I was having coffee with a new client at a coffee shop in town. It was the kind that tried to replicate an old coffee shop of the 1800’s. Fine bone china, doilies, finger sandwiches and little pieces of chocolate.

She asked, “How did you start your business?”

Simple question.

My answer was also simple, “It started with a quote.”

My company’s name is Life is a Daring Adventure. This Helen Keller quote has been my mantra for over twenty years. I’ve embellished it a little by adding the words, and I’m not done yet, but I think Helen would approve.

After I started walking out to my car, moved by the nostalgia of the coffee shop, it hit me that at times of choice and decision many of my life quotes pop up to assist me. They provide me inspiration, fearlessness and comfort in times of stress.

Is that true for you?

We don’t know what the future holds, but we know who holds the future

My eighth grade teacher thought that each class should have a life quote. Being a religious in a Catholic school, teaching 100 students that year, she wanted us to know that the future was unpredictable but centered in her religious perspective. I still remember this. And perhaps that’s why this post is being written about the need for life quotes. I wonder if the other 99 students remember.

There’s no place like home.

I’m a huge Wizard of Oz fan. Just ask me to sing a few bars and I’ll karaokeSomewhere over the Rainbow at a moment’s notice, while clicking the ruby slippers I got for Christmas. You might cover your ears, but Dorothy, Toto and I have walked that yellow brick road forever. The message of a land over a rainbow, of needing brains, heart and courage challenge me everyday.

I do believe there is no place like home, and that home is where those you love abide. That includes myself. I carry my home in my heart to share with those that may be homeless.

If an organism does not get new information, it will die.

I read this one rainy day in 1991. sitting on my screened in porch. My life was stagnating at the time. I was doing the same thing every day. Work, home, dishes, tuck in boys, sleep, repeat, repeat, repeat. This Margaret Wheatley quote found inLeadership and the New Sciences, changed my life. One phrase in one book, located on page 32, bottom right changed my life.

I didn’t want to die. I wanted to fill my mind and heart with all types of information. I went back to school and studied adult education, I met new people, I thought new thoughts. I was alive. It’s the same reason I keep learning today. If we don’t provide new information into our lives, just roll out the grass blanket over us.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.

And so time passes and I found Helen Keller. I face daily a new future of change and constantly act as a free spirit in the presence of my fates. Life is indeed a daring adventure, and I’m not done yet.

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These life quotes have provided me so much. Connection to parts of my past. Inspiration for those moments that life may look challenging. Hope for tomorrow.

Do you have some life quotes that have meant something to you? Where did you get them? How do you live them? I’d love to hear….