Recovery Quotes

09/02/2003 Dr Wingnut Quotations, Recovery Comments Off on Recovery Quotes
  • Everyone has talent.  What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.Erica Jong
  • Don’t be afraid to take a big step.  You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.David Lloyd George
  • Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.Jean Cocteau
  • She lost it.Martin Lowney, director of federal wildlife services in Virginia, describing the reaction a woman at a hospital for cancer counseling when not one but two black vultures landed on the ledge outside her window.
  • If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost, that is where they should be.  Now put foundations under them.Henry David Thoreau
  • He who cannot rest, cannot work; He who cannot let go, cannot hold on; He who cannot find footing, cannot go forward.Harry Emerson Fosdick
  • Go often to the house of your friend for weeds soon choke up the unused path.Scandinavian proverb
  • The strength you’ve insisted on assigning to others is actually within yourself.Lisa Alther
  • Happiness is not pleasure.  Happiness is victory.Zig Ziglar
  • Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love.  It is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost.Thomas Merton
  • Reputation is what you have when you come to a new community; character is what you have when you go away.William Hersey Davis
  • Psychotics think two and two make five.  Neurotics know two and two make four — but they can’t stand it.Anonymous
  • To live in dialogue with another is to live twice.  Joys are doubled by exchange and burdens are cut in half.Wishart
  • If you play with a thing long enough, you will surely break it.Anonymous
  • When you can’t stand criticism you learn to be a perfectionist.Anonymous
  • The proper function of man is to live, not to exist.  I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.Jack London
  • In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.Robert Frost
  • Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind.  If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained. Arthur Somers Roche
  • The purpose of life is not to get rid of the butterflies in your stomach, but to make them fly in formation.Author unknown
  • Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.Soren Kierkegaard
  • Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics: It is addictive, gives momentary pleasure, and separates the victim from reality.John Gardner
  • When a man has reached a condition in which he believes that a thing must happen when he does not wish it, and that what he wishes to happen can never be, this is really the state called desperation.Schopenhauer
  • When I feed on resentments and anger, I am giving someone else rent-free space in my head.Kathy Kendall
  • Where the willingness is great, the difficulties cannot be great.Niccolo Machiavelli
  • There is no happiness; there are only moments of happiness.Spanish proverb
  • Pride is the mask of one’s own faults.Hebrew Proverb
  • We find that as we become more centered within the Higher Power part of us, our ego becomes less real, less threatening, less compelling.Jerry Hirshfield
  • Information is of two kinds.  We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.Samuel Johnson
  • Anger helps straighten out a problem like a fan helps straighten out a pile of papers.Susan Marcotte
  • And if not now, when?The Talmud
  • Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.Carl Jung
  • When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.Ursula K. LeGuin
  • Without prayer, I should have been a lunatic long ago.Mahatma Gandhi
  • As the soft yield of water cleaves obstinate stone, So to yield with life solves the insoluable; To yield I have learned is to come back again.Lao Tsu
  • Stress is an ignorant state.  It believes that everything is an emergency.Natalie Goldberg
  • Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.Truman Capote
  • A private railroad car is not an acquired taste.  One takes to it immediately.Eleanor R. Belmont
  • When I am anxious it is because I am living in the future.  When I am depressed it is because I am living in the past.Jimmy R.
  • Worry means we aren’t letting God do God’s work.Karen Casey
  • Where is the yesterday that worried us so?Joan Walsh Anglund
  • Why pick thorns, when you can pick roses?Karin W.
  • The trouble is not that we are never happy — it is that happiness is so episodical.Ruth Benedict
  • You are worthy because you are.Seth
  • When it gets dark enough, you can see the stars.Lee Salk
  • There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.William Shakespeare
  • Believe the best in yourself.  Then it is easier to believe the best in others.Mardy Kopischke
  • What is experience?  A poor little hut constructed from the ruins of the palace of gold and marble called our illusion.Joseph Roux
  • Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which [were] overcome while trying to succeed.Booker T. Washington
  • I am allergic to alcohol and narcotics.  I break out in handcuffs.Robert Downey Jr. eyeing the beer chilling in the snow at the Sundance Film Festival
  • When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.Alexander Graham Bell
  • “And this, too, shall pass away.”  How much it expresses!  How Chastening in the hour of pride!  How consoling in the depths of affliction!  “And this, too, shall pass away."Abraham Lincoln
  • Do your best and leave to God the rest.Proverb
  • The only limits to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.  Let us move forward with a strong and active faith.Franklin D. Roosevelt
  • Courage is very important.  Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use.Ruth Gordon
  • Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark.Rabindranath Tagore
  • God did not make us to be eaten up by anxiety, but to walk erect, free, unafraid in a world where there is work to do, truth to seek, love to give and win.Joseph Fort Newton
  • You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.  And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.Max Ehrmann
  • Great Spirit, help me never to judge another until I have walked in his moccasins for two weeks.Sioux Indian prayer