99 inspiring quotes to make you a Better Human.

Continuing my “Best of the Newsletter” while I’m on vacation, below are the best quotes I’ve used as [View online]( [Coach Tony]( Coach Tony [@tonystubblebine]( Continuing my “Best of the Newsletter” while I’m on vacation, below are the best quotes I’ve used as ledes. Some are meant to inspire and others to shake up your thinking a bit. Please highlight the ones you like best. (To do this, you need to be on the [Medium version](.) - - - - - Purpose Starting, of course, with purpose. To what end are you reading a self-improvement newsletter? You need a purpose. “It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.” ~ Abraham Maslow “I take my fundamental cue from John Coltrane that says there must be a priority of integrity, honesty, decency, and mastery of craft.” ~ Cornel West “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born… and the day you find out why.” ~ Mark Twain “Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” ~ Norman Cousins “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most people dread it.” ~ George Bernard Shaw - - - - - Positive impact “If you want to do this, if you want to play big, if you want to really impact lives, you’ve got to face yourself. You’ve got to be courageous and willing to go all in and address everything about you that is uncomfortable.” ~ Harry Lopez “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr. “We should care as much about well-doing as well-being. I want to live in a world that values purpose as much as pleasure, contribution as much as contentment, honesty as much as excitement, and justice as much as joy.” ~ Adam Grant “You cannot do kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson “I’m here to contribute. We all depend on each other. I depend on people in generations prior to me. People in generations after me will depend on me.” ~ Bryan Nwafor “Meaning is about making a difference, not having an audience.” ~ Adam Grant “I don’t see why we have to say ‘I will die,’ because I can already see myself in you, in other people, and in future generations.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh “This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” ~ Dalai Lama - - - - - The courage to be the best version of yourself “You don’t have to become something you’re not to be better than you were.” ~ Sidney Poitier “Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.” ~ Laozi “Always be a first version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.” ~ Judy Garland “Too many people spend money they earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people that they don’t like.” ~ Will Rogers “We’re only envious of those already doing what we were made to do. Envy is a giant, flashing arrow pointing us toward our destiny.” ~ Glennon Doyle Melton “The idea says get in the car. Don’t worry, I’m driving. Sometimes I’m shotgun, sometimes I’m in the trunk. The idea takes you where it wants to go.” ~ Dave Chapelle “I increasingly encounter a strain of critique … arguing that we strive toward arbitrary fitness goals, or feel compelled to carefully document a dinner on Instagram, or race to finish reading the latest hot novel, because we’ve internalized a culture of production designed to ultimately help the capitalists exploit our labor.” ~ Cal Newport “And I feel like that [idea of] like hard work, if you’re not suffering and eating sh*t and you’re not happy, then you’re not doing anything good for society. I feel like that is the biggest load of bullsh*t. It’s the biggest lie that young people get fed.” ~ Joey Santore “Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.” ~ Gretel Ehrlich “The place to find who you are is where you stand.” ~ George Mumford “Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.” ~ Paulo Coelho - - - - - Focus “If you want more time, freedom, and energy, start saying no.” ~ Unknown “If a window of opportunity appears, don’t pull down the shade.” ~ Tom Peters “I will have to remember ‘I am here today to cross the swamp, not to fight all the alligators.” ~ From The Art of Possibility by Rosamund and Benjamin Zander - - - - - Recognize your enormous potential “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein “I think a singular identity isn’t very interesting, and I’m a little bit more multifaceted as a person than that.” ~ Catherine Opie - - - - - Habits “A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit.” ~ Erasmus “Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.” ~ Warren Buffett “A year from now you may wish you had started today.” ~ Karen Lamb “Self-discipline is doing what’s right instead of doing what you feel like doing. That’s the meaning of self-disciple.” ~ Eliud Kipchoge “We want to be great at the things that happen a lot.” ~Unknown “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.” ~ Archilochus “Don’t dream of winning, train for it!” ~ Mo Farah “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.” ~ James Clear “The quality of our life on planet earth depends on the choices we make every day.” ~ BJ Fogg - - - - - Work hard… “I didn’t get there by wishing for it or hoping for it, but by working for it.” ~ Estée Lauder “More work than you want, less than you fear.” ~ Coach Tony “Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” ~ Teller … but it’s more important to work smart. “What gets measured gets done, what gets measured and fed back gets done well, what gets rewarded gets repeated.” ~ Unknown “You are not responsible for your first thought, but you are responsible for your second thought.” ~ Raquel Smith “There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.” ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti “One learns from books and reels only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.” ~ Children of Dune “Good advice helps you find the solution to your problem. Great advice helps you find you were solving the wrong problem.” ~ Merlin Mann “My definition of being properly educated is being right when the professor is wrong.” ~ Charlie Munger “What you learn from a life in science is the vastness of our ignorance.” ~ David Eagleman “The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.” ~ Rene Descartes “If I’ve learned anything from beliefs, it’s that I could be totally wrong. And so could you… We should never be sure of anything we think.” ~ Andrew Gold “The paradox of learning is that to get better, you need to go outside your comfort zone, and thus feel worse. The people who grow continuously, thus feel consistently over their heads.” ~ Scott Young “Laziness (virtue): The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it.” ~ Larry Wall “The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.” ~ Carl Sagan “Process life as it is, not as you want it to be.” ~ Unknown “The whole point of meditation is that we’re marrying the right and left hemispheres of the brains. You’re merging that left brain memorization, outcome-oriented piece of you with the present moment, intuitive creative vessel part of you.” ~ Emily Fletcher “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” ~ Groucho Marx “Meditation’s benefit to creativity is awareness. Learning to meditate helps one quiet the mind. The judgmental mind, which we all can struggle with, impedes our creativity, spontaneity, and ability to act/react confidently in the moment. Just being aware of your thoughts can give you just enough distance from them to let you say, ‘Hello negative thoughts, I know you are there but I don’t need you to run the show today.’ That can be very liberating.” ~ Adam Bernstein “The competent [person] is fully aware of the strictly limited size of their own skull; therefore they approach the task in full humility.” ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra - - - - - Self-talk “I know people that believe in ghosts but don’t believe in themselves.” ~ Mitch Hedberg “You really have to love yourself first to get anything done in this world.” ~ Lucille Ball “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!” ~ Affirmation by Stuart Smalley “Failure I can live with. Not trying is what I can’t handle.” ~ Sanya Richards-Ross “My anxiety doesn’t come from thinking about the future but from wanting to control it.” ~ Hugh Prather “Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you’ll start having positive results.” ~ Willie Nelson “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” ~ Albert Camus “The direction you choose to face determines whether you’re standing at the end or the beginning of a road.” ~ Richelle E. Goodrich - - - - - Mental health “Solitude is pleasant. Loneliness is not.” ~ Anna Neagle “Recognizing and acknowledging our boundaries is critical and healthy both for our mind and body — it’s stressful when we are pressured to do something we should not.” ~ Lesia “I do recommend for people to practice saying the words, ‘I need help,’ in front of the mirror while maintaining eye contact with yourself and seeing how that feels for you.” ~ Adriana Alejandre “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”~ Marcus Aurelius “Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: It must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.” ~ William Faulkner “Friends are the siblings God never gave us. ” ~ Mencius “Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.” ~ Abraham Maslow “When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That’s the message he is sending.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh “Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.” ~ Muhammad Ali “I pray to be like the ocean, with soft currents, maybe waves at times. More and more, I want the consistency rather than the highs and the lows.” ~ Drew Barrymore “Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.” ~ Viktor Frankl “True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.” ~ Brianna Wiest - - - - - Procrastination “The same elements of your brain light up when you consider your future self as when you consider a stranger. That may be why your present self is so quick to sell your future self short by procrastinating.” ~ Tim Pychyl “The most dangerous distractions are the ones you love, but that don’t love you back.” ~ Warren Buffet “Perhaps because complexity is a way to avoid facing the reality that what really matters for most things in life is simply showing up and doing the work. Not thinking about it. Not talking about it. Not dreaming about it. But doing it. Put differently, maybe part of our attraction to complexity is that you can so easily hide behind it. Complexity feeds procrastination.” ~ Brad Stulberg “Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.” ~ M. Scott Peck - - - - - Productivity “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” ~ Navy SEALs “Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.” ~ John Lubbock “Write. Write. Write. Learn how to revise. No story is perfect straight from the keyboard.” ~ Carol Berg “To be ‘well’ is not to live in a state of perpetual safety and calm, but to move fluidly from a state of adversity, risk, adventure, or excitement, back to safety and calm, and out again. Stress is not bad for you; being stuck is bad for you.” ~ Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski “If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit.” ~ Banksy “In a moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing to do, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt “I never wrote things down to remember; I always wrote things down so I could forget.” ~ Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights “The best investment is in the tools of one’s own trade.” ~ Benjamin Franklin “The truth is that productivity is often more about regulating stress than it is about living a thoughtful, responsible life.” ~ Kathleen Smith “Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more.” ~ John Kabat-Zinn “I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for; perfection is God’s business.” ~ Michael J. Fox “Going in one more round when you don’t think you can. That’s what makes all the difference in your life.” ~ Rocky Balboa “Being constantly the hub of a network of potential interruptions provides the excitement and importance of crisis management. As well as the false sense of efficiency in multitasking, there is the false sense of urgency in multi-interrupt processing.” ~ Michael Foley “Budgeting isn’t about limiting yourself — it’s about making the things that excite you possible.” ~ Unknown - - - - - Health “We also have people dying longer, we are able to keep people alive without much quality of life in many cases. We haven’t done a great job of making healthspan match up with lifespan, which is both miserable and unbelievably costly — and frightening.” ~ Ken Dychtwald, Ph.D. “Unilateral exercises (those that work one side of the body at a time) are some of the best ways to build a stronger body because they tend to engage the deeper muscles of the core to resist rotation, and because they reveal strength imbalances (i.e. when one side of the body is stronger than the other) — and provide a way to correct them.” ~ Brad Buzzard “Sleep is all about recovering. So if you’re not sleeping, you’re not recovering. And if you’re going to break your body down a lot, you better find ways to build it back up. And the only way to do that is get a lot of sleep. So for me, I go to bed at like 8:30, 9:00. As soon as I put my kids to bed. Because I’m up at 5:30 the next day.” ~ Tom Brady - - - - - Tips or feedback? 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