More inspirational quotes for the season

He struggled with himself, too. I saw it – I heard it. I saw the inconceivable misery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.

I don’t like work – but I like what is in work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – which no other man can ever know.

Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well. A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better. If it falls to his lot to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven will pause to say, ‘There lived a great street sweeper who did his job well’.

Everybody can be great …. because anybody can serve.

We must accept infinite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.

The thing about happiness is that it doesn’t help you grow, only unhappiness does that. I am grateful that my bed of roses was made up equally of blossoms and thorns. I’ve had a privileged, creative, exciting life, and I think that the parts that were less joyous were preparing me, testing me, strengthening me.

It has always seemed strange to me …. the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system, and those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the qualities of the first, they love the produce of the second.