I have just been reading a great new book by Pascoe Sawyers called MePLC: http://meplc.moonfruit.com/ .
Influenced by various authors, Pascoe’s contention is that we need to run our lives like we’d run our business, and one paradoxical contention of that is we need to put ourselves first. Once, and only then, we have looked after ourselves can we take care of others.
He has some great stuff in the book like his unpicking of the FOCUS acronym, so I won’t spoil his work – read it. But as a sidebar that I particularly like: his book is full of great quotations garnered from a variety of sources.
I don’t know about you but I love quotations and often find them extremely motivating. And if not motivating – a Mote Quote – then revealing or amusing.
From his book I had heard this one before: “Our life is what our thoughts make it” – Marcus Aurelius. But I had not encountered James Baldwin’s, “Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we are to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock”. Now that’s funny and apposite!
My favourite quotation from the book? Probably, Wayne Dyer’s, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”. Wonderful.
What, then, are some of my favourite Mote Quotes to share with you? And what quotes do you find particularly powerful?
First, from Marcus Aurelius: “The secret of all success lies in the organization of the non-obvious”. How powerful is that?
“Nothing happens unless first a dream” – Carl Sandberg
“That man who has no faith in himself can never have faith in God.” – Vivekananda
“As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts” – Buddha
“Generosity gives rise to a creative mind” – Dalai Lama
“the imagination has some way of lighting on the truth which reason has not, and …. it’s commandments … are the most binding we can ever know” WB Yeats
And perhaps, finally for now, a quotation that makes me laugh out loud: “It often happens that I wake up at night and begin to think about a series of problems and decide I must tell the Pope about it; then I wake up completely and remember, I am the Pope!” – Pope John 23rd
The point is with these quotations is that they are more than Christmas Cracker mottoes; at some deep level really good/great quotations can become mantras that we rehearse and which direct us in turbulent times.
I am all for making lists and treasuring the key ones. What are your Mote Quotes?
James
The Mapping Motivation Series 