It Could Happen

"this is the magic of travel. you leave your home secure in your own knowledge and identity. but as you travel, the world in all its richness intervenes. you meet people you could not invent; you see scenes you could not imagine. your own world, which was so large as to comsume your whole life, becomes smaller and smaller until it is only one tiny dot in time and space.
you return a different person..." ~ kent nerburn

via http://www.jengray.com/archives/000370.html

"Do not wait; the time will never be 'just right'. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along." -- Napoleon Hill (1883-1970)

from http://leading-forward.blogspot.com/2005/06/leading-ideas-do-it-now.html

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book that bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don't read a book out its right time for you. . . . Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the truth in words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master. . . . [Y]ou should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow your intuitive feeling about what you need: that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people.

In the preface to 1971 edition of The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing via
http://magnificentoctopus.blogspot.com/2005/06/notebook.html

Snippet from a poem Mother Teresa had hanging on a wall of the orphanage she founded in Calcutta:

Anyway

People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

via http://evelynrodriguez.typepad.com/crossroads_dispatches/2005/06/damned_if_you_d.html