Quotes About Dedication

It is just as crazy not to be crazy about Christ as it is to be crazy about anything else.

It's the most essential thing of all just because it's not a matter of how you do it at all, but of whether you do it. Like being born, or cooking: how you do it is less important than whether you do it. You can find thousands of books on prayer that give you methods of praying, hundreds of hows; but they do you no good at all unless you actually pray. Otherwise it's like reading a cookbook instead of cooking. You can't eat a cookbook!

Praying anywhere can easily become praying nowhere, just as praying anytime can easily become praying at no time. Everything in general becomes nothing in particular.

martyrdom is not only not the same as suicide, it is the polar opposite of suicide, since the suicide loves nothing in life enough to keep living, while the martyr loves something so much that he gives up everything for it, even life. The suicide sees less value and meaning in life than anyone else, while the martyr sees more.

The fanatic is certain that he is right.

That American [Philip Kapleau] was asking us whether it is possible for him to attain enlightenment in one week of sesshin. Tell him this for me: don't say days, weeks, years, or even lifetimes. Tell him to vow to attain enlightenment though it take the infinite, the boundless, the incalculable future.4

That's the only way to do it—go.

considerable

If you are not actively involved in getting what you want, you don't really want it.

there was not one point of contact between those at home and those who had done what we had done, but we had done it for them.

A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.

To my daughter, without whose help this book would have been completed a long time back.

Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice.

As a young child in Rome, he wrote out the entire score of a nine-voice religious work after hearing it twice.

mean a thing without the ring." To inspire the players, I adapted a quote from Walt Whitman and taped it on their lockers before the first game of the playoffs, against the Miami Heat. "Henceforth we seek not good fortune, we are ourselves good fortune." Everyone expected us to dance our way to the championship

Practice doesn't make perfect," he used to say. "Perfect practice does.

If you want more, you have to require more from yourself.

I lifted you from the tomb world just now and I will continue to lift you until you lose interest and want to quit. But you will have to stop searching for me because I will never stop searching for you.(Mercer)

You know that, Ted. It's the most precious thing we have. Loyalty between us, between protector and serf, between a man and his mistress. Maybe, Benteley said slowly, a person should be loyal to an ideal.

He was interested in only one thing: turning out the best job he could, with the skill he possessed.

You know, I struggled for years to get through Training. I had to work and pay my own way. Washed dishes, worked in kitchens. Studied at night, learned, crammed, worked on and on. And you know what I think, now? What? I wish I'd become a plant earlier.

If you want something you can have it, but only if you want everything that goes with it, including all the hard work and the despair, and only if you're willing to risk failure.

What is worth having is worth working for.

It takes long practice, yes. You have to work. Did you think you could snap your fingers, and have it as a gift? What is worth having is worth working for.