QUOTES

"The basic difference between an ordinary person and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge while an ordinary person takes everything as a blessing or a curse."
-- Carlos Castaneda

"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element.
It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."
   -- Haim Ginott (modified)

I have come to a frightening conclusion. I am the decisive element in the classroom. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration. I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.
In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or dehumanized.
  -- Haim Ginott, Between Parent and Child (original)

"The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past...we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude...I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it."
   -- Charles Swindoll

In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
-- Eric Hoffer

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. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.
   -- Alan Cohen

"In the last decade or so, science has discovered a tremendous amount about the role emotions play in our lives. Researchers have found that even more than IQ, your emotional awareness and abilities to handle feelings will determine your success and happiness in all walks of life, including family relationships."
   -- John Gottman, Ph.D., Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child

 Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it with use.
  -- Ruth Gordon, American actress (1896-1985)

 Intelligence capacity is diminished when frustration, anxiety or inner turmoil operate. Such emotional states cause incoherence in the rhythmic and electrical output of the heart, diminishing neurological efficiency.  It's one of the reasons smart people can do stupid things. When you make internal coherence a daily priority, you save time and energy. Internal coherence "oils" your system. Without oil in an engine, it burns up. So can you.
   --Doc Childre and Bruce Cryer, From Chaos to Coherence, 2000, HeartMath LLC

 Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he/she has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to her.
   -- Jalal-Uddin Rumi

 It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them--the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas.
  -- Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 - 1881) Russian novelist

Unconditional love is free from judgment, fear, impatience, resentment, self-pity, worry and sadness. Since it comes from the heart, it doesn't have any of these overcares generated by the head that can interfere with a relationship and drain it of its fun, vitality and intimacy.
Unconditional love is a great concept, but it has to be worked on and refined.
   -- Doc Childre

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."
   -- Marcus Aurelius

One cannot but be in awe when [one] contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.
It is enough if one tries to merely comprehend a little of this mystery each day.
Never lose a holy curiosity.
   -- Albert Einstein