The “BANG”
Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.
We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open.
Development is a series of rebirths.
Awareness is all about restoring your freedom to choose what you want instead of what your past imposes on you.
Life comes at us in waves. We can't predict or control those waves, but we can learn to surf.
The first and greatest victory is to conquer self.
The whole universe is contained within a single human being – you.
Sometimes you have to lose all you have to find out who you truly are.
We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.
Changing your outside world cannot make you happy if you are an unhappy person. The real personal change can only happen from the inside out. If you firstly create the change within yourself, you can turn your life around.
Why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
The first step to getting anywhere is deciding you’re no longer willing to stay where you are.
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
In an obscure night
Fevered with love's anxiety
I went, none seeing me
Forth from my house,
where all things quiet be.
To shift your life in a desired direction, you must powerfully shift your subconscious.
If you don’t like where you are, then move! You’re not a tree.
You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking out new landscapes but in having new eyes.
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
Lasting change happens when people see for themselves that a different way of life is more fulfilling than their present one.
The adventure of awakening is among the most universal of human dramas.
It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful.
Scared and sacred are spelled with the same letters. Awful proceeds from the same root word as awesome. Terrify and terrific. Every negative experience holds the seed of transformation.
Nearly two decades later, I can say that the only thing that allowed me to take that leap was because a deeper, wiser part of me believed that somehow I’d be able to figure it out.
In order to change ourselves, we must first believe we can.
Interestingly, the very experience of fear itself is the tip-off moment, the signal that a possibility for action is opening up and so a choice needs to be made.
Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.
Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.
If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always got.
One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.
We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
Pessimistic labels lead to passivity, whereas optimistic ones lead to attempts to change.
Education is... doing anything that changes you.
The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.
What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.
Our self image, strongly held, essentially determines what we become.
When a man is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something.
People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
You will act like the sort of person you conceive yourself to be.
It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true. These negative ideas have exactly the same effect upon our behavior as the negative ideas implanted into the mind of a hypnotized subject by a professional hypnotist.
Times will change for the better when you change.
To become more effective, you must learn what these people have learned: how you feel is not controlled by others or events. You are not the physical or psychological slave of your parents, husband, wife, child, boss, the economy, or anything else unless you choose to be.
Everyone tells you what's good for you. They don't want you to find your own answers. They want you to believe theirs.
We cannot become what we need by remaining what we are.
Once you can change your thoughts, your new feelings will begin to emerge, and you will have taken the first step on the road to your personal freedom.
Lastly, to my father, thank you for the life you lived and the example you set for me. I love you. I close with one of your famous teachings. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it said better. “The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours—it is an amazing journey—and you alone are responsible for the quality of it.”
To change what you get you must change who you are.
Awareness is the greatest agent for change.
We don't change what we are, we change what we think what we are.
You are like you are, because you tell yourself that you are that way.
When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.
Your life will be transformed when you make peace with your shadow. The caterpillar will become a breathtakingly beautiful butterfly. You will no longer have to pretend to be someone you're not. You will no longer have to prove you're good enough. When you embrace your shadow you will no longer have to life in fear. Find the gifts of your shadow and you will finally revel in all the glory of your true self. Then you will have the freedom to create the life you have always desired.
Change the changeable, accept the unchangeable, and remove yourself from the unacceptable.
You must welcome change as the rule but not as your ruler.
Personal evolution takes time and work.
A lifetime of mediocrity is a high price to pay for safety.
Ninety-nine percent of people will die having not examined their conditioning and beliefs in a meaningful way.
The greatest discovery of our generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. As you think, so shall you be.
Believe that the only reason change happens is to make your life better, and your life will be better.
Don’t fight the reality that now exists in your life. Once we accept that we can’t control the external events, people, and circumstances in our lives, we also see what we can control: our attitude, how we embrace change, and our reactions to change.
To change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.
When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different.
If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.
All changes… have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.
Sustained change only happens when we shift at an emotional rather than logical level.
Life's had to break you down so you could be rebuilt.
We become the stories we listen to. But perhaps the more important question is, what stories do you listen to? What stories are forming your life?
Here’s the key: I’m not going to tell you how to change. People don’t change. I want you to trust who you already are, and get to that Zone where you can shut out all the noise, all the negativity and fear and distractions and lies, and achieve whatever you want, in whatever you do.
How many souls have failed to soar because they were suffocated in a loved one’s worry?
Without making the actual attempt, without trial and strife, there can be no true knowledge, no progress, no high achievement, and no legend.
To learn how to die, according to the Stoics, is to unlearn how to be a slave.
How can I leave my mark on the world, I thought, unless I get out there first and see it?
You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.
Dont ever be impressed with goal setting; be impressed with goal getting. Reaching new goals and moving to a higher level of performance always requires change, and change feels awkward. But take comfort in the knowledge that if a change doesn't feel uncomfortable, then it's propably not really a change.
There is a possibility for change because all emotions are fleeting.
I think what everyone should be doing, before it's too late, is committing themselves to what they really want to do with their lives.
We all fool ourselves from time to time in order to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided.
If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.
Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.
Our entire life changes in a moment.
Heal the boy and the man will appear.
If you do not feel yourself growing in your work and your life broadening and deepening, if your task is not a perpetual tonic to you, you have not found your place.
You will find the whole world will change to you when you change your attitude toward it.
If your story is not inspiring you, it’s time to change it.
If your story is not inspiring you, it’s time to change it.
The only way to get to where you want to go is to ruthlessly evaluate your where you are now. The key here is that your biggest obstacle in life is always yourself—not external factors.
Important decisions aren’t supposed to be easy, but don’t let that stop you from making them.
The dream in your heart may be bigger than the environment in which you find yourself. Sometimes you have to get out of that environment to see that dream fulfilled. It’s like planting an oak sapling in a pot. Once it becomes rootbound, its growth is limited. It needs a great space to become a mighty oak. So do you.
It’s time to WAKE UP and make empowering choices.
Don’t wait another day to start the small disciplines that will lead you in the direction of your goals!
When we're living as amateurs, we're running away from our calling — meaning our work, our destiny, the obligation to become our truest and highest selves. Addiction becomes a surrogate for our calling. We enact the addiction instead of embracing the calling. Why? Because to follow a calling requires work. It's hard. It hurts. It demands entering the pain-zone of effort, risk, and exposure.
Turning pro is like kicking a drug habit or stopping drinking. It's a decision, a decision to which we must re-commit every day.
Real change requires you to change your behavior-not just your attitude.
We’re trained as a society to expect, even demand, immediate gratification. And we have an extraordinary ability to rationalize this weakness. Instead of admitting we’re avoiding pain, we tell ourselves we’re being virtuous; Vinny had convinced himself he was refusing to “sell out.” We end up with a distorted worldview that makes avoidance seem right, even brave and idealistic. This is the worst sin of all—lying to ourselves. It makes change impossible.”
The universe is not short on wake-up calls. We’re just quick to hit the snooze button.
To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking.
Self-Image changes. Here is how to do it in four steps. First, you must be willing to change. Our Self-Image does not respond to the changes others want us to make. You must decide for yourself and you must choose to do it NOW. Second, you must identify specifically the habits and/or attitudes that you need to change. Be specific.
Change is a difficult challenge to face.
Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something; it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.
Whether you are sixteen or sixty, the rest of your life is ahead of you. You cannot change one moment of your past, but you can change your whole future. Now is your time.
I also came to realize that you couldn’t solve problems with the same consciousness that created them. It’s only in changing your consciousness that you can solve problems and transform your game, whatever it is and wherever you’re playing it.
Unfortunately, many people are in the same trap—and not only in academia. We are influenced by our teachers and parents to the extent that we spend our lives trying, as best we can, to mimic them, and all too often we end up being second-rate replicas.
Perhaps the most important insight of all with regard to success is that to achieve greatly, you must become a different person. It is not the material things you accomplish or acquire that matter so much as it is the quality of the person you must become to accomplish well above the average. The development of self-discipline is the high road that makes everything possible for you.
Seeing is better than being blind, even when seeing hurts.
Every human being has both sets of forces within him. One set clings to safety and defensiveness out of fear, tending to regress backward, hanging on to the past, afraid to grow away from the primitive communication with the mother’s uterus and breast, afraid to take chances, afraid to jeopardize what he already has, afraid of independence, freedom and separateness. The other set of forces impels him forward toward wholeness of Self and uniqueness of Self, toward full functioning of all his capacities, toward confidence in the face of the external world at the same time that he can accept his deepest, real, unconscious Self.
Through the program, people realize that many of the messages that they have internalized and accepted unthinkingly at face value were actually implanted in their mind by others (for instance, by significant adults or the media). Once they are able to recognize these messages for what they are—internalizations of the subjective ideas of others, rather than their own true beliefs about themselves—they can begin to free themselves from the oppressive and harmful consequences of these negative messages.
This is what the self-help books don’t tell you. Fully alive and deeply committed is a risky business. Once you strip away the platitudes, a life of passion and purpose will always cost, as T. S. Eliot reminds us, “Not less than everything.
In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.
Once you get started on an established path of corrective thinking and constructive behavior, you will make more and more profound and satisfying changes hour by hour and day by day. That is why we have called this book ‘I Can If I Want To.'
Rapid long-lasting and meaningful improvements in psychological functioning call for at least two specific areas of intervention: (1) we need to correct irrational thinking; and (2) we need to overcome negative behaviors.
Psychological change calls for change in the here and now rather than preoccupation with the hereafter or the heretofore.
We come to realize that the universe mirrors back to us perfectly our beliefs, our intentions, our sincerity. What is is the product of the map of reality you carry inside you. If you want to change your experience, you need to change the map.
When you’d rather die than relive an error, and when you’re truly committed to finding a better way to live your life, this is when the world opens its arms, welcomes and rewards you with opportunity. This is why we innovate, or we die.
Unless we take the time to regain our perspective and face the reality that life is short, we risk arriving at a destination we didn’t choose—or at least one we wouldn’t prefer.
This is the day that everything can change for you.
As meditation deepens, compulsions, cravings, and fits of emotions begin to lose their power to dictate our behavior. We see clearly that choices are possible: we can say yes, or we can say no. ... "All we are is the result of what we have thought." By changing our mode of thinking, we can remake ourselves completely.
So freedom lies, not in trying to become something different, nor in doing whatever you happen to feel like doing, nor in following the authority of tradition, of your parents, of your guru, but in understanding what you are from moment to moment.
With a strong commitment to inquiring into yourself, the universe does not have to use catastrophes to wake you up.
Wake up! No one is going to save you. No one is going to take care of your family or your retirement. No one is going to “make things” work out for you. The only way to do so is to utilize every moment of every day at 10X levels.
As long as you and I allow others to program us in a way that fits their choosing, we are, without a doubt, out of control, captive to the whims of some unknown destiny, not quite recognizing that what hangs in the balance is the fulfillment of our own futures.
A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering. Attaching to a thought means believing that it’s true, without inquiring. A belief is a thought that we’ve been attaching to, often for years.
Our parents, our children, our spouses, and our friends will continue to press every button we have, until we realize what it is that we don't want to know about ourselves, yet. They will point us to our freedom every time.
Whatever it takes for you to find your freedom, that's what you've lived.