"If there is any hope for the future, it surely must rest upon the ability to stare unflinchingly into the heart of darkness."
unknown
"It is better to deserve honours and not have them, than to have them and not to deserve them."
Mark Twain
"If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I dont embrace trouble; thats as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for youll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it."
Oliver Wendell Holmes
"Act the way youd like to be, and soon youll be the way you act."
Kerr Cuhulain, from Full Contact Magick (p. 107)
"Ones dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away until it is surrendered."
Michael J. Fox
"But theres another piece of me. The part thats with my family. The family I chose; the family that chose me. I feel everything that hurts them, or makes them sad. I wouldnt just kill for them; Id die for them. Theyre all I have. Theyre everything I have. And what they give me is . . . that piece of myself thats clean."
Burke, from Pain Management by Andrew Vachss
"You must do the thing you think you cannot do."
Eleanor Roosevelt, from You Learn by Living
"Dont eye the top of the ladder, eye the next rung."
Gen. Colin Powell
"There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self."
Hindustani proverb
This next one may be a bit controversial, but I do think it fits here.
"The only way a (parasitic individual) could return after being got rid of was through pity. The same is true of any type of evil. Feeling sorry for people who are engaged in wrong action does nobody any good."
Anderson Reed, from Shouting at the Wolf (p. 41)
"In all forms of warfare the loser is beaten in spirit before he is beaten in fact."
David J. Rogers
"The human body has an amazing ability to cope with arduous situations and testing environments. People who have come through, after enduring terrible hardship under seemingly impossible conditions, are a living proof of this."
John Wiseman
"Succeed in not fearing the lion, and the lion will fear you."
Eliphas Levi
"Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it."
Helen Keller
This next one makes me think about abuse. Though I would perhaps subsitute the word evil for mistakes in that case.
"There are mistakes too monstrous for remorse . . ."
Edwin Arlington Robinson
"Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one."
Jane Howard, from Families
"Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind."
William James
And one last one. I got these all off of one website, but only picked out a fraction that I felt would fit. or could fit depending on the person.
"Self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others."
Joan Didion