"From myself I am copper, through you, friend, I am gold. From myself I’m a stone, but through you, I am a gem!" ~ Rumi

"Where you stand determines what you see and what you do not see; it determines also the angle you see it from; a change in where you stand changes everything." ~ Steve de Shazer

"Adversity is like the period of the rain. . . cold, comfortless, unfriendly to people and to animals; yet from that season have their birth the flower, the fruit, the date, the rose and the pomegranate." ~ Walter Scott

"Yet, taught by time, my heart has learned to glow for other's good, and melt at other's woe." ~ Homer

"Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light." ~ Helen Keller

"I've come to realize that real growth of character takes place in the valleys of life." ~ Dave Dravecky

"Instead of command and control, managing the creative process is about facilitating and permitting." ~ John Kao

"Your children will become what you are; so be what you want them to be" ~ David Bly

"I believe if you follow your heart and do what you love, success will follow. If you enchant yourself, others will be too." ~ Mark Ryden

"Jealousy springs more from love of self than from love of another." ~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

"Where wise actions are the fruit of life, wise discourse is the pollination." ~ Bryant H. McGill

"One of the things I think the next president has to do is to stop fanning people's fears. If we spend all our time feeding the American people fear and conflict and division, then they become fearful and conflicted and divided. And if we feed them hope and we feed them reason and tolerance, then they will become tolerant and reasonable and hopeful." ~ Barack Obama

"There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle." ~ James Russell Lowell

"The search for truth begins in your heart." ~ Rickson Gracie

"I do not want a friend who smiles when I smile, who weeps when I weep; for my shadow in the pool can do better than that." ~ Confucius

"To feed men and not to love them is to treat them as if they were barnyard cattle. To love them and not respect them is to treat them as if they were household pets." ~ Mencius

"A person has three choices in life. You can swim against the tide and get exhausted, or you can tread water and let the tide sweep you away, or you can swim with the tide, and let it take you where it wants you to go." ~ Andrew Schneider

"The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation." ~ Vladimir Lenin

"For a moment, I wondered how different my life would have been had they been my parents, but I shook the thought away. I knew my father had done the best he could, and I had no regrets about the way I'd turned out. Regrets about the journey, maybe, but not the destination. Because however it had happened, I'd somehow ended up eating shrimp in a dingy downtown shack with a girl that I already knew I'd never forget." ~ Nicholas Sparks