Stop the habit of wishful thinking and start the habit of thoughtful wishes.

Start by using this sentence for all of your wants: "I'm so happy and grateful now that..."!

Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.

Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you'll start having positive results.

Life isn't simple. But the beauty of it is, you can always start over. It'll get easier.

Each of is unique and irreplaceable. There is only one of us all of time. We are on this earth, partnered always by unseen forces that would guide us and guard us as we journey into the unknown. No one else can take our journey for us. Two people setting off side by side will still encounter different sights, different wonders. The openness to being is all the openness we are required to have each day. We start today, and tomorrow we start again, and the day after we start again, as we will the day after that. In this way, and no other, does our journey come to us. We begin. The rest unfolds through us.

The memory of my mother and her teachings were, after all, the only capital I had to start life with, and on that capital I have made my way.

God is present everywhere. The act of making art is a direct path to contact with God, and we do not need to travel any geographic or psychic distance to experience the grace of creation in the grace of our own creating. Goethe told us, "Whatever you think you can do, or believe you can do, begin it, because action has magic, grace and power in it." This was no mere bromide. It was a report on spiritual experience — an experience that each of us can have whenever we surrender to being a beginner, whenever we dismantle our adult's aloof avoidance and actively seek the Great Creator's hand by reaching out our own to start anew.

America's greatest strength, and its greatest weakness, is our belief in second chances, our belief that we can always start over, that things can be made better.

Gentleness, encouragement, safety — these are the watchwords to be put in place for criticism. I have been writing for thirty years. I have seen more good writing destroyed by bad criticism than I ever have seen bad writing helped by good criticism. I have watched valid and valuable books be picked to pieces by too many editors. I have watched plays start to find their feet, only to be tripped up by too many people contributing fixes. It is a metaphysical law that "the first rule of magic is containment." Nowhere should that law be more rigorously applied than to our writing.

You don’t need endless time and perfect conditions. Do it now. Do it today. Do it for twenty minutes and watch your heart start beating.

No one can go back and make a brand new start, my friend, but anyone can start from here and make a brand new end.

The Wonderful Paradox: I have more fun and enjoy more financial success when I stop trying to get what I want and start helping other people get what they want.

If all difficulties were known at the onset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all.

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

We're not talking about historical accuracy, we're talking about art. I've set in motion a geometric inevitability. If I start chiseling there, chipping here, the whole form is compromised.

One of the most important tasks in artistic recovery is learning to call things — and ourselves — by the right names. Most of us have spent years using the wrong names for our behaviors. We have wanted to create and we have been unable to create and we have called that inability laziness. That is not merely inaccurate. It is cruel. Accuracy and compassion serve us far better. Blocked artists are not lazy. They are blocked. Do not call the inability to start laziness. Call it fear.