The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly.
Richard BachRead
nobody means to get carried away in mediocrity, but it happens, it happens unless you think about everything you do, unless you make every choice the best one you know how to make.
Interpretation
Mediocrity can creep into our lives if we don't consciously make the best choices.
This quote emphasizes the importance of intentionality in our actions and decisions. It warns that without mindful consideration, we may settle into a life of mediocrity rather than striving for excellence and fulfillment. Richard Bach advocates for a proactive approach to life where every choice is made with care to avoid complacency.
In practice
In a motivational speech about pursuing excellence in one's career.
The gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull . . . was no ordinary bird. Most gulls don't bother_x000D_ _x000D_ to learn more than the simplest facts of flight how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this_x000D_ _x000D_ gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else,_x000D_ _x000D_ Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.
True love stories never have endings.
We wait all these years to find someone who understands us, I thought, someone who accepts us as we are, someone with a wizard's power to melt stone to sunlight, who can bring us happiness in spite of trials, who can face our dragons in the night, who can transform us into the soul we choose to be. Just yesterday I found that magical Someone is the face we see in the mirror: It's us and our homemade masks.
From time to time it's fun to close our eyes, and in that dark say to ourselves, 'I am the sorcerer, and when I open my eyes I shall see a world that I have created, and for which I and only I am completely responsible.' Slowly then, eyelids open like curtains lifting stage-center. And sure enough, there's our world, just the way we've built it.
If our body is a perfect expression of our thought about body, and if our thought about body is that it’s condition has everything to do with inner image and nothing to do with time, then we don’t have to be impatient for being too young or frightened of being too old.
When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas.
I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.
I felt deep within me that the highest point a man can attain is not Knowledge or Virtue or Goodness or Victory but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!
We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.
Young people have a right to optimism, and rightly so; human beings have grown and developed and accomplished wonderful feats in the world. But what mires me in pessimism is the fact that so much of life is pain and sorrow and willful ignorance and violence, and pushing back against that tide takes so much effort, so much steady fight. It's tiring.
Effortlessness is the ability to slow down and listen for the spaces between the joints... Deep within all things there is a natural rhythm, a music of opening and closing, expansion and contraction.
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