Thursday 13:

This week I'm sharing some of my favorite quotes, organized by yours truly's principles for a happy life.

1. Keep It Simple
“A mess can cover up more than tables and floors. People lose themselves in the day-to-day stuff, and they don’t get to be who they really are.”
Organizer Extraordinaire, Laurie Arriola

2.Stay Present: Correct the Past, Plan the Future, But Live Now
“We are born at the rise of the curtain and we die with its fall, and every night in the presence of our patrons we write our new creation, and every night it is blotted out forever; and of what use is it to say to audience or to critic, “Ah, but you should have seen me last Tuesday?”
Michael MacLiammoir, The Bell,
“Hamlet in Eisinore”, 1952

3. Commit: Find a Purpose and Live It
“I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific”
Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner

4. Don’t Turn on Yourself
“When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included?”
Mary Oliver

5. Keep Conflict to a Minimum
"One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat. "
Woodrow Wilson, 1916

6. Laugh and Cry
“Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The Conduct of Life, 1860

7.Do Good Work
“Don’t ask your self what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who come alive” (Harold Whitman).

8.Bend Bend Bend: Choose Happy Instead of Right
“There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.”
James Russell Lowell, “Democracy”
address in Birmingham England 1884

9.Create
“I entered biology to understand the beauty of life. I started with the ecology of animals, but that wasn’t quite right, so I went one level deeper, to the study of tissues, then to chemistry, and finally even dabbled in the depths of quantum mechanics. Yet when I got there, I saw that the wonder of life had somehow slipped through my fingers along the way.”
Allbert Szent-Gyorgyi,
Nobel Laureate Biologist

10. Connect
“Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love IS everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. ..It really IS worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.”
Erica Jong, How to Save your Own Life, 1977

And a final word from the Saint of the Universe:
We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But if that drop was not in the ocean, I think the ocean would be less because of that missing drop. I do not agree with the big way of doing things.
Mother Theresa, 1975