Inspirational Quotes
"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will
prevail. He is
immortal, not because he alone among
creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he
has a soul, a spirit capable ofcompassion and sacrifice
andendurance."
-William Faulkner
"How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own
nor of my concern should immediately affect me as
though it were my own, and with such force that it
moves me to action?"
-Schopenhauer
"A beautiful word or thought that is not accompanied by
corresponding acts is like a bright flower that bears no
fruit. It would not produce any effect."
-Buddha
"No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden
of it for anyone else."
-Charles Dickens
"At such moments, you realize that you and the other
are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the
second law of life. The first is that we are all one."
-Joseph Campbell
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the
Universe... he experiences himself, his thoughts and
feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind
of optical delusion of his consciousness.
"This delusion is a kind of prison for us... Our task must
be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our
circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures
and the whole of nature in its beauty."
-Albert Einstein
"Tho much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield."
-Tennyson, from the closing stanza of Ulysses
"Forgiving and being reconciled are not about pretending
that things are other than they are. It is not patting
one another on the back and turning a blind eye to the
wrong. True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the
abuse, the pain, the degradation, the truth. It could
even sometimes make things worse. In forgiving people
are not asked to forget. On the contrary, it is important
to remember, so that we should not let such atrocities
happen again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning
what has been done. It means taking what happened
seriously and not minimizing it; drawing out the sting in
the memory that threatens to poison our entire
existence. It involves trying to understand the
perpetrators and so have empathy, to try to stand in
their shoes and appreciate the sort of pressures and
influences that might have conditioned them. Forgiving
means abandoning your right to pay back the
perpetrator in his own coin, but it is a loss that
liberates the victim. We will always need a process of
forgiveness and reconciliation to deal with those
unfortunate, yet all too human, breaches in
relationships. They are an inescapable characteristic of
the human condition."
-Desmond Tutu
"A person is a person through other human beings.
Or stated philosophically:
I am because you are, you are because we are: Umuntu
Ngumuntu Ngabantu."
-Nguni Inspiration
"One finger cannot pick up a grain: Rintiho rinwe a ri
nusi hove."
-Tonga Inspiration
"The hands are for each other: Izlandla ziyagezana."
-Swazi Inspiration
"Action from principle-the perception and performance
of right-changes things and relations; it is essentially
revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with
anything which was. It not only divides states and
churches, it divides families; aye it divides the
individual, separating the diabolical in him from the
divine."
-Henry David Thoreau
"Just as those who have been capable of the most
horrendous atrocities turn out to be ordinary human
beings like you and me, so too those who have
demonstrated noteworthy instances of the capacity to
forgive could easily be the man or woman living down
the street. Wonderfully, forgiveness and reconciliation
are possible anywhere and everywhere and have
indeed been taking place, often unsung, unremarked."
-Desmond Tutu
"A person can only realize his or her Ubuntu (African
humanism) in the company of and in interaction with
others."
-Reuel Khoza
"One such was Gordon Wilson. He was a man so
practiced in the discipline of love that when his
beautiful daughter Marie died, hard and cruelly, at the
slaughter that was the Enniskillen bombing, her hand in
his as she slipped away, the words of love and
forgiveness sprang as naturally to his lips as a child's
eyes are drawn to its mother. His words shamed us,
caught us off guard. They sounded so different from
what we expected and what we were used to. They
brought stillness with them. They carried a sense of the
transcendent into a place so ugly we could hardly
bear to watch. But he had his detractors and
unbelievably his bags of hate mail. How dare you
forgive? They shouted. What kind of father are you
who can forgive your daughter's killers? It was as if
they had never heard the command to love and forgive
before. It was as if they were being spoken to for the
first time in the words of humanity and Christ had
never uttered the words, 'Father, forgive them for
they know not what they do.' As one churchgoing critic
said to me on the subject of Gordon Wilson, 'Surely the
poor man must have been in shock,' as if to offer love
and forgiveness is a sign of mental weakness instead of
spiritual strength."
-Mary McAleese
"The world is a messy place, and unfortunately the
messier it gets, the more work we have to do."
-Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general and
winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.