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Sunday Night Quotes 5/13/12- Attitude

I believe that attitude is perhaps the most powerful gift God has infused into humanity. Attitude can make or break a team. Attitude can sink family or organizational morale as well as  life it up to new heights. Attitude properly aligned can seemingly see into the invisible.

Our culture seems to be infected with toxic levels of cynicism and negativity. We applaud the cynic and sigh heavily at the dreamer. We elevate the risk managers and turn a raised eyebrow toward the risk takers. Yet, it is the dreamers and the risk takers that make a difference in the world in the most dramatic ways. The cynics droll out their sarcastic barbs and nothing changes for the positive…the change only happens towards the negative.

God has infused us with life, creativity, talent, and the ability to impact the lives of people on the planet in profound ways. The portal to seeing dreams come true and finding the faith to take a risk is in the altitude of our attitude. What you think about…the way you think about things…what you dwell upon…these are the things you slowly move towards and become. To enjoy a positive life requires that we continually work on a incorporating a positive attitude. So tonight’s quotes come from all over the place, but focus on the power of bringing your thoughts under the control of God in a positive way…go ahead just try it, I dare you, be positive this week 🙂

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Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
~Viktor E. Frankl

Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.  ~Zig Ziglar

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.  ~Maya Angelou

Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.  ~Thomas Jefferson

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.
~Khalil Gibran

Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you’re going to live your life.  ~Joel Osteen

When you pray for anyone you tend to modify your personal attitude toward him.
~Norman Vincent Peale

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.
~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

When you are thwarted, it is your own attitude that is out of order.  ~Meister Eckhart

Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.  ~Victor Hugo

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune.  ~Walt Whitman

“It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.”   ~ Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends & Influence People

“Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become your words. Keep your words positive because your words become your behavior. Keep your behavior positive because your behavior becomes your habits. Keep your habits positive because your habits become your values. Keep your values positive because your values become your destiny.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi

“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”   ~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”   ~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”  ~Winston Churchill

When one door of happiness closes, another opens, but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us. ~Helen Keller

Your time is limited, so don`t waste it living someone else`s life.   Don`t be trapped by Dogma – which is living the results of other people`s thinking.   Don`t let the noise of other`s drown out your own inner voice.   And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.   They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
~ Steve Jobs

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It’s easy to criticize…

Father_and_son_by_Gloredel

In this season of political attack adds, I ran across a powerful essay that appeared in Readers Digest many years ago, and it breathed some life and important reminders into me.

It reveals the patterns of criticism that we so easily fall into. Father to son, worker to boss, boss to worker, or even neighbor to neighbor. In this piece, it is seen through father and son.

Criticism never changes anything or anybody, it only causes the criticized to become defensive and critical in return. So, why do we expend so much energy criticizing? Why does it seem so much easier to condemn than to encourage? 

Imagine the shift that could happen if our world population decided to eliminate judgments, and criticisms, and instead worked to positively effect the change that they were critical about, rather than only pointing the finger at the other guy.

Enjoy this little reality check…may it cause you to slow down and choose to be channels of God's grace.

Monty 

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Father Forgets:

Listen, son: I am saying this as you lie asleep, one little paw crumpled under your cheek and the blond curls stickily wet on your damp forehead. I have stolen into your room alone. Just a few minutes ago, as I sat reading my paper in the library, a stifling wave of remorse swept over me. Guiltily I came to your bedside.

There are the things I was thinking, son: I had been cross to you. I scolded you as you were dressing for school because you gave your face merely a dab with a towel. I took you to task for not cleaning your shoes. I called out angrily when you threw some of your things on the floor.

At breakfast I found fault, too. You spilled things. You gulped down your food. You put your elbows on the table. You spread butter too thick on your bread. And as you started off to play and I made for my train, you turned and waved a hand and called, ‘Goodbye, Daddy!’ and I frowned, and said in reply, ‘Hold your shoulders back!’

Then it began all over again in the late afternoon. As I came up the road I spied you, down on your knees, playing marbles. There were holes in your stockings. I humiliated you before your boyfriends by marching you ahead of me to the house. Stockings were expensive – and if you had to buy them you would be more careful! Imagine that, son, from a father!

Do you remember, later, when I was reading in the library, how you came in timidly, with a sort of hurt look in your eyes? When I glanced up over my paper, impatient at the interruption, you hesitated at the door. ‘What is it you want?’ I snapped.You said nothing, but ran across in one tempestuous plunge, and threw your arms around my neck and kissed me, and your small arms tightened with an affection that God had set blooming in your heart and which even neglect could not wither. And then you were gone, pattering up the stairs.

Well, son, it was shortly afterwards that my paper slipped from my hands and a terrible sickening fear came over me. What has habit been doing to me? The habit of finding fault, of reprimanding – this was my reward to you for being a boy. It was not that I did not love you; it was that I expected too much of youth. I was measuring you by the yardstick of my own years.

And there was so much that was good and fine and true in your character. The little heart of you was as big as the dawn itself over the wide hills. This was shown by your spontaneous impulse to rush in and kiss me good night. Nothing else matters tonight, son. I have come to your bedside in the darkness, and I have knelt there, ashamed!

It is a feeble atonement; I know you would not understand these things if I told them to you during your waking hours. But tomorrow I will be a real daddy! I will chum with you, and suffer when you suffer, and laugh when you laugh. I will bite my tongue when impatient words come. I will keep saying as if it were a ritual: ‘He is nothing but a boy – a little boy!’

I am afraid I have visualized you as a man. Yet as I see you now, son, crumpled and weary in your cot, I see that you are still a baby. Yesterday you were in your mother’s arms, your head on her shoulder. I have asked too much, too much.

– W. Livingston Larned