Charles Handy Quotes

I'm trying to just take things as they come, not to try to expect too much, just do my job and hope things work out.

I try to take life as it comes, and just hope it keeps coming.

So I just decided to relax into it, bumpy and crazy as it might be, and try for once to just go along for the ride.

A great mantra to have, whether you're breaking up with your boyfriend or you lose your job, or something changes that you didn't anticipate - which is a fact of life, and very much a fact of running a business - is: 'I was OK before this, I will be OK after this.'

I'm used to things not coming in the packages you expect.

When I left home at sixteen I bought a small rug. It was my roll-up world. Whatever room, whatever temporary place I had, I unrolled the rug. It was a map of myself. Invisible to others, but held in the rug, were all the places I had stayed - for a few weeks, for a few months. On the first night anywhere new I liked to lie in bed and look at the rug to remind myself that I had what I needed even though what I had was so little. Sometimes you have to live in precarious and temporary places. Unsuitable places. Wrong places. Sometimes the safe place won’t help you.

You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down.

The future is bound to surprise us, but we don't have to be dumbfounded.

You have to move forward. It's constantly changing. Everything changes and everything falls apart. You have to be nimble and on your toes and accessible to it all. Not everyone is on board with this.

Some things I cannot change, but 'til I try I'll never know.

Assume any career move you make won't go smoothly. They won't. But don't look back.

Stay fluid and roll with those changes. Life is just a big extended improvisation.

Life doesn't care about your vision. You just gotta roll with it.

When Things Fall Apart” and I quote “Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don't get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It's a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.

You never know what you're going to have to face, so you'd better be prepared.

Do what you feel called to do, but also be prepared to accept that you don't necessarily know what you're going to learn. Be willing to be surprised by forces beyond your control, and realize that a major learning on the journey is the art of surrender.

There are just lots of possibilities in the world...I need to keep my mind open for what could happen and not decide that the world is hopeless if what I want to happen doesn't happen. Because something else great might happen in between.

I just think that life is a constant experiment.

I don't think it's something you can be prepared for. I'm just going with the flow.

Success in life is defined by how well you deal with plan B.

Things are always changing. Part of being successful here is being comfortable with not knowing what's going to happen.

I'm not sure anyone's life turns out exactly the way they imagine. All we can do is to try to make the best of it. Even when it seems impossible.

That's life. You've got to deal with it, good and bad. We'll be all right. I mean, if we make the chase, we make it. If we don't, we don't.

Every one of us is called upon, perhaps many times, to start a new life. A frightening diagnosis, a marriage, a move, loss of a job...And onward full-tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct...Crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is.

Life's sloppy...You think you know how tomorrow's going to be, you've made your plans, everything is set in place, and then the unimaginable happens. Life catches you by surprise. It always does. But there's good mixed in with the bad. It's there. You just have to recognize it.