A Quote by Mark Van Doren

There is one thing we can do, and the happiest of people are those who do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present.

Mark Van Doren

Quote Topics

Ability Happiest Limit One Thing People Present Thing Those

Quote Author

Mark Van Doren
American - Poet
June 13, 1894 - December 10, 1972

The happiest people I know are not those who are the most beautiful, rich or famous. The happiest people I see are simply those who stay cheerful and try to cheer up others while getting through their own bad stuff

Helen Gurley Brown

One way to define wisdom is the ability to see, into the future, the consequences of your choices in the present. That ability can give you a completely different perspective on what the future might look like.

Andy Andrews

If the personal freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution inhibit the government's ability to govern the people, we should look to limit those guarantees.

William J. Clinton

When we take no responsibility for any aspect of our past, we limit our ability to respond in the present and the future.

Bill Crawford

I think the thing that I got most from working with Frank Zappa is that I was able to see someone who completely independent. The most beautiful thing about Frank was that he was completely in the moment and present and eternally creative.

Steve Vai

I'm happiest in nature, in trees, rivers, streams, and I'm happiest around my kid - you know that's the funny thing, he is not always in the best of moods, but I am always happiest around him and in nature. Around my family is where I am happiest.

Gregory Porter

Opportunity shies away from need, but opportunity is attracted by talent and ability. What you don't want to happen is opportunity to turn cool on you. You don't want to offend opportunity. So the only thing you present to opportunity is ability, performance and skill. Don't present need to opportunity.

Jim Rohn

She seems to have had the ability to stand firmly on the rock of her past while living completely and unregretfully in the present.

Madeleine L'Engle

People of great ability do not emerge, as a rule, from the happiest background. So far as my own observation goes, I would conclude that ability, although hereditary, is improved by an early measure of adversity and improved again by a later measure of success.

C. Northcote Parkinson

To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one's ability to know; it enfeebles one's ability to feel and think.

Wendell Berry

The happiest people are those who have harvested their time in others. The unhappiest people are those who wonder how the world is going to make them happy.

John C. Maxwell

If there is one thing I’ve learned in my years on this planet, it’s that the happiest and most fulfilled people I’ve known are those who devoted themselves to something bigger and more profound than merely their own self interest.

John Glenn

Anyone who stands on the edge of the unknown, fully in the present without reference point, experiences groundlessness. That's when our understanding goes deeper, when we find that the present moment is a pretty vulnerable place and that this can be completely unnerving and completely tender at the same time.

Pema Chodron

Being completely and totally present and at every single point of space and time, It is fully and completely present here and now, thus we can no more attain immanent Spirit then we could, say, attain our feet.