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.
You don't need a special place to meditate. You can transcend anywhere in the world. The unified field is here, and there, and everywhere.
Failures are infinitely more instructive than successes.
That was a sin: to consider yourself victimized or not able to control your destiny or your fate - that was the one cardinal sin in our community.
When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important. It's hard to understand failure when you're going through it, but in the grand scheme of things it's good to fall down - not because you're drunk and not near stairs.
The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.
I never said I was an angel. Nor am I innocent or holy like the Virgin Mary. What I am is natural and serious and as sensitive as an open nerve on an ice cube.
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