Happy Spring! Add a little “spring” to your step with ATG’s top 10 inspirational quotes from the book, Life’s Journey According to Mister Rogers:

1. “’Someone else’s action should not determine your response.’ It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? And yet what if someone else’s action should be shouting angry words at us or hitting us with a rotten tomato? That doesn’t affect what we do in response? Not if our compassion is genuine. Not if our love is the kind the Dalai Lama advocates.”

2. “’The outside is never as much as the inside…’ As you may know by now, that’s one of the major themes of our work: The invisible essential. Oh, the outsides of life are important, but the insides are what enhance so much of the rest.”

3. “Anyone who has ever been able to sustain good work has had at least one person – and often many – who have believed in him or her. We just don’t get to be competent human beings without a lot of different investments from others.”

4. “The root of all our lives go very, very deep, and we can’t really understand a person unless we have the chance of knowing who that person has been, and what that person has done and liked and suffered and believed.”

5. “Caring comes from the Gothic word ‘kara’, which means ‘to lament.’ So caring is not what a powerful person gives to a weaker one. Caring is a matter of being there…lamenting right along with the one who laments.”

6. “All we’re ever asked to do in this life is to treat our neighbors – especially our neighbor who is in need – exactly as we would hope to be treated ourselves. That’s our ultimate responsibility.”

7. “It may be that the most important mastery we achieve early on is not the mastery of a particular skill or particular piece of knowledge, but rather the mastery of the patience and persistence that learning requires, along with the ability to expect and accept mistakes and the feelings of disappointment they may bring.”

8. “The media shows the tiniest percentage of what people do. There are millions and millions of people doing wonderful things all over the world, and they’re generally not the ones being touted in the news.”

9. “Try your best to make goodness attractive. That’s one of the toughest assignments you’ll ever be given.”

10. “There are three ways to ultimate success: the first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.”

Continue delving into all things Mister Rogers with our post, “Springing into Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood“; delve more into all things life wisdom from:

• Gift from the Sea

• Social Graces: Words of Wisdom on Civility in a Changing Society

• 8,789 Words of Wisdom

• Grit: the Power of Passion and Perseverance 

• Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

• The Road to Character

• The Shepherd’s Life

• Napoleon: A Life

• the Knights Code of Chivalry

• living the aloha spirit

• and from these military excerpts, creeds and poems

• in addition to these quotes about the importance of planning 

• and these quotes on teaching, thinking and learning

• finally, a personal message for college graduates