Brainy Thoughts

“You create your own personal experience of reality through your beliefs, expectations, attitudes, desires, fears, judgements, feelings, and consistent or persistent thoughts and actions.”

“You can create anything you can conceive.”

Serge Kahili King, author of A guide to the Huna Way, about the ancient Hawaiian teachings of Huna which emphasize practical living and harmony with three levels of consciousness or selves. These selves are the 1. Subconscious (inner, emotional, intuitive), 2. Waking consciousness, and 3. Super-conscious (connection with the divine). Huna changes the Hawaiian concept of mana, (privileged as a divine power in traditional Hawaiian belief), and views it as a vitalizing life force, which can, with knowledge of the three selves, be used to heal body and mind and achieve life goals.

“Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner”

Lao Tzu (c.604-531 B.C.)
Chinese philosopher & mystic, founder of Taoism

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.”

The Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) (563 BCE – 483 BCE) Spiritual teacher from ancient India and the historical founder of Buddhism.

After a reputed 49 days of meditation under the Bodhi tree, at the age of 35, he is said to have attained Enlightenment. At the time of his awakening he realized complete insight into the cause of suffering, and the steps necessary to eliminate it. These discoveries became known as the “Four Noble Truths”, which are at the heart of Buddhist teaching. Through mastery of these truths, a state of supreme liberation, or Nirvana, is believed to be possible for any being.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.”

Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) Pseudo-name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens – US humorist, novelist, short story author, and wit; wrote novels “Tom Sawyer” 1876, “Huckleberry Finn” 1884, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” 1889

“Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
George Orwell, 1984

“A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”

Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) Irish writer and poet. Became one of London’s most popular playwrights in the early 1890s

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust (1871 – 1922) French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental literary work In Search of Lost Time

“There are no justified resentments.”

Author unknown.

“Do not seek the truth, only cease to cherish your opinions.”

Zen Proverb

Zen is a school of Buddhism originating in China during the 6th century. Zen emphasizes the attainment of enlightenment and the personal expression of direct insight in the Buddhist teachings. Zen de-emphasizes mere knowledge of doctrine and favors direct understanding through zazen and interaction with an accomplished teacher.

“The Absolute is unknowable exactly because it’s beyond knowing, or beyond the reach of the consciousness itself. Those that have attained such a state of awareness report that it can’t be described and can have no meaning for anyone without experience of that context. Nonetheless, this is the true state of Reality, universally and eternally – we merely fail to recognise it. Such a recognition is the essence of enlightenment and the final resolution of the evolution of consciousness, to the point of self-transcendence.”

David Hawkins (1927 – 2012)

Physician, author, lecturer, and researcher of consciousness. Pioneer psychiatrist bringing major clinical breakthroughs, especially in the treatment of schizophrenia and alcoholism. Co-authored Orthomolecular Psychiatry with Nobel Laureate chemist Linus Pauling, initiating a new field within psychiatry.

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

Viktor Frankl, M.D., Ph.D., (1905 – 1997) Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist.

Viktor Frankl is the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, which chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate at Auschwitz in WW2 and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding meaning in all forms of existence, even the most sordid ones, and thus a reason to continue living.

Viktor Frankl is one of the key figures in existential therapy.

“Though an inheritance of acres may be bequeathed, an inheritance of knowledge and wisdom cannot. The wealthy man may pay others for doing his work for him, but it is impossible to get his thinking done for him by another, or to purchase any kind of self-culture.”

Samuel Smiles (1812 – 1904) Scottish author and reformer.

“Advances are Made by Answering Questions. Discoveries are Made by Questioning Answers.”

Bernard Haisch – German-born American astrophysicist, and author of The God Theory, offering “a genuine insight into how you can, and should, be a rational, science-believing human being and at the same time know that you are also an immortal spiritual being, a spark of God.” Haisch has advocated the serious scientific study of phenomena outside the traditional scope of science and is known for his interest in the UFO phenomenon as well as a variety of other unorthodox topics.

“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) – Author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

“You are lucky to have hornets, because if you have hornets then you will not be troubled by wasps.”
Old English’ Farmer Wisdom

“My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet aeroplane. His son will ride a camel.”

Saudi saying
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

“Good timber does not grow with ease: The stronger wind, the stronger trees”

Douglas Malloch

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) Greek critic, philosopher, physicist, & zoologist

“Too many people buy things they don’t even need, with money they don’t even have, to impress people they don’t even like.”

Ali-Azri Hassan

“Knowledge without wisdom is a load of books on the back of ass”

Japanese Proverb

“None of us is as smart as all of us”

Japanese Proverb

“Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.”

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer.

“As a blazing fire turns firewood into ashes, so does the fire of knowledge burn to ashes all reactions to material activities.”

The Bhagavad Gita is a 700-verse Hindu scripture that is part of the ancient Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, but is frequently treated as a freestanding text. It is considered among the most important texts in the history of literature and philosophy.

Bhagavad Gita

“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

Author: Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) Pseudo-name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens – US humorist, novelist, short story author, and wit; wrote novels “Tom Sawyer” 1876, “Huckleberry Finn” 1884, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” 1889

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”

Mahatma Gandhi (October 2 1869 – January 30 1948) Describing the stages of a winning strategy of nonviolent activism.

“Discontent is the first necessity of progress.”

Thomas A. Edison

Thomas Edison

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) German philosopher.

Schopenhauer’s metaphysical analysis of will, his views on human motivation and desire, and his aphoristic writing style influenced many well-known thinkers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Gustav Jung, Leo Tolstoy, and Jorge Luis Borges.

“Failure is not falling down, but staying down. Get up. Act!”

Author: Unknown

“Worry is spiritual near-sightedness, a fumbling way of looking at little things and magnifying their value.”

Anna Robertson Brown Lindsay (1864–1948) American author, and the first woman to earn a doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.”

Epictetus (AD 55 – AD 135) Greek Stoic philosopher.

“Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.”

William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist.

“What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913 – 1983) American journalist and author.

Mignon McLaughlin

“Wealth is not his who has it, but his who enjoys it.”

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin

“The tragedy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.”

Albert Einstein

“Apathy is the glove into which evil slips its hand.”

Author: Bodie Thoene

“Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws”

- Plato (428 – 348 BC)

Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of natural philosophy, science, and Western philosophy.

“If you want to become whole,
let yourself be partial.
If you want to become straight,
let yourself be crooked.
If you want to become full,
let yourself be empty.
If you want to be reborn,
let yourself die.
If you want to be given everything,
give everything up.”

Author: Tao Te Ching or Dao De Jing. Written around 6th century BC by the sage Laozi (or Lao Tzu, “Old Master”).

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to the job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, the car, and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.”

Ellen Goodman (1941 -)

Ellen is an American journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist.

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973)

Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. Commonly known simply as Picasso, he is one of the most recognized figures in 20th-century art. He is best known for co-founding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work.

“Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper”

Author Unknown

“The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams.”

Author: Unknown
.

“Vision without execution is hallucination.”

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847, October 18, 1931)

American inventor and businessman who developed many devices which greatly influenced life in the 20th century. Dubbed “The Wizard of Menlo Park” by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production to the process of invention, and can therefore be credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory. Some of the inventions credited to him were not completely original, but improvements of earlier inventions, or were actually created by his numerous employees working under his direction. Nevertheless, Edison is considered one of the most prolific inventors in history, holding 1,097 U.S. patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

“Stand together, yet not too near together;
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”

Khalil Gibran (1883 – 1931) was a Lebanese American artist, poet, and writer. Author of The Prophet, a book of 26 poetic essays written in English in 1923.

Khalil Gibran was Born in the town of Bsharri in modern-day Lebanon, as a young man he emigrated with his family to the United States where he studied art and began his literary career.

“Being an executive does not require very developed frontal lobes, but rather a combination of charisma, a capacity to sustain boredom, and the ability to shallowly perform on harrying schedules.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960 – )

A specialist in financial derivatives, he held a “day job” in a lengthy senior trading and financial mathematics career in a number of New York City’s Wall Street firms, before starting a second career as a scholar in the epistemology of chance events to focus on his project of mapping how to live and act in a world we do not understand, and how to come to grips with randomness and the unknown – which includes his black swan theory of unexpected rare events.

“Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.”

George Bernard Shaw

Irish dramatist, literary critic, and socialist. During his career Shaw wrote more than sixty plays. He was uniquely honoured by being awarded both a Nobel Prize (1925) for his contribution to literature and an Oscar (1938) for Pygmalion. He was a strong advocate for socialism and women’s rights, a vegetarian and teetotaller, and a harsh critic of formal education.

“Fate does not always call upon us at the time of our own choosing.”

Author: Unknown

“It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection”

The Bhagavad Gita (5th – 2nd Century BC)

Krishna, Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gita is revered as a sacred scripture of Hinduism, and considered as one of the most important religious classics of the world. The teacher of the Bhagavad Gita is Krishna, who is regarded by the Hindus as the supreme manifestation of the Lord Himself, and is referred to within as Bhagavan—the divine one. The Bhagavad Gita is commonly referred to as The Gita for short.

“Think deeply, speak gently, love much, laugh often, work hard, give freely, pay promptly, be kind”

Author Unknown

“Luck is: labouring under correct knowledge”

Author Unknown

“By the yard its hard, but inch by inch it’s a cinch.”

Author Unknown.

“Saying that you don’t have time to improve your thoughts and your life is like saying that you don’t have time to stop for gas because you are too busy driving. Eventually it will catch up with you.”

Robin Sharma (1965 – )

“Don’t compromise yourself; you are all you’ve got.”

Janis Joplin (1943 – 1970) was an American singer, songwriter, and music arranger. She rose to prominence in the late 1960s as the lead singer of Big Brother and the Holding Company, and later as a solo artist. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Joplin number 46 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but do it better, do it harder, do it faster, and do it sooner.”

Author: Brainythoughts.com

“Civilisation, in the real sense of the term, consists not in the multiplication, but in the deliberate and voluntary reduction of wants. This alone promotes real happiness and contentment.”

Gandhi

“Hold your own, know your name, go your own way.”

Jason Mraz (1977 – ) American grammy-nominated singer-songwriter.

“He is not only idle who does nothing, but he is idle who may be better employed.”

Socrates

“I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Walter Whitman (1819 – 1892) American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist. He was a part of the transition between Transcendentalism and realism.

“To thine own self be true”

William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) English playwright and poet.

“I have many unrecognised talents, but my faults have somehow succeeded in securing wide recognition.”

Ashleigh Brilliant (Ashley Brilliant)

“Hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path.

It’s not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.“

Barack Hussein Obama II (1961 -) President-elect of the United States, and the first African American to be elected President of the United States

“The significant challenges we face cannot be resolved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

Albert Einstein

“You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.”

Eric Hoffer (1902 – 1983) was an American social writer. He produced ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983 by President of the United States Ronald Reagan.

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Author Unknown

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) American essayist, philosopher, poet.

“It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”

C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis (1898 – 1963) was an Irish writer and scholar. Lewis’s works are diverse and include medieval literature, literary criticism, radio broadcasts, and fiction relating to the fight between good and evil. Author of The Chronicles of Narnia and The Space Trilogy.

“To know that you do not know is best.”

Author: Lao Tzu (4th or 6th century BC) Philosopher of ancient China and central figure in Taoism.

“As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know. There are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

-Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing

Donald Rumsfeld (born July 9, 1932) is a United States businessman, politician, the 13th Secretary of Defense under President Gerald Ford from 1975 to 1977, and the 21st Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2006. He is both the youngest (43 years old) and the oldest (68 years old) person to have held the position, as well as the only person to have held the position for two non-consecutive terms, and the second longest serving. Rumsfeld is also one of the most controversial defense secretaries in US history.

“It’s far easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.”

Adlai Ewing Stevenson II (1900 – 1965) American politician, noted for his intellectual demeanor and advocacy of liberal causes in the Democratic Party.

“Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.”

Attributed to Henry Ford (1863 – 1947)

Henry Ford was the founder of the Ford Motor Company and father of modern assembly lines used in mass production. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry. He was a prolific inventor and was awarded 161 U.S. patents. He is credited with “Fordism”, that is, the mass production of large numbers of inexpensive automobiles using the assembly line which would finish a car in 98 minutes, coupled with high wages for his workers—notably the $5.00 a day pay scale adopted in 1914. Ford, though poorly educated, had a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace. His intense commitment to lowering costs resulted in many technical and business innovations, including a franchise system that put a dealership in every city in North America, and in major cities on six continents.

“No credit can be given for predicting rain – only for building arks.”

Louis V Gerstner, Jr.
Former CEO, IBM

“Some men are born with greatness, some men achieve greatness, and some men have greatness thrust upon them.”

William Shakespeare (1564-1616) English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England’s national poet. His surviving works consist of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language, and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.

“Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat.”

Robert Anson Heinlein (1907 – 1988) American novelist and science fiction writer. Often called “the dean of science fiction writers”, he is one of the most popular, influential, and controversial authors of “hard science fiction”.

“Courage is the capacity to go from failure to failure with increased enthusiasm!”

Paraphrased Winston Churchill

“The truth is merely a matter of fact whereas honesty is a question of attitude.”

Tim Maher-DeTroyer

“To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target.”

Ashleigh Brilliant (Ashley Brilliant)

“You are neither right nor wrong because others agree with you. You are right because your facts are right.”

Warren Buffett (1930 – ) American investor, businessman and philanthropist.

He is regarded as one of the world’s greatest stock market investors, and is the largest shareholder and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. With an estimated net worth of around US$62 billion, he was ranked by Forbes as the richest person in the world as of March 5, 2008.

Buffett is noted for his adherence to the value investing philosophy and for his personal frugality despite his immense wealth. His 2006 annual salary is about $100,000, which is on the low side of senior executive remuneration in other comparable companies, and when he spent $9.7 million of Berkshire’s funds on a business jet in 1989, he jokingly named it “The Indefensible” because of his past criticisms of such purchases by other CEOs. He lives in the same house in the central Dundee neighborhood of Omaha that he bought in 1958 for $31,500, today valued at around $700,000.

“The energy and anxiety that you invest in putting off an activity can consume more energy than is required to perform the activity.”

Jeff Davidson

“Problems are those things we see when we take our eyes off the goal.”

Author Unknown

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

Sir Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, alchemist, inventor and natural philosopher. He is often regarded as the most influential scientist in history and is best known for discovering the Laws of Gravity.

“Life is an attitude. It’s what you choose to believe, always.”

Dr. Wayne Dyer (1940 -) American author and lecturer. His 1976 book Your Erroneous Zones has sold over 30 million copies and is one of the best-selling books of all time. It is said to have “brought humanistic ideas to the masses”

“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

Andre Gide (1869 – 1951) – French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1947. Gide’s career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism between the two World Wars.

“A rat, even if he gets out of the rat race, is still a rat”

Author Unknown

“A fool with a tool is still a fool”

Author Unknown

You can choose your family but you can’t choose your friends. Or is it the other way around?

Brainy Thought 2008

Longevity, like intelligence or good looks, is largely a matter of heredity: choose your parents with care.

Author: Edward Paul Abbey

“Nothing is true, but that which is simple.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) German writer of poetry, drama, literature, theology, humanism, and science.

“I long to accomplish great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.”

Helen Keller (1880 – 1968) American author, activist and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to graduate from college.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Original Author: Upton Sinclair
More recently used by Al Gore (born 1948) in the documentary movie “An Inconvenient Truth” 2006.

Al Gore was forty-fifth vice president of the United States, serving from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Gore was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which was shared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, headed by Rajendra K. Pachauri (Delhi, India). The award was given “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” on October 12, 2007.

An Inconvenient Truth documents the evidence for anthropogenic global warming and warns of the consequences of people not making immediate changes to their behavior. In late July, it surpassed Bowling for Columbine as the third-highest-grossing documentary in U.S. history

“You get treated in life the way you teach people to treat you.”

Dr. Wayne Dyer (born 1940) Popular American author and lecturer.

Dyer spent much of his adolescence in an orphanage. He has a Doctorate of Education in counseling, and was a guidance counselor in Detroit at the high school level and a professor of counselor education at St. John’s University in New York.

“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.”

Author: Carl August Sandburg (1878 – 1967) American poet, historian, novelist, journalist, biographer, and autobiographer. During the course of his career, Sandburg won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his biography of Abraham Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln: The War Years) and one for his collection The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg.

“No one lives long enough to learn everything they need to learn starting from scratch. To be successful, we absolutely, positively have to find people who have already paid the price to learn the things that we need to learn to achieve our goals.”

Brian Tracy

“It is preoccupation with possession, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.”

Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970). British philosopher, historian, logician, mathematician, advocate for social reform, pacifist, and prominent rationalist.

“Hear and you forget; see and you remember; do and you understand.”

“See one, do one, teach one.”

Authors Unknown.

“Spoon feeding in the long-run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.”

Edward Morgan Forster (1879 – 1970) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist.
He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society.

“I find my mistakes interesting, my confusions even more so — they are like windows into my thinking.”

Author Unknown

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak, Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen”

Sir Winston Churchill

“The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.”

Sir Winston Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. A noted statesman, orator and strategist, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army. He has been studied to a unique extent as part of modern British and world history. A prolific author, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his own historical writings.

“It is not the will to win that counts, it’s the will to prepare to win that makes all the difference.”

Author Unknown.

“If you think you are beaten, you are,
If you think you dare not, you don’t
If you like to win, but you think you can’t,
It is almost certain you won’t.

“Life’s battles don’t always go
To the stronger or faster man,
But soon or late the man who wins
Is the man WHO THINKS HE CAN!”

Author Unknown

“People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I do not believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they cannot find them, they make them.”

George Bernard Shaw

Irish dramatist, literary critic, and socialist. During his career Shaw wrote more than sixty plays. He was uniquely honoured by being awarded both a Nobel Prize (1925) for his contribution to literature and an Oscar (1938) for Pygmalion. He was a strong advocate for socialism and women’s rights, a vegetarian and teetotaller, and a harsh critic of formal education.

“Give a man a fish, and he will eat for today. Teach a man to fish, and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to learn, and he will not always have to eat fish.”

Author Unknown.

“Chance favours the prepared mind”

Louis Pasteur (1822 – 1895) was a French chemist best known for his remarkable breakthroughs in microbiology. His experiments confirmed the germ theory of disease, also reducing mortality from puerperal fever (childbed), and he created the first vaccine for rabies. He is best known to the general public for showing how to stop milk and wine from going sour – this process came to be called pasteurization.