Richard Carlson Quotes

I really try to ask myself the question of nine. Will this matter in nine minutes, nine hours, nine days, nine weeks, nine months or nine years? If it will truly matter for all of those, pay attention to it.

If it doesn't matter in five years, it doesn't matter.

Frame every so-called disaster with these words: In five years, will this matter?

The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.

My biggest change is what is important to me, and what is not. What's worthy worrying about, and what is not. When we're younger, we tend to spend too much time worrying and going over the unnecessary. I'm no longer running the hamster wheel.

It's not worth getting too excited about thinking about the larger picture. The larger picture doesn't come into focus for an awfully long time.

We miss a lot in life because we don't know when to quit, what to leave out.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

Someday you're going to have to learn to separate what seems to be important from what really is important.

Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who live to the present.

Quit saying you don't have time. You have time for what you make time for in life.

You got to know what's worth keeping and what's worth letting go.

I may be the type who manages to grab all the pointless things in life but lets the really important things slip away.

... and you can only have 2 or 3 things everyday, because everything else will just come at you; you know fires in a day.

What distracts us will begin to define us. We don't need to swing at every pitch.

There are a lot of decisions we pass up on because we think, "You know what? That's just going to build - you know, maybe that's going to build me and not build the ministry and what I'm trying to do." So we pass up on a lot of opportunities.

'Well,' said Red Jacket [to someone complaining that he had not enough time], 'I suppose you have all there is.'

Keep the best, forget the rest.

When you know what's most important to you, making a decision is quite simple.

Maybe I can put it another way... Life, Charlie Brown, is like a deck chair." "Like a what?" "Have you ever been on a cruise ship? Passengers open up these canvas deck chairs so they can sit in the sun... Some people place their chairs facing the rear of the ship so they can see where they've been... Other people face their chairs forward... They want to see where they're going! On the cruise ship of life, Charlie Brown, which way is your deck chair facing?" "I've never been able to get one unfolded.

Our past, our present, and whatever remains of our future, absolutely depend on what we do now.

If you don't have time, the truth is, you don't have priorities. Think harder; don't work harder.

My particular worries on any given day - how I'm doing in the polls or what somebody is saying about me... for good or for ill - isn't particularly relevant. What is relevant is: What am I building that lasts?

Look carefully through all the claims pressing upon you in your complicated life, and decide once and for all what it is that is the one really important and overmastering duty in it, and should be the one dominating aim. Then remember that if you succeed in that, the others, so multifarious, are really no more than the fringe of the garment, and that you need not spend so much anxiety over them, provided that the one most important is faithfully attended to.

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be.