Incredibly Inspiring Quotes

Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don't.

True beauty, the kind that doesn't fade or wash off, takes time. It takes incredible endurance. It is the slow drip that creates the stalactite, the shaking of the Earth that creates mountains, the constant pounding of the waves that breaks up the rocks and smooths the rough edges. And from the violence, the furor, the raging of the winds, the roaring of the waters, something better emerges, something that would have otherwise never existed. And so we endure. We have faith that there is purpose. We hope for things we can't see. We believe there are lessons in loss, power in love, and that we have within us the potential for a beauty so magnificent, our bodies can't contain it.

‎Today is a new day. It's a day you have never seen before and will never see again. Stop telling yourself the 'same crap, different day' lie! How many days has that lie stolen from you? Seize the wonder and uniqueness of today! Recognize that throughout this beautiful day, you have an incredible amount of opportunities to move your life into the direction you want it to go.

Even the smallest changes in our daily routine can create incredible ripple effects that expand our vision of what is possible.

There is something incredibly beautiful about a woman, who knows herself, she can't break, she just falls but in every fall she rises, past who she was before.

We had seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.

My dad likes to say, ‘Life is never simple’. This is one of his favourite aphorisms. I actually think it’s incorrect. Life is often simple, but you don’t notice how simple it was until it gets incredibly complicated, like how you never feel grateful for being well until you’re ill, or how you never appreciate your tights drawer until you rip a pair and have no spares.

When you trust someone, you don't need to know everything.

If you're reading this, I hope God opens incredible doors for your life this year. Greatness is upon you. You must believe it though.

Living a life fully engaged and full of whimsy and the kind of things that love does is something most people plan to do, but along the way they just kind of forget. Their dreams become one of those "we'll go there next time" deferrals. The sad thing is, for many there is no "next time" because passing on the chance to cross over is an overall attitude toward life rather than a single decision.

Recognize that throughout this beautiful day,you have an incredible amount of opportunities to move your life into the direction you want it to go.

A personality for the incredibly beautiful can be a pointless cargo...

How can we finally unplug in a hustling world? We often notice we simply do not have the knack for unwinding and finding moments of stillness. Learning to align our commitments to our needs or values and keeping our time budget under surveillance can be incredibly grounding and energizing. If we put boundaries around our time and energy patterns, we can succeed in leading a balanced and inspiring life without regret. (“Finally unwind”)

My life isn't good or bad. It's an incredible series of emotional and mental extremes, with beautiful thunderstorms and stunning sunrises. Some would say this is my artistic temperament. Others would say i am mentally ill or bipolar. I SAY... it's a bit of both and i make the most of them, CREATIVELY.

Acceptance makes an incredible fertile soil for the seeds of change.

You can have the joy of reading the stories of incredible happenings, or you can be part of the story

I define vulnerability as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. With that definition in mind, let's think about love. Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can't ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment's notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow- that's vulnerability. Love is uncertain. It's incredibly risky. And loving someone leaves us emotionally exposed. Yes, it's scary, and yes, we're open to being hurt, but can you imagine your life without loving or being loved?

Work hard. Do good. Be incredible!

Incredible. It is just incredible that you can notice something like that when your face is so cold you can't feel it anymore, and you know perfectly well you are surrounded by death, and the only way to stay alive is to endure the howling wind and hold your course. And still the sky is beautiful.

God can take the ordinary and create the extraordinary. Our incredible God has the power to transform your simple life and give you the life of your dreams. Remarkable things happen in your life when you believe.

There is a secret place. A radiant sanctuary. As real as your own kitchen. More real than that. Constructed of the purest elements. Overflowing with the ten thousand beautiful things. Worlds within worlds. Forests, rivers. Velvet coverlets thrown over featherbeds, fountains bubbling beneath a canopy of stars. Bountiful forests, universal libraries. A wine cellar offering an intoxi cation so sweet you will never be sober again. A clarity so complete you will never again forget. This magnificent refuge is inside you. Enter. Shatter the darkness that shrouds the doorway… Believe the incredible truth that the Beloved has chosen for his dwelling place the core of your own being because that is the single most beautiful place in all of creation.

Sounds incredible? Hell, it does. But perhaps we all need to believe something incredible once in a while.

I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition.... we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.

There is a purpose for everyone you meet. Some people will test you, some will use you, some will bring out the best in you, but everyone will teach you something about yourself. Both positive and negative relationships teach you valuable lessons. This is an incredible step toward expanding your consciousness. The road to self-discovery requires help from others. As humans we are always seeking feedback and approval from others. That is how we learn and become better as individuals. No relationship is a waste of time. The wrong ones teach you the lessons that prepare you for the right ones. Appreciate everyone that enters your life because they are contributing to your growth and happiness.

Being here . . . meeting your mother and seeing where you came from and who you somehow turned out to be . . . it’s inspiring, Quinn. I don’t know how you did it, you selfless, amazing, incredible woman.” A lot of people can’t pinpoint the exact moment they fall in love with another person. I can. It just happened. And maybe it’s coincidence or maybe it’s something more, but Graham chooses this exact moment to press his forehead to mine and say, “I love you, Quinn.” I wrap my arms around him, grateful for every single part of him. “I love you, too.

People say not to judge a book by its cover, but what if you somehow read the inside of the book without seeing the cover first? And what if you really liked what was inside the book? Of course when you go to close the book and are about to see the cover for the first time, you hope it's something you'll find attractive. Because who wants an incredibly written book sitting on their bookshelf if they have to stare at a shitty cover?

My Dear Friend, Don't ever allow yourself to forget how incredibly special you are, even for a single second. Without you, the world would not be as magnificent. Let yourself remember to love again, starting with you loving you.

Everything is inspiration. If you look at the world as the incredible place it is, then each moment is a feast.

Work hard. Do good. Be incredible.

...it seems that what God does most of the time when He has something to say is this...He doesn't pass us messages, instead he passes us each other.

People do incredible things for love, particularly for unrequited love.

The problem with catching dreams is you forget how truly incredible they are when you live with them everyday.

The incredibly powerful and enriching lifestyle of seeking beauty is a humble service of love and healing.

If we really are spiritual beings living a physical existence, then we have incredible power.

God has the most incredible, unimaginable, inconceivable, and indescribable intention and design for your life.

To Charlie Bowater: Getting to know you has been such a highlight of my career, and your incredible art has inspired me in so many ways. Thank you for all your hard work (and for being a total genius).

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall and rise again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. Boats and youth passing and distant trees, "the falling fountains of the pendant trees". I see it all. I feel it all. I am inspired. My eyes fill with tears. Yet even as I feel this. I lash my frenzy higher and higher. It foams. It becomes artificial, insincere. Words and words and words, how they gallop - how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw with me - some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity. Yet it is incredible that I should not be a great poet.

We live in an incredibly dynamic universe that gives us what we wish for, like a waking dream

Happiness was my choice, and though it is hard-won, I am the only person who can stand in the way of it.

You laugh at me becuse I am different. I laugh at you becuse your all the same.

There are worse things, worse than being like us. Look, at least we're alive.

It is incredible what you do, knowing you have to.

Young friends, whose string-and-tin-can phone extended from island to island, had to pay out more and more string, as if letting kites go higher and higher. They had more and more to tell each other, and less and less string. The boy asked the girl to say "I love you" into her can, giving her no further explanation. And she didn't ask for any, or say "That's silly," or "We're too young for love," or even suggest that she was saying "I love you" because he asked her to. Instead she said, "I love you." The words traveled through the long, long string. The boy covered his can with a lid, removed it from the string, and put her love for him on a shelf in his closet. Of course, he never could open the can, because then he would lose its contents. It was enough just to know it was there.

We are in charge of our own lives and how we spend our time. You should never do something you don’t want to do. Lives are incredibly short. If it doesn’t feel right to do something then you have permission to not do it. Who cares what other people will think?

I have lived my life backwards as compared to my peers. Everyone did incredibly stupid things as teenagers and pre-teens. I didn't. I was the one telling everybody that they were incredibly stupid. Now that they are all past that stage and we are all much older— I am the one doing incredibly stupid things. I have figured that I've earned that right, by now! You have to earn the right to be stupid.

Some days I like to wander to old and warn our places, forests ripped apart by man and streams that carry stagnant water where it use to flow. There is a sense of clarity in these places, a reflection of who I am or atleast who I have been. Broken, yet still incredibly beautiful.

If you're thinking, 'Great! I just need to be a superhero to fight perfectionism,' I understand. Courage, compassion, and connection seem like big, lofty ideals. But in reality, they are daily practices that, when exercised enough, become these incredible gifts in our lives. And the good news is that our vulnerabilities are what force us to call upon these amazing tools. Because we're human and so beautifully imperfect, we get to practice using our tools on a daily basis. In this way, courage, compassion, and connection become gifts - the gifts of imperfection.

there's only one rule that's essential for your training: never give up. You can make mistakes, you can learn incredibly slow or be clumsy as you like. But you cannot give up.

Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us to little more than animals, humanity in the shape of our saintly medical officers triumphed over barbarism. Remember, while it always seems darkest before the dawn, perseverance pays off and the good times will return.

If you do your best, stay in the game, learn along the way, and adapt as best you can, life has an incredible way of filling in the details for you.

God can use anyone, for sure. If you can shred on a Fender or won "Best Personality," you're not disqualified-it just doesn't make you more qualified.

We did live in dire poverty. And one of the things that I hated was poverty. Some people hate spiders. Some people hate snakes. I hated poverty. I couldn't stand it. My mother couldn't stand the fact that we were doing poorly in school, and she prayed and she asked God to give her wisdom. What could she do to get her young sons to understand the importance of developing their minds so that they control their own lives? God gave her the wisdom. At least in her opinion. My brother and I didn't think it was that wise. Turn off the TV, let us watch only two or three TV programs during the week. And with all that spare time read two books a piece from the Detroit Public Libraries and submit to her written book reports, which she couldn't read but we didn't know that. I just hated this. My friends were out having a good time. Her friends would criticize her. My mother didn't care. But after a while I actually began to enjoy reading those books. Because we were very poor, but between the covers of those books I could go anywhere. I could be anybody. I could do anything. I began to read about people of great accomplishment. And as I read those stories, I began to see a connecting thread. I began to see that the person who has the most to do with you, and what happens to you in life, is you. You make decisions. You decide how much energy you want to put behind that decision. And I came to understand that I had control of my own destiny. And at that point I didn't hate poverty anymore, because I knew it was only temporary. I knew I could change that. It was incredibly liberating for me. Made all the difference.

I thought maybe if she could express herself rather than suffer herself, if she had a way to relieve the burden, she lived for nothing more than living, with nothing to get inspired by, to care for, to call her own, she helped out at the store, then came home and sat in her big chair and stared at her magazines, not at them but through them, she let the dust accumulate on her shoulders.

One indicator of inspiration is awe. We tend to take so much for granted. How can we move past disconnection and desensitization to the incredible wonders of nature and human engineering all around us? Most of what we see in the world holds the potential to inspire astonishment if looked at from a less jaded perspective. Train yourself to see the awe behind the obvious. Look at the world from this vantage point as often as possible. Submerge yourself. The beauty around us enriches our lives in so many ways. It is an end in itself. And it sets an example for our own work. We can aim to develop an eye for harmony and balance, as if our creations have always been here, like mountains or feathers.

Something important I have learned is patience, and turning each failure into a learning experience. ..Instead of calling them "failures" I call them "lessons". Instead of saying, "I failed at that," I say, "I learned from that." Each failure has taught me something incredibly valuable and by recognizing this I can see the hand of God in my life in situations where most people would feel abandoned by Him.

Take a moment from time to time to remember that you are alive. I know this sounds a trifle obvious, but it is amazing how little time we take to remark upon this singular and gratifying fact. By most astounding stroke of luck and infinitesimal portion of all the matter in the universe came together to create you and for the tiniest moment in the great span of eternity you have the incomparable privilege to exist. For endless eons there was no you. Before you know it, you will cease to be again. And in between you have this wonderful opportunity to see and feel and think and do. Whatever else you do with your life, nothing will remotely compare with the incredible accomplishment of having managed to get yourself born. Congratulations. Well done. You really are special.

My love flew over the boundary of time with incredible beauty and notorious rhyme.

Luck favors the prepared." -Louis Pasteur . . . but actually for me, Edna from The Incredibles. At least I admitted it.

...some have asked me what understanding of Nature one shapes from so strange a year? I would answer that one's first appreciation is a sense that creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and as active to-day as they have ever been, and that to-morrow's morning will be as heroic as any of the world. Creation is here and now. So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment, a solitary note heard in a symphony thundering through debatable existences of time. Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy

unlike, say, the sun, or the rainbow, or earthquakes, the fascinating world of the very small never came to the notice of primitive peoples. if you think about this for a minute, it's not really surprising.. they had no way of even knowing it was there, and so of course they didn't invent any myths to explain it. it wasn't until the microscope was invented in the sixteenth century that people discovered that ponds and lakes, soil and dust, even our body, teem with tiny living creatures, too small to see, yet too complicated and, in their own way, beautiful, or perhaps frightening, depending on how you think about them. the whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye - and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all knowing god, mentions them at all. in fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out. they don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or nuclear fusion, or electricity, or anaesthetics. in fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive people who first started telling them. if these 'holly books' really were written, or dictated, or inspired, by all knowing gods, don't you think it's odd that those gods said nothing about any of these important and useful things?

What’s the main allure of folks in Extreme Spiritual Addiction? Astral flash, of course. Picture a wannabe rock star, all decked out in garish colors and sequins. Why does that over-the-top kind of dress-up work so well in Vegas? Because audiences in Vegas aren’t seeking Spiritual Enlightenment, nor even a refined experience. Quite the opposite, right? Fact is, multitudes anywhere prefer entertainment that’s larger-than-life. Sleazy sex sells, and so does every other kind of garishness, including astral flash. To some spiritual seekers – and others -- astral flash can seem incredibly wonderful. Only some folks of course – you need not be one of them.

The Book revealed to Muhammad is one and unique of its kind. It has left indelible impression on the hearts of humanity. Nothing can overcome its majesty. The Quran has given new dimensions to human thinking - Surprising reforms, stunning success! The power that created in Muslims a ravenous appetite for knowledge sprung from the Quran.

Incredible how so many people have no sense of honor. How does this happen? This happens by thriving on how one appears to the world around him rather than cultivating a person inside him that he knows is honorable and that he can be proud of. When all the focus is on what people think about you based upon your facebook profile or based upon the exterior that you put on everyday; you leave no room for looking at yourself and saying, "I want to look into the mirror every day and see someone that I can be proud of." And that's what a life of honor is based upon. It is based upon the knowledge that you know your own actions, your own self, and you can see the things that you do and know the things that you think. You answer to yourself, therefore, your standards need to come up to what you expect of yourself. It doesn't matter at all if anybody is looking. When such a sense of honor is present in a large group of people, that's when we see no crime rate or a very low crime rate, respect for other human life and personas, respect for the surroundings and really a respect for oneself. Because a respect for other people can only first be born from a true respect for oneself.

He had been inspired to start a career in the porn industry after reading the incredible tale of a Japanese man who avenged the death of his sister by going down on her best friend for seven days and seven nights.

I want to send out my heartfelt thanks to everyone who has purchased Break in Two, and especially to those of you who took the time to review it. Your thoughtfulness and kind words have made the past two weeks most incredible. This whole writing thing was an experiment to see if I could do it. You have inspired me to continue on! I had no idea this would be such an incredibly gratify experience. Thank you to each and everyone one of you. All the best to you and yours this holiday season! MJ

fear is something i don't you experience unless you have a choice. If you have a choice, you're liable to be afraid. But without a choice, what is there to be afraid of? You just go along and do what has to be done.".,

A goal is a dream with its work boots on. A goal is a dream you’ve decided to make real. A goal is a destination you’re working toward instead of an idea you’re only considering or hoping for. Hope is a beautiful thing and an incredibly valuable tool to help keep us motivated and inspired about the possibility for the future. But let’s be very clear on this point: hope is not a strategy.

He gave us taste buds, then filled the world with incredible flavors like chocolate and cinnamon and all the other spices. He gave us eyes to perceive color and then filled the world with a rainbow of shades. He gave us sensitive ears and then filled the world with rhythms and music. Your capacity for enjoyment is evidence of God's love for you. He could have made the world tasteless, colorless, and silent. The Bible says that God "richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment." He didn't have to do it, but he did, because He loves us.

His laws changed all of physics and astronomy. His laws made it possible to calculate the mass of the sun and planets. The way it's done is immensely beautiful. If you know the orbital period of any planet, say, Jupiter or the Earth and you know its distance to the Sun; you can calculate the mass of the Sun. Doesn't this sound like magic? We can carry this one step further - if you know the orbital period of one of Jupiter's bright moons, discovered by Galileo in 1609, and you know the distance between Jupiter and that moon, you can calculate the mass of Jupiter. Therefore, if you know the orbital period of the moon around the Earth (it's 27.32 days), and you know the mean distance between the Earth and the moon (it's about 200,039 miles), then you can calculate to a high degree of accuracy the mass of the Earth. … But Newton's laws reach far beyond our solar system. They dictate and explain the motion of stars, binary stars, star clusters, galaxies and even clusters of galaxies. And Newton's laws deserve credit for the 20th century discovery of what we call dark matter. His laws are beautiful. Breathtakingly simple and incredibly powerful at the same time. They explain so much and the range of phenomena they clarify is mind boggling. By bringing together the physics of motion, of interaction between objects and of planetary movements, Newton brought a new kind of order to astronomical measurements, showing how, what had been a jumble of confused observations made through the centuries were all interconnected.

People who treat change as a positive force are able to adapt to any situation, because the human mind is incredible

Everything will be fine,” the ocean seemed to whisper. “Life will always be messy. But oh, it’s so incredibly beautiful, too.

I am afraid of emotions," Mack admitted. "Emotions are the colors of the soul; they are spectacular and incredible. When you don't feel, the world becomes dull and colorless.

(Via Malcolm)"...For the moment, I have this incredible gift...It just happened. I bend, whisper, sing, shout—and a radiant light surrounds and then emanates from people.

How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough!

You don't need to be brave. You just need to do what needs done. - Vic Challenger

The world could not define her. She was ineffably, inimitably, and incredibly herself!

And maybe that's what a misfit is to me: someone with the ability to become increasingly dangerous, in incredibly loving ways, and not care what people think about it. [written by Jason Arias]

Traveling solo is an incredible – life changing – journey, which I can recommend anyone to undertake. It’s the fear of being alone that prevents many people from daring to take the step to go on that journey. But as with many things, within that fear you’ll discover the greatest triumphs.

If you're feeling discouraged and defeated—don't quit. Play on, hope on, and move forward. The music you play—even in the midst of incredible darkness—can and will turn the tide of your own battles.

You're afraid that you suck. And - at least if you never try - no one (especially you) will be able to confirm that. Spoiler alert: This kind of thought doesn't come from an underachiever who's not good at anything. This kind of thought comes from a perfectionist. And truthfully? It's lame. There's so much incredible potential in you. But you're going to squander it because trying may or may not confirm that you're not as good as you thought you were. Stop being so hard on yourself!

The simple facts of Mao’s career seem incredible: in a vast land of 400 million people, at age 28, with a dozen others, to found a party and in the next fifty years to win power, organize, and remold the people and reshape the land–history records no greater achievement. Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, all the kings of Europe, Napoleon, Bismarck, Lenin–no predecessor can equal Mao Tse-tung’s scope of accomplishment, for no other country was ever so ancient and so big as China. Indeed Mao’s achievement is almost beyond our comprehension.

Where you see scars I see art Where you see flaws I see incredible beauty Where you see failures I see knowledge and growth Everything is perception You see with your eyes I see with my soul It’s how you rock And how I roll.

Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.” No doubt, entering space is an unforgiving business to deal with but Musk mastered it. His biggest advice is to, “really pay attention to negative feedback and actively solicit it, particularly from friends... hardly anyone does that. It's incredibly helpful.

She is not meant to be defined by the world. She is not meant to be described by the world. She is ineffable. She is inimitable. She is indomitable. And she is happy being her own self. She is immensely powerful. She is incredibly herself!

Here's what we're gonna do. You're going to give me that doubt. You're just going to hand it to me, and I'm going to hold it for you. I'm going to keep it for as long as you need me to. For the rest of our lives. I will be your safe place. The place you get to be soft. Right here, just like this. When you leave my arms, you leave whole. Because you already are. You're not broken sweetie, you're human. You're incredibly strong. You're a wonder. You'll return to your team as the warrior you've always been. And you'll know that at any time, you can come to me, and you'll know my arms are strong enough." Sigh

Dreams set the bar for what we hope and expect out of life; they ultimately become incredibly accurate predictors of who we will eventually become. Dream big and you will achieve big things. Dream small and expect small results. It is not that big dreamers are more capable than other people, it’s just that no one can hope to accomplish more than he or she can imagine.

But all of those points of light above are also suns, even farther away, and they all have worlds, too." "All of them? Every single one? But that's like hundreds." "Thousands. Maybe millions." "But that's incredible," Borne said, quietly. "That's amazing. That's devastating.

Pick something you aren't just able to do; instead, pick something you feel like you were made to do and then do lots of that. You weren't just an incredible idea that God never got around to making. The next step happened for the world when God dropped you on the planet...God decided to have us intersect history, not at just any time, but at this time. He made us to be good at a few things and bad at a couple of others. He made us to love some things and not like others. Most of all, He made us to dream...We're part of God's much bigger plan for the whole world. Just like God's Son arrived here, so did you. And after Jesus arrived, God whispered to all of humanity..."It's your move.

What God declares the believing heart confesses without the need of further proof. Indeed, to seek proof is to admit doubt, and to obtain proof is to render faith superfluous. Everyone who possesses the gift of faith will recognize the wisdom of those daring words of one of the early Church fathers: "I believe that Christ died for me because it is incredible; I believe that He rose from the dead because it is impossible.

At one point in the story, following a brazen daytime bank robbery, Electro is shown escaping from the authorities by climbing up the side of a building, as easily as Spider-Man . . . we see one observer exclaim, "Look!! That strangely-garbed man is racing up the side of the building!" A second man on the street picks up the narrative: "He's holding on to the iron beams in the building by means of electric rays—using them like a magnet!! Incredible!" There are three feelings inspired by this scene. The first is wonder as to why people rarely use the phrase "strangely-garbed" anymore. The second is nostalgia for the bygone era when pedestrians would routinely narrate events occurring in front of them, providing exposition for any casual bystander. And the third is pleasure at the realization that Electro's climbing this building is actually a physically plausible use of his powers.

Thinking back to my time with Tad on this lake, I remember it like a painting, a snapshot in my mind. But really, all memories are like paintings: They can be incredibly vivid and lifelike. But in the end, they both just remind us that we only get to live any particular moment once, even if we remember it forever.

The United States is literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration,” he says. “This is a land of adventurers.” That spirit needed to be rekindled in America, he felt, and the best way to do that would be to embark on a mission to colonize Mars. “To have a base on Mars would be incredibly difficult, and people will probably die along the way, just as happened in the settling of the United States. But it will be incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the world.” Life cannot be merely about solving problems, he felt. It also had to be about pursuing great dreams. “That’s what can get us up in the morning.

We never know what can happen when we feel called to follow Jesus’ gospel witness of welcome. Heeding such a call can require incredible courage. Sometimes this gospel way of welcome can lead us to put our very lives on the line. But Jesus’ way of welcome can inspire us to keep working to do what is right in a world where too often too much is wrong.

The moment you realize there is incredible beauty in not knowing.

At times, it can be incredibly difficult to look past our imperfections, given the high expectations set by our family and peers.

Mindfulness is incredibly important to ensure we are aware of the actions we take.

The way you tackle the world is up to you. If you always carry an umbrella because you're afraid of the rain, you'll never see the sun.

You can start from the ordinary bizzare to the extraordinary incredible

It's better to lose something than never to have had

The body is an outstanding source of strength; the mind an incredible source of intelligence; the heart an uncommon source of might; and the soul a remarkable source of power.

Life is a brief shot at something incredible

the sum total of your incredible choices in life is the destiny you aspire for... make wise choices to sum up a desirable destiny you yern for

Jesus doesn’t invite us on a business trip. Instead, He says let’s go after those things that inspire and challenge you and let’s experience them together. You

You have immense power--power to overcome, power to achieve, power to possess, and power to prosper, making you incredibly irresistible.

When you believe, incredible things happen. You set divine forces into motion.

If you have the chance to achieve, do it. Life is about taking a chance on something incredible.

Life is an incredible adventure into the mysterious unknown future.

I never forgot who Queena was before the attack, but she was so different now that it almost felt like I had a third child.

Teamwork and community have been incredibly important to me as of late. You can get a lot done by yourself, but a collaborative effort can take you even further.

The job is to add value. Whatever your job title, this is your job. Adding value is the essential work.

We can often do more than we initially imagine. If we open our minds to possibility, "unrealistic" goals often come within reach.

Peace is priceless. That is something to be incredibly grateful for.

Be proud of the incredible person that you are... and become a rainbow in someone's cloudy day.

Acknowledging and welcoming your self-worth, your own extraordinary power, is incredible. You become unstoppable.

A bud has to bloom to unfold her beauty. A child has to become educated to unfold her incredible potential.

But there’s no such thing as just human. Humans can do incredible things sometimes.

Breaking out of your comfort zone to do the things that are not only difficult but even seemingly impossible, can bring incredible results.

The most incredible service you can render to yourself is to clearly define WHY you are here and live it out.

To succeed in life you need five things – a burning desire, a willingness to do whatever it takes, wisdom, incredible effort, and a commitment to never ending improvement.

How would it feel if for an instance we stop being someone’s son/daughter, someone’s father/mother, someone’s husband/wife, someone’s lover, somebody’s employee, a countryman of some nation, a faithful devotee of some religion or a follower of some ideal and live only being a part of this wonderful, incredible and mysterious creation, wouldn't it would be something worth living for?

Without the underlying emotion accompanying a match, Bischoff ruminated, the result was something much less inspiring - two guys in their underwear fighting for ambiguous reasons. “They were basically telling me that I had to abandon the very formula that had not only worked for us, but that our competition had adapted,” he says. “I was then told to have my scripts approved a month in advance.

So many of you feel good about feeling sorry for the beggar on the street corner. You say, “Isn't that the right thing to do?” Instead of feeling sorry for the beggar on the street, your compassion would honor and admire him. “That's my hero—somebody who can dive that deep into their journey, their story, their illusions; somebody who can go to that level of begging on the street. That's an incredible creation.

There’s incredible power in trusting that you are created braver than you seem. When a raging storm of life threatens to humble you, calmly face what’s facing you, and you come out stronger than ever before.

Continue going after your dreams because you deserve them; life has many incredible experiences ahead of you. Today's obstacles are tomorrow's victories, and tomorrow's breakthroughs are today's possibilities.

Human Society Has Made Incredible Strides In Science And Technology Yet In Spite Of What Appears An Unstoppable Success March, A Small Poisonous Arrow Of Time-Wasting Obsession Could Be Our Weakness, Our Downfall”.

Thank you and endless love to Louisse Ang, Steph Brown, Jennifer Kelly, Alice Fanchiang, Diyana Wan, Laura Ashforth, Alexa Santiago, Rachel Domingo, Jessica Reigle, Jennifer Armentrout, Christina Hobbs, Lauren Billings, and Kelly Grabowski. To Charlie Bowater: Getting to know you has been such a highlight of my career, and your incredible art has inspired me in so many ways. Thank you for all your hard work (and for being a total genius).

Twinkle lights are the perfect metaphor for joy. Joy is not a constant. It comes to us in moments—often ordinary moments. Sometimes we miss out on the bursts of joy because we’re too busy chasing down extraordinary moments. Other times we’re so afraid of the dark that we don’t dare let ourselves enjoy the light. A joyful life is not a floodlight of joy. That would eventually become unbearable. I believe a joyful life is made up of joyful moments gracefully strung together by trust, gratitude, inspiration, and faith. For those of you who follow my blog, you’ll recognize this as the mantra for my gratitude posts on Fridays that I call TGIF. I turned this quote into a small badge, and part of my gratitude practice is a weekly post about what I’m Trusting, what I’m Grateful for, what Inspires me, and how I’m practicing my Faith. It’s incredibly powerful to read everyone’s comments. Joy

What I'm willing to admit is that my mind, as it serves my heart, becomes a very creative place, capable of surprising ingenuity and masterful reframes. And in this incredibly creative place, my world works for me, not against me.

You were incredible today,” he said finally, his voice soft but full of meaning. “Not just on the slopes, but everything—handling that call, standing your ground, deciding to elevate your business. That’s strength. That’s inspiring.

Accounts from Europe indicate that the danse macabre took another form, inspired by the Black Death, rather like our children's rhyme 'Ring o' Ring o' Roses', which refers to the Great Plague. In 1374, a fanatical sect of dancers appeared in the Rhine, convinced that they could put an end to the epidemic by dancing for days and allowing other people to trample on their bodies. It is not recorded whether they recovered but, incredibly, they began to raise money from bystanders. By the time they reached Cologne they were 500 strong, dancing like demons, half-naked with flowers in their hair. Regarded as a menace by the authorities, these dancers macabre were threatened with excommunication.

The human mind is an incredible thing. It can conceive of the magnificence of the heavens and the intricacies of the basic components of matter. Yet for each mind to achieve its full potential, it needs a spark. The spark of enquiry and wonder. Often that spark comes from a teacher. Allow me to explain. I wasn’t the easiest person to teach, I was slow to learn to read and my handwriting was untidy. But when I was fourteen my teacher at my school in St Albans, Dikran Tahta, showed me how to harness my energy and encouraged me to think creatively about mathematics. He opened my eyes to maths as the blueprint of the universe itself. If you look behind every exceptional person there is an exceptional teacher. When each of us thinks about what we can do in life, chances are we can do it because of a teacher. [...] The basis for the future of education must lie in schools and inspiring teachers. But schools can only offer an elementary framework where sometimes rote-learning, equations and examinations can alienate children from science. Most people respond to a qualitative, rather than a quantitative, understanding, without the need for complicated equations. Popular science books and articles can also put across ideas about the way we live. However, only a small percentage of the population read even the most successful books. Science documentaries and films reach a mass audience, but it is only one-way communication.

But too often, we proceed like this . . . A flash of inspiration: I want to do the best and biggest ______ ever. Be the youngest ______. The only one to ______. The “firstest with the mostest.” The advice: Okay, well, here’s what you’ll need to do step-by-step to accomplish it. The reality: We hear what we want to hear. We do what we feel like doing, and despite being incredibly busy and working very hard, we accomplish very little. Or worse, find ourselves in a mess we never anticipated.

If you focus on the world’s deficiencies and stop there, then you’ll probably feel horrible and paralyzed. But why stop there? It’s intellectually dishonest to focus on what’s wrong with the world without acknowledging our rich history of overcoming incredible odds.

Dat man ober dar say dat women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to have de best places… and ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!... I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me - and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much as any man (when I could get it), and bear de lash as well - and ain’t I a woman? I have borne five children and I seen ‘em mos all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother’s gried, none but Jesus hear - and ain’t I a woman?

Every job I was denied for… opened the door to new opportunities. Every relationship that hurt me… led me to my true love. Every mistake I thought would be the end of me… pointed me towards an incredible success. Sometimes when you think you're losing, you're winning.

They were doing something so right, protecting the mustangs. As wild as they were, they had incredible potential if tamed by the right hands. Wasn't that how it was with God? When others gave up, He kept going, kept pursuing, always seeing the potential of a person tamed by His hands.

By the dim light of the hanging lantern she looked incredibly ancient and awe-inspiring. She spoke in the impressive voice one would expect from someone who had been in sacred service for so long, and I was convinced that she was no ordinary mortal but a manifesting of the Goddess herself.

In a romantic relationship, intentionally using the Law of Attraction is an amazing method. It is incredibly beneficial to speak beautiful and positive words into your partner. Especially when you're talking about them to an outside person. Speak and think what you want to manifest into your relationship.

Everybody should know exactly what it is that they are. Really now. If you are beautiful, please know that you are beautiful; if you are strong please know that you are strong; if you are courageous please know that you are courageous; if you are a cunt, please don't fool yourself thinking you're a good person. You are in fact a cunt. If you are a giver, then know you are a giver and learn how to receive. If you are a receiver, identify this, then learn how to give. If you are incredibly stupid; please try to fix that and if you are profoundly intelligent, then please don't hide that. If you are gay, then love being gay and if you're straight then love being straight. Please be who it is that you are, please look into the mirror, please see yourself. Always. Every day. Be whatever it is that you are. Fix what needs to be fixed, throw out what needs to be thrown out; but please, not even for a second, do not ever stop looking at your reflection in the mirror!

I wish I could tell you it doesn't matter. I wish I could hold you close and tell that you will be loved for what you do, that you are incredible and unique. I wish you knew how much you were needed, how much I miss you. I wish. You dream of desires and hopes, and that is why I dream of you - because you are my desire and hope.

Alex here. (...) Ron, I really enjoy all the help you have given me and the times we spent together. I hope that you will not be too depressed by our parting. It may be a very long time before we see each other again. But providing that I get through the Alaskan Deal in one piece you will be hearing form me again in the future. I’d like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing or been to hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one piece of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. (...) Once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. (...) Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. (...) You are wrong if you think joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living. Ron, I really hope that as soon as you can you will get out of Salton City, put a little camper on the back of your pickup, and start seeing some of the great work that God has done here in the American West. you will see things and meet people and there is much to learn from them. And you must do it economy style, no motels, do your own cooking, as a general rule spend as little as possible and you will enjoy it much more immensely. I hope that the next time I see you, you will be a new man with a vast array of new adventures and experiences behind you. Don’t hesitate or allow yourself to make excuses. Just get out and do it. Just get out and do it. You will be very, very glad that you did. Take care Ron, Alex

If you can be with a loved one when they die, you should. Her hands getting cold as the circulation shuts down, her breathing getting heavy, the death rattle. Bearing witness to a death is an incredibly intimate thing. You should be there, not because it’s easy – it isn’t – but because one day you’ll want someone to hold your hand. One day your mum put you down and never picked you up again.

Her later work on adolescent girls and their “silenced” voices shows us a different Gilligan. Her ideas were successful in the sense that they inspired activists in organizations like the AAUW and the Ms. Foundation to go on red alert in an effort to save the nation’s “drowning and disappearing” daughters. But all their activism was based on a false premise: that girls were subdued, neglected, and diminished. In fact, the opposite was true: girls were moving ahead of boys in most of the ways that count. Gilligan’s powerful myth of the incredible shrinking girl did more harm than good. It patronized girls, portraying them as victims of the culture. It diverted attention from the academic deficits of boys. It also gave urgency and credibility to a specious self-esteem movement that wasted everybody’s time.

That’s always been part of my goal — to show the dark side of women. Men write about bad men all the time, and they’re called antiheroes. … What I read and what I go to the movies for is not to find a best friend, not to find inspirations, not necessarily for a hero’s journey. It’s to be involved with characters that are maybe incredibly different from me, that may be incredibly bad but that feel authentic.

When I first envisioned myself running, I saw myself as Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling in the opening scenes of The Silence of the Lambs. So strong, so focused, so proud. She is utterly confident, completely single-minded about her training run across a terrifying assault course. At one point she runs past a tree with the sign HURT AGONY PAIN LOVE IT stapled to it. She doesn’t care what she looks like; she has shit to do, and she is going to get it done. And yet . . . she is wearing a phenomenally impractical outfit. She is in a heavy cotton sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms and is drenched in sweat. The top is sticking to both her chest and back and looks painfully heavy. She is summoned by a colleague and heads inside past a roomful of people dressed in khaki, faffing around with guns, and then gets into an elevator. All in the heavy, damp cotton. That wet fabric must have gotten incredibly cold the minute she stopped running, and it bothers me whenever I think of the poor woman in that meeting. For years the scene was my running inspiration, yet now I am unable to watch the first hour of the film without worrying about whether Clarice is shivering from the horrors of Hannibal Lecter or because she caught a dreadful chill.

The thing that actually gets me the most excited about it is that I just think it’s the grandest adventure I could possibly imagine. It’s the most exciting thing—I couldn’t think of anything more exciting, more fun, more inspiring for the future than to have a base on Mars,” he once said. “It would be incredibly difficult and probably lots of people will die and terrible and great things will happen along the way, just as happened in the formation of the United States.

AUNT MARY: And will you be saying that when you’re forty and he’s sixty? Or when you’re sixty and he’s eighty, and you have to change his diapers? RYANN: He’s got money. We’ll pay someone else to change his diapers........It means nothing to me! Mal at eighty will be just as sexy to me as Mal at forty. His mind is incredible, and the things he makes with his hands are just beyond amazing. He’s an artist. And he treats me like I’m the most important person in his life.

The disabled people populating these billboards epitomize the paradoxical figure of the supercrip: supercrips are those disabled figures favored in the media, products of either extremely low expectations (disability by definition means incompetence, so anything a disabled person does, no matter how mundane or banal, merits exaggerated praise) or extremely high expectations (disabled people must accomplish incredibly difficult, and therefore inspiring, tasks to be worthy of nondisabled attention).

Her astonishment, as she reflected on what had passed, was increased by every review of it. That she should receive an offer of marriage from Mr. Darcy! That he should have been in love with her for so many months! So much in love as to wish to marry her in spite of all the objections which had made him prevent his friend's marrying her sister, and which must appear at least with equal force in his own case—was almost incredible! It was gratifying to have inspired unconsciously so strong an affection.

The first flight of a previously flown booster came a month later on a launch also from 39A. After the launch, an emotional Musk called it “an incredible milestone in the history of space,” one that SpaceX had been working toward for fifteen years. This, he said, would be what would ultimately lower the cost of spaceflight, perhaps by a factor of a hundred or more—“the key to opening up space, and becoming a spacefaring civilization, a multiplanetary species and having the future be incredibly exciting and inspiring.

For months beforehand, I fielded calls from British media. A couple of the reporters asked me to name some British chefs who had inspired me. I mentioned the Roux brothers, Albert and Michel, and I named Marco Pierre White, not as much for his food as for how—by virtue of becoming an apron-wearing rock-star bad boy—he had broken the mold of whom a chef could be, which was something I could relate to. I got to London to find the Lanesborough dining room packed each night, a general excitement shared by everyone involved, and incredibly posh digs from which I could step out each morning into Hyde Park and take a good long run around Buckingham Palace. On my second day, I was cooking when a phone call came into the kitchen. The executive chef answered and, with a puzzled look, handed me the receiver. Trouble at Aquavit, I figured. I put the phone up to my ear, expecting to hear Håkan’s familiar “Hej, Marcus.” Instead, there was screaming. “How the fuck can you come to my fucking city and think you are going to be able to cook without even fucking referring to me?” This went on for what seemed like five minutes; I was too stunned to hang up. “I’m going to make sure you have a fucking miserable time here. This is my city, you hear? Good luck, you fucking black bastard.” And then he hung up. I had cooked with Gordon Ramsay once, a couple of years earlier, when we did a promotion with Charlie Trotter in Chicago. There were a handful of chefs there, including Daniel Boulud and Ferran Adrià, and Gordon was rude and obnoxious to all of them. As a group we were interviewed by the Chicago newspaper; Gordon interrupted everyone who tried to answer a question, craving the limelight. I was almost embarrassed for him. So when I was giving interviews in the lead-up to the Lanesborough event, and was asked who inspired me, I thought the best way to handle it was to say nothing about him at all. Nothing good, nothing bad. I guess he was offended at being left out. To be honest, though, only one phrase in his juvenile tirade unsettled me: when he called me a black bastard. Actually, I didn’t give a fuck about the bastard part. But the black part pissed me off.

When the sun sets at night and you lay your head down on your pillow, you must believe beyond the shadow of a doubt that your business will be successful. More than anyone, you, the business owner, should have incredible faith that you will experience prosperity. This journey is not about following a popular path that leads to fame and fortune, instead, it is about creating an extension of God’s kingdom right here on earth. As beacons of light and salt of the earth, Christians should provide an example of what true victory means to the rest of the world.

Will had discovered, even before coming to the City, that his muse was, like all muses, an incredibly finicky and temperamental mistress. He'd had several good short stories over the years, a few of them bordering on brilliant, and some of them had even been published; but these gifts from his imaginary goddess of inspiration were, in truth, frustratingly infrequent. She would hang around and whisper in his ears for hours, or days, or weeks, and then suddenly go off on an extended vacation without informing Will of her whereabouts or when she planned to return.

I confess, I have setbacks like anyone. But they don’t cause distress or coalesce in a mess for I’ve learned to step back, to reflect and assess where I’m at and enact a simple plan of attack — to press forward, progress; not digress, not give up nor express my despair but address what I can, my mistakes and my faults, with a head-on assault. For I’m blessed with my faith and belief and a chest that encases a heart that does not know the meaning of “quit" or “give up" or “there there” or “oh well”, “never-mind” or “bad luck” or “just try something else”, no. Me and myself, my reflection and I, we are not of that ilk, we aren’t ones to comply. We aren’t ones to conform or accept that the norm is a one-size-fits-all way to simply exist for we strive to be different, incredible, unique. Not irrelevant, invisible, insignificant or meek. We strive to resist and we fight to excel, so setbacks to us are a thing to be quashed, to be quelled, to be squished, to be left in our wake as we go on our way, as we sail right on by to impossible ends, to what few dare to try. This is why – this is why – as my reflection attests, there is no time to rest. The struggle is unending … but I will give it my best.

Be big enough to offer the truth to people and if it short circuits them I think that's tragic. I think that's sad but, I will not strike no unholy bargains to self erase. I wont do it. I don't care how many people fucked up their lives. I don't care how many bad choices people have made. I don't care how much pettiness they've consumed and spat out. I don't care how much viciousness , rage, abuse, spanking they've dealt out. I am gonna tell the truth as I see it and I'm going to be who I fucking am and if that causes the world to shift in it's orbit and half the evil people get thrown off the planet and up into space well, you shouldn't of been standing in evil to begin with because, there is gravity in goodness. So, sorry; I have to be who I am. Everyone ells is taken. There is no other place I can go than in my own head. I can't jump from skull to skull until I find one that suits bad people around me better. I don't have that choice. So, be your fucking self. Speak your truth and if there are people around you who tempt you with nonexistence , blast through that and give them the full glory of who you are. Do not withhold yourself from the world. Do not piss on the incandescent gift of your existence. Don't drown yourself in the petty fog and dustiness of other peoples ancient superstitions, beliefs, aggressions, culture, and crap. No, be a flare. We're all born self expressive. We are all born perfectly comfortable with being incredibly inconvenient to our parents. We shit, piss, wake up at night, throw up on their shoulders, scream, and cry. We are in our essence, in our humanity, perfectly comfortable with inconveniencing others. That's how we are born. That's how we grow. That's how we develop. Well, I choose to retain the ability to inconvenience the irrational. You know I had a cancer in me last year and I'm very glad that the surgeons knife and the related medicines that I took proved extremely inconvenient to my cancer and I bet you my cancer was like "Aw shit. I hate this stuff man." Good. I'm only alive because medicine and surgery was highly inconvenient to the cancer within me. That's the only reason I'm alive. So, be who you are. If that's inconvenient to other people that's their goddamn business, not yours. Do not kill yourself because other people are dead. Do not follow people into the grave. Do not atomize yourself because, others have shredded themselves into dust for the sake of their fears and their desire to conform with the history of the dead.

Welcome to part one of my author’s note: the inspiration behind this book. Just a few years ago, the wildest thing ever happened to me. During my senior year, Tom Holland secretly enrolled in my high school, the Bronx High School of Science, as an undercover student to learn more about American high schools for his upcoming role as Spider-Man. I was lucky enough to meet and talk to him during his time there (literally still reeling in shock if we’re being honest because w h a t), and I’ve always treasured that experience. Since then, an idea has lingered in the back of my head—wouldn’t this be such an incredible concept for a book?

It was then that the central figure of the gospels, a historical figure whom she deeply revered and sought to imitate, began at rare intervals to flash out at her like live lightning from their pages, frightening her, turning the grave blueprint into a dazzle of reflected fire. Gradually she learned to see that her fear was not of the lightning itself but what it showed her of the nature of love, for it dazzled behind the stark horror of Calvary. At this point, where so many vowed lovers faint and fail, Mary Montague went doggedly on over a period of years that seemed if possible longer and harder than the former period. At some point along the way, she did not know where because the change came so slowly and gradually, she realized that he had got her and got everything. His love held and illumined every human being for whom she was concerned, and whom she served with the profound compassion which was their need and right, held the Cathedral, the city, every flower and leaf and creature, giving it reality and beauty. She could not take her eyes from the incredible glory of his love. As far as it was possible for a human being in this world she had turned from herself. She could say, 'I have been turned,' and did not know how very few can speak these words with truth.

I have lived a big life. For that I am grateful. But as one disengages from it and grows more reflective and less involved in the day-to-day grind, I think it’s possible to discover wisdom, born of experience and thankfulness. You must “ swallow the shadow” i.e. the fear of death. You must let go of the image of the fit-body and the triumph of your ego-place in the overculture. I think, if you can do that, this “good age” as I like to call it, can be full of radiant inspiration and tender memory. For in all it’s contradiction, somewhere, in the puzzle of life, is incredible beauty. And who does not want to know beauty through their remembering?

But too often, we proceed like this… A flash of inspiration: I want to do the best and biggest ______ ever. Be the youngest ______. The only one to ______. The “firstest with the mostest.” The advice: Okay, well, here’s what you’ll need to do step-by-step to accomplish it. The reality: We hear what we want to hear. We do what we feel like doing, and despite being incredibly busy and working very hard, we accomplish very little. Or worse, find ourselves in a mess we never anticipated. Because we only seem to hear about the passion of successful people, we forget that failures shared the same trait. We don’t conceive of the consequences until we look at their trajectory.

True beauty, the kind that doesn't fade or wash off, takes time. It takes incredible endurance. It is the slow drip that creates the stalactite, the shaking of the Earth that creates mountains, the constant pounding of the waves that breaks up the rocks and smooths the rough edges. And from the violence, the furor, the raging of the winds, the roaring of the waters, something better emerges, something that would have otherwise never existed. And so we endure. We have faith that there is purpose. We hope for things we can't see. We believe there are lessons in loss, power in love, and that we have within us the potential for a beauty so magnificent, our bodies can't contain it.

Despite being a nonprofit, we have been able to build a team that rivals those of the most resource-rich tech companies. Hundreds of incredibly talented people have committed a major part of their careers to be part of the Khan Academy team, often taking considerable pay cuts to do so. Thousands of volunteers all over the world have now translated Khan Academy into over fifty languages. Inspirational leaders like Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, and Elon Musk have become some of our biggest supporters and advocates. This journey seems so serendipitous that it has become something of an inside joke among the Khan Academy team that perhaps benevolent aliens are helping us so that, through education, we can prepare humanity for first contact.

Be brave, be curious, be determined, overcome the odds. It can be done." "Our future is a race between the growing power of our technology and the wisdom with which we use it. Let's make sure that wisdom wins." "Human mind is an incredible thing. It can conceive of the magnificence of the heavens and the intricacies of the basic components of matter. Yet for each mind to achieve its full potential, it needs a spark. The spark of enquiry and wonder." - Often that spark comes from a teacher. "Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. and However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you dont just give up. Unleash your imagination. Shape the future.

Have you ever just laid down on the grass and watch as the day slowly transitions to evening? The sky flows through hues of orange and slowly fades to greys, the incredible palette of dusk. This is where the magic begins to happen. First the planets reveal themselves as bright pinpoints of light against the bleak canvas, and for a few moments they are the only thing you can focus on - they’re so bright that they draw away from anything else. When you stare at only one, when there is so much distance between it and anything else, it almost seems to be dancing back and forth in space, playing mind tricks on you. However, as you emerge from its hypnotic trance, you begin to see the less significant stars awaken from what seems like nowhere. They too earn your attention, but in a different way. You can’t look at them directly because otherwise you won’t see their beauty. You have to glance at them from the side, from the corner of your eye to really see them in their fullness. The sky is not yet completely in darkness and the universe is already showing off. Distant stars even further light years away and planets orbiting from afar being to emerge and before you know it you almost don’t know where to look, there are little grains of sand lighting up the sky from everywhere. This happens every night - a spectacular natural light show but so many people miss it. It’s sad to think that, but it makes viewing it that much more special when you get to experience it. Just you and the universe, watching itself through your own very eyes.

As we celebrate International Women’s Day, I would like to take a moment to honour and appreciate all the incredible women who have touched our lives in so many ways. To all the mothers, sisters, daughters, grandmothers, and friends who have shown us kindness, wisdom, and grace. Your strength, resilience, and perseverance continue to inspire us every day. You have been a constant source of support, and your guidance has helped us navigate through the toughest of times. No amount of gratitude is enough to thank you for everything that you have done for us. May you continue to shine your light and inspire others to do the same. May you be blessed with love, happiness, and success in all that you do. Happy International Women’s Day to all the incredible women out there!

Brad Bird remembers a meeting during the making of The Incredibles, soon after he joined the studio, when Steve hurt his feelings by saying that some of the Incredibles artwork looked "kind of Saturday morning"––a reference to the low-budget cartoons that Hanna-Barbera and others produced. "In my world, that's kind of like saying, 'Your mama sleeps around,'" Brad recalls. "I was seething. When the meeting ended, I went over to Andrew and said, 'Man, Steve just said something that really pissed me off.' And Andrew, without even asking what it was, said, 'Only one thing?'" Brad came to understand that Steve was speaking not as a critic but as the ultimate advocate. Too often, animated superheroes had been made on the cheap and looked that way, too––on that Steve and Brad could agree. The Incredibles, he was implying, had to reach higher.

Compassion and communication are both incredibly important in relationships, but most of us use these at the wrong time. If we communicate, it's only in times of conflict, allowing repressed emotions and unsaid worries form into their worst phrasings. If we show compassion, it's only in good times, when we're feeling good about one another and don't feel triggered or attacked. What if we changed our approach? What if we showed compassion in conflict—taking the time to listen, understand, help each other release pent-up emotions? And what if we communicated in good times—taking the time to talk about patterns we fall into, triggers we both have, and how we can work together to break our cycles? Then, we would stop helplessly dancing the same old tango of mutual misunderstanding. Then, we could work on giving one another room to feel, to love, and to grow.

And so I suppose now, my Fellow Reader, comes the moment I assume you've all been waiting for - the Magnum Opus of this merry tale of absurd and inflammatory nonsense in which our Holy Protagonist sets out for adventure to find himself and seek a moment of astounding enlightenment amid daring trials and tribulations and perils and dangers and gallant quests and encounters with fascinating people and enlightening conversations and unforgettable sights and upon return from this great and wild journey a new discovery of himself and the world around him and an opportunity for you Oh Holy Noble Reader to live vicariously through these incredible experiences and to dream of YOUR one day when YOU will have the courage to undertake such a journey yourself. So sit back and enjoy the ride because Costa Rica has been one zany insaney psychobrainy fuck of a holy trip.

For inspiration, I would turn again and again to Lieutenant Jason “Jay” Redman, a Navy SEAL who had been shot seven times and had undergone nearly two dozen surgeries. He had placed a hand-drawn sign on the door to his room at Bethesda Naval Hospital. It read: ATTENTION. To all who enter here. If you are coming into this room with sorrow or to feel sorry for my wounds, go elsewhere. The wounds I received I got in a job I love, doing it for people I love, supporting the freedom of a country I deeply love. I am incredibly tough and will make a full recovery. What is full? That is the absolute utmost physically my body has the ability to recover. Then I will push that about 20% further through sheer mental tenacity. This room you are about to enter is a room of fun, optimism, and intense rapid regrowth. If you are not prepared for that, go elsewhere. From: The Management.

Capitalism is rotten at every level, and yet it adds up to something extraordinarily useful for society over time. The paradox of capitalism is that adding a bunch of bad-sounding ideas together creates something incredible that is far more good than bad. Capitalism inspires people to work hard, to take reasonable risks, and to create value for customers. On the whole, capitalism channels selfishness in a direction that benefits civilization, not counting a few fat cats who have figured out how to game the system. You have the same paradox with personal energy. If you look at any individual action that boosts your personal energy, it might look like selfishness. Why are you going skiing when you should be working at the homeless shelter, you selfish bastard! My proposition is that organizing your life to optimize your personal energy will add up to something incredible that is more good than bad.

Bringing incredible creative projects to life demands much hard work down in the trenches of day-to-day idea execution. Genius truly is “1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” But we cannot forget the flip side of that 99 percent—it’s impossible to solve every problem by sheer force of will. We must also make time for play, relaxation, and exploration, the essential ingredients of the creative insights that help us evolve existing ideas and set new projects in motion. Often this means creating a routine for breaking from your routine, working on exploratory side projects just for the hell of it, or finding new ways to hotwire your brain’s perspective on a problem. It also means learning how to put your inner critic on mute, banish perfectionist tendencies, and push through anxiety-inducing creative blocks. To stay creatively fit, we must keep our minds engaged and on the move—because the greatest enemy of creativity is nothing more than standing still.

People are always asking me—and every other writer I know—where story ideas come from. Where do you get your ideas, they ask; how do you ever manage to think them up? It’s certainly the hardest question in the world to answer, since stories originate in everyday happenings and emotions, and any writer who tried to answer such a question would find himself telling over, in some detail, the story of his life. Fiction uses so many small items, so many little gestures and remembered incidents and unforgettable faces, that trying to isolate any one inspiration for any one story is incredibly difficult, but basically, of course, the genesis of any fictional work has to be human experience. This translation of experience into fiction is not a mystic one. It is, I think, part recognition and part analysis. A bald description of an incident is hardly fiction, but the same incident, carefully taken apart, examined as to emotional and balanced structure, and then as carefully reassembled in the most effective form, slanted and polished and weighed, may very well be a short story.

The Poetry of Love We see the world with the eyes of a small child. We visualize the beauty of the world with an unique magic sense,and unfold our deeper feelings and expectations diffusing the seizing negative forces that stretch out their threatening tentacles. We give blow and shape in our dreams. We seek for Love through unfamiliar new people and new experiences. Love is a vivid spirit, a big breath that touches upon each piece of our existence, our each cell… Love affiliates a lot of forms, exists and fits everywhere. Each flight of a small bird, the flutter of an incredible beauty butterfly, the stones wetted by waters of Aquamarine River, the branches of the trees that dally with the blow of wind, all these is the Spirit of Love. When you love in a genuine way, love everything. You are not bothered by the babble of Nature and the strange reactions of people. You hear the sounds of everyday routine with bigger consequence. Overtakes the meanness consequently and with courage. You seek truth in small things. You live the each moment as if it's unique. Love for nature. Love for life. Love for people.

I would like to crush the incredibly infantile notion, that entails everything a woman does, is in the seeking for approval. A woman shares a selfie: she is looking for approval; a woman smiles at you: she is looking for your approval; a woman speaks her knowledge: she wants to be smart in order to gain your approval; a woman graduates at NASA: she wants to gain the approval of society (no, it cannot be that she simply dreams of landing on the Moon); a woman takes all her clothes off in her photos: she wants to gain the approval of men. Why is it that everything a woman does, says, shows and thinks; is assumed to be in the seeking of approval? The only time a woman is not seen in such a light, is when: she is silent, her body is covered up, she goes around meekly like a lamb or stands idly like a fading flower. A woman is a person who may do, say, think, feel, and show, as she wishes to, without any of that having to do with any man or any other woman around her. Yes, it is true that no person is an island, but what is also true, is that, every person is a living being capable of performing, acting, thinking, showing and feeling, entirely unto their own will and for their own purposes.

Louis de Broglie, who carried the title of prince by virtue of being related to the deposed French royal family, studied history in hopes of being a civil servant. But after college, he became fascinated by physics. His doctoral dissertation in 1924 helped transform the field. If a wave can behave like a particle, he asked, shouldn’t a particle also behave like a wave? In other words, Einstein had said that light should be regarded not only as a wave but also as a particle. Likewise, according to de Broglie, a particle such as an electron could also be regarded as a wave. “I had a sudden inspiration,” de Broglie later recalled. “Einstein’s wave-particle dualism was an absolutely general phenomenon extending to all of physical nature, and that being the case the motion of all particles—photons, electrons, protons or any other—must be associated with the propagation of a wave.”46 Using Einstein’s law of the photoelectric affect, de Broglie showed that the wavelength associated with an electron (or any particle) would be related to Planck’s constant divided by the particle’s momentum. It turns out to be an incredibly tiny wavelength, which means that it’s usually relevant only to particles in the subatomic realm, not to such things as pebbles or planets or baseballs.

I have known fantaisistes in whom phantasy was as it were organic and who died of it. I felt in them a kind of mild madness very dangerous both for themselves and for their friends. Despite the respect which all existence that does not spare itself inspires in us, none the less they fill us with uneasiness. For these fantaisistes are usually mythomaniacs, and sometimes their aim is to hold not our attention but our hearts. If they succeed in this, it means that they are neither frivolous nor given to phantasy, but that they appear so because of their clumsiness in convincing us, from a modesty of spirit which impels them to try to appear exceptional, from a desire to enter into our scheme of things from their remorse at having thought themselves indiscreet. This remorse inveigles them into flights, into total eclipses, into punishments which they inflict upon themselves and of which I could quote appalling instances. The world in which they live makes contact with them very difficult for us, since the least word, the least gesture on our part (and which we thought of no significance) sets in motion in them incredible deviations which may lead them even to suicide. One must therefore shun them from the beginning, however much they may beguile us in a world where fire is rare and never fails to attract us.

If monks had only been ascetic and eccentric in their behavior, however, they would not have won the devotion and admiration of the people in the way they did. Thus, secondly, their exemplary lifestyle made a profound impact, particularly on the peasants. Their conduct was epitomized in the words of the Celtic monk Columban (543–615), “He who says he believes in Christ ought to walk as Christ walked, poor and humble and always preaching the truth” (quoted in Baker 1970:28). The monks were poor, and they worked incredibly hard; they plowed, hedged, drained morasses, cleared away forests, did carpentry, thatched, and built roads and bridges. “They found a swamp, a moor, a thicket, a rock, and they made an Eden in the wilderness” (Newman 1970:398). Even secular historians acknowledge that the agricultural restoration of the largest part of Europe has to be attributed to them (:399). Through their disciplined and tireless labor they turned the tide of barbarism in Western Europe and brought back into cultivation the lands which had been deserted and depopulated in the age of the invasions. More important, through their sanctifying work and poverty they lifted the hearts of the poor and neglected peasants and inspired them while at the same time revolutionizing the order of social values which had dominated the empire's slave-owning society (cf Dawson 1950:56f).

In the logic of ableism, anyone who can handle such an (allegedly) horrible life must be strong; a lesser man would have given up in despair years ago. Indeed, Reeve's refusal to “give up” is precisely why the FBL selected Reeve for their model of strength; in the “billboard backstories” section of their website, they praise Reeve for trying to “beat paralysis and the spinal cord injuries” rather than “giv[ing] up.” Asserting that Goldberg is successful because of her hard work suggests that other people with dyslexia and learning disabilities who have not met with similar success have simply failed to engage in hard work; unlike Whoopi Goldberg, they are apparently unwilling to devote themselves to success. Similarly, by positioning Weihenmayer's ascent of Everest as a matter of vision, the FBL implies that most blind people, who have not ascended Everest or accomplished equivalently astounding feats, are lacking not only eyesight but vision. The disabled people populating these billboards epitomize the paradoxical figure of the supercrip: supercrips are those disabled figures favored in the media, products of either extremely low expectations (disability by definition means incompetence, so anything a disabled person does, no matter how mundane or banal, merits exaggerated praise) or extremely high expectations (disabled people must accomplish incredibly difficult, and therefore inspiring, tasks to be worthy of nondisabled attention).

Toward an Organic Philosophy SPRING, COAST RANGE The glow of my campfire is dark red and flameless, The circle of white ash widens around it. I get up and walk off in the moonlight and each time I look back the red is deeper and the light smaller. Scorpio rises late with Mars caught in his claw; The moon has come before them, the light Like a choir of children in the young laurel trees. It is April; the shad, the hot headed fish, Climbs the rivers; there is trillium in the damp canyons; The foetid adder’s tongue lolls by the waterfall. There was a farm at this campsite once, it is almost gone now. There were sheep here after the farm, and fire Long ago burned the redwoods out of the gulch, The Douglas fir off the ridge; today the soil Is stony and incoherent, the small stones lie flat And plate the surface like scales. Twenty years ago the spreading gully Toppled the big oak over onto the house. Now there is nothing left but the foundations Hidden in poison oak, and above on the ridge, Six lonely, ominous fenceposts; The redwood beams of the barn make a footbridge Over the deep waterless creek bed; The hills are covered with wild oats Dry and white by midsummer. I walk in the random survivals of the orchard. In a patch of moonlight a mole Shakes his tunnel like an angry vein; Orion walks waist deep in the fog coming in from the ocean; Leo crouches under the zenith. There are tiny hard fruits already on the plum trees. The purity of the apple blossoms is incredible. As the wind dies down their fragrance Clusters around them like thick smoke. All the day they roared with bees, in the moonlight They are silent and immaculate. SPRING, SIERRA NEVADA Once more golden Scorpio glows over the col Above Deadman Canyon, orderly and brilliant, Like an inspiration in the brain of Archimedes. I have seen its light over the warm sea, Over the coconut beaches, phosphorescent and pulsing; And the living light in the water Shivering away from the swimming hand, Creeping against the lips, filling the floating hair. Here where the glaciers have been and the snow stays late, The stone is clean as light, the light steady as stone. The relationship of stone, ice and stars is systematic and enduring: Novelty emerges after centuries, a rock spalls from the cliffs, The glacier contracts and turns grayer, The stream cuts new sinuosities in the meadow, The sun moves through space and the earth with it, The stars change places. The snow has lasted longer this year, Than anyone can remember. The lowest meadow is a lake, The next two are snowfields, the pass is covered with snow, Only the steepest rocks are bare. Between the pass And the last meadow the snowfield gapes for a hundred feet, In a narrow blue chasm through which a waterfall drops, Spangled with sunset at the top, black and muscular Where it disappears again in the snow. The world is filled with hidden running water That pounds in the ears like ether; The granite needles rise from the snow, pale as steel; Above the copper mine the cliff is blood red, The white snow breaks at the edge of it; The sky comes close to my eyes like the blue eyes Of someone kissed in sleep. I descend to camp, To the young, sticky, wrinkled aspen leaves, To the first violets and wild cyclamen, And cook supper in the blue twilight. All night deer pass over the snow on sharp hooves, In the darkness their cold muzzles find the new grass At the edge of the snow.

In The After Light “They don’t burn do they? Not like us.” -Cole Stewart “Darling, If it were between you and a hundred of Gray’s finest. I’d pick you everytime.” -Liam Stewart “It raine the day I walked into Thurmond and It rained the day I walked out.” -Ruby Never Fade “Do I… look as pretty as I feel?” -Cole Stewart “If you think you’re going to faint, sit your ass down. I told you this because you’re a big girl and I need your help’ -Cole Stewart “That’s my Gem!” -Cole Stewart “I have all the time in the world for you, Gem” -Cole Stewart “I don’t want to just see someone’s face; I want to know his shadow, too” - Jude “How cute! I have one of those too!” -Vida “ ‘I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m down to hear about that one-eyed chick’ Vida said. ‘You are actually the worst person I ever met’ Chubs said. ” -Chubs And Vida “You had day of the week underwear growing up, didn’t you?” -Jude “Ass-Clown” -Vida The Darkest Minds “I don’t know, Green; why don;t you hit her up for a chat and tea the next time she tries to capture us?” -Chubs “Oh my God, Green. Just take the damn socks and put the kid out of his misery’ -Chubs “I had pegged him’ -Ruby (Full sentence: I had pegged him for a Zepplin Fan) “Are you kidding me? Yesterday he thought a mailbox was a clown.” -Liam Stewart “Ruby! For the love of… We were talking about Black Betty not your Orange ass!” -Chubs “...Crackers…Yesssss…” -Chubs “Wake up, Team! Time to carpe the hell out of this diem!” -Liam Stewart “I know who It is! Santa!” -Liam Stewart “Did I just get sassed by a twelve-year-old?” -Liam Stewart Extra Quotes From Through The Dark “Home isn’t four walls, It’s the people you’re with” “Of course. My girl? She’s incredible” “Crazy is only crazy when it works

We had finished the set when a lovely young woman wandered into our dressing room. She had bleached-blond hair and fire-engine-red lips and giant eyelashes that made her look like a reincarnated southern version of Marilyn Monroe. As I was prone to do at that time, I made my move before anyone else could even talk to her. I grabbed her hand and pulled her into the bathroom and asked her if she could keep me company while I took a shower. Once I got into the shower, she went into an impeccable rendition of Marilyn singing "Happy Birthday" to JFK. I got out of that shower ready to go. She immediately threw off her clothes and we made love on the floor. I had known the girl for five minutes, but I was certain of my affection for her. We spent the night together, and I found out more about her, including the fact that she went to Catholic school. (She would be the inspiration for a later song, "Catholic School Girls Rule.") The next day we drove to Baton Rouge, and of course, she came with us. After we got offstage, she came up to me and said, "I have something to tell you. My father's the chief of police and the entire state of Louisiana is looking for me because I've gone missing. Oh, and besides that, I'm only fourteen." I wasn't incredibly scared, because in my somewhat deluded mind, I knew that if she told the chief of police she was in love with me, he wasn't going to have me taken out to a field and shot, but I did want to get her the hell back home right away. So we had sex one more time, and she gave me an interesting compliment that I never forgot. She said, "When you make love to me, it's like you're a professional." I told her that she should give herself a little time and she'd realize that it was because she didn't have much to compare it to. And I put her on a bus and sent her back to New Orleans.

We often talk about being kind, but how do we define "kind" at its very root? Where is the root and what is the root of "kind" and "kindness"? I truly believe that kindness is rooted in the acceptance of the flaws of life, the acceptance of the turns life has taken which we couldn't have planned for and that we didn't hope for. Kindness is rooted in the acceptance of the fact that life is a wild thing that cannot ever be caged. Some people are going to get married and divorced seven times before they find the one they are meant to be with; that's okay. Some people are going to be born with disabilities; that's okay. Some people are born in heaven while others are born in hell; both are okay. Some people are born in hell later ending up in heaven while others are born in heaven later ending up in hell; it's all okay. Life, whether belonging to you or to others, is never going to be a painting fitting into your prepared picture frame. How dare we come into this monstrous, joyous, incredible, terrible world, thinking that we can dictate what's wrong and right, what's better and what's lesser? Come into this world with your wings and your claws and your paws and your laughters! With your feathers and your fur! Because you're going to need all of it! And when you look at other people, sometimes they are going to be donning feathers and other times they are going to be clawing things, jumping in and out, screaming or laughing or crying or being quiet; it's all okay. Because we are ALL living with this monstrous and beautiful creature called Life! So, kindness is the realisation of this, the readiness to see this in others, the willingness to embrace everything that happens-- whether it is happening to yourself or to other people. Kindness is waking up to the true and full nature of life, looking her in the eyes, and being ready to embrace her.

In fact, the same basic ingredients can easily be found in numerous start-up clusters in the United States and around the world: Austin, Boston, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, Bangalore, Istanbul, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, and Dubai. To discover the secret to Silicon Valley’s success, you need to look beyond the standard origin story. When people think of Silicon Valley, the first things that spring to mind—after the HBO television show, of course—are the names of famous start-ups and their equally glamorized founders: Apple, Google, Facebook; Jobs/ Wozniak, Page/ Brin, Zuckerberg. The success narrative of these hallowed names has become so universally familiar that people from countries around the world can tell it just as well as Sand Hill Road venture capitalists. It goes something like this: A brilliant entrepreneur discovers an incredible opportunity. After dropping out of college, he or she gathers a small team who are happy to work for equity, sets up shop in a humble garage, plays foosball, raises money from sage venture capitalists, and proceeds to change the world—after which, of course, the founders and early employees live happily ever after, using the wealth they’ve amassed to fund both a new generation of entrepreneurs and a set of eponymous buildings for Stanford University’s Computer Science Department. It’s an exciting and inspiring story. We get the appeal. There’s only one problem. It’s incomplete and deceptive in several important ways. First, while “Silicon Valley” and “start-ups” are used almost synonymously these days, only a tiny fraction of the world’s start-ups actually originate in Silicon Valley, and this fraction has been getting smaller as start-up knowledge spreads around the globe. Thanks to the Internet, entrepreneurs everywhere have access to the same information. Moreover, as other markets have matured, smart founders from around the globe are electing to build companies in start-up hubs in their home countries rather than immigrating to Silicon Valley.

In my generation we did a lot of pleasure chasing—we, the generation responsible for today’s twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds and forty-year-olds. Before they came into our lives, we were on a pleasure binge, and the need for immediate gratification passed through us to our children. When I got out of the Army in 1944, the guys who were being discharged with me were mostly between the ages of eighteen and thirty. We came home to a country that was in great shape in terms of industrial capacity. As the victors, we decided to spread the good fortune around, and we did all kinds of wonderful things—but it wasn’t out of selfless idealism, let me assure you. Take the Marshall Plan, which we implemented at that time. It rebuilt Europe, yes, but it also enabled those war ruined countries to buy from us. The incredible, explosive economic prosperity that resulted just went wild. It was during that period that the pleasure principle started feeding on itself. One generation later it was the sixties, and those twenty-eight-year-old guys from World War II were forty-eight. They had kids twenty years old, kids who had been so indulged for two decades that it caused a huge, first-time-in-history distortion in the curve of values. And, boy, did that curve bend and bend and bend. These postwar parents thought they were in nirvana if they had a color TV and two cars and could buy a Winnebago and a house on the lake. But the children they had raised on that pleasure principle of material goods were by then bored to death. They had overdosed on all that stuff. So that was the generation who decided, “Hey, guess where the real action is? Forget the Winnebago. Give me sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.” Incredible mind-blowing experiences, head-banging, screw-your-brains-out experiences in service to immediate and transitory pleasures. But the one kind of gratification is simply an outgrowth of the other, a more extreme form of the same hedonism, the same need to indulge and consume. Some of those same sixties kids are now themselves forty-eight. Whatever genuine idealism they carried through those love-in days got swept up in the great yuppie gold rush of the eighties and the stock market nirvana of the nineties—and I’m afraid we are still miles away from the higher ground we seek.

In 1853, Haussmann began the incredible transformation of Paris, reconfiguring the city into 20 manageable arrondissements, all linked with grand, gas-lit boulevards and new arteries of running water to feed large public parks and beautiful gardens influenced greatly by London’s Kew Gardens. In every quarter, the indefatigable prefect, in concert with engineer Jean-Charles Alphand, refurbished neglected estates such as Parc Monceau and the Jardin du Luxembourg, and transformed royal hunting enclaves into new parks such as enormous Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes. They added romantic Parc des Buttes Chaumont and Parc Montsouris in areas that were formerly inhospitable quarries, as well as dozens of smaller neighborhood gardens that Alphand described as "green and flowering salons." Thanks to hothouses that sprang up in Paris, inspired by England’s prefabricated cast iron and glass factory buildings and huge exhibition halls such as the Crystal Palace, exotic blooms became readily available for small Parisian gardens. For example, nineteenth-century metal and glass conservatories added by Charles Rohault de Fleury to the Jardin des Plantes, Louis XIII’s 1626 royal botanical garden for medicinal plants, provided ideal conditions for orchids, tulips, and other plant species from around the globe. Other steel structures, such as Victor Baltard’s 12 metal and glass market stalls at Les Halles in the 1850s, also heralded the coming of Paris’s most enduring symbol, Gustave Eiffel’s 1889 Universal Exposition tower, and the installation of steel viaducts for trains to all parts of France. Word of this new Paris brought about emulative City Beautiful movements in most European capitals, and in the United States, Bois de Boulogne and Parc des Buttes Chaumont became models for Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park in New York. Meanwhile, for Parisians fascinated by the lakes, cascades, grottoes, lawns, flowerbeds, and trees that transformed their city from just another ancient capital into a lyrical, magical garden city, the new Paris became a textbook for cross-pollinating garden ideas at any scale. Royal gardens and exotic public pleasure grounds of the Second Empire became springboards for gardens such as Bernard Tschumi’s vast, conceptual Parc de La Villette, with its modern follies, and “wild” jardins en mouvement at the Fondation Cartier and the Musée du Quai Branly. In turn, allées of trees in some classic formal gardens were allowed to grow freely or were interleaved with wildflower meadows and wild grasses for their unsung beauty. Private gardens hidden behind hôtel particulier walls, gardens in spacious suburbs, city courtyards, and minuscule rooftop terraces, became expressions of old and very new gardens that synthesized nature, art, and outdoors living.

Meditation + Mental Strength An emotion is our evolved biology predicting the future impact of a current event. In modern settings, it’s usually exaggerated or wrong. Why is meditation so powerful? Your breath is one of the few places where your autonomic nervous system meets your voluntary nervous system. It’s involuntary, but you can also control it. I think a lot of meditation practices put an emphasis on the breath because it is a gateway into your autonomic nervous system. There are many, many cases in the medical and spiritual literature of people controlling their bodies at levels that should be autonomous. Your mind is such a powerful thing. What’s so unusual about your forebrain sending signals to your hindbrain and your hindbrain routing resources to your entire body? You can do it just by breathing. Relaxed breathing tells your body you’re safe. Then, your forebrain doesn’t need as many resources as it normally does. Now, the extra energy can be sent to your hindbrain, and it can reroute those resources to the rest of your body. I’m not saying you can beat whatever illness you have just because you activated your hindbrain. But you’re devoting most of the energy normally required to care about the external environment to the immune system. I highly recommend listening to the Tim Ferriss’s podcast with Wim Hof. He is a walking miracle. Wim’s nickname is the Ice Man. He holds the world record for the longest time spent in an ice bath and swimming in freezing cold water. I was very inspired by him, not only because he’s capable of super-human physical feats, but because he does it while being incredibly kind and happy—which is not easy to accomplish. He advocates cold exposure, because he believes people are too separate from their natural environment. We’re constantly clothed, fed, and warm. Our bodies have lost touch with the cold. The cold is important because it can activate the immune system. So, he advocates taking long ice baths. Being from the Indian subcontinent, I’m strongly against the idea of ice baths. But Wim inspired me to give cold showers a try. And I did so by using the Wim Hof breathing method. It involves hyperventilating to get more oxygen into your blood, which raises your core temperature. Then, you can go into the shower. The first few cold showers were hilarious because I’d slowly ease myself in, wincing the entire way. I started about four or five months ago. Now, I turn the shower on full-blast, and then I walk right in. I don’t give myself any time to hesitate. As soon as I hear the voice in my head telling me how cold it’s going to be, I know I have to walk in. I learned a very important lesson from this: most of our suffering comes from avoidance. Most of the suffering from a cold shower is the tip-toeing your way in. Once you’re in, you’re in. It’s not suffering. It’s just cold. Your body saying it’s cold is different than your mind saying it’s cold. Acknowledge your body saying it’s cold. Look at it. Deal with it. Accept it, but don’t mentally suffer over it. Taking a cold shower for two minutes isn’t going to kill you. Having a cold shower helps you re-learn that lesson every morning. Now hot showers are just one less thing I need out of life. [2] Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind. Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit.

I’m the kind of patriot whom people on the Acela corridor laugh at. I choke up when I hear Lee Greenwood’s cheesy anthem “Proud to Be an American.” When I was sixteen, I vowed that every time I met a veteran, I would go out of my way to shake his or her hand, even if I had to awkwardly interject to do so. To this day, I refuse to watch Saving Private Ryan around anyone but my closest friends, because I can’t stop from crying during the final scene. Mamaw and Papaw taught me that we live in the best and greatest country on earth. This fact gave meaning to my childhood. Whenever times were tough—when I felt overwhelmed by the drama and the tumult of my youth—I knew that better days were ahead because I lived in a country that allowed me to make the good choices that others hadn’t. When I think today about my life and how genuinely incredible it is—a gorgeous, kind, brilliant life partner; the financial security that I dreamed about as a child; great friends and exciting new experiences—I feel overwhelming appreciation for these United States. I know it’s corny, but it’s the way I feel. If Mamaw’s second God was the United States of America, then many people in my community were losing something akin to a religion. The tie that bound them to their neighbors, that inspired them in the way my patriotism had always inspired me, had seemingly vanished. The symptoms are all around us. Significant percentages of white conservative voters—about one-third—believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. In one poll, 32 percent of conservatives said that they believed Obama was foreign-born and another 19 percent said they were unsure—which means that a majority of white conservatives aren’t certain that Obama is even an American. I regularly hear from acquaintances or distant family members that Obama has ties to Islamic extremists, or is a traitor, or was born in some far-flung corner of the world. Many of my new friends blame racism for this perception of the president. But the president feels like an alien to many Middletonians for reasons that have nothing to do with skin color. Recall that not a single one of my high school classmates attended an Ivy League school. Barack Obama attended two of them and excelled at both. He is brilliant, wealthy, and speaks like a constitutional law professor—which, of course, he is. Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them. We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right.

She who empowers women to achieve great success from small beginnings. Her goal is to help other women because she is an incredibly successful woman.

yet it’s so simple. A conscious leader needs to be actively appreciative. We can be tough leaders at times, we can and should be strong, but at the end of the day, human beings respond best to care and appreciation. It’s important to remember that in business, everything we accomplish is ultimately done with and through other people. That is what conscious leaders do—we inspire, motivate, develop, and lead others. To be appreciative of the gifts that other people share with us and with our teams is uplifting and creates a rewarding feeling of fulfillment. Appreciations are easy for leaders and organizations to implement, as we have done at Whole Foods, and they have very powerful reverberations. They unite people, create camaraderie, and help build trust. Conscious leaders should consider ways to institutionalize a culture of appreciation—their teams will thank them for it. Let me end this section on appreciation with a personal note. I have always felt so grateful for the truly amazing people I have worked with over the past forty-plus years at Whole Foods. Without them, the company never would have amounted to much of anything, and neither would I. Every day I work with people who I know are incredibly smart, talented, caring, and passionate

If you can find the seed of compassion in your heart to send it to any person, place or situation who needs it, you will see right in front of your eyes the incredible miracle of your life healing in joy and bliss

Instead of focusing on all the negative and the things that you cannot do. Start focusing on the positive and all the things you can do.

Our words have tremendous power to speak life or death to others, however, we are accountable to God for the words we choose to speak.

Here was light, and flowers, and colours in profusion. There was a loom in the corner, and baskets of fine, thin thread in bright, bright hues. The woven coverlet on the bed, and the drapings on the open windows were unlike anything I had ever seen, woven in geometric patterns that somehow suggested fields of flowers beneath a blue sky. A wide pottery bowl held floating flowers and a slim silver fingerling swam about the stems and above the bright pebbles that floored it. I tried to imagine the pale cynical Fool in the midst of all this colour and art. I took a step further into the room, and saw something that moved my heart aside in my chest. A baby. That was what I took it for at first, and without thinking, I took the next two steps and knelt beside the basket that cradled it. But it was not a living child, but a doll, crafted with such incredible art that almost I expected to see the small chest move with breath. I reached a hand to the pale, delicate face, but dared not touch it. The curve of the brow, the closed eyelids, the faint rose that suffused the tiny cheeks, even the small hand that rested on top of the coverlets were more perfect that I supposed a made thing could be. Of what delicate clay it had been crafted, I could not guess, nor what hand had inked the tiny eyelashes that curled on the infant’s cheek. The tiny coverlet was embroidered all over with pansies, and the pillow was of satin. I don’t know how long I knelt there, as silent as if it were truly a sleeping babe. But eventually I rose, and backed out of the Fool’s room, and then drew the door silently closed behind me.” - Robin Hobb | Farseer Trilogy Book 1 | Assassin’s Apprentice Chapter Nineteen | Journey

Dear me, you're like the grand champion of awesome sauce! Your wit is so sharp it could slice through ice cream without melting it, and your charm could make even a rock swoon. I mean, seriously, you're so incredible; you make unicorns jealous! So keep on being your fantastic self, 'cause the world needs more of your wit-tastic brilliance!

Take a breath, 'cause you're just getting started on this rollercoaster of awesomeness. You haven't even scratched the surface of your incredible self! There are uncharted territories waiting to be explored, mind-blowing experiences yet to be had, and a parade of epic moments ready to march into your life. So, hold on tight, keep that wit sharp, and get ready to embrace all the jaw-dropping adventures that life has in store for you!

And at the moment of his death, he was more positive and more in control of his life and himself than he had ever been before. For someone to have lived each moment, in the moment, and loving freely, unconditionally? That boy loved everybody. He was an incredible man who was about to accomplish incredible things, and he left not an enemy in this world.

Annabella was intrigued by Santiago’s amazing mind, he was also very charming, funny, philosophical, empathic and understanding. He had a gentle soul and was incredibly romantic! Annabella fell madly in love with him. Santiago was not like the other men in her life, he was not rich, but he was self-educated, happy, confident and content just the way he was

To Jennifer Chambers Lynch, Damian O’Donnell, and the cast of the incredible 2012 film Chained—a lot of people will read this and think The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but that’s inaccurate. It was Chained that inspired me to write this book.

The woman I once saw as my greatest enemy if also the one who's shown she understands me the most, and there's something too incredible about that for dignity to matter.

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A message, like a fortune cookie, dropped into my inbox yesterday. It said: “Everything I touch sparkles, my energy is contagious & all those connected to me – wins… I can’t say for sure if it’s true, but thank you from the bottom of my heart for such sentiments. Darling listen – I want you to also take a moment today to reach out to someone who’s been a lucky charm in your life. Send them a carrier pigeon with a Thank-You note! Sweetheart, your vibes, energy & touch also have incredible power. Think about the people you care about & the ones whose lives you’re woven into. Are you making them feel lucky to have you around? Are your thoughts, words & actions adding sunshine to their day or leaving them feeling like they accidentally stepped into a grumpy cloud. Let you always strive to become the person whose presence brings joy, whose thoughts inspire, whose actions make a difference. Let you make people laugh in grocery stores, dance in small gatherings & to sing in elevators. Let your journey be meaningful & your impact undeniable. Blessings!