Little Red's Big Ideas

Changing of the Guard

In honor of our President-Elect -- I'm happy to share these quotes about "hope."  I love Obama's words of wisdom.  What's your thought on the subject?

Barack Obama:

We've been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.

Christopher Reeve:

Once you choose hope, anything's possible.

Dale Carnegie:

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.

Don Quixote:

Sanity may be madness but the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be.

Dorothy Thompson:

Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.

Dorothy Thompson:

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

Elie Wiesel:

I have learned two lessons in my life: first, there are no sufficient literary, psychological, or historical answers to human tragedy, only moral ones. Second, just as despair can come to one another only from other human beings, hope, too, can be given to one only by other human beings.

Elizabeth Gilbert:

The inability to open up to hope is what blocks trust, and blocked trust is the reason for blighted dreams.

Elizabeth Gilbert:

To sit patiently with a yearning that has not yet been fulfilled, and to trust that, that fulfillment will come, is quite possibly one of the most powerful "magic skills" that human beings are capable of. It has been noted by almost every ancient wisdom tradition.

Erik H. Erikson:

Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.

Friedrich Nietzsche:

Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man.

George Bernard Shaw:

He who has never hoped can never despair.

Caesar and Cleopatra

Henri J. M. Nouwen:

All the great spiritual leaders in history were people of hope. Abraham, Moses, Ruth, Mary, Jesus, Rumi, Gandhi, and Dorothy Day all lived with a promise in their hearts that guided them toward the future without the need to know exactly what it would look like. Let's live with hope.

Henry Ward Beecher:

Repentance is another name for aspiration.

Jane Wagner:

A sobering thought: what if, at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential?

Kalidasa:

Listen to the Exhortation of the Dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very Life of Life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Realities of your Existence.
The Bliss of Growth,
The Glory of Action,
The Splendor of Beauty;
For Yesterday is but a Dream,
And To-morrow is only a Vision;
But To-day well lived makes
Every Yesterday a Dream of Happiness,
And every Tomorrow a Vision of Hope.
Look well therefore to this Day!
Such is the Salutation of the Dawn!

Lin Yutang:

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

Louisa May Alcott:

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow them.

Margaret Fuller:

I accept the universe!

(Ralph Waldo Emerson's reported response: "By God, she'd better!")

Marion Zimmer Bradley:

The road that is built in hope is more pleasant to the traveler than the road built in despair, even though they both lead to the same destination.

Martin Luther King, jr.:

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.

The Trumpet of Conscience

Mohandas K. Gandhi:

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Molly Ivins:

I still believe in Hope - mostly because there's no such place as Fingers Crossed, Arkansas.

Patricia Hampl:

The future is here, now, and the past is full of actual deeds, real history. Utopias hardly have the meat on their bones to sustain a people in grave times.

Pearl S. Buck:

None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

Pearl S. Buck:

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

Pearl S. Buck:

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.

Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Rita Mae Brown:

Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work.

Robert Fulghum:

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge -- myth is more potent than history -- dreams are more powerful than facts -- hope always triumphs over experience -- laughter is the cure for grief -- love is stronger than death.

Robert G. Ingersoll:

Hope is the only universal liar who never loses his reputation for veracity.

Samuel Johnson:

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.

Thomas Jefferson:

I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail, but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy.

1816

Thomas Merton:

Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

Unknown:

Rosa sat so Martin could walk, Martin walked so Barack could run, Barack ran so we all can fly.

Will Durant:

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

William Penn:

Never give out while there is hope; but hope not beyond reason, for that shows more desire than judgment.

Winston Churchill:

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.

Summer Quotes

This week marks the official first day of summer.  Heat up your outgoing voice mail, email signature, web pages and "out-of-office" email messages with these inspirational words. 

I walk without flinching through the burning cathedral of the summer.  My bank of wild grass is majestic and full of music.  It is a fire that solitude presses against my lips.  ~Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit


Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.  ~Russel Baker


A perfect summer day is when the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing, the birds are singing, and the lawn mower is broken.  ~James Dent


If a June night could talk, it would probably boast it invented romance.  ~ Bern Williams


Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare,
And left the flushed print in a poppy there.
~Francis Thompson


To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
~Emily Dickinson


What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the fulfillment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade.  ~Gertrude Jekyll


In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way
I have to go to bed by day.
~Robert Louis Stevenson


In June, as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day.  No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.  ~Aldo Leopold


I question not if thrushes sing,
If roses load the air;
Beyond my heart I need not reach
When all is summer there.
~John Vance Cheney


Oh, the summer night
Has a smile of light
And she sits on a sapphire throne.
~Barry Cornwall


In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. ~Albert Camus


There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart.  ~Celia Thaxter


The summer night is like a perfection of thought.  ~Wallace Stevens


In summer, the song sings itself.  ~William Carlos Williams


Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.  ~Sam Keen


Summer has set in with its usual severity.  ~Samuel Taylor Coleridge


People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.  ~Anton Chekhov


A life without love is like a year without summer.  ~Swedish Proverb


Press close, bare-bosomed Night! Press close, magnetic,
nourishing Night!
Night of south winds!  Night of the large, few stars!
Still, nodding Night!  Mad, naked, Summer Night!
~Walt Whitman


Being a child at home alone in the summer is a high-risk occupation.  If you call your mother at work thirteen times an hour, she can hurt you.  ~Erma Bombeck


The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. ~Author unknown, commonly misattributed to Mark Twain


Do what we can, summer will have its flies.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Heat, ma'am! it was so dreadful here, that I found there was nothing left for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones.  ~Sydney Smith, Lady Holland's Memoir


Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.  ~John Lubbock


No price is set on the lavish summer;
June may be had by the poorest comer.
~James Russell Lowell, The Vision of Sir Launfal, 1848


Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.  ~Henry James


Love is to the heart what the summer is to the farmer's year - it brings to harvest all the loveliest flowers of the soul.  ~Author Unknown


Then followed that beautiful season... Summer....
Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light; and the landscape
Lay as if new created in all the freshness of childhood.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Summer is the time when one sheds one's tensions with one's clothes, and the right kind of day is jeweled balm for the battered spirit.  A few of those days and you can become drunk with the belief that all's right with the world.  ~Ada Louise Huxtable


This was one of those perfect

New England

days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders.  ~Sarah Orne Jewett

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.

Exercise Quotes

Quotes are a super-easy way to add dimenstion to promotional pieces.  Quotations like these, are a great way to add personality to everything from brochures and meeting agendas to web pages and email signatures.   This list focuses on fitness and exercise.   

Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.  ~Edward Stanley

If it weren't for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn't get any exercise at all.  ~Joey Adams

Lack of activity destroys the good condition of every human being, while movement and methodical physical exercise save it and preserve it.  ~Plato

Fitness - if it came in a bottle, everybody would have a great body.  ~Cher

There is a necessity for a regulating discipline of exercise that, whilst evoking the human energies, will not suffer them to be wasted.  ~Thomas de Quincey

The only exercise some people get is jumping to conclusions, running down their friends, side-stepping responsibility, and pushing their luck!  ~Author Unknown

Movement is a medicine for creating change in a person's physical, emotional, and mental states.  ~Carol Welch

A man's health can be judged by which he takes two at a time - pills or stairs.  ~Joan Welsh

The word aerobics came about when the gym instructors got together and said, "If we're going to charge $10 an hour, we can't call it jumping up and down."  ~Rita Rudner

I have to exercise in the morning before my brain figures out what I'm doing.  ~Marsha Doble

A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise.  ~A.A. Milne

I get my exercise acting as pallbearer to my friends who exercise.  ~Chauncey Depew, also sometimes attributed in slightly different wording to Mark Twain

I really don't think I need buns of steel.  I'd be happy with buns of cinnamon.  ~Ellen DeGeneres

Commit to be fit.  ~Author Unknown

It is exercise alone that supports the spirits, and keeps the mind in vigor.  ~Marcus Tullius Cicero

Aerobics:  a series of strenuous exercises which help convert fats, sugars, and starches into aches, pains, and cramps.  ~Author Unknown

Any workout which does not involve a certain minimum of danger or responsibility does not improve the body - it just wears it out.  ~Norman Mailer

An hour of basketball feels like 15 minutes.  An hour on a treadmill feels like a weekend in traffic school.  ~David Walters

Better to hunt in fields, for health unbought,
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught,
The wise, for cure, on exercise depend;
God never made his work for man to mend.
~John Dryden

People say that losing weight is no walk in the park.  When I hear that I think, yeah, that's the problem.  ~Chris Adams

If your dog is fat, you're not getting enough exercise.  ~Author Unknown

I am pushing sixty.  That is enough exercise for me.  ~Mark Twain

What's your favorite quote?  Share it below, please...

Health Quotes

Is your voicemail message drawing yawns from callers?  Why not add a short quotation to your message.  Always let people know how they can bypass the message in the future, change your quote frequently and get feedback from callers once you connect.  I regularly post quotes related to parks, recreation and community at this section of my blog.  So check back often or, better yet, subscribe -- it's free and you'll get instant notification when I add new material. 

The greatest wealth is health.  ~Virgil

Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.  ~World Health Organization, 1948

The power of love to change bodies is legendary, built into folklore, common sense, and everyday experience.  Love moves the flesh, it pushes matter around.... Throughout history, "tender loving care" has uniformly been recognized as a valuable element in healing.  ~Larry Dossey

In order to change we must be sick and tired of being sick and tired.  ~Author Unknown

The best six doctors anywhere
And no one can deny it
Are sunshine, water, rest, and air
Exercise and diet.
These six will gladly you attend
If only you are willing
Your mind they'll ease
Your will they'll mend
And charge you not a shilling.
~Nursery rhyme quoted by Wayne Fields, What the River Knows, 1990

Diseases of the soul are more dangerous and more numerous than those of the body.  ~Cicero

Water, air, and cleanliness are the chief articles in my pharmacopoeia.  ~Napoleon I

From the bitterness of disease man learns the sweetness of health.  ~Catalan Proverb

If you have health, you probably will be happy, and if you have health and happiness, you have all the wealth you need, even if it is not all you want.  ~Elbert Hubbard

Spring is in the Air

Oh, I know it's a been a long, cold, snowy, rainy winter.  But, Spring is just around the corner.  Use these quotes to take the chill out of the last days of winter and to warm up your promotional copy.

No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow.  ~Proverb

Springtime is the land awakening.  The March winds are the morning yawn.  ~Quoted by Lewis Grizzard in Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You

Spring is nature's way of saying, "Let's party!"  ~Robin Williams

Spring makes its own statement, so loud and clear that the gardener seems to be only one of the instruments, not the composer.  ~Geoffrey B. Charlesworth

April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.  ~Christopher Morley, John Mistletoe

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold:  when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.  ~Charles Dickens

It's spring fever.  That is what the name of it is.  And when you've got it, you want - oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!  ~Mark Twain

I love spring anywhere, but if I could choose I would always greet it in a garden.  ~Ruth Stout

Spring is sooner recognized by plants than by men.  ~Chinese Proverb


The naked earth is warm with Spring,
And with green grass and bursting trees
Leans to the sun's kiss glorying,
And quivers in the sunny breeze.
~Julian Grenfell


In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.  ~Mark Twain

I think that no matter how old or infirm I may become, I will always plant a large garden in the spring.  Who can resist the feelings of hope and joy that one gets from participating in nature's rebirth?  ~Edward Giobbi

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day.
~Robert Frost

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.  ~George Santayana

The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another.  The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month.  ~Henry Van Dyke

If you've never been thrilled to the very edges of your soul by a flower in spring bloom, maybe your soul has never been in bloom.  ~Audra Foveo

For lots more quotes about anything imaginable check out Quote Garden AND COMMENT below to tell me your very favorite thing about Spring.

Lucky You!

Oh, the luck of the Irish is everywhere at this time of year.  So, share a bit of good fortune with your customers and staff by adding some of these lucky quotes to your marketing materials throughout the month. 

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change.  ~Wilson Mizner

Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit.  ~R.E. Shay

Luck is the by-product of busting your fanny.  ~Don Sutton

Everything in life is luck.  ~Donald Trump

Name the greatest of all inventors.  Accident.  ~Mark Twain

Luck never gives; it only lends.  ~Swedish Proverb

Luck:  when your burst of energy doesn't run afoul of someone else's.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

Go and wake up your luck.  Persian Saying

Those who have succeeded at anything and don't mention luck are kidding themselves.  ~Larry King

Luck is what you have left over after you give 100 percent.  ~Langston Coleman

It's hard to detect good luck - it looks so much like something you've earned.  ~Frank A. Clark

Luck never made a man wise.  ~Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

Luck is when opportunity knocks and you answer.  ~Author Unknown

I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.  ~Thomas Jefferson

Luck has a peculiar habit of favoring those who don't depend on it.  ~Author Unknown

Shallow men believe in luck.  Strong men believe in cause and effect.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?  ~Jean Cocteau

The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.  ~Harry Golden

Feeling lucky?  Tell me about it by COMMENTING below.

Quotes about Goals

To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.

Anatole France

We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different and yet the same.

Anne Frank

Nothing happens unless first we dream.

Carl Sandburg

Our ideals resemble the stars, which illuminate the night. No one will ever be able to touch them. But the men who, like the sailors on the ocean, take them for guides, will undoubtedly reach their goal.

Carl Schurz

One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.

Frank Lloyd Wright

I long to accomplish a great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.

Helen Keller

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

Henry David Thoreau

If you don't know where you are going, you can never get lost.

Herb Cohen

Give me a stock clerk with a goal and I'll give you a man who will make history. Give me a man with no goals and I'll give you a stock clerk.

J.C. Penney

Arriving at one point is the starting point to another.

John Dewey

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

John F. Kennedy

The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men.

John F. Kennedy

Most important, leaders can conceive and articulate goals that lift people out of their petty preoccupations and unite them in pursuit of objectives worthy of their best efforts.

John Gardner

To me success means effectiveness in the world, that I am able to carry my ideas and values into the world -- that I am able to change it in positive ways.

Maxine Hong Kingston:

To will is to select a goal, determine a course of action that will bring one to that goal, and then hold to that action till the goal is reached. The key is action.

Michael Hanson

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

Michelangelo

Good thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless they be executed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Goals are discovered, not made.

Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline

Goals are not only absolutely necessary to motivate us. They are essential to really keep us alive.

Robert H. Schuller:

If one does not know to which port is sailing, no wind is favorable.

Seneca

It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.

Ursula K. LeGuin:

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

Vince Lombardi

Leaders aren't born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal.

Victor Frankl

Dictionary is the only place that success comes before work. Hard work is the price we must pay for success. I think you can accomplish anything if you're willing to pay the price.

Vince Lombardi

When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.

W. Clement Stone

You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.

Yogi Berra

God Bless America

I love America. I love that I can hate things about it, speak about it and write about it without getting in trouble, thrown in jail or beheaded.  So, in honor of its 231^st Birthday I’m happy to share these thoughts about the best country ever won. Have a blast!

There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America. -- Bill Clinton (1946 - )

There's the country of America, which you have to defend, but there's also the idea of America. America is more than just a country, it's an idea. An idea that's supposed to be contagious.  -- Bono (1960 - ), Oprah Winfrey Show, 2002

I see America, not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us, I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God. I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision.  -- Carl Sandburg (1878 - 1967)

The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide-open spaces surrounded by teeth. 

Charles Luckman

 

America is the greatest, freest and most decent society in existence. It is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism. This country, once an experiment unique in the world, is now the last best hope for the world. 

Dinesh D'Souza

 

There is nothing wrong with America that the faith, love of freedom, intelligence and energy of her citizens cannot cure. 

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969) 

 

America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself. 

Georg W. Hegel (1770 - 1831) 

 

America has never been united by blood or birth or soil. We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests and teach us what it means to be citizens. 

George W. Bush (1946 - ), Inaugural address, 2001

 

America will never run... And we will always be grateful that liberty has found such brave defenders. 

George W. Bush (1946 - )

 

Our American values are not luxuries but necessities, not the salt in our bread, but the bread itself. Our common vision of a free and just society is our greatest source of cohesion at home and strength abroad, greater than the bounty of our material blessings.

Jimmy Carter (1924 - )

 

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth. 

John Adams (1735 - 1826) 

 

I believe America's best days are ahead of us because I believe that the future belongs to freedom, not to fear. 

John Kerry (1943 - )

 

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy. 

John Updike

Do you have a favorite quote about America or the place that you call home?  Share it by COMMENTing below.

Reflections on Youth by Joseph Conrad

"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more --the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort --to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires --and expires, too soon, too soon --before life itself." -- Joseph Conrad

For more quotes go to The Library Spot. Or share your favorite quote by clicking on COMMENTS below.