Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.
– James Mattis, US Marine Corps Commander, instructing his troops as they deployed to Iraq
Aug 312012
Aug 302012
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Just as the stone of the fruit must break, so that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. And if you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy. If you accept the seasons of your heart, as you have always accepted the four seasons, you would watch with serenity the winters of your grief. Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility. For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen.
– Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
http://www.rozanehmagazine.com/allarticles/HomaLyaghat.htm
Aug 292012
Once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
– Haruki Murakami from Kafka on the Shore
http://littleaugury.blogspot.com/2011/03/tsunami.html
Aug 282012
If you can’t make a mistake, you can’t make anything.
– Marva Collins
Aug 272012
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom..
– Viktor Frankl
Aug 262012
Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
Said by The Man in Black
– William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Aug 252012
In this age, I don’t care how tactically or operationally brilliant you are, if you cannot create harmony—even vicious harmony—on the battlefield based on trust across service lines, across coalition and national lines, and across civilian/military lines, you need to go home, because your leadership is obsolete. We have got to have officers who can create harmony across all those lines.
– James Mattis, Marine Corps Commander