dan Millman
As a peaceful warrior, I would choose when, where and how I would behave. With that commitment, I began to live the life of a warrior.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Commitment, Live, Life, Warrior, War, Peace
To be authentic literally means to be your own author.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Love
Faith means living with uncertainty – feeling your way through life, letting your heart guide you like a lantern in the dark.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Faith
The warrior is here, now.
—Dan Millman
Don’t wait until you die to learn the warrior’s way. Do it now, each night, just before you drift off to sleep. As you review your day, consider these two questions of courage and love. Learn from each day, so that each day you can show a little more courage and a little more love. Then, as incidents occur, you may rise to the occasion and look back at the end of your life and feel good about the way you lived.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Questions, Love, Warrior, War, Live, Learn, Life, Sleep, Good, Courage
When we feel stuck, going nowhere—even starting to slip backward—we may actually be backing up to get a running start.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Courage, Growth
Act happy, feel happy, be happy, without a reason in the world. Then you can love, and do what you will.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Happiness
When you sit, sit. When you stand, stand. Whatever you do, don’t wobble.
—Dan Millman
If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is a law, and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Death, Wisdom, Life, Change
As poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore reminds us, “We cannot cross the sea merely by staring at the water”. Simplicity has power. And living on purpose comes to this: Just do it. How much simpler can we get?
—Dan Millman
Topics: Mind, Water, Purpose, Simplicity, Power
Moderation? It’s mediocrity, fear, and confusion in disguise. It’s the devil’s dilemma. It’s neither doing nor not doing. It’s the wobbling compromise that makes no one happy. Moderation is for the bland, the apologetic, for the fence-sitters of the world afraid to take a stand. It’s for those afraid to laugh or cry, for those afraid to live or die. Moderation…is lukewarm tea, the devil’s own brew.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Fear, Risk, Courage, Happy
Choice means saying no to one thing so you can say yes to another.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Choice, Yin
Someday, in the moment of death, your whole life will pass before you. In a few fractions of a second—because time no longer applies—you will see many incidents from your life in order to learn. You will review your life with two questions in your consciousness: Could I have shown a little more courage in these moments? Could I have shown a little more love? You will see where you let fear stop you from expressing who you are, how you feel, or what you need. You will see whether you were able to expand into these moments, just a little, to show love, or whether you contracted.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Fear, Life, Learn, Lies, Sin, Act, Love, Courage, Action, Death, Questions
Life is brief—a flash of lightning, a snap of eternity’s fingers.
—Dan Millman
When you begin your transcendental training, focusing your best efforts, without attachment to outcomes, you will understand the peaceful warrior’s way.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Warrior, Peace, Attitude, Effort
Wake up! If you knew for certain you had a terminal illness—if you had little time left to live—you would waste precious little of it! Well, I’m telling you…you do have a terminal illness: It’s called birth. You don’t have more than a few years left. No one does! So be happy now, without reason—or you will never be at all.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Action, Happy
Simplicity has power. Founding our life on constructive, positive behavior is the simplest, most direct, and powerful approach I’ve ever found—simple, but not easy.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Power, Life, Simplicity
Willpower is the key to success. Successful people strive no matter what they feel by applying their will to overcome apathy, doubt or fear.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Success, Willpower, Action, People, Fear, Apathy, Doubt, Power
You haven’t yet opened your heart fully, to life, to each moment. The peaceful warrior’s way is not about invulnerability, but absolute vulnerability—to the world, to life, and to the Presence you felt. All along I’ve shown you by example that a warrior’s life is not about imagined perfection or victory; it is about love. Love is a warrior’s sword; wherever it cuts, it gives life, not death.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Warrior, Life, Peace, Love, Death
If you desire to dig a well to reach water, your efforts are more fruitful if you dig one 100-foot-deep hole than if you dig ten holes each 10 feet deep.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Desire, Effort, Water
When running up a hill, it is all right to give up as many times as you wish—as long as your feet keep on moving.
—Dan Millman
Topics: Give
There are times to let things happen, and times to make things happen. Now is that time. You will either make things happen, watch what happens, or wonder what happened.
—Dan Millman
People rarely fail; they only stop trying.
—Dan Millman
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Norman Vincent Peale American Clergyman, Self-Help Author
- Marie Chapian American Christian Writer
- Laura Schlessinger American Broadcaster
- Jamie Lee Curtis American Film Actress
- Russell Hoban American Author
- Nikki Giovanni American Poet, Writer
- Glenn Beck American Mormon Children’s Books Writer
- Jimmy Buffett American Singer-Songwriter
- Louise Erdrich American Children’s Books Writer
- Diane Ackerman American Poet, Naturalist
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