Optimism
The first step towards the solution to any problem is optimism.
John Baines

Order
Life is too complicated not to be orderly.
Martha Stewart

Parenting - Children - Growth
It's not only children who grow. Parents do too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell my children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it myself.
Joyce Maynard in At Home in the World (Picador)

Patience
Patience is the ability to idle your motor when you feel like stripping your gears.
Barbara Johnson

Think on this doctrine: Reasoning beings were created for one another's sake. To be patient is a branch of justice. People sin without intending it.
Marcus Aelius Aurelius

Patience - Worry
The bridges you cross before you come to them are over rivers that are not there.
Gene Brown

Patriotism
In a free country, patriotism is not an endorsement of the worst we have been, but the pursuit of the best we can be.
Kevin Willis

The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?
Pablo Casals

A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.
George William Curtis

Pay - Reward
The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
John Ruskin

Peace
You cannot shake hands with a clinched fist.
Indira Gandhi

If they want peace, nations should avoid the pin-pricks that precede cannon shots.
Napoleon Bonaparte

If you want to make peace, you don't talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.
Moshe Dayan

Peace - Power
Many people want peace without the aloneness of power.
M. Scott Peck in Meditations from the Road

Perfection - Creativity
Perfectionism is the enemy of creation, as extreme self-solitude is the enemy of well-being.
John Updike in Odd Jobs (Knoph)

Perseverance
Consider the postage stamp: its usefulness consists in the ability to stick to one thing till it gets there.
Josh Billings

I'm a slow walker, but I never walk backwards.
Abraham Lincoln

Politics
The most important political office is that of private citizen.
Louis Brandeis

Posing
Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be, because sooner or later, if you are posing, you will forget the pose, and then where are you?
Fanny Brice

Positive - Negative
When one door closes, another opens. But we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we fail to see the one that has opened for us.
Alexander Graham Bell.

Positive - Negative
Did is a word of achievement,
Won't is a word of retreat.
Might is a word of bereavement,
Can't is a word of defeat.
Ought is a word of duty,
Try is a word each hour.
Will is a word of beauty,
Can is a word of power.
Anonymous

Potential - Personality
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.
Erich Fromm

Pride
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity to what we would have others think of us.
Jane Austen

Prison
I don't care how big he is, how many tattoos he's got, how tough he acts, at some point every man in prison cries. It's that bad.
Michael Sneed

Procrastination
Procrastination means you know what you need to do and you don't do it. If you don't know what to do, you aren't procrastinating. You are thinking.
Lynn Lively in The Procrastinator's Guide to Success

If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?
Stephen Levine

Productivity - Innovation
We know where most of the creativity, the innovation, the stuff that drives productivity lies -- in the minds of those closest to the work.
John F. Welch, Jr.

Professionals - Amateurs
Amateurs compete to win over their competitors. Pros compete to win over themselves.
Gerhard Gschwandtner

Progress
No great step, private or public, has ever been undertaken in a bliss of certainty.
Leon Wiesltier in The New Republic

Progress - Political
The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have too much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Public Office
When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.
Thomas Jefferson