The path to awareness lies not in another’s footsteps.
– CFD –

Fear is healthy, panic is deadly.
– Mavericks Movie

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It’s not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
– Quoted in the movies Coach Carter and Akeelah and the Bee, and often attributed to Nelson Mandela who used it in his 1994 Inaugural Speech, actually from Marianne Williamson’s book A Return to Love – Reflections on the Principles in A Course in Miracles (Chapter 7, Section 3, Page 165).

A leader brings people where they want to go.

A great leader brings people where they ought to go but may not be want to go.
– Rosalyn Carter

An effective leader helps people discover their own desire to go where they ought to go.
– CFD

Disappointment is expectations not met. – DC
Happiness is expectations exceeded. – CD

Sometimes when you win, you lose. Sometimes when you lose, you win.
– What Dreams May Come

If they can conceive it and believe it, they can achieve it. They must know it is not their aptitude but their attitude that will determine their altitude.
– Jesse Jackson, Washington Post 21 May 78

“CQ + PQ > IQ” (ie Curiosity Quotient and Passion Quotient are more important than Intelligence Quotient. – Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat

Even the fear of death is nothing compared to the fear of not having lived authentically and fully.
– Frances Moore Lappe, O Magazine, May 2004

The greatest danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.
– Michelangelo

Destiny is what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their destiny is — everything is clear and everything is possible. They are not afraid to dream, and to yearn for everything they would like to see happen to them in their lives. But, as time passes, a mysterious force begins to convince them that it will be impossible for them to realize their destiny. To realize one’s destiny is a person’s only real obligation. – Paulo Coehlo, The Alchemist –

We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind’s greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.
– Elisabeth Kubler Ross –

Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.
– Jim Morrison

Some of the worst mistakes of my life have been haircuts. – Jim Morrison

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths.  These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassions, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
– Elisabeth Kubler Ross

If you try to lead others while you yourself do not develop, you will eventually become lost. Then you will feel everything burdensome. It is most fundamental to advance and develop yourself.
– Ikeda (The Human Revolution)

Give up money, give up fame, give up science, give the earth itself and all it contains rather than do an immoral act. And never suppose that in any possible situation, or under any circumstances, it is best for you to do a dishonorable thing, however slightly so it may appear to you …
From the practice of the purest virtue, you may be assured you will derive the most sublime comforts in every moment of life, and in the moment of death. Thomas Jefferson (letter to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785)

Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.
–  Jane Addams

There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, ‘Yes, I’ve got dreams, of course. I’ve got dreams.’ Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look in it, and yep, they’re still there. These are great dreams, but they never even get out of the box.
– Erma Bombeck

It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, ‘How good or bad am I?’ That’s where the courage comes in.
– Erma Bombeck

Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others for their sake and for our own.
– Cesar Chavez

Thinking too well of people often allows them to be better than they otherwise would.
– Nelson Mandela

Treat a person as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat him as he could be, and he will become what he should be.
– Jimmy Johnson

I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.
– Abraham Lincoln

It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business. 
– Mohandas Gandhi

If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner. 
– Nelson Mandela

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered. 
– Nelson Mandela

When we are really honest with ourselves, we must admit that our lives are all that really belongs to us. So it is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are. It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life.
– Cesar Chavez

The success of love is in the loving- it is not in the result of loving. Of course it is natural in love to want the best for the other person, but whether it turns out that way or not does not determine the value of what we have done. The more we can remove this priority for results the more we can learn about the contemplative element of love. There is the love expressed in the service and the love in the contemplation. It is the balance of both which we should be striving for. Love is the key to finding this balance.
– Mother Teresa from A Simple Path

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.
– John F. Kennedy

Most people don’t understand the power of nonviolence and tend to be amazed by the whole idea. Those who have been involved in bringing about change and see the difference between violence and nonviolence are firmly committed to a lifetime of nonviolence, not because it is easy or because it is cowardly, but because it is an effective and very powerful way.
– Cesar Chavez

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
– Friedrich Nietzche
See and reach the kind soul inside a monster, and you will discover the kinder soul within yourself
– CD

Education is more than a luxury; it is a responsibility that society owes to itself.
– Robin Cook, Coma

Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
– Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others they send forth a ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
– Robert F Kennedy

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.
– Abraham Lincoln

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
– Viktor Frankl (author, neurologist and psychiatrist Holocaust survivor (1905-1997))

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.
– Theodore Roosevelt 26th US President (1858-1919)

Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate; it is that we are powerful beyond measure.
– Nelson Mandela

For to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
– Nelson Mandela

There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
– Nelson Mandela, ‘A Long Walk to Freedom’

Education is the most powerful weapon, which you can use to change the world. 
– Nelson Mandela

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. – The 14th Dalai Lama

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
– Albert Einstein
New knowledge is obtained by exploring where our imagination takes us.
– CD

Within the child lies the fate of the future.
– Maria Montessori
The child within us will helps us create a future that will be good for our children.
– CD

Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul.
– Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain)
Each time we discover we are wrong, we have grown for we have learned something new.
– CD

As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.
– Socrates
You are like this cup; you are full of ideas. You come and ask for teaching, but your cup is full; I can’t put anything in. Before I can teach you, you’ll have to empty your cup.
– Zen Master Ryutan

To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.
– Disraeli

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
– George Santayana

The best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want, and then advise them to do it.
– Harry Truman

If you’re lonely while you’re alone, you’re in bad company.
– Jean-Paul Sartre

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Be the change you wish to see in the world.
– Mahatma Gandhi

It is little short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not already completely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry. I believe that one could even deprive a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness if one could force it with a whip to eat continuously whether it were hungry or not. 
– Albert Einstein

Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs. 
– Albert Einstein

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge. 
– Albert Einstein

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. 
– Albert Einstein

One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community. 
– Albert Einstein

One should guard against inculcating a young man with the idea that success is the aim of life, for a successful man normally receives from his peers an incomparibly greater portion than the services he has been able to render them deserve. The value of a man resides in what he gives and not in what he is capable of receiving. The most important motive for study at school, at the university, and in life is the pleasure of working and thereby obtaining results, which will serve the community. The most important task for our educators is to awaken and encourage these psychological forces in a young man. Such a basis alone can lead to the joy of possessing one of the most precious assets in the world – knowledge or artistic skill. 
– Albert Einstein

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. 
– Albert Einstein

When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. 
– Albert Einstein

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. 
– Albert Einstein

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity. 
– Albert Einstein

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. 
– Albert Einstein

Nothing is more important to the public weal [well-being] than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue.
– Benjamin Franklin

One day my dream is that my children … will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Intelligence plus character – that is the true goal of education.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Great learning and superior abilities… will be of little value and small estimation unless virtue, honor, truth and integrity are added to them.
– Abigail Adams to her son John Quincy Adams

The truest friend to the liberty of this country is he who tries to promote its virtue.
– Samuel Adams

I care not about what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do. That is character!
– Theodore Roosevelt

Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Choose always the way that seem the best, however rough it may be. Custom will soon render it easy and agreeable.
– Pythagoras

The final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.
– Anne Frank

The secret of education is respecting the pupil.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

Few things help an individual more that to place responsibility upon him and to let him know that you trust him.
– Booker T. Washington

We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.
– Dr. Martin Luther King

Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
– Abraham Lincoln

As Aristotle taught, people do not naturally or spontaneously grow up to be morally excellent or practically wise. They become so, if at all, only as the result of a lifelong personal and community effort.
– Jon Moline

A school can create a coherent environment, a climate, more potent than any single influence – teachers, class, family, neighborhood – so potent that for at least six hours a day it can override almost everything else in the lives of children.
– Ron Edmonds

Character education is the central curriculum issue confronting educators. Rather than the latest fad, it is a school’s oldest mission.
– Dr. Kevin Ryan

Character isn’t inherited. One builds it daily by the way one thinks and acts, thought by thought, action by action.
– Helen Gahagan Douglas

It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.
– Roy Disney

Children spell ‘love’ … T-I-M-E.”
– Dr. Anthony P. Witham

Parents say they want to know what’s going on in our lives, what we do, but they don’t really want to know.
– 11th grade student, 2001

Parents are the first and most important models and teachers of their children.
– Dr. James Comer

Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.
– Robert Fulghum

I’ve come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element in the classroom. My personal approach creates the climate. My daily mood makes the weather. As a teacher, I posses a tremendous power to make a child’s life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situation, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated and a child humanized or dehumanized.
– Haim Ginott

The elegance of honesty needs no adornment.
– Merry Brown

Enter your classroom every day looking for some way to make every student feel good about something. It may be the way a student is dressed, answers a question, helps another student, etc. Use any opportunity, anywhere, anytime.
– Joseph Katarski

Character education is not something new to add to your plate. It is the plate!
– Superintendent John Walko (NY school)

Effective character education is not adding a program or set of programs to a school. Rather it is a transformation of the culture and life of the school.
– Dr. Marvin Berkowitz

Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique: good teaching come from the identity and integrity of the teacher.
– Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach

We have a profound moral contract with our students. We insist, under the law, that they become thoughtful, informed citizens. We must – for their benefit and ours – model such citizenship. The routines and rituals of a school teach, and teach especially about matter of character.
– Sizer & Sizer, The Students Are Watching

The big questions, those asked by Gaugin and written in his famous triptych, are the essence of what humanities try to fathom for us, through poems and stories and plays and essays and factual narratives: where do we come from, and what are we and where are we going? Such questions have to do with “the meaning of life,” a phrase once summoned commonly, but these days all too sadly left unused.
– Robert Coles, “A Vision of the Humanities for the Young.”

We are all part of a larger stream of events, past, present and future. We are all the beneficiaries of those who went before us – who built cathedrals, braved the unknown, who gave their time and their service, who kept faith with the possibilities of the mind and the human spirit… History teaches us that character counts. Character above all.
– David McCullough, Commencement Address, University of Massachusetts, Boston

The two great goals of education: growing academically and becoming the best people we can be. – Unknown

The greatest menace to freedom is an inert public.
– Former Supreme Court Justice Loius Brandeis

Difference is the beginning of synergy.
– Stephen R. Covey

To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.
– Steven R. Covey

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift; the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
– Albert Einstein

One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do. –
Henry Ford

Be the change you want to see in the world.
– Mohandas K. Ghandi

Be of good cheer. Do not think of today’s failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere, and you will find joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.
– Helen Keller

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and
controversy.
– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The greatest danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low and achieving our mark.
– Michelangelo

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.
– John Stuart Mills

The penalty good people pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by people worse than themselves.
– Plato

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.
– Theodore Roosevelt

Do what you can with what you have where you are.
– Theodore Roosevelt

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
– Robert Louis Stephenson

People begin to become successful the minute they decide to be.
– Harvey MacKay

No one succeeds without effort…Those who succeed owe their success to their perseverance.
– Ramana Maharshi

The end of all education should surely be service to others. We cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about the progress and
prosperity of our community.
– Cesar Chavez

Our ambitions must be broad enough to include the aspirations and needs of others for their sake and for our own.
– Cesar Chavez

The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world.
– Max Born

Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.
– Jane Addams

Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful.
– Annette Funicello

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right.
– Mohandas K. Ghandi

Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.
– Peter T. McIntyre

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
– Frederick Nietzsche

It is not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness.
– Charles H. Spurgeon

To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.
– Steven R. Covey
To teach others how to touch the souls of other living beings is to bring them unto the holy ground.
– CD

The success of love is in the loving- it is not in the result of loving. Of course it is natural in love to want the best for the other person, but whether it turns out that way or not does not determine the value of what we have done. The more we can remove this priority for results the more we can learn about the contemplative element of love. There is the love expressed in the service and the love in the contemplation. It is the balance of both which we should be striving for. Love is the key to finding this balance.
– Mother Teresa from A Simple Path –

The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it seems to me the deepest root of all evil that is in the world.
– Max Born

A leader brings people where they want to go.
A great leader brings people where they ought to go but may not be want to go.
– Rosalyn Carter
An effective leader helps people discover their own desire to go where they ought to go.
– CFD

In the Last Samurai, there is a scene where Katsumoto is studying the cherry blossoms in the garden outside the temple. He comments to Algren “The perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life.” Near the end of the film, Katsumoto has a vision of millions of cherry blossoms falling from the sky and with his dying breath, he softly utters his discovery: “Perfect… They are all… perfect…”

Vous ne trouvez pas le Saint-Graal. C’est le Saint-Graal qui vous trouve.
(You do not find the Holy Grail; the Holy Grail finds you.)
– Dan Brown – The Da Vinci Code
Is the “Grail” here a metaphor for the “truth” or “enlightenment”?

“The world, Govinda, is perfect at every moment.”
– Herman Hesse (Siddartha)

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
– Yogi Berra