Instructions For Life

Give people more than they expect, and do it cheerfully.

Memorize your favorite poem.

Don’t believe all you hear, spend all you have, or sleep all you want.

Say "I love you" or "Aloha" only if you mean it.

When you say, "I’m sorry," look the person in the eye.

Be engaged at least six months before you get married.

Believe in love at first sight.

Never laugh at anyone’s dreams.

Love deeply and passionately. You might get hurt, but it’s the only way to live life completely.

In disagreements, fight fairly. No name calling.

Don’t judge people by their relatives.

Talk slowly but think quickly.

When someone asks you a question you don’t want to answer,
smile and ask, "Why do you want to know?"

Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

Call home.

Say, "Bless you" when you hear someone sneeze.

When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

Remember the three R’s:
Respect for self;
Respect for others;
Responsibility for all your actions.

Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

Smile when picking up the phone. The caller will hear it in your voice.

Marry a person you love to talk to. As you get older, their conversational skills will be as important as any others.

Spend some time alone.

Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.

Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

Read more books and watch less TV.

Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll get to enjoy it a second time.

Trust in God but lock your car.

Do all you can to create a tranquil, harmonious home?

In disagreements with loved ones, deal with the current situation.

Don’t bring up the past.

Read between the lines.

Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.

Be gentle with the Earth.

Pray. There’s immeasurable power in it.

Never interrupt when you are being flattered.

Mind your own business.

Don’t trust a man/woman who doesn’t close his/her eyes when you kiss.

Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.

If you make a lot of money, put it to use helping others while you are living. That is wealth’s greatest satisfaction.

Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a stroke of luck.

Learn the rules, and then break some.

Remember that the best relationship is one where your love
for each other is greater than your need for each other.

Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

Remember that your character is your destiny.

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

Many people will walk in and out of your life,
but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.

To handle yourself, use your head;
To handle others, use your heart.

Anger is only one letter short of danger.

If someone betrays you once, it’s his fault;
if he betrays you twice, it’s your fault.

Great minds discuss ideas;
Average minds discuss events;
Small minds discuss people.

God gives every bird its food;
But He does not throw it into its nest.

He, who loses money, loses much;
He who loses a friend, loses more;
He who loses faith, loses all.

Beautiful young people are acts of nature,
But beautiful old people are works of art.

Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.

The tongue weighs practically nothing, But so few people can hold it.

The real test of class is how you treat people who cannot possibly do you any good.

The road to success and the road to happiness are two lanes of the same highway. The toll paid is, "To Thine Ownself, Be True."

Everyone can use a prayer.

Family, caring and love have no ethnic, age, socio-economic, geographic, religious, cultural, or ethnic boundaries.

No matter how hard and heart-wrenching the consequences:
"It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all."

Making a living is not the same thing as making a life.

If you pursue happiness, it will elude you. If you focus on your family, the needs of others, your work, meeting new people, and doing the very best you can, happiness will find you.

Believe in miracles.

Synchronicity happens when one tunes in and listens to the soft, almost imperceptible whisperings.

If something unkind is said about you, bless the person, knowing that untoward comments are merely self-projections. Continue to live your life, so that no one will believe them.

Children and grandparents are natural allies.

A heart filled with gratitude attracts serenity and contentment.

Even when you have pains, you don’t have to be one.

Silent company is often more healing than words of advice.

When one door closes, another opens. Keep from looking so regretfully at the closed door, and look for the other that is swinging wide open.

The greater a person’s sense of guilt, the greater his/her need to cast blame on others.

Carpe Diem (Seize the Day)! Yet, while opportunity may not knock twice, Grace often gives you a second chance.

Going through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands doesn’t work; you need to be able to throw something back.

Singing Amazing Grace, Kanaka Wai Wai and Kawaipunahele can lift my spirits for hours.

Someone’s day, month, or year is made by simply sending a card or an e-mail.

Less is more.

Living in the tradition of Lloyd C. Douglas’ The Magnificent Obsession, giving without telling anyone, is true giving.

To cheer yourself up, cheer someone else up.

When you wave to people in the country, they stop what they are doing and wave back.

You can tell a lot about a person by the way three things are handled: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.

Whenever a decision is based on love, it is the right decision.

Among the best gifts given to children are not material. They include: values, loving your loved ones and nurturing your relationships, being there for them, and expressing your affection and Aloha with thought, word, and deed.

There are people who love you dearly and just don’t know how to say it. Their eloquence is to be found in their loving actions.

Reach out and hold hands, initiate a warm hug, or give a friendly pat on the back. Human touch is healthful for body and soul.

Regardless of your relationship with your parents, you miss them terribly after they die.

Thy Will is infinitely wiser than my will. There are no accidents.

There’s always something new to learn.

Love is our reason for living.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

Its not that beauty doesn’t exist in our world, its that we seldom seem to notice!

To a worm in a horseradish, the whole world is a horseradish.

Goals are not our life! NOW is our life!

We were born to learn, to grow, to expand, to love, to create, to enjoy, to see the beauty in all things – including ourselves. But we weren’t born to be perfect.

We diminish the present as we worry about the future.

When we have done our best, we should await the results in peace.

Setting your heart on something is entering into a state of rigidity. Unsetting your heart is entering a state of flow.

We are deluding ourselves when we focus on the bad!

Either we make it all right or we make ourselves helpless victims.

Find the blessing. Find the lesson to be learned. Find the strength you never thought you had. Find the triumph.

If there is a hell on earth, living as a victim with feelings of anger and blame defines it. If there is a heaven on earth, living powerfully and lovingly as the creator of our own lives defines it.

Being understood is similar to being loved.

Sometimes everything is a nail to those you possess a hammer.

We do not see things as they are; we see them as we are.

My own behavior baffles me, For I find myself not doing what I really want to do but doing what I really loathe.

Even God can’t change the past.

Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really frightening!

If there is something you can do about it, get off your butt and do something about it. If you can’t do anything about it, don’t worry about it.

All the dangers in our world are like a blessed wake-up call. They tell us to live life NOW — not tomorrow, not when the children grow up, not when we retire — but NOW.

Taking things for granted is one of the greatest assaults on the quality of our lives.

In order to break any habit, repetition of the preferred behavior is a must.

We don’t have to wait until we are old to gather the riches, we can gather them everyday of our lives.

NOW is the only time we have.

If you see your tasks in life as drudgery, then they are drudgery. On the other hand, if you see them as a gift of the Universe manifest through you, then your tasks in life create a heaven on earth.

In daily life, we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but the gratefulness that makes us happy.

When we focus on abundance, our life feels abundant, when we focus on lack, our life feels lacking. It is simply a matter of focus.

We have to train ourselves to be appreciative; our present habit is to be unappreciative.

As we start looking for the good, our focus automatically is taken from the bad.

When you come upon a magic place, listen.

We weren’t born to hold on to positions. Nor are we meant to be perfect. We are meant to flow in a world that is constantly moving beneath our feet.

We’re all learning how to walk, and sometimes we walk into walls.

Pretty good advice, don’t you think? If even one of these "instructions" causes you to rethink how you are responding to an important situation in your life, then this feature has done its job.

Take care of yourself.