Author: Yoga With Brian

We must learn to honor excellence in every socially accepted human activity, however humble the activity, and to scorn shoddiness, however exalted the activity. An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society that scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. -John W. Gardner

“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”  -Dr. Jane Goodall

You can’t be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet. -Hal Borland

What power has love but forgiveness? -William Carlos Williams

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth. -Leo Tolstoy

A harbor, even if it is a little harbor, is a good thing, since adventurers come into it as well as go out, and the life in it grows strong, because it takes something from the world, and has something to give in return. -Sarah Orne Jewett

Appealing to tribe, appealing to fear, pitting one group against another, telling people that order and security will be restored if it weren’t for those who don’t look like us or don’t sound like us or don’t pray like we do, that’s an old playbook. It’s as old as time. And in a healthy democracy it doesn’t work. Our antibodies kick in, and people of goodwill from across the political spectrum call out the bigots and the fearmongers, and work to compromise and get things done and promote the better angels of our nature. -Barack Obama

Trust is the first step to love. -Premchand

The hands that help are better far / Than lips that pray. / Love is the ever gleaming star / That leads the way, / That shines, not on vague worlds of bliss, / But on a paradise in this. -Robert Green Ingersol

Every student needs someone who says, simply, “You mean something. You count.” -Tony Kushner