Women That Inspire Me

Today I'm giving myself a birthday gift of dedicating my blog to me with some of my favorite quotes from women that I admire and inspire me.

Nadezhda Mandelstam, Russian writer, Hope Against Hope

I decided it is better to scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.

Eleanor Roosevelt, activist You Learn by Living

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Oprah Winfrey, American TV personality

As you become more clear about who you really are, you'll be better able to decide what is best for you - the first time around.

Janis Joplin, American singer

Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.

Dolly Parton, singer

If you want the rainbow, you've got to put up with the rain.

Maya Angelou, poet, educator

It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself, which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.

Maya Angelou, African American Poet

How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!

Diane Ackerman, Poet

[quoted in Newsweek, September 22, 1986] I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

The following are quotes by Mother Theresa - on the top of my list of great women.

Mother Theresa, social worker

If you judge people, you have no time to love them.

How can there be too many children? That is like saying there are too many flowers.

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

The most terrible poverty is loneliness and the feeling of being unloved.

If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one. It is not how much you do, but how much love you put into the doing that matters.

I am not sure exactly what Heaven will be like. But I don't know that when we die and if comes the time for God to judge us, He will not ask, "How many good things have you done in your life?" Rather He will ask, "How much love did you put into what you did?" 

It is easy to love the people far away. It is not always easy to love those close to us. It is easier to give a cup of rice to relieve hunger than to relieve the loneliness and pain of someone unloved in our own home. Bring love into your home for this is where our love for each other must start.

What I can do, you cannot. What you can do, I cannot. But together we can do something beautiful for God. 

Let no one come to you without leaving better and happier.

Love begins by taking care of the closest ones… the ones at home.

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.

I hope you found some of these quotes motivating and inspirational. I have been reading and keeping quote journals since I was a kid in middle school... my science teacher would have a proverb written on the chalk board each morning - I got hooked. Not only did I get hooked, I found over the years it has been cheap therapy... nothing like a daily dose of inspiration.