43 Power Quotes That Remind Us Everything In Our Lives Is Within Our Control

Champions don't do extraordinary things.

“An idea can only become a reality once it is broken down into organized, actionable elements.”

— Scott Belsky, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

Tagged: Structure

“Like creating a masterpiece, quitting is an art: you have to decide what to keep within the frame and what to keep out.”

— Richie Norton, The Power of Starting Something Stupid

Tagged: Structure

“Understand: your mind is weaker than your emotions. But you become aware of this weakness only in moments of adversity,precisely the time when you need strength. What best equips you to cope with the heat of battle is neither more knowledge nor more intellect. What makes your mind stronger, and more able to control your emotions, is internal discipline and toughness. No one can teach you this skill; you cannot learn it by reading about it. Like any discipline, it can come only through practice, experience, even a little suffering. The first step in building up presence of mind is to see the need for it, to want it badly enough to be willing to work for it.”

— Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War (Joost Elffers Books)

“Life is not found in atoms or molecules or genes, but in the organization of them. Not in symbiosis, but in synthesis.”

— Edwin Grant Conklin, Heredity and environment in the development of men

Tagged: Structure

“You can’t calm the storm, so stop trying. What you can do is calm yourself. The storm will pass.”

— Timber Hawkeye, Buddhist Boot Camp

“The real me isn't the person I describe, no the real me is the me revealed by my actions.”

— Malcom Gladwell, Blink

Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy

“Being able to tolerate negative feelings can be crucial to a wide variety of life situations: delaying gratification, learning from bad experiences, truly hearing what other people have to say, and assessing our own circumstances.”

— Julie K. Norem

“Everyone believes very easily whatever he fears or desires.”

— Jean de La Fontaine, Jean de La Fontaine

“In fact, the most important change may be the toughest of all—and that’s changing ourselves.”

— Barack Obama, Glamour Exclusive: President Obama On Feminism and the World He Wants to Leave His Daughters

“Human-as-machine analogies get shaky, but for the sake of all of this talk about ‘optimization’ let’s briefly forego all the weird dystopic sci-fi connotations and refer to ourselves as machines.

We’ve got hardware — physical bodies.

We’ve got software — psychological predispositions, subjective real experience, and subjective virtual experience (culture).

We’ve got accessories — the stuff we own and consume.

In this respect, we are more machine than we are special snowflake. People are ‘individuals’ only to the degree that their collective subjective experiences and minor biological tweaks differ from others. Besides that, we’re working with a unified mass of very similar machines. These machines get more similar as you group them based on religion, cultural ideology, ethnicity, nationality, etc. Even in the globalized world, people tend to group together based on these identifiers, so I cannot ignore their differences completely for the sake of a more simplistic argument.”

— Charlie Ambler, How to Program Your Habit System

“According to Dr. Judith Orloff, the voice, words or images brought on by intuitive knowledge, are ‘neutral’, without much emotional charge. Also your intuition is your inner wisdom, your soul speaking to you. It will approach you with a ‘compassionate, affirming tone’.

On the other hand, your fear will speak in a ‘highly emotionally charged’ way.

It will provide ‘cruel, demeaning or delusional content’. Other experts, such as transformational leadership coach Rosalie Puiman, also mention this as a key way to tell the difference between fear speaking or intuition speaking.”

— Unknown, The Difference Between Intuition & Fear: How To Tell Them Apart

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”

— Stephen King, Awaken

“When we truly need to do is often what we most feel like avoiding.”

— David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

“When efforts that are wisely executed, the situation and condition don't affect the performance.”

— Ashish Patel, Getting started with Spring Framework: a hands-on guide to begin developing applications using Spring Framework

“If forensic analysts confiscated your calendar and email records and web browsing history for the past six months, what would they conclude are your core priorities?”

— Chip Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

“Although you can download all the productivity apps in the world (and I have), no app will make you care about what you have to do like the Rule of 3. The rule is dead simple:
1. At the beginning of every day, mentally fast-forward to the end of the day, and ask yourself: When the day is over, what three things will I want to have accomplished? Write those three things down.
2. Do the same at the beginning of every week.
The three things you identify then become your focus for the day and the week ahead.
That’s it.”

— Chris Bailey, The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy

“Imagination is the ability to produce new ideas without the need of time to stop and actually think about it. I'll produce elevator buttons - I bought that business from Jarod Kintz, who was only selling it, because he found a new, more profitable job – male prostitution (he’s selling his grandpa’s services, not his own, because his own are virtually non-existent – he’s a monk now, and monks are sworn to celibacy, you know, or should, by now). Buy now - grieve later. Two 5th floor buttons for your floorless cardboard-built tree house, for the price of one, 7-story tall tree, which, for the purpose of this story we’ll call Nathan. Nathan sends you its best regards and wishes you a happy, silent, well-watered-down life, which, coming from a tree isn’t really that much, however, as you know - trees aren’t regular customers in the land of walking and talking, and it took quite a lot of convincing to make him come over and say that. Meow.”

— Will Advise, Nothing Is Here

“You do not need to schedule your hours, you need to schedule your attention. It is your energy, not your time, that is limited each day.”

— Brianna Wiest, Productivity

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library Classics)

“Freedom is not the absence of commitments, but the ability to choose - and commit myself to - what is best for me.”

— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Success awaits those who steadfastly commit to any requisite sacrifice.”

— Ken Poirot, Mentor Me: GA=T+E- A Formula to Fulfill Your Greatest Achievement

“If you want to see what your truly committed to, look at your results.”

— Jennifer Ho-Dougatz, Jennifer Ho Dougatz

“And, in the end
The love you take
is equal to the love you make.”

— Paul McCartney, WINGS GREATEST HITS

“Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

— Will Rogers, Never Met a Man I Didn't Like: The Life and Writings of Will Rogers

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”

— Alice Walker, The Color Purple

“It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.”

— Chuck Palahniuk, Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”

— Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense

“Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go.”

— Oriah Mountain Dreamer, What We Ache For: Creativity and the Unfolding of Your Soul

“Every day you play with the light of the universe.”

— Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems (Bilingual Edition) (English and Spanish Edition)

Tagged: Inspirational, Universe

“Thoughts are like burning stars, and ideas, they flood, they stretch the universe.”

— Criss Jami, Killosophy