?I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.

- ?Frances Willard

When we put down ideas of what life should be like, we are free to wholeheartedly say yes to our life as it is.

- Tara Brach

To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.

- Stephen Hawking

Whether you think you can or think you can't, you are right.

- Henry Ford

Love isn't finding a perfect person. It's seeing an imperfect person perfectly.

- Sam Keen

Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world -- making the most of one's best.

- Harry Emerson Fosdick

I thank God for my handicaps, for through them, I have found myself, my work, and my God.

- Helen Keller

Imperfection is not our personal problem, it is a natural part of existing,

- Tara Brach

Imperfection is not our personal problem -- it is a natural part of existing.

- Tara Brach

It doesn't matter how long we may have been stuck in a sense of our limitations. If we go into a darkened room and turn on the light, it doesn't matter if the room has been dark for a day, a week, or ten thousand years -- we turn on the light and it is illuminated. Once we control our capacity for love and happiness, the light has been turned on.

- Sharon Salzberg

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections but instantly set about remedying them -- every day begin the task anew.

- Saint Francis de Sales

A principle is the expression of perfection, and as imperfect beings like us cannot practise perfection, we devise every moment limits of its compromise in practice.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi

If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.

- Napoleon Hill

We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.

- Tara Brach

I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.

- Harry Emerson Fosdick

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't.

- Emerson M. Pugh



Human fallibility being what it is, victory and truth do not always go together. Therefore, if you have to always win, you can't always be true.

- Rebbe Nachman of Breslov



I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.

- Werner von Braun



Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt



You can put wings on a pig, but you don't make it an eagle.

- Bill Clinton



Reason itself is fallible, and this fallibility must find a place in our logic.

- Nicola Abbagnano



The people cannot be all, and always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.

- Thomas Jefferson



To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

- Bertrand Russell



Analyzing what you haven't got as well as what you have is a necessary ingredient of a career.

- Orison Swett Marden



This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past.

- Agathon



Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

- Theodore Roosevelt



Injustice can be eliminated, but human conflicts and natural limitations cannot be removed. The conflicts of social life and the limitations of nature cannot be controlled or transcended. They can, however, be endured and survived. It is possible for there to be a dance with life, a creative response to its intrinsic limits and challenges ... [A Feminist Ethic of Risk]

- Sharon Welch



We need a coat with two pockets. In one pocket there is dust, and in the other pocket there is gold. We need a coat with two pockets to remind us who we are.

- Parker J. Palmer



The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people.

- John Stuart Mill



The man who is anybody and who does anything is surely going to be criticized, vilified, and misunderstood. This is part of the penalty for greatness, and every man understands, too, that it is no proof of greatness.

- Elbert Hubbard



Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.

- Blaise Pascal



We are all something, but none of us are everything.

- Blaise Pascal



Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

- Arthur Schopenhauer



Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

- Arthur Ashe



In these days, a man who says a thing cannot be done is quite apt to be interrupted by some idiot doing it.

- Elbert Hubbard



[W]hen people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

- Isaac Asimov



When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.

- Helen Keller



I seldom think of my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times; but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers.

- Helen Keller



Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

- Rollo May



Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations; reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance; liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame; the other to postpone all things to the man himself; conservatism is debonnair and social; reform is individual and imperious.

The Conservative

- Ralph Waldo Emerson



Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.

- Elbert Hubbard



We must learn our limits. We are all something, but none of us are everything.

- Blaise Pascal



I am only one,
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

- Edward Everett Hale



No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.

- William Osler



Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life... as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.

- Booker T. Washington