“
The summit of happiness is reached when a person is ready to be what he is.
”
”
Erasmus
“
Though your steps may falter
persevere with the climb,
You will achieve the summit
at the appropriate time.
”
”
Patricia D'Arcy Laughlin (Sacrifice For A Kingdom)
“
There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.
”
”
Karl Marx (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1)
“
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
”
”
René Daumal
“
For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire.
”
”
Helen Keller (The Story of My Life)
“
The aim of all Christian education, moreover, is to train the believer in an adult faith that can make him a "new creation", capable of bearing witness in his surroundings to the Christian hope that inspires him.
”
”
Pope Benedict XVI (Sacramentum Caritatis: On the Eucharist as the Source and Summit of the Church's Life and Mission)
“
Everybody wants to be on the mountaintop, but if you'll remember, mountaintops are rocky and cold. There is no growth on the top of a mountain. Sure, the view is great, but what's a view for? A view just gives us a glimpse of our next destination-our next target. But to hit that target, we must come off the mountain, go through the valley, and begin to climb the next slope. It is in the valley that we slog through the lush grass and rich soil, learning and becoming what enables us to summit life's next peak.
”
”
Andy Andrews (The Noticer: Sometimes, All a Person Needs Is a Little Perspective)
“
Our life is like a land journey, too even and easy and dull over long distances across the plains, too hard and painful up the steep grades; but, on the summits of the mountain, you have a magnificent view--and feel exalted--and your eyes are full of happy tears--and you want to sing--and wish you had wings! And then--you can't stay there, but must continue your journey--you begin climbing down the other side, so busy with your footholds that your summit experience is forgotten.
”
”
Lloyd C. Douglas (The Robe)
“
It's one of the ironies of mountaineering,' said Young, 'that grown men are happy to spend months preparing for a climb, weeks rehearsing and honing their skills, and at least a day attempting to reach the summit. And then, having achieved their goal, they spend just a few moments enjoying the experience, along with one or two equally certifiable companions who have little in common other than wanting to do it all again, but a little higher.
”
”
Jeffrey Archer (Paths of Glory)
“
I have been seriously afraid at times but have used my fear as a stimulating factor rather than allowing it to paralyse me. My abilities have not been outstanding, but I have had sufficient strength and determination to meet my challenges and have usually managed to succeed with them.
”
”
Edmund Hillary (View from the Summit: The Remarkable Memoir by the First Person to Conquer Everest)
“
One day, you will stand at the summit of a figurative mountain and look back on your life's journey. And, to your utter amazement, you will see how your experiences with depression, dark and painful as they were, only added to the overall beauty of your life.
”
”
Seth Adam Smith
“
When he was preparing for a big fight, his trainer would take him mountain climbing to build up his hand strength and endurance. Max’s favorite piece of advice? Don’t look down until you reach the summit. Galen had asked why, thinking Max would give him some inspirational shit about the satisfaction of seeing how far he’d come at the end or something. Instead, Max had snorted, “Because it’s fucking scary.
”
”
Christine Bell (Down for the Count (Dare Me, #1))
“
The paths to mountain peaks are ever rugged, but men reach the summits.
”
”
Percy James Brebner (Princess Maritza)
“
Success is not a summit to climb, It is an equilibrium where work and life are balanced
”
”
Kandarp Gandhi (Buddhist Banker : Money can’t buy happiness, Wisdom can.)
“
Mountains are both journey and destination. They summon us to climb their slopes, explore their canyons, and attempt their summits. The summit, despite months of preparation and toil, is never guaranteed though tastes of sweet nectar when reached. If my only goal as a teacher and mountaineer is the summit, I risk cruel failure if I do not reach the highest apex. Instead, if I accept the mountain’s invitation to journey and create meaning in each step, success is manifest in every moment.
”
”
T.A. Loeffler
“
Each of us has a mountain to climb. To reach the summit you need to understand who you are and what you can do. Without an idea of your strengths and weaknesses you cannot define your personal limits. Survival training helps you figure that bit out. It makes you stronger, more fearless and ultimatley resilient! There is no easy or pain free way to the summit – you just have to endure and climb to it by yourself.
”
”
Rich Hungerford
“
Getting to the summit is a great achievement. But the mountain will always be there. Getting back down alive is the priority.
”
”
Amy McCulloch (Breathless)
“
Failing is easy, but climbing up the mountain requires strategy, commitment, endurance, and the iron will to keep trying till you reach the summit.
”
”
John Taskinsoy
“
Summit of a mountain is not the upper end of that mountain because every mountain has a soul higher than his body!
”
”
Mehmet Murat ildan
“
well, you made it.
you survived.
the unbearable weight suddenly lifted.
the endless night broke into dawn.
the uphill battle led you to a peak,
and now you stand tall at the summit.
so
what now?
what do you do next?
there is now air to breathe and room to grow
and time to fill and you did not plan for this,
you did not plan on having a life worth living.
and suddenly, there it is.
so,
what now?
how will you make the most of it?
how will you live the life
you fill and you did not plan for this,
you never thought you’d get the chance to see?
”
”
Caroline Kaufman (When the World Didn't End)
“
Come with us to the summit of the pyramid, to the perfection of the universe and the perfection of yourself. At the top of the pyramid are the gods and goddesses themselves – fully optimized, perfected minds. They have reached the Hyper Point, the Point Above All. Join us. Join the Society of the Divine. Join the Community of the Gods. Do not worship God. Become God.
”
”
Thomas Stark (Base Reality: Ultimate Existence (The Truth Series Book 16))
“
How to describe the excitement I felt when I saw this beautiful work and realized its potential? I guess it's like when, after a long journey, suddenly a mountain peak comes in full view. You catch your breath, take in its majestic beauty, and all you can say is "Wow!" It's the moment of revelation. You have not yet reached the summit, you don't even know yet what obstacles lie ahead, but its allure is irresistible, and you already imagine yourself at the top. It's yours to conquer now. But do you have the strength and stamina to do it?
”
”
Edward Frenkel (Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality)
“
I wanted to climb to the summit of challenges, attack my way through hardships as solid as granite, tempt all sorts of peril, and break through mysteries with science. I longed to inhale all sorts of experience and then explore the labyrinthine ins and outs of life that in the end cannot be guessed. I yearned for possibilities that react with each other, like the collision of uranium molecules: binding, multiplying, bursting, and dispersing in unexpected directions. I wanted to go to faraway places and meet with endless varieties of foreign languages and peoples. I wished to rove, finding my direction through reading the stars of constellations. I wanted to cross fields and deserts, to be burned by the sun until I blistered, to be shook by the assaulting wind, and shrink from being gripped by cold. I wanted a life that was thrilling, filled with conquest. I wanted to live! To feel the essence of being!
”
”
Andrea Hirataira
“
HAPPINESS: "Flourishing is a fact, not a feeling. We flourish when we grow and thrive. We flourish when we exercise our powers. We flourish when we become what we are capable of becoming...Flourishing is rooted in action..."happiness is a kind of working of the soul in the way of perfect excellence"...a flourishing life is a life lived along lines of excellence...Flourishing is a condition that is created by the choices we make in the world we live in...Flourishing is not a virtue, but a condition; not a character trait, but a result. We need virtue to flourish, but virtue isn't enough. To create a flourishing life, we need both virtue and the conditions in which virtue can flourish...Resilience is a virtue required for flourishing, bur being resilient will not guarantee that we will flourish. Unfairness, injustice, and bad fortune will snuff our promising lives. Unasked-for pain will still come our way...We can build resilience and shape the world we live in. We can't rebuild the world...three primary kinds of happiness: the happiness of pleasure, the happiness of grace, and happiness of excellence...people who are flourishing usually have all three kinds of happiness in their lives...Aristotle understood: pushing ourselves to grow, to get better, to dive deeper is at the heart of happiness...This is the happiness that goes hand in hand with excellence, with pursuing worthy goals, with growing mastery...It is about the exercise of powers. The most common mistake people make in thinking about the happiness of excellence is to focus on moments of achievement. They imagine the mountain climber on the summit. That's part of the happiness of excellence, and a very real part. What counts more, though, is not the happiness of being there, but the happiness of getting there. A mountain climber heads for the summit, and joy meets her along the way. You head for the bottom of the ocean, and joy meets you on the way down...you create joy along the way...the concept of flow, the kind of happiness that comes when we lose ourselves through complete absorption in a rewarding task...the idea of flow..."Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times...The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limit in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."...Joy, like sweat, is usually a byproduct of your activity, not your aim...A focus on happiness will not lead to excellence. A focus on excellence will, over time, lead to happiness. The pursuit of excellence leads to growth, mastery, and achievement. None of these are sufficient for happiness, yet all of them are necessary...the pull of purpose, the desire to feel "needed in this world" - however we fulfill that desire - is a very powerful force in a human life...recognize that the drive to live well and purposefully isn't some grim, ugly, teeth-gritting duty. On the contrary: "it's a very good feeling." It is really is happiness...Pleasures can never make up for an absence of purposeful work and meaningful relationships. Pleasures will never make you whole...Real happiness comes from working together, hurting together, fighting together, surviving together, mourning together. It is the essence of the happiness of excellence...The happiness of pleasure can't provide purpose; it can't substitute for the happiness of excellence. The challenge for the veteran - and for anyone suddenly deprived of purpose - is not simple to overcome trauma, but to rebuild meaning. The only way out is through suffering to strength. Through hardship to healing. And the longer we wait, the less life we have to live...We are meant to have worthy work to do. If we aren't allowed to struggle for something worthwhile, we'll never grow in resilience, and we'll never experience complete happiness.
”
”
Eric Greitens (Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life)
“
…every now and then when I felt the necessity of a strong inspiration of soul-thought. My heart was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heart as well as that which falls on a ledge. It is injurious to the mind as well as the body to be always in one place and always surrounded by the same circumstances. A species of thick clothing slowly grows about my mind … little habits become a part of existence, and by degrees the mind is inclosed in a husk. When this began to form I felt eager to escape from it … to drink deeply once more at the fresh fountains of life. An inspiration -- a long deep breath of pure air of thought -- could alone give health to the heart. There was a hill to which I used to resort at such periods. The labour of walking three miles to it, all the while gradually ascending, seemed to clear my blood of the heaviness accumulated at home … the slow continued rise required continual effort, which carried away the sense of oppression … Moving up the sweet short turf, at every step my heart seemed to obtain a wider horizon of feeling; with every inhalation of rich pure air, a deeper desire … By the time I had reached the summit I had entirely forgotten the petty circumstances and the annoyances of existence. I felt myself, myself'.
”
”
Richard Jefferies (The Story of my Heart)
“
It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.
”
”
Bill Bryson (One Summer: America, 1927)
“
Ignition’, the first entrepreneurship summit for colleges in south India.
”
”
Rashmi Bansal (ARISE, AWAKE
THE INSPIRING STORIES OF
YOUNG ENTREPRENEURS WHO
GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE
INTO A BUSINESS OF THEIR OWN)
“
But Longinus and his intellectual descendants had been concerned with the Sublime as a literary effect: how language, not landscape, could be lofty, grand or inspiring.
”
”
Robert Macfarlane (Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit (Landscapes))
“
We allow for complexity, and therefore make accommodations for disagreement and its patient resolution, in most of the big areas of life: international trade, immigration, oncology... but when it comes to domestic existence, we tend to make a fateful presumption of ease, which in turn inspires in us a tense aversion to protracted negotiation. We would think it peculiar indeed to devote a two-day summit to the management of a bathroom, and positevely absurd to hire a professional mediator to help us identify the right time to leave the house to go out for dinner.
Without patience for negotiation, there is bitterness: anger that has forgotten where it came from. There is a nagger who wants it done now and can't be bothered to explain why. And there is a naggee who no longer has the heart to explain that his or her resistance is grounded in some sensible counter- arguments or, alternatively, in some touching and perhaps even forgivable flaws of character.
The two parties just hope the problems - so boring to them both - will simply go away.
”
”
Alain de Botton (The Course of Love)
“
When the mountain is shrouded in clouds, dressed in snow, and painted in golden yellow, the journey appears difficult, tedious, and rough. However, as we reached the top and looked down, we took a deep breath of fresh air. I changed my perspective and soon understood there were million other ways to get here. And the best view - can be found at the summit of the most challenging ascent.
”
”
Shree Shambav (Journey of Soul - Karma)
“
Poem of the Phalanx
(Perception as Visual Personal Art)
Memories, shard, intersect and twitch,
Create images anew as they inter and switch.
Amid blackness eternal, the ground breaks the day
And the shape which cuts the ground—
Phalanx in time—reapers way. 5
Thoughts as geometric planes galley the night mind,
Images thoughted, float raging ever by.
Comets to the mind–bolt outta the black they mortise and fly–
Disappear they do–into their midnighted cry.
(Yea, evil is wrought from the want of the want of Love’s lost ought. 10
Goodness wrights of the abundance of Love in blood ’twas bought.
—Live the moment within God’s Mind too,
For once missed she will pass by you.
But He alone shall remember thy days,
For in His Heart He will hold thy ways. 15
(. . . Surmount untold; reproaching its summits hidden self face,
Can’t make for a daydrop of lost opportunity and regret’s disgrace.
Yes, eternities of regrets can never create
The day’s bested instance that was forsaked).
Fleets of illusion harbor and snag, 20
Bristled spears impale with emotive jags.
Willish anvil beaten and enhammored in bers red embs,
Guards the hellgates unhinged in forged remembered contems.
(Aye, the anvil of will beaten and wrought
Sentinels the gate ripped in forged oughts). 25
Phalanx of dreams penetrate they deep,
Guard thy soul they do lest the enemy
storms thy keep.
They rancor and barb thyself under penalty of arms,
And kill the dragons
that would do thee most harm.
Yea, in the Belly of the Beast thy wounds do feel pierced, 30
For Love Eternal must cut darkness as the Spirit is so fierce.
The hour of shadows exalt—! ’Gainst
the Christ in His plain splin‴try array–
Yet curshed in a moment on that ill-fated day.
The way of caution doth forbear to tread beyond the mire
In those bleak hours when the ‘Powers that Be’ seek
to solace thee in thy soulish desires. 35
Mercy travails deep upon the Fires of His Winds
To heal by His cut; His own everlasting His–
Is to die to Love Eternal with He,
–as He now does and is . . .
Hell for others, heaven for some,
His work ’tis finished all given and in all thrust done. 40
As Love rejoices His shed blood run red for thee—,
—Things Divined and precioius for you
and for me forever in He
(The spear that killed Him gave Him life
–the enemy’s travesty).
Phalanx comes, phalanx goes,
Wither are thou—dost thousest know? 45
Are ye pierced through and through out within?
Seek his face so life may begin
Sharp keys to hell the warriors doth say,
Yet unlock they the gate to heaven’s pathway.
End
”
”
Douglas M. Laurent
“
Even more threatening to Christian assumptions than the Qur’an’s flat denial that Jesus had been crucified, however, was the imperious, not to say terrifying, tone of authority with which it did so. Very little in either the Old or the New Testament could compare. For all the reverence with which Christians regarded their scripture, and for all that they believed it illumined by the flame of the Holy Spirit, they perfectly accepted that most of it, including the Gospels themselves, had been authored by mortals. Only the covenant on the tablets of stone, given to Moses amid fire and smoke on the summit of Sinai, ‘and written with the finger of God’,13 owed nothing to human mediation. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Moses, of all the figures in the Old and New Testaments, should have featured most prominently in the Qur’an. He was mentioned 137 times in all. Many of the words attributed to him had served as a direct inspiration to Muhammad’s own followers. ‘My people! Enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for you!’14 The Arab conquerors, in the first decades of their empire, had pointedly referred to themselves as muhajirun: ‘those who have undertaken an exodus’. A hundred years on from Muhammad’s death, when the first attempts were made by Muslim scholars to write his biography, the model that they instinctively reached for was that of Moses. The age at which the Prophet had received his first revelation from God; the flight of his followers from a land of idols; the way in which—directly contradicting the news brought to Carthage in 634—he was said to have died before entering the Holy Land: all these elements echoed the life of the Jews’ most God-favoured prophet.15 So brilliantly, indeed, did Muslim biographers paint from the palette of traditions told about Moses that the fading outlines of the historical Muhammad were quite lost beneath their brushstrokes. Last and most blessed of the prophets sent by God to set humanity on the straight path, there was only the one predecessor to whom he could properly be compared. ‘There has come to him the greatest Law that came to Moses; surely he is the prophet of this people.’16
”
”
Tom Holland (Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World)
“
EVERYBODY IS SCARED OF 2021. EUROPEANS ARE LOSING JOBS, BUSINESS AND HOPE.”
The Supreme Pontiff of Hinduism, Jagatguru Mahasannidhanam, His Divine Holiness Bhagavan Nithyananda Paramashivam reveals that we manifest not what we desire but what we believe in. Humans always operate from the space of fear and greed and that is what will be manifested in their reality. He further adds, “ even if one person makes the effort to have a shift in his/her thinking and have higher cognitions and thus raise their consciousness, there will be a shift in the entire humanity.”
Inspired by the vision of The SPH for the whole of humanity, Kailasa’s Department of Education have been holding various conventions and summits to promote the wellbeing of global citizens mentally and physically. One of them includes the Paramashivoham program, the longest, non-stop, back-to-back program currently in its 22nd Season. Using powerful, time tested, guaranteed amalgamation of spiritual tools such as Darshan where one mirrors the neurons of the cosmic principles truths, learning about the cosmic principle truths and its direct application to live an empowered and enlightened life, manifesting those truths as part of you where as a byproduct, one starts manifesting spiritual powers just by sheet initiation from The SPH.
”
”
The SPH JGM HDH Nithyananda Paramashivam, Reviver of KAILASA - the Ancient Enlightened Hindu Nation
“
Becoming your best is the essence of leadership. It's about embodying passion and integrity while inspiring the same in others. Leadership is not just about the climb to the summit, but also the transformation along the journey
”
”
Farshad Asl
“
The summit is conquered step by step; persistence fuels the ascent.
”
”
Aloo Denish Obiero
“
Sangre de Cristo foothills rising up to Santa Fe Baldy, a great gray-topped mound of a mountain, its summit often graced by snow. As described in the interview, this peak helped inspire his novella “24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai.
”
”
Roger Zelazny (The Magic: (October 1961-October 1967) Ten Tales by Roger Zelazny)
“
Eventually, at 7:22 A.M. on the morning of May 26, 1998, with tears still pouring down my frozen cheeks, the summit of Mount Everest opened her arms and welcomed me in.
As if she now considered me somehow worthy of this place. My pulse raced, and in a haze I found myself suddenly standing on top of the world.
Alan embraced me, mumbling excitedly into his mask. Neil was still staggering toward us.
As he approached, the wind began to die away.
The sun was now rising over the hidden land of Tibet, and the mountains beneath us were bathed in a crimson red.
Neil knelt and crossed himself on the summit. Then, together, with our masks of, we hugged as brothers.
I got to my feet and began to look around. I swore that I could see halfway around the world.
The horizon seemed to bend at the edges. It was the curvature of our earth. Technology can put a man on the moon but not up here.
There truly was some magic to this place.
The radio suddenly crackled to my left. Neil spoke into it excitedly.
“Base camp. We’ve run out of earth.”
The voice on the other end exploded with jubilation. Neil passed the radio to me. For weeks I had planned what I would say if I reached the top, but all that just fell apart.
I strained into the radio and spoke without thinking.
“I just want to get home.”
The memory of what went on then begins to fade. We took several photos with both the SAS and the DLE flags flying on the summit, as promised, and I scooped some snow into an empty Juice Plus vitamin bottle I had with me.*
It was all I would take with me from the summit.
I remember having some vague conversation on the radio--patched through from base camp via a satellite phone--with my family some three thousand miles away: the people who had given me the inspiration to climb.
But up there, the time flew by, and like all moments of magic, nothing can last forever.
We had to get down. It was already 7:48 A.M.
Neil checked my oxygen.
“Bear, you’re right down. You better get going, buddy, and fast.”
I had just under a fifth of a tank to get me back to the Balcony.
I heaved the pack and tank onto my shoulders, fitted my mask, and turned around. The summit was gone. I knew that I would never see it again.
*Years later, Shara and I christened our three boys with this snow water from Everest’s summit. Life moments.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
If success is the peak (or the summit), or the final destination in the success journey, then failures should be treated as the stepping stones (stairs) to reach success.
”
”
John Taskinsoy
“
Achieving success is not easy nor it is final, but sustaining one prolonged is a lot harder. Remember the road to success is often an uphill battle with many obstacles, along the way, you may fail more than once in this horrendous journey before reaching the summit. Keep in mind, none of the failures is fatal as long as you have the courage to get up after each fall, shake the dust off, and try even harder in your next attempt. After all, the process and the iron-will to continue counts more than the actual achievement of success.
”
”
John Taskinsoy
“
Sometimes before we can ascend the Summit of Success, we must first start our climb not near the top, not the middle, but at the very bottom. So when you say to yourself you've hit "rock bottom" that my friend is when you need to begin your climb.
”
”
Gaiven Clairmont (The 7 Lamps of Inspiration (A Paulo Coelho Type of Book))
“
It's an image that we're given. People have told us "No, these are the things that aren't for you." So one of the most empowering things as a young person was to go to one of the top schools and realize that there are all kinds of affirmative action. You know, there's legacy.. there's the college athlete. And colleges and universities have a right and an interest in diversifying. The problem is that when it comes to students of color, poor kids, all of a sudden that's affirmative action and that's a problem. And they're lesser than.
I have been at probably every powerful table there is in the world. I've been at G-summits, I've been in castles and palaces, in boardrooms and academic universities, and I'm coming down from the mountaintop to tell every young person that is poor and working class and has been told regardless of the color of your skin that you don't belong, don't listen to them. They don't even know how they got at those seats.
”
”
Michelle Obama
“
All that has happened let it flow in, all that flows in let it shape you, all that leaves let it go even if that crumbles you, let it all go, let it evaporate in the flames of Time. Don't regret any part of your life, any decision that you had once taken, because that's exactly what it needed to be like at that very moment to make you come this far in this exact space that you occupy now. Sometimes you would be happy with that present space and sometimes you won't, but when you find yourself distraught and broken in that state remind yourself that your journey is not over yet. Sometimes when you look back and see that in some parts of your Life, Life didn't treat you great, know that it isn't Life it is those few people and those chosen situations that Life had planned in chiselling you into your soul's very armour. Sometimes things that happen would never make sense but that's when you know that they are not meant to make sense and you accept them gracefully as a part of God's plans. That is when you learn to accept, in its absolute fullness. At times Life may look stagnant as if nothing makes sense and looking back you might like to put up questions before Life but then you have to keep going, one step at a time, seeping in every breath of air in a single moment, trying to nourish every bit of your soul and that is all around. Pain is immensely powerful and it can either ruin you entirely or form you into something beyond your imagination, but that only happens when you surrender to the summit of the pain and let it flow in each atom of your soul. Let your suffering absorb you into its shell, feel it, embrace it and above all cherish it. Not everyone is given the power to assemble a force so pure and so vulnerably strong. And then each time something comes with a face of anger, envy, fear or grief or anything that is disruptive you walk upon it gently with grace, a smile of calmness, the one that only the ocean finds to reduce the waves of a turbulent gust. That is the cost you have paid. Rather, that is the reward you have earned.
”
”
Debatrayee Banerjee
“
When I had been at sea, she felt so close, yet now living full time on land in our bed she couldn’t have been any more distant than the summit of Mauna Kea from the sea mountain. I longed for this woman beside me, like a first-time marathoner desires the finish line. I could envision the big picture; I saw us as old people holding hands and watching our children graduate from college. I was mentally prepared for the hardest of miles. In my mind, none of our problems were more than a mere hang-up in a lifetime commitment to something bigger than ourselves. Schooled by the sea, I feared not hard work, less than perfect conditions, or the hands of time. Accepting the temperamental nature of the sea and women, I expected this storm to pass as the others had before. She would toss and turn, relentlessly complaining about summer heat in our room, yet no number of blankets could warm me from her wintery chill. I had been over a thousand miles out to sea before, but after the accident, my side of the bed became the loneliest place I ever visited on the planet.
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Kenton Geer (Vicious Cycle: Whiskey, Women, and Water)
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Once you reach the summit of your own heart you will see beauty is everywhere.
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Bryant McGill (Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life)
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If you want to reach the summit , you gotta take the hard path
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Wissam Douglas
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Traditionally, Apollo and the nine goddesses known as the Muses make their home on the mountain in Greece called Parnassus. Believed to inspire creativity, they are Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Euterpe (lyric poetry), Thalia (comedy and pastoral poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Terpsichore (dance), Erato (love poetry), Polyhymnia (sacred poetry), and Urania (astronomy). Exclusively deities of performance, their blessing was solicited before any play or public recitation. (There were no Muses for sculptors, painters, and architects, regarded in Attic Greece as mere workmen, too lowly for divine patronage.)
During the eighteenth century, students from the religious schools of the Latin Quarter, panting up this hill at the southern limit of Paris, may have looked back at the city spreading along the banks of the Seine and thought themselves masters of the known world. Through the haze of wine purchased from the locals, this unpromising landfill, formed from the rubble of urban expansion and fertilized by the corpses of the nameless dead, could have felt like their own Parnassus, an illusion they celebrated by reciting or improvising verse. Still then nameless, the hill first appeared on a map, the Lutetia Parisiorum vulgo of Johannes Janssonius, in 1657, which identified the track leading to its summit as the Chemin d’Enfer: the Road to Hell. The district looked doomed to remain a wasteland until, in 1667, Louis XIV chose to build an observatory there. (Charles II of England, envious, immediately commissioned his own for Greenwich.) Sometime during the next fifty years, it became officially Montparnasse, since in 1725 the city annexed it under that name. A road was laid along the ridge. Tunneling below the unstable topsoil, quarrymen mined the fine-grained limestone from which a greater Paris would be built, and where soon the Muses, though far from home, would again be heard.
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John Baxter (Montparnasse: Paris's District of Memory and Desire (Great Parisian Neighborhoods, #3))
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The less you see of your toxic friends and the more you see of your enthusiastic friends, the better you will feel about yourself, and the better you will become. We are such social creatures that we all tend to become like the people we hang out with. It is human nature.
So spend your days in the company of people who build you up and who see your mountain as achievable.
It is why I pick team members on big expeditions so carefully. I don’t pick people just for their skills - the world is full of skilful people. I pick those who have that rare combination of good skills and even better attitudes.
Those who see the glass as half full; those who will see an obstacle as a challenge not a problem; those who help others, who encourage others and who will watch my back when it is turned.
Picking friends and expedition members who are better than you is a sure way to grow yourself. It elevates us, it inspires us, and together we all get stronger.
But most people do the opposite: they pick friends or team members who are just a little ‘lower’ down the pecking order than they are, because it makes them feel superior. But that is not the path of growth - it is the path of mediocrity.
The true champion, the true summiteer, hangs out with those who help and inspire them to be even better - through encouragement, through their actions and through their attitudes.
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Bear Grylls (A Survival Guide for Life: How to Achieve Your Goals, Thrive in Adversity, and Grow in Character)
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It's possible to reach your summit not when you accept what steps must be taken, but when you embrace them.
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Mozella Ademiluyi (Rise!: Lean Within Your Inner Power & Wisdom™)
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When I first decided to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro at the age of 50, my fears were greater than my dreams of achieving our goal. My sisters and I made it to just under 15,000 feet, exhausted and ready to head in the opposite direction of our ultimate goal. And yet, even as I turned back and did not reach the summit, I had experienced the groundwork for future success.
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Mozella Ademiluyi (Rise!: Lean Within Your Inner Power & Wisdom™)
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There is something august and stately in the Air of these things,’ he wrote after the Simplon crossing, ‘that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions … as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and imagination.
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Robert Macfarlane (Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit (Landscapes))
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Heaven should be a happy place, like those green summits of the Dolomite Mountains, after you’ve rounded a hundred curves, pedaling all the way.
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Aili McConnon (Road to Valor: A True Story of WWII Italy, the Nazis, and the Cyclist Who Inspired a Nation)
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There are great things at the peak of every mountain. When God allows you to go through a mountain, He wants you to experience greatness at the summit.
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Gift Gugu Mona (Daily Quotes about God: 365 Days of Heavenly Inspiration)
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I had to travel to the darkest corners of my mind to seek the summit of my soul.
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Positively Sherry
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Whatever the Struggle/Continue the Climb/It May Be Only One Step to the Summit
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Alicia Kay Lanier (My Unspeakable Loss: A Birthmother's Memoir About Adoption Secrecy)
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Capes are the poetic points of continents. They are the summits of our sailing souls.
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Kaci Cronkhite