Quotes about Motivation

I promise I shall never give up, and that I’ll die yelling & laughing.

"I am motivated simply by my awareness of the impact today's actions have on tomorrow's circumstances."

A warm breeze blew through my window like a gentle wave lapping the sandy shore in summer at low tide, and as I took in a breath of air that blanketed my body like tall grass in a field I felt for just that moment in time, like I did when I was a child. I felt that I had not one worry, not one burden, nothing was on my mind accept that breeze that made the curtains swell like balloons.

Motivation is everything. You can do the work of two people, but you can't be two people. Instead, you have to inspire the next guy down the line and get him to inspire his people.

This thing remember, when I am dead,
Be sure you are right, then go ahead.

Success is being the best you can be where you are right now.

Enthusiasm is the great hill-climber.

Religion is a helping hand that ends up in your pocket.

I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves - the ethical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty.  The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.

A peaceful mind is a springboard to positive transformation , for by cleansing the mind we inspire the spirit and motivate the soul.

Alexander the Great conquered the world by age 25. Mozart composed his first symphony by age 8. What have you done with your life?

You kiss the back of my neck

I'm spinning to the ground

You run your strong fingers down my back

I can't hear a sound

You whisper things to me

So sweet I can taste your words

You're so close to me

I can feel our souls touching

You draw circles in my palm

Your love warms me to my toes, this I will never forget.

You loved me even if it was only for a minute

I hold onto that minute every night

You needed me even if only for a moment

I still hold onto that moment inside.

If you look at the map you're only an inch away!

“Somewhere in your make-up there lies sleeping, the seed of achievement which, if aroused and put into action, would carry you to heights, such as you may never have hoped to attain.”

You never know how you affect other people.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.

"success is not a simple plan"

Give me somewhere to stand, and I will move the world.

If God is willing to prevent evil, but is not able to

 Then he is not omnipotent.

If he is able, but not willing

 Then he is malevolent.

If he is both able and willing

 Then whence cometh evil?

If he is neither able nor willing

 Then why call him God?

It's one of the paradoxes of spiritual practice: we need a path to travel where we already are.  SAKYONG MIPHAM RINPOCHE explains how to create the causes and conditions for realizing the enlightened nature we already possess.

Each time I leave a meditation retreat, I'm struck by the level of speed and stress in our environment.  I'm not just talking about Westerners.  Ther first time I went to Tibet, life there was very simple, but when I returned three years later, cell phones were ringing and the distraction was visible, even while I was conducting ceremonies.  Something else I've noticed lately is  that we're bombarded with bad news.  But the people I admire have always focused on the good news:  that we have in our mind wisdom, compassion, and all the other elements of enlightenment.

While living in stressful times does not ultimately affect our enlightened qualities, it does demand that we become more engaged in awakening them.  To transform the environment, we must begin with our mind.  We can't expect everyone else to change first.  As my father, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, was fond of saying, "It's easier to put on a pair of shoes than to wrap the earth in leather."  The process of putting on a pair of shoes is the path of enlightenment.

On the ultimate level, enlightenment is already here, but on the relative level we need to engineer its causes and conditions.  The mind is a neutral situation, like a cotton sheet that we can dye any color we want, but unless we take hold of it, karmic tendencies--whatever habits we've ingrained in the past--will just take over.  The practice of the path is slowly orienting that white cloth and coloring it the way we want.  The path consists of three elements: view, meditation, and activity.

View is our orientation, and how we orient our life is intimately connected with our motivation.  Traditionally, the Buddhist teachings list three kinds of motivation: small, medium, and large. These levels of motivation describe how we evolve on the path of enlightenment.  When we wake up in the morning, where is our mind taking us?  Whatever it is, from motivation, everything else will arise.

If our motivation is small, we will use our day getting the "stuff" we think will make us happy--food, clothing, and friends.  If it's a little bigger, we might add some yoga to make us feel better.  We might even expand it further to think about the karmic consequences of our actions--but it's still all about "me".  With a medium-level motivation, we're no longer so fixated on our own happiness; the basis of our actions is loving-kindness and compassion.  We're maturing.  With the largest motivation, we put the happiness of others before our own.  This is the motivation of the Buddha.  If we get up in the morning and the first thought that comes to mind is, "There are so many sentient beings; even if I amd the last person on earth, I will stay here to help them," that is a very big view.  Motivation is just an attitude, and it's free.  So why not have a big motivation?

Why is view so important? View is how our mind is oriented, and the way our mind is oriented determines what we get.  Our realization is based on the size of our view.  The view of enlightenment is that we are taking charge of our own destiny.  Unless we take the mind where we want it to go, the environment will take the mind where it wants it to go.  

By setting our view every morning, we become very good at supporting ourselves in the second element of the path, meditation.  Meditation is essentially a dualistic process in which we place our mind on an object.  When we place our mind on something, the mind absorbs its qualities, because we're becoming familiar with it.  This isn't particularly a spiritual truth; it's our everyday reality.  For example, if the object is the anger you feel toward your spouse, you become more familiar with anger, soaking up its qualities like a sponge.  In the end, that meditation leads to action.  You yell at your spouse or stomp out of the room.

Meditation is a proactive approach to this reality of mind.  We practice choosing the object rather than being led by whatever thoughts and emotions randomly beckon.  We steep our mind in qualities that lead it forward.  We begin with the stabilization technique called sharmtha, "peaceful abiding, " in which we focus on the breath.  Through this practice our mind becomes settled and workable.  Why is this important?  We may have good intentions, but if we can't control our mind, we can never enact them.  For example, we want to be compassionate but we get discursive, distracted by our mental ups and downs.  Before we can cultivate compassion, we need to possess our mind.  That's what we do in stabilizing meditation, where we calm down and experience the space of mind just being there.  From that, our mind is much less speedy.

The mind resting peacefully has incredible implications.  If you're present for the moment, you're present for your life, and you can therefore observe what's going on.  If you can observe what's going on, you can make judgements, deciding where you want to go.  At this point--known as the present moment--you can change your karma.  You can reorient your whole path, because in terms of the future, you're in the driver's seat.  You are getting more enlightened.  You are waking up.

We actively reorient ourselves in contemplation, the second kind of meditation, known as vipashyana, "clear seeing."  Now we take a thought as the object of our meditation.  For example, we can focus on our motivation, stated very simply:  "I want to meditate," "I want to develop compassion," "I want to tread on the path of enlightenment," or "I want to become enlightened, no holds barred."  At other times we might contemplate a quality--generosity, exertion, discipline, or patience--that could support our motivation.

This is a practice of fabricating our enlightened qualities so that our mind naturally turns in their direction.  We know that we're innately compassionate, and we also know that we don't feel right now because there's a blockage.  So we contrive our buddhanature in order to reveal it.  We call this relative understanding.  That understanding may be brief, but we should not be discouraged .  By becoming familiar with the view, we are clarifying our future.

It's one thing to have the attitude of enlightenment and another thing to act in an enlightened way, which is conduct or activity, the third element of the path.  If we have proper understanding of our motivation and are getting used to our enlightened qualities, chances are we can deal with speed and stress more effectively.  First we can create space in our mind to see where we are.  Then we can reorient ourselves by remembering what we're doing.  That allows us to say, "Sure, I'm tired and in a hurry and my phone is ringing again.  Yet I can stay on the path by sticking with the ten percent of my mind that really wants to do this."  The more we develop the tools to move forward on the spot, the less influence the other ninety percent of our mind will have.  Our karmic tendency to drift into agitation and discursiveness will incrementally decrease.  View, meditation, and conduct give us a way to remember what we're doing and why we're doing it, and then enact our own enlightenment.  As we do that, we are stepping on the path.  We're making progress.

Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche is the spiritual leader of Shambhala, an internation network of Buddhist meditation and retreat centers.  He is the author of Turning the Mind into an Ally and Ruling Your World.

Motivation and desire are the bulldozers that move obstacles to your goal.

NO CHALLENGE, NO CHANGE !  Forget the no pain no gain thing.  If it's pain, then STOP!  I made up the phrase 'no challenge no change' over 15 years ago when I realized it was not the pain that made one change, but the challenge that was overcome.  It started out with references to working out and then I realized I could apply that idea to every part of my life, including motherhood, relationships, school, work, etc.  I will continue to live by this phrase and hope to instill it in my daughter as well.  It has gotten me through so many hard times, including divorce, losing my mom 3 years ago, and while being in school for the last 7 years... getting closer to that PhD every semester.  There have been an insane amount of challenges I have dealt with in my life, so my goal is that the changes that result will in turn have an insane impact, not only on myself, but my daughter, and everyone I come into contact with. 

Sometimes I feel the fear of uncertainty stinging clear
And I cant help but ask myself how much I'll let the fear take the wheel and steer
It's driven me before, it seems to have a vague
Haunting mass appeal
Lately I'm beginning to find that I should be the one behind the wheel
Whatever tomorrow brings, I'll be there
With open arms and open eyes yeah
Whatever tomorrow brings, I'll be there, I'll be there
So if I decide to waiver my chance to be one of the hive
Will I choose water over wine and hold my own and drive, oh oh
It's driven me before, it seems to be the way
That everyone else get around
Lately, I'm beginning to find that when I drive myself, my light is found
Whatever tomorrow brings, I'll be there
With open arms and open eyes yeah
Whatever tomorrow brings, I'll be there, I'll be there
Would you choose water over wine
Hold the wheel and drive
Whatever tomorrow brings, I'll be there
With open arms and open eyes yeah
Whatever tomorrow brings, I'll be there, I'll be there

This is song lyrics for the song Drive by Incubus.  Whenever I am having a bad day or I feel like giving up I listen to this song and regain a sense or confidence and power to make it through no matter what today, tomorrow, and the future may bring.

"Ask, Believe it in your gut and it is yours!"

People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing - that's why we recommend it daily.

I recieved this email this afternoon and would like to share a qote with you..

The email said.....
In looking at your beautiful web site, I thought of a quote that fits with the spirit I see and feel from you here:

"If you can live by the best inside yourself, the worst outside yourself will crumble at your feet."

Laura Teresa Marquez

Have a great day! Jim, El Paso, TX, USA

From: Jim Stegall

Believe that your life is worth living, and your belief will create the fact.

People often say that motivation doesn't last.
Well, neither does bathing-that's why we recommend it daily.

"The only lifelong, reliable motivations are those that come from within, and one of the strongest of those is the joy and pride that grow from knowing that you’ve just done something as well as you can do it."

"You can't leave footprints in the sands of time if you're sitting on your butt. And who wants to leave buttprints in the sands of time?"