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What a year! Yes, of course, there were certainly a few bright spots. But for the most part the entire year seemed to be about the economy, the loss of jobs, people losing their homes, and the lack of credit: money, money, money. As 2009 hobbles off, is there anyone who doesn’t yearn to shout “Good Riddance!” and slam the door behind it? Here’s to a better year for all of us in 2010.

Meanwhile, enjoy my roundup of the Best Business-Related Quotes for the year we will soon be rid of:

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• “An error of judgment.” (Ponzi swindler Bernie Madoff’s explanation for his multi-billion-dollar investment fraud, the biggest ripoff in Wall Street history.)

• “I wish they caught me six years ago, eight years ago.” (Bernie Madoff again, this time in an interview with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. This was the No. 10 quote for the year on Time Magazine’s poll of Top 10 Quotes.)

Warren Buffet

• “It’s fallen off a cliff.” (Billionaire investor Warren Buffet describing the U. S. economy last March.)

• “This is all happening because my father didn’t buy me a train set as a kid.” (Warren Buffett redux, interviewed early in November after his company, Berkshire Hathaway, purchased Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad for $26 billion.)

• “We’re going to have no paper, no printing plants, no unions. It’s going to be great!” (Media mogul Rupert Murdoch enthusing over the eventual replacement of newspapers by electronic devices like the Amazon Kindle.)

• “My piggy bank is not entitled to TARP funds. My piggy bank is not entitled to TARP funds. My piggy bank is…” (Bad boy Bart Simpson, writing on a classroom blackboard)

Martha Stewart

• “How can I kick myself? There are other people to be kicked.” (Martha Stewart’s response on Nightline last November, when asked about the insider-trading scandal that sent her to jail a few years earlier and reportedly cost her company more than a billion dollars. Who can deny the truth of what she says? Stewart spent 5 months in jail for her small-potatoes insider trading, but the geniuses who brought down the world’s economy through greed, chicanery and outright crime are not only walking around free but taking multi-million-dollar bonuses!)

• “I had to hold my nose and stop those firms from failing.” (Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the U. S. Federal Reserve, explaining in August that he used taxpayer money to bail out firms like AIG because he feared a second Great Depression.)

• “It makes me angry. I slammed the phone more than a few times on discussing AIG.” (Another bit of insight into Ben Bernanke’s thinking about AIG, this time in March on the CBS program, 60 Minutes.)

• “Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity.’” (Pope Benedict XVI calling for global economic reform in a July 6 Vatican Encyclical.)

Bernie Madoff on the cover of New York Magazine

• “I left a legacy of shame. It is something I will live with for the rest of my life.” (Who else? Bernard Madoff, again. This time he’s apologizing at his sentencing hearing in July.)

• “There’s an app for that.” (Apple’s advertising slogan for the iPhone. In 2009, Apps became huge.)

• “I don’t know anything about cars.” (Edward Whitacre Jr., newly appointed chairman of GM last June.)

• “When you face such an overwhelming challenge as global climate change, it can be daunting; it’s kind of like trying to lose weight.” (U. S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last May)

• “There is a real difference between managing and leading. … Managing winds up being the allocation of resources against tasks. Leadership focuses on people. My definition of a leader is someone who helps people succeed.” (Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo!)

• “In the end this is a symptom of a larger problem, a bubble-and-bust economy that valued reckless speculation over responsibility and hard work.” (President Barack Obama last March, expressing anger at $165 million in bonuses insurance giant AIG planned to pay executives after being given a $180 billion taxpayers’ bailout to stay afloat.)

• “I am deeply sorry and ashamed. I knew what I was doing was wrong—indeed, criminal.” Ooops! Bernie Madoff yet again, discussing his $65 billion swindle.

• “He [Madoff] is going to be sentenced for 150 years. I hope he lives a long life.” (Accountant Richard Friedman discussing his feelings about Bernie Madoff, whose Ponzi scheme swindled $3 million of Friedman’s money.

• “It’s the inhumanity of this man, that he can go around depriving people of their livelihoods.” (Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel discussing Bernie Madoff, who swindled Wiesel’s charitable foundation out of $15.2 million.)

President Barack Obama

• “I’m happy to get good ideas from across the political spectrum, from Democrats and Republicans. What I won’t do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place, because those theories have been tested, and they have failed. And that’s what part of the election in November was all about.” (President Barack Obama during his first official press conference in February. This was the No. 3 quote for the year on Time’s poll of Top 10 Quotes.)

• “This package that he’s going to sign is our bridge over troubled waters.” (Former U. S. President Bill Clinton in an NBC interview last Frebruary, praising Obama’s economic recovery plan.)

• “If there ever comes a day when Steve wants to retire or for other reasons cannot continue to fulfill his duties as Apple’s CEO, you will know it.” (Apple statement responding to rumors about the then-failing health of CEO Steve Jobs.)

#49 (Tyra Banks) and #100 (Chris Ferguson)

Last week I wrote about Fast Company’s impressive June article on the 100 Most Creative People in Business: each person stars on his or her own dedicated web page, which in turn links to a diversity of information. If you’re interested in a specific person, trend, or occupation, you can drill down vertically and expand horizontally, exploring any topic you find intriguing.

What appealed to me most were the quotes made by these Creatives, each linking to an article, interview, book or other medium in which that quote appeared. Most quotes were incredibly focussed and specific to a person’s field of endeavor. If I wanted to know more I could link to the source, and read the quote within its original context.

The only drawback to all of this: quotes were given for only about half of the one-hundred Creatives. Some of the people who intrigued me most were quoteless. Nonetheless, I’ve culled some good material, which I’m passing on here, making for an easy way to explore the creativity of some pretty remarkable people.

For each person below you’ll find:

• Ranking # in the list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business
• Name
• Title
• Quote
• Source with direct link (when given)

Enjoy!

#1: Jonathan Ive
Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Apple
“There’s an applied style of being minimal and simple, and then there’s real simplicity. This looks simple, because it really is.”
- Design According to Ive, Wired

#12: John Garing
Chief information officer, Defense Information Systems Agency
“We have a concept that we learned from Google called the sandbox. You bring a technology inside the sandbox and let people test it and see if it works. So it’s not the Wild West.”
- Creative Cooperation, Source

#14: JJ Abrams
Founder, Bad Robot Productions
“Star Wars is probably the most influential film of my generation. It’s the personification of good and evil and the way it opened up the world to space adventure, the way westerns had to our parents’ generations, left an indelible imprint. So, in a way, everything that any of us does is somehow directly or indirectly affected by the experience of seeing those first three films.”
-On the original Star Trek

#15: Thom Mayne
Design Director, Morphosis
“Architecture is a way of seeing, thinking, and questioning our world and our place in it. It requires a natural inquisitiveness, openness in our observations, and a will to act in affirmation…I’m chasing an architecture that engages and demands inquiry. Architecture is not passive, not decorative.”
- Pritzer Prize Acceptance Speech May 2005

#26: Sheila Bair
Chairman, FDIC
“We’ve moved beyond the liquidity crisis of last year. Most major institutions managed to turn a profit in the first quarter. And one of the few that didn’t was hurt by an improvement in its credit spreads, which damaged its balance sheet by increasing the theoretical cost of repurchasing its own debt. As I see it, we are now in the clean up phase. We need to get in, do the repair work, and get out. And we also must look to how to improve our system for the future.”
-Remarks by FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair to The Economic Club of New York

#34: Evan Williams
CEO, Twitter
“We do think Twitter is potentially a mainstream application. The way I look at it, coming from the blogging world, is that it touches a lot of the same motivations that drive people to blog, especially the more social motivations and the universal desire to put thoughts out there. Now there’s such a low barrier, combined with the ubiquity of mobile, we really think that we can reach very far and wide.”
- Q&A With Evan Williams, VentureBeat

#41: Maurice Sendak
Writer, illustrator, producer
“You dive deep and God help you. You could hit your head on something and never come up and nobody would even know you were missing. Or, you will find some nugget that was worth the pain in your chest, the blindness, everything, and you’ll come up with it and that will be what you went down for. In other words, you either risk it or you sell out.”
- An Interview with Maurice Sendak, Source

#43: Neri Oxman
Presidential Fellow, MIT Media Lab
“The biological world is displacing the machine as a general model of design.”
- ReMIXEDLIFE, ReMIXEDLIFE

#47: A.R. Rahman
Composer (Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack)
“I wasn’t too happy with the I-don’t-want-to-listen-to-it attitude of our youngsters towards film music. Why can’t we get our guys to listen to our own music rather than to Michael Jackson? I didn’t want us to lose the market to the West. The music had to be cool and rooted, and yet had to branch out. It was like the wild imagination of a child… but it worked… it did travel beyond Madras and attract people.”
- The Mozart of Madras, Indian Muslims

#49: Tyra Banks
Founder, Bankable Enterprises
“I do know about body image. About worrying about it. I made my living being 20 or 30 pounds heavier than the average model. And that’s where I got famous. Victoria’s Secret said I sold more bras and panties than anybody else, and I was traipsing down that runway with 30 pounds more booty than the other girls. So it had a lot to do with my success, my weight, but it’s also always been issue for me, so I can relate.”
- Interview: Tyra Banks - The supermodel turned spokeswoman, The Guardian

#57: Susan Wu
Chief executive officer, Ohai
“There are now a number of high profile consumer Web and gaming communities in the US making millions of dollars a year in virtual goods revenue.”
- Speakers in the News, SXSW.com

#58: June Arunga
Equity partner, Black Star Lines
“Many [African] laws breed corruption. For example, until eight years ago the Kenyan government, by law, had a monopoly on telephone service. Anyone who wanted to have this service had to go through a government employee and there was no other option. A law of this kind is not unjust but its impact is to create injustice.”
- An Interview With June Arunga, Global Envision

#61: Nora Ephron
Author, director, producer
“Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy.”

#65: Consuelo Castiglioni
Creative director, Marni
“Clothes don’t necessarily render a man sexy—his attitude and his nature do. For me, someone who is not classically handsome but has a lot of charm is more attractive than a really good-looking guy with no personality.” — From 10 Rules of Fashion From Consuelo Castiglione of Marni, Details

#83: Brian Eno
Musician
“When I was at art college, the teachers who helped me were not the ones I agreed with, or the ones who encouraged me, but the ones who took very strong positions. Because if someone does that, you can find your own position in relation to it: what is it that I don’t agree with? In the studio I want to articulate a position clearly enough so that other people can use it - or chuck it away if they don’t want it.”
- Brian Eno - interview with the producer of U2’s No Line On The Horizon, Source

#85: Pier Giulianotti
Chief of minimally invasive, general and robotic surgery, University of Illinois Medical Center
“The idea of abandoning the safe hand of the surgeon and the idea of being operated on by a mechanical device is something weird, or even dangerous. In reality, behind the robot is the control of the human mind.”
- Robotic surgery chief on cutting edge, Source

#88: Karin Fong
Creative director, Imaginary Forces
“Animation yields huge opportunities for surrealism. You can make your own logic. The nice thing about working in this medium is that you can combine techniques, old and new. The computer is a fantastic collage-box. All kinds of drawings, photography and textures can be mashed together both by hand and then even further in the machine. They don’t have to be or look digital.”
- Interview with Karin Fong, Source

#93: Bill Bensley
Principal, Bensley Design Studios
“My philosophy on design has always been Lebih gila, lebih biak, which in Indonesian means the more odd, the better.”
- Architectural Digest 100, Source

#100: Chris Ferguson
Founder, Full Tilt Poker
“Most poker players don’t understand what it is they do,’ he says. ‘I understand what I do. The core strategy I use is based on mathematics and is very difficult to play against. When I think about poker, I’m concentrating more on my own game than my opponents. If I had to tell my opponent how I’m going to play every single hand, how would I play? I’m trying to come up with a strategy that even if he knows how I’m going to play, he’s not going to be able to beat me – even if he watches me for hours. That’s the way I think about poker.”
- Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson, Source

More tips for success from the eminently quotable Mr. Trump:

16. I’m a busy guy but I set aside quiet time every morning and every evening to keep my equilibrium centered on my own path. I don’t like being swayed by anything that might be negative or damaging.

17. Every day you’ll have opportunities to take chances and to work outside your safety net. Sure, it’s a lot easier to stay in your comfort zone—in my case, business suits and real estate. But sometimes you have to take risks. When the risks pay off, that’s when you reap the biggest rewards.

18. Take the pains required to become what you want to become, or you might end up becoming something you’d rather not be. That is also a daily discipline and worth considering.

19. What matters is where you want to go. Focus in the right direction!

20. The old saying that “success breeds success” has something to it. It’s that feeling of confidence that can banish negativity and procrastination and get you going the right way.

21. Get in, get it done, get it done right, and get out.

22. I learned a lot about discipline and about channeling my aggression into achievement.

23. I was relentless, even in the face of total lack of encouragement, because—much more often than you’d think—sheer persistence is the difference between success and failure.

24. My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.

25. You can’t be scared. You do your thing, you hold your ground, you stand up tall, and whatever happens, happens.

26. My experience is that if you’re fighting for something you believe in—even if it means alienating some people along the way—things usually work out for the best in the end.

27. The most important thing in life is to love what you’re doing, because that’s the only way you’ll ever be really good at it.

28. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals.

29. Most people think small because most people are afraid of success, afraid of making decisions, afraid of winning. And that gives people like me a great advantage.

30. If you don’t tell people about your success, they probably won’t know about it.

31. Sometimes it pays to be a little wild.

Donald Trump

Love him or hate him, there’s no ignoring Donald Trump. Over the decades he’s made and lost major fortunes, known great success and abject failure, been hailed as a visionary and condemned as an ego-maniacal fool. His business empire, originally centering on Manhattan real estate, now includes hotels and buildings nationwide; international licensing of Trump properties;  the private Palm Beach club, Mar-A-Lago; the role of executive producer (and star) of the mega-hit NBC reality show, The Apprentice; ownership of the Miss Universe Organization; and a whole lot more. Trump’s personal life—filled with high-profile romantic complications and well-reported feuds—has been open to public scrutiny for decades.

Pugnacious and voluble, Trump has plenty to say about Trump—and about his work methods, tips for success, and general outlook. Here’s the first of two batches of Donald Trump quotes for your enjoyment and learning (I’ve given my very favorite quote the No. 1 position):

1. As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.
2. Everything in life is luck.
3. Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you’re generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don’t make.
4. I try to learn from the past, but I plan for the future by focusing exclusively on the present. That’s were the fun is.
5. If you’re interested in “balancing” work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable.
6. Money was never a big motivation for me, except as a way to keep score. The real excitement is playing the game.
7. Part of being a winner is knowing when enough is enough. Sometimes you have to give up the fight and walk away, and move on to something that’s more productive.
8. Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war.
9. What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate.
10. When somebody challenges you, fight back. Be brutal, be tough.
11. Without passion you don’t have energy, without energy you have nothing.
12. You can’t know it all. No matter how smart you are, no matter how comprehensive your education, no matter how wide-ranging your experience, there is simply no way to acquire all the wisdom you need to make your business thrive.
13. Watch, listen, and learn. You can’t know it all yourself…anyone who thinks they do is destined for mediocrity.
14. People get caught up in wonderful, eye-catching pitches, but they don’t do enough to close the deal. It’s no good if you don’t make the sale. Even if your foot is in the door or you bring someone into a conference room, you don’t win the deal unless you actually get them to sign on the dotted line.
15. In business, I’ve discovered that my purpose is to do my best to my utmost ability every day. That’s my standard. I learned early in my life that I had high standards.

Today we’ll finish up the bounty off quotes about being organized that we started last week (see the March 20 post):

• I find it helps to organize chores into categories: Things I won’t do now; Things I won’t do later; Things I’ll never do. (Cartoon Character “Maxine”)

• The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. (20^th century abstract expressionist painter Hans Hoffman)

• Organization can never be a substitute for initiative and for judgment. (early 20^th century U. S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis)

• Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it’s not all mixed up. (A.A. Milne, English author and creator of Winnie-the-Pooh)

• A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being. (American atuhor Anne Dillard, from The Writing Life)

• The trouble with organizing a thing is that pretty soon folks get to paying more attention to the organization than to what they’re organized for. (American author Laura Ingalls Wilder, who wrote Little Town on the Prairie)

• We adore chaos because we love to produce order. (Dutch artist M. C. Escher, known for his precise and mathematically-inspired woodcuts)

• Time is really the only capital any human being has, and the one thing he can’t afford to waste. (American inventor Thomas Edison)

• The person who moves a mountain begins by carrying small stones. (Ancient Chinese Proverb)

The seemingly impossible desire to be orderly, disciplined, and/or organized seems to have perplexed people for centuries:

• Start at the beginning, the King said gravely, and go till you come to the end; then stop. (19th century author and mathematician Lewis Carroll, from his classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

• Don’t agonize. Organize. (Florynce Kennedy, 20th century US lawyer and civil rights advocate)

• There can be no one best way of organizing a business. (Joanne Woodward, Actor)

• Good order is the foundation of all things. (Edmund Burke, 18th century Irish statesman and philosopher)

• In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves … self discipline with all of them came first. (Harry S Truman, U.S. President 1945-1953)

• It is best to do things systematically, since we are only human, and disorder is our worst enemy. (Hesiod, ancient Greek poet)

• Each morning sees some task begin/Each evening sees it close/Something attempted, something done/Has earned a night’s repose. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 19th century US poet and educator)

• It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan. (Eleanor Roosevelt, mid-20th century First Lady and lifelong political activist)

• Order is the shape upon which beauty depends. (Pearl S. Buck, 20th century American writer; winner of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes for Literature)

• Out of clutter, find Simplicity. From discord, find Harmony. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity. (Albert Einstein, 20th century Nobel Prize winning physicist)

When thinking about making our lives happier, more successful, and fulfilled, we seldom contemplate that the way to do it is through deliberately seeking difficulties. However, when Mihaly Csikszenmihalyi completed his initial studies into ‘Flow and the Psychology of Optimal Experience’, he was asked to condense the findings of a 2000 page document. After a brief moment he said,

Every day, the happy person does at least one difficult thing.

Lillian Galbraith, an early pioneer in the field of productivity and one of the most amazing women of the twentieth century, was asked what kept her alive and vital into her seventies. She responded,

‘ Every morning I ask God to give me a day filled with difficulties and challenges. Every evening I give thanks as he always answers my prayer. ‘

It may seem odd to conclude that by intentionally making your life harder you’ll be rewarded with more happiness, however, it does give a new perspective when your struggling to meet the deadline and the pressures piling. So next time you’re starting to feel stressed because the end is far from sight, take a deep breath and relax. Maybe it’s just one of those lessons that life itself keeps attempting to teach us.

Following up on my post of February 13, here are a few salient quotes about the productivity and inter-personal benefits of Listening with a capital L. The sources range from modern-day business gurus to a 1st century philosopher to an ancient Ethiopian proverb. Enjoy!

• “The best way to persuade people is with your ears—by listening to them.” (Dean Rusk, former U. S. Secretary of State)
• “If you try to get your ideas across to others without paying attention  to what they have to say, you can forget about the whole thing.” (Saul Alinsky, considered the founder of modern Community Organizing in America)
• “The fool speaks. The wise man listens.” (Ethiopian proverb)
• “Listen to everyone. Ideas come from everywhere.” (Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence)
• “The funny thing about human beings is that we tend to respect the intelligence of, and eventually to like, those who listen attentively to our ideas even if they continue to disagree with us.” (S. I. Hayakawa, Canadian-born American academic and political figure)
• “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” (Winston Churchill, British statesman and orator, former UK Prime Minister, Nobel Prize Winner)
• “In a truly customer-driven organization, everybody listens. But that’s not the way it usually is. In a typical organization, the higher up you go the less direct listening to customers there is.” (Feargall Quinn, King of Ireland’s Shopping Malls)
• “The essential information we need to get  from others depends on whether they trust us or not. Who do we trust  that doesn’t listen to us? No one. Want to build a trusting  relationship? Want to get essential information to make important decisions? Learn how to listen. Hire  people who listen to you.” (Peter deLiser, Executive Coach)
• “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They are either speaking or preparing to speak.” (Steve Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People)
• “Listening is the single skill that makes the difference between a mediocre and a great company.” (Lee Iacocca, American businessman famed for his revival of Chrysler Corporation in the 1980s)
• “Hearing is a faculty; listening is an art. When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” (Ernest Hemingway, Novelist and Nobel Prize Winner)
• “We have two ears and one mouth and should use them in that proportion.” (Epictetus, Greek Stoic Philosopher who lived 55-135 AD)

The other day, while doing some research on the Internet, I stumbled across the best and most concise description ever of what it means to be productive. But what’s particularly terrific about this little ditty is that it’s kind to those of us trying to do our best. It allows for the fact that we’re human. We can’t be perfect every day. We make mistakes. But nonetheless, we continue striving. In other words, it’s a Zen approach to productivity. I’m passing it along now:

Now is better than later.
Later is better than never.
Organized is better than messy.
Big things are composed by smaller things.
Smaller things are done by action.
Think like a person of action.
Act like a person of thought.
The beginning is half of every action.
The longest journey starts with the first step.
Everything should be made as simple as possible.
But not simpler.
Celebrate any progress.
Don’t wait to get perfect.
Deadlines and stress are a part of life.

Thanks so much to todoist for posting this great advice.

Nearly three decades ago, Tom Peters co-authored a book that became one of the biggest-selling business books of all time: In Search of Excellence. One of its eight underlying excellence principles was: “Take Action.” In other words, Get Things Done.

Peters hasn’t slowed down a whit over the years. He’s still writing best-selling books, consulting on numerous topics, winning international awards, flying across the planet to give talks… Definitely a man on the go. The personal symbol he utilizes on his website and books—a fat red exclamation point—is quite apt.

Peters once put together a list of his 41 favorite quotes to help others “ruminate on where you’ve been, and where you might go.”

To start off the New Year, here are a lucky fourteen of Tom Peters’ treasures:

• “We have a ’strategic’ plan. It’s called doing things.”—Herb Kelleher, Founder of Southwest Airlines
• “If you can’t state your position in eight words or less, you don’t have a position.”—Seth Godin
• “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”—Charles Darwin
• “We may not be interested in chaos but chaos is interested in us.”—Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century
• “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.”—General Eric Shinseki, retired Chief of Staff, U. S. Army
• “If things seem under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”—Mario Andretti
• “I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living, or get busy dying.”–-The Shawshank Redemption (Tim Robbins’ character)
• “You are the storyteller of your own life, and you can create your own legend or not.”—Isabel Allende
• “Nobody can prevent you from choosing to be exceptional.”—Mark Sanborn, The Fred Factor
• “Do one thing every day that scares you.”—Eleanor Roosevelt
• “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”—Mary Oliver
• “Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”—Helen Keller
• “Make your life itself a creative work of art.”—Mike Ray, The Highest Goal
• “Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.”—James Dean