The Zen of Success – Successful Thoughts on Courage
Published July 28, 2010 | 
One of the most important and effective ways to gain knowledge and enlightenment is to learn from Successful people in history that have gone before us and become a priceless part of our past, and who were generous with their thoughts, experience and understanding.
One man with courage is a majority. – Thomas Jefferson
Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts. – John Wooden
You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man’s initiative and independence. – Abraham Lincoln
Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today’s world do not have. – Ronald Reagan
There are no easy answers’ but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. – Ronald Reagan
My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return. – Maya Angelou
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again. – Maya Angelou
One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest. – Maya Angelou
Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage. – Maya Angelou
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. – Albert Einstein
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. – Winston Churchill
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. – Winston Churchill
Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities… because it is the quality which guarantees all others. – Winston Churchill
All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them. – Walt Disney
We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them. – Benjamin Franklin
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. – C. S. Lewis
I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. – Nelson Mandela
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. – Mark Twain
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare. – Mark Twain
The Zen of Success – Successful Thoughts on Generosity
Published July 27, 2010 | One of the most important and effective ways to gain knowledge and enlightenment is to learn from Successful people in history that have gone before us and become a priceless part of our past, and who were generous with their thoughts, experience and understanding.
Alfred Nobel stipulated that no distinction of race or color will determine who received of his generosity. – Abdus Salam
At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame. – Barbara Ehrenreich
Candor and generosity, unless tempered by due moderation, leads to ruin. – Tacitus
Curiosity endows the people who have it with a generosity in argument and serenity in their own mode of life which springs from their cheerful willingness to let life take the form it will. – Alistair Cooke
Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence, the other from pride or fear. – Horace Mann
Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need. – Kahlil Gibran
Generosity is not giving me that which I need more than you do, but it is giving me that which you need more than I do. – Kahlil Gibran
Generosity is nothing else than a craze to possess. All which I abandon, all which I give, I enjoy in a higher manner through the fact that I give it away. To give is to enjoy possessively the object which one gives. – Jean-Paul Sartre
Gentleness, self-sacrifice and generosity are the exclusive possession of no one race or religion. – Mohandas Gandhi
Happiness exists on earth, and it is won through prudent exercise of reason, knowledge of the harmony of the universe, and constant practice of generosity. – Jose Marti
He who gives what he would as readily throw away, gives without generosity; for the essence of generosity is in self sacrifice. – Henry Taylor
Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity that of a man. – Adam Smith
It has always seemed strange to me… the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. 
And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. – John Steinbeck
It is not possible, given any degree of optimism and generosity in regard to people in general, to set a time limit on creative reflection or a limitation on the number of people involved in the creation. – Earle Brown
It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert. – Jacques Yves Cousteau
Understanding the Art of Generosity
Published June 15, 2010 | Let me start by making a statement about you and generosity, which is “the more you give, the more you get in return,” and being generous is something that you must develop, an art, and reach the understanding that when you are generous, you are making a difference,
and the more you practice your generosity the better you get at it, because you learn how to target being generous where it makes the biggest impact on people or projects that change them for the better, and many times, forever.
When you make a difference in someone’s life or even a group, you actually start to make lasting connections, and more importantly you interact with people that want to be interacted with because it is in human nature, our DNA, and many times the changes you make and the difference in lives will be respected by the people, the difference they actually yearn for.
Now more importantly, as you begin to make a 
difference, people will naturally start to gravitate towards you, they will want to engage with you and what you are doing, interact with you, and get you even more involved in by now what has become your Art of Generosity, and with time you will experience the exhilaration of getting more in return then you give, and by doing so you will reach a level of understanding achieved by very few.
The recession has taught us that when the economy begins to suffer our natural instincts of survival are activated to take care of ourselves and our families first, and many among us will focus only on what our instincts lead us to do, but a community that is connected and the connected economy doesn’t respect this natural instinct, although the instinct is well understood, and instead, everyone turns to those among us that are generous with who we are, and what we do, looking for the difference, the impact, and the empowerment that changes a life, changes lives, changes a village, and changes the worlds we are connected with.
Many Entrepreneurs share the art of being generous and are able to weave it into the fabric of their business, into what they do and who they are, and they understand completely that they get back much more in return through strong connections and relationships with their customers, employees and community, and the success that comes their way is in many ways a direct result of the Entrepreneur’s understanding of the Art of Generosity.