Thoughts on Years from Daily Inspiration

Thoughts on Years

May you find inspiration in these thoughts and quotes on Years from my large Daily Inspiration library of inspiring quotes and inspirational words.

And in the end, it's not
the years in your life that count,
it's the life in your years.
- Abraham Lincoln

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Thank You,
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

If you think in terms of a year, plant a seed;
if in terms of ten years, plant trees;
if in terms of 100 years, teach the people.
- Confucius

Love is not a matter of counting the years,
but making the years count.
- Michele St. Amand

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth,
but delicious in the years of maturity.
- Albert Einstein

When a man you like switches from what
he said a year ago, or four years ago,
he is a broad-minded person who has courage enough
to change his mind with changing conditions.
When a man you don't like does it,
he is a liar who has broken his promise.
- Franklin Pierce Adams

I do not fear death.
I had been dead for billions and billions
of years before I was born,
and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
- Mark Twain

I have spent many years of my life in opposition,
and I rather like the role.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

"Mother Teresa Prayer"
People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered;
... Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you
of selfish, ulterior motives;
... Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some
false friends and some true enemies;
... Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
... Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
... Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
... Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
... Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
... Give the world the best you've got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God;
It was never between you and them anyway.
We can do no great things - only small things with great love.
- although commonly attributed to Mother Teresa,
who kept a copy of this prayer on
the wall of her Calcutta orphanage,
this prayer was actually written by Kent Keith.

If you plan for a year, plant a seed.
If for ten years, plant a tree.
If for a hundred years, teach the people.
When you sow a seed once, you will reap a single harvest.
When you teach the people, you will reap a hundred harvests.
- Kuan Chung

Anger is a destructive emotion
that becomes instinctive over the years.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

You can make more friends in two months
by becoming interested in other people
than you can in two years by trying
to get other people interested in you.
- Dale Carnegie

Almost nothing you worry about today
will matter in a hundred years.
Think carefully about what you can focus on today.
Choose tasks that will actually make a positive difference
to your great-grandchildren.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Might I perhaps win my wings?
I've been waiting for over 200 years now, sir,
and people ARE beginning to talk.
- It's a Wonderful Life (1946 movie)

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant
I could hardly stand to have the old man around.
But when I got to be 21, I was astonished
at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
- Mark Twain

A person is smart. People are dumb,
panicky dangerous animals and you know it.
Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew
the Earth was the center of the universe.
Five hundred years ago,
everybody knew the Earth was flat,
and fifteen minutes ago,
you knew that humans were alone on this planet.
Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
- the movie Men in Black

In a bad marriage, friends are the invisible glue.
If we have enough friends, we may go on for years,
intending to leave, talking about leaving -
instead of actually getting up and leaving.
- Erica Jong

Once you have seen the truth
you must make the decision to let go
of the pain, anger, and resentment you have been holding on to.
This requires you to take action.
If you are attached to your pain, resentment,
and self-righteousness, and addicted to your emotional reactions,
this will be a difficult step for you.
Taking action requires letting go of the very thing
you have been holding on to for so many years.
There is comfort in what we find familiar,
even if we are experiencing pain and suffering.
The pain and suffering itself becomes the familiarity we seek.
It takes absolute faith in yourself
plus courage, will, and discipline to let go.
But once you let go, it will be as if
the weight of the world has been taken off your shoulders.
In this process it is important to forgive
not just the others in our lives, but also ourselves.
For most people, giving ourselves
the gift of forgiveness is very challenging.
- Sheri Rosenthal

One of the greatest titles we can have is "old friend."
We never appreciate how important old friends are until we are older.
The problem is we need to start our old friendships when we are young.
We then have to nurture and grow those friendships over our middle age
when a busy life and changing geographies
can cause us to neglect those friends.
Today is the day to invest in those people
we hope will call us "old friend" in the years to come.
- Grant Fairley

Everyone has an opinion on many subjects
and is ready to share those opinions -
labeling them as "truth."
Sometimes it is relatively easy
to filter out these opinions.
Upon hearing an ad for the latest
weight-loss powder on late-night TV,
our skepticism leaps to our defense.
However, if we have heard the same opinion for years
from our parents, friends,
government officials, or religious leaders,
we are more likely to believe without questioning
than to raise our filter of skepticism
and ask the hard questions.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Personally, I have fond memories of playing
on slippery rocks on the banks of a rushing river
as a child and hitchhiking in college.
To those who say, "But times are different now,"
I reply that statistically life is much safer now
than in the 1950s, with regard to both crime and accidents.
What has changed is our attitudes.
In those years, a broken leg from falling off a swing
or the back of a tractor was just part of childhood -
an excuse for gathering autographs.
Today that broken leg would be a source
of outrage and probably lawsuits.
I long for a simpler time when life was taken less seriously.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

To be seventy years young is sometimes
far more cheerful and hopeful
than to be forty years old.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Some years ago I became president of Columbia University
and learned within 24 hours to be ready
to speak at the drop of a hat,
and I learned something more, the trustees were expected
to be ready to speak at the passing of the hat.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower

If you have been divorced, you know it hurts -
especially if your marriage had lasted many years.
Whatever the circumstances of your relationship,
and whatever the nature of its ending,
there is always grief and regret -
perhaps regret over the ending,
or perhaps regret over not ending the relationship sooner -
or perhaps both.
Nonetheless, move past the grief and regret.
No matter how painful, divorce, like all endings,
opens the door to new beginnings.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Regrets and their cousins, resentments,
are a huge cause of self-inflicted suffering.
Sometimes it takes years of psychotherapy
to gain freedom from regrets about what you did or did not do,
and freedom from resentment over what others did or did not do.
Sometimes it takes a lifetime of self-talk to remember
to put the past in the past where it belongs.
However, sometimes a simple symbolic act can help immeasurably
to grant ourselves freedom from the past.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

To know God, watch a butterfly return to the same tree -
after a year and a thousand miles.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Write it on your heart that every day
is the best day in the year.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do you remember the things you were worrying about a year ago?
Didn't you waste a lot of fruitless energy
on account of most of them?
Didn't most of them turn out all right after all?
- Dale Carnegie

A New Year's resolution is something that
goes in one Year and out the other.
- Anonymous

Everyone is a genius at least once a year;
a real genius has his original ideas closer together.
- Georg Lichtenberg

Endings: sometimes a season of sorrow and grief.
Endings: what must precede new beginnings.
Life is an endless cycle of endings and beginnings.
Renewal and rebirth cannot occur without endings -
as the new year's crop can only be planted and flourish
in the decay of last year.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

One of the illusions of life is that the present hour
is not the critical, decisive hour.
Write it on your heart that
every day is the best day in the year.
No man has learned anything rightly,
until he knows that every day is Doomsday.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

During his training, a baseball player strives
to make each swing better than the last.
The repetition of a faulty swing would be worse than useless.
It would ingrain bad habits.
The same is true of emotional responses.
If we allow ourselves to continue to have the same angry responses,
we just entrench our anger habit.
But if we strive - through consciousness, visualization, and coaching -
to moderate our anger response,
over time, we can train ourselves to respond
to events as we choose - without anger.
You can't magically be free from anger tomorrow,
but you can put yourself on your own training program
that will reduce the frequency and intensity
of your anger response day by day, year by year.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

From the way most people live,
one would never guess that humans are beings of free will.
Repetition can be a choice, but often it isn't.
The athlete or pianist who practices the same routine
day after day, year after year, has their eye on a goal.
The unending repetition is a conscious choice
in the pursuit of a life dream.
But what about the sameness of most lives?
Observe the morning commute, the after-work drink,
the Sunday football game or religious service -
how many of those people are consciously following their dream,
training their mind, body, and spirit through that daily repetition?
And how many are mindlessly slogging through each day
out of habit and boredom?
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

This bright new year is given me
To live each day with zest
To daily grow and try to be
My highest and my best.
- William Arthur Ward

Once you have mastered time,
you will understand how true it is that
most people overestimate what
they can accomplish in a year -
and underestimate what
they can achieve in a decade!
- Tony Robbins

What if we like our outrageous side best?
We "know" that the "right" thing to do is to suck it up,
put the costume and the happy face back in storage for another year,
re-dress in our frown and gray flannel suit,
and trudge back to job, chores, "responsibilities," and "duty."
Stop! Maybe TODAY is the day to put the frown and gray flannel
into that dusty storage locker, and start to LIVE.
Not just today, but EVERY DAY for the rest of your life!
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

If you don't know where you're going,
any road will take you there.
- Lewis Carroll
(Alice in Wonderland)

To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children,
to leave the world a better place,
to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived,
this is to have succeeded.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

To know yet to think that one does not know is best;
Not to know yet to think that one knows
will lead to difficulty.
- Lao Tzu

God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.
- Reinhold Niebuhr (Serenity Prayer)

One can not reflect in streaming water.
Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.
- Lao Tzu

Stand Tall, Stand Proud.
Know that you are unique and magnificent.
You do not need the approval of others.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates.
You never know what you're gonna get.
- the movie Forrest Gump

To leave the world a bit better ...
to know that one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I know God will not give me anything I can't handle.
I just wish he didn't trust me so much.
- Mother Teresa

This is my wish for you:
Comfort on difficult days,
Smiles when sadness intrudes,
Rainbows to follow the clouds,
Laughter to kiss your lips,
Sunsets to warm your heart,
Hugs when spirits sag,
Beauty for your eyes to see,
Friendships to brighten your being,
Faith so that you can believe,
Confidence for when you doubt,
Courage to know yourself,
Patience to accept the truth,
Love to complete your life.
- Anonymous

Once you know yourself as a genuine seeker,
and when your own inner chamber is quite enlightened,
then comes the natural unfoldment of pure love and compassion
and a genuine desire to serve others.
- Rod Stryker

You cannot do a kindness too soon,
for you never know how soon it will be too late.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition -
they somehow already know what you truly want to become.
- Steve Jobs

At the center of your being you have the answer;
you know who you are and you know what you want.
- Lao Tzu

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.
It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
- Mark Twain (attributed)

Know that the greatest fear is fear of the unknown.
Seek to meet the unknown with courage and a sense of adventure.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Know the power and the peace of saying,
"I love you just the way you are."
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Happiness blooms
in the presence of self-respect
and the absence of ego.
Love yourself.
Love everyone around you.
Love everyone in the whole world.
Know that your own life is of infinite importance,
as is every other life.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Know that you are one with the earth, with the water,
with the fire, with the air that you breathe, with all living things,
and that all of these are one with Spirit.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Know that when you live joyfully,
you radiate your light into the world.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Know that when you see Spirit in everything,
peace is at hand.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Know that life is most joyfully lived boldly -
with courage and intent.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Know that you can have whatever you want,
when you ask from a compassionate heart.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Have you ever hugged a tree?
Hug a tree, and one day you will come to know
that it is not only that
you have hugged the tree
but that the tree also responds,
the tree also hugs you.
- Osho

Find your balance and stand with it.
Find your song and sing it out.
Find your cadence and let it appear like a dance.
Find the questions that only you know how to ask and
The answers that you are content to not know.
- Mary Anne Radmacher

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May the world be kind to you,
and may your own thoughts be gentle upon yourself.
- Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Thoughts on Years

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