Challenge Quotes

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I will prepare and someday my chance will come.

- Abraham Lincoln

Hope and change are hard-fought things.

- Michelle Obama

It is not change that causes anxiety; it is the feeling that we are without defenses in the presence of what we see as danger that causes anxiety. (from Immunity to Change)

- Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free.

- Anne Sullivan

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself. If all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

- Simone de Beauvoir

Community is that place where the person you least want to live with always lives.

And when that person moves away, someone else arises to take his or her place.

- Parker J. Palmer

I wanted to live the life, a different life. I didn't want to go to the same place every day and see the same people and do the same job. I wanted interesting challenges.

- Harrison Ford

We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe, and the threat is outrunning our response.

- Sam Nunn

We are uncomfortable because everything in our life keeps changing -- our inner moods, our bodies, our work, the people we love, the world we live in. We can't hold on to anything -- a beautiful sunset, a sweet taste, an intimate moment with a lover, our very existence as the body/mind we call self -- because all things come and go. Lacking any permanent satisfaction, we continuously need another injection of fuel, stimulation, reassurance from loved ones, medicine, exercise, and meditation. We are continually driven to become something more, to experience something else.

- Tara Brach

Don't be afraid to fail. Don't waste energy trying to cover up failure. Learn from your failures and go on to the next challenge. It's OK to fail. If you're not failing, you're not growing.

- Anne Sullivan

Even the knowledge of my own fallibility cannot keep me from making mistakes. Only when I fall do I get up again.

- Vincent van Gogh

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

- Winston Churchill

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

- Abraham Maslow

People of little understanding are most apt to be angry when their sense is called into question.

- Samuel Richardson

If we fall, we don't need self-recrimination or blame or anger - we need a reawakening of our intention and a willingness to re-commit, to be whole-hearted once again."

- Sharon Salzberg

Beliefs and values that have held sway for thousands of years will be questioned as never before.

- Carol P. Christ

Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.

- Bernice Johnson Reagon

When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.

- Harriet Beecher Stowe

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

- Hugh Miller

If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call "failure" is not the falling down, but the staying down.

- Mary Pickford

The manager accepts the status quo; the leader challenges it.

- Warren Bennis

... without darkness
Nothing comes to birth,
As without light
Nothing flowers.

- May Sarton

You may wonder, 'How can I leave it all behind if I am just coming back to it? How can I make a new beginning if I simply return to the old?' The answer lies in the return. You will not come back to the 'same old thing.' What you return to has changed because you have changed. Your perceptions will be altered. You will not incorporate into the same body, status, or world you left behind. The river has been flowing while you were gone. Now it does not look like the same river. [The Book of the Vision Quest]

- Steven Foster