"Use your imagination in a healthy way. If you really want something—within reason—and you imagine it in detail, you can achieve it. Let your heart fly, make a plan of action, and execute it. The plan is fundamental: Without a plan and short-term goals, good things remain out of reach."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"Be wary of mentally going over everything that’s worrying you once you’re in bed, and try not to dwell on all the bad things that happened during the day, or might happen tomorrow. Focus on something joyful and positive that happened to you or brought a smile to your face. However bad the day has been, there’s always something positive to hold onto."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"Harmful emotions are caused by thoughts, whether conscious or not. And thoughts can be learned or reeducated. To successfully become a happy person, fulfilled and at peace, you must work on the way you think. If you do, you’ll be surprised by the results."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"Trust yourself. The way in which you project yourself has the power to set the best version of your brain free. Having confidence in yourself and getting excited about achieving your goals activates your creativity, your problem solving abilities, and a more enthusiastic view of life."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"Fear will always exist; learn to be an optimist and find a way out of the painful cycle of thoughts that is blocking you. Don’t forget that fear is a terrible liar—it always paints reality as worse than it is."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"A fearful person sees their environment as hostile and upsetting, making them vulnerable to everything. We shouldn’t forget that the best challenges possess an element of uncertainty; nothing great can begin without a little fear."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"Forgiveness is an act of love and an elevated mindset with which to approach other human beings and life in general. To forgive is to respond positively when you have been treated negatively. It’s a special form of surrender, and it lifts human beings to a higher plane."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"Learn to love yourself, and to move through life with a sense of well-being. The most important thing is knowing how to be good to yourself. People who remain stuck in a state of guilt can’t manage to see their strengths or their talents. They see everything as crashing down on them because of their limitations or defects—because their perception is distorted!"
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"The past is a valuable source of information, but it doesn’t determine your future. The act of living with your mind anchored in the past, turning over and over things that have already happened, can have adverse effects, bringing up emotions and sensations from melancholy, frustration, guilt, sadness, or resentment all the way to full-blown depression. All of these have an element in common—they prevent us from enjoying the present. Getting stuck in the past prevents us from moving forward in life."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"Whatever your goal, always try to get better, to give value and to help bring the best out of others. Try to be a human vitamin, someone who adds, who helps, who brings joy and optimism even to periods of uncertainty."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"Don’t expect everything to happen without you doing your bit. Instant results are often deceptive, and you need to accept that it’s difficult to build stable and durable relationships—in any area of life—in a matter of minutes. It requires patience, perseverance, and knowing how to give of yourself."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"To be happy we must be capable of rebuilding ourselves as much as possible in the face of trauma and hardship. The reason is simple: there is no life story without its wounds. Failures, and how one frames them, are the most decisive aspect of anyone’s trajectory in life."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"The simplest thing is to think short term, to live according to our reactions to the anarchic external impulses that affect us, letting ourselves be carried along; what is better, although more difficult to achieve, is to design one’s life with long-term objectives, so that, even if something turns us out of our path, we can reorient ourselves toward our goals. A person without a project, who doesn’t know what they want to become, and who doesn’t find meaning in their life, cannot be happy."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"We cannot choose a lot of what will happen to us in life, but we are absolutely free, each and every one of us, to choose the attitude with which we confront it. We are dealt some cards, good or bad, but they’re the ones we have and we must play them as well as we can."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"We as human beings, over the whole course of our lives, pass through very demanding and difficult moments, which mean that we will not be able to be happy if we do not learn to get over them, or at least try."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"Napoleon said it. Don’t be afraid to grab a pencil and a piece of paper. A four colored ballpoint, a felt-tip pen, a blackboard . . . Write, cross out, draw arrows. Whatever you do, make a plan. You’ll be surprised at how many mutual acquaintances you find, you’ll discover past experiences that might be useful now, and, if you need to work on some skill because you notice it doesn’t come easy, read, inform yourself, and ask for help."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"When someone loses them self and doesn’t know where to go, having values and a few guiding principles helps stop the boat from running aground. Aristotle said it long ago, in his Nicomachean Ethics: “Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right?” Today there are no marks to aim at, the archers have died out, and arrows are flying randomly in all directions."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
"Happiness consists in having a fully realized life, in which we try to get the best out of our values and aptitudes. Happiness is making a little work of art out of life, striving every day to bring out our best selves."
-- Marian Rojas Estape
