Living Life Fully--
a little bit of insight into how and why this site came to be.
  
This website exists in order to provide its visitors with a place of peace, comfort, wisdom, and hope that they can use as a sanctuary on the World Wide Web.  The Internet is full of sites that want to sell us material goods and get information from us, but there are relatively few places that actively offer a place of peace that presents wisdom that can have practical and direct applications to everyone's lives.  While there are quite a few motivational sites online, most of them suffer from neglect--not having been updated in months or years--or a lack of truly deep, truly relevant material.

Most quotation sites rely on databases to present their information, which tends to result in a rather cold feel.  Furthermore, there's very little editing for content done on those sites, which results in many quotations being put on pages that are only marginally relevant to the topic.  When all is said and done, we choose to present fewer than half of the quotations that we find on any given topic--the ones we leave out either don't say much at all or they're more negative in nature.  We also do our best to make sure that the material we present isn't just our favorite stuff, for this site isn't about us.  This site is about you and anyone else who wants to visit.

We see the site as a kind of online coffee-table book, and thus we've done our best to make it as attractive as possible.  Scenes of nature and people tend to be relaxing and help us keep perspective by reminding us of the beauty that's out there in the world.  Our choice of fonts is also important--we change fonts and colors and sizes in order to make each quotation stand on its own in the reader's eyes so that it's easier to read and to separate mentally from the rest of the quotations on the page.  There are few things more difficult than trying to internalize an idea or concept when it's just one of thirty passages on a given page, and all are in the same small font.  It's very difficult to read that way.
  

    
We strive to use all original photos; I took this shot
a couple of blocks from our house a few years ago.

   
We truly hope that our presentation of material is helpful and useful to almost everyone.  There's enough of a broad spectrum here that this should be the case, though we know that it's pretty much impossible to please everyone in the world.
 
That said, I'll tell you that we started this site in 1999 because we felt that it was important that there be somewhere on the web that people could go to for encouragement and inspiration, a place that's creative and attractive as well as full of material.  We've spent lots of time searching the 'net for backgrounds that are peaceful, artistic, and pleasing to the eye.  We choose quotations on the basis of their potential relevance and depth, and since we started the site, we've seen our collection of books of quotations and other inspiring material grow dramatically.

This site is important to us because we know that this material has worked to pull us out of depression, feelings of anxiety and hopelessness, and feelings of being completely alone in the world.  Personally, I don't need to go into details about my childhood, but so many of the behaviors and thought patterns that I developed then were destructive to me, and I continued to allow them to grow as an adult.  Reading this material is a way for me to counter those tendencies.  Most of the concept has grown out of a writing course that I taught for several years at St. Anselm College entitled Carpe Diem, in which we explored the concept of what life was all about through literature, film, music, and philosophy.

One of the things I most like about the site is that it allows the important words of many caring and loving people to continue to do their work, encouraging and motivating us to go on with our lives, improving ourselves and recognizing our own worth.  Many of the people whose words appear here are dead and gone, but their work continues to be helpful to many, many people.

Mission Statement

With these pages, we hope to create an area on the worldwide web where people can come for inspiration, encouragement, hope, and peace, or just to feel positive about life.  In a world with news and entertainment media that tend to focus on the violent and the abnormal, we hope to remind people that life is, indeed, beautiful, and that we are constantly surrounded by wonderful people who do mostly good in their lives; unfortunately, we don't always recognize these people for who they are.
  
   We hope to be always within the realms of copyright law concerning fair use and public domain.  We will never present non-original material as original, and any use of any quotations will be intended to present the author in a positive light insofar as she or he is focusing on the positive aspects of being human.
  
   We realize that many people object to the use of the pronoun "he" in generic fashion, and we've tried to eliminate this archaic use when possible, as long as the change doesn't modify the original meaning or intent of a particular quotation.  This isn't an attempt to be politically correct--it's an effort to recognize and show our appreciation for the many wonderful contributions to our lives made by many gifted women.
  
For me, this type of reading is my meditation.  It's my way of reminding myself that the world is a positive place, and that we ALL have a place of value in it.  I'm a pretty independent person by nature, and I just don't feel comfortable in many social settings (especially those that are staged or "required fun"), so it's important to me to have a refuge for my mind, a place where my thoughts can refocus and grow stronger.
   
We would like this site to be a reminder to all who visit that each one of us is a beautiful, unique, valuable member of humanity and of the earth, and we all need to be here for things to work.  We want to make available to people the messages of value and worth because we all are worth it, and the better we take care of ourselves, especially mentally and emotionally, the more positive effects we can have on others, and they can then spread the positiveness (I know--it's not really a word!) to others. . . .
  
We thank you for your visit, and we wish you all the best in life.  If you have any comments on the site, please feel free to drop us a line at infoatlivinglifefully.com, or go to our feedback page.  Take good care, and enjoy your visit!

tom