"It is sometimes a mistake to make the climb; it is always a mistake never even to make the attempt. If you climb, you can either succeed or fall. But there is a third option: Sometimes when you fall, you find out you can fly."
 –NG
(via Benjamin LaBrot, founder of Floating Doctors)

“I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be honorable, to be compassionate. It is, after all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.”

- Leo C. Rosten (1908-1977)

“Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort.”

- Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945)

"The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world's problems."

-- Mahatma Gandhi

"The secret of joy in work is contained in one word: excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it."

(Pearl S. Buck)

Buckminster Fuller, on "what one person can do":

"Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary -- the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there's a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trim tab.

It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim tab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.

So I said, call me Trim Tab."

"Things won are done, joy's soul lies in the doing."

(William Shakespeare)

"In order to win, we pay with energy and effort and discipline. If we lose, we pay in disappointment, discontent, and lack of fulfillment."

(Maya Angelou)