Deborah Norville quotes: on work ethic, gratitude, taking care of yourself, and more.
“Your dreams can be realities. They are the stuff that leads us through life toward great happiness.”
“When you’re true to who you are, amazing things happen.”
“Certainly the research shows that grateful people are more innovative thinkers.”
“People who feel positively think differently. They think better.”
“Your cognitive thinking can be improved. You can actually influence your body’s response to stress. You can actually lower your blood pressure.”
“When you focus on what’s working, you know how good you feel. We all know that feel‑good feeling. Well, what’s happening is that feel‑good feeling is most importantly activating this part of your brain. This is where your dopamine receptors are. When you activate the dopamine receptors, you have also excited the same part of your brain as where strategic thinking, reasoning and logic, cognitive associations. So when you focus on your blessings, when you take a moment out of every day to just jot down what’s working for you, you have actually started an incredibly powerful process that I think is particularly vital during challenging times… where you are smarter, you’re a better decision maker, you can come up with strategies that will be more effective, and you will think more clearly. And heaven knows we all can use that.”
“Positive psychology, a fairly new field, is this notion of counting your blessings and the quantifiable benefits of gratitude. But what gratitude does is it puts you in positive affect. You feel good from counting your blessings, you’re more optimistic, you’re less pessimistic, you even exercise on average an hour and a half more per week. That is really cool. You feel good when you do all of those things. Well, if you feel good your dopamine receptors are activated. You are a better thinker. You will do better on a test.”
“It puts your mind in a positive place which enables you to do your best whether it is your best thinking or your best planning. You make connections that you otherwise would not make.”
“If you take one tiny little step, then you can take another and another.”
“No one ever said when we come out of the womb there is someone standing there who says, ‘Welcome to the world. It’s going to be fair from here on out.’ It’s not. There are no guarantees made to anyone. None were given to me. That’s okay because I’m a big believer in hard work.”
“The same work ethic that got me on Today at the age of 29, got me back to where I’m fronting a show that 5.2 million people watch every day. That same work ethic helped me do the research for a book that’s about a fundamental truth that sold enough copies to make the New York Times top 10 list.”
“That same work ethic enables me to do the juggling act and have three children that are incredibly cool kids and has kept me married for 20 years. Sometimes the breaks go your way and sometimes they don’t.”
“My life went better when I focused on what was working as opposed to fixating on what goes wrong, and we’ve all got stuff that goes wrong. I found that when I focused on what was working in my life things were better.”
“Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open.”
“There is a comfort in rituals, and rituals provide a framework for stability when you are trying to find answers.”
“There is something in even the darkest situations that we can make a positive in our lives.”
“I now find magic in the mundane. I’m also more creative—better able to look beyond the obvious and come up with new story angles.”
“Ive gotten to where I am by a lot of hard work. An inability to be personally satisfied with my own effort. I would say also unquenchable curiosity.”
“I enjoy mentoring members of our staff and seeing them grow in their careers. I also love to learn every day.”
“I think our job as parents is to give our kids roots to grow and wings to fly.”
“A parent can teach a child to express gratitude easily by a matter of patterning. Children may not notice the positive moments in life unless we point them out to them. Sometimes there is a question and answer period that you have to do. You always make a point to point out the positives in your child’s day. You always point out to your children where their happy moments have been because they probably don’t notice them.”
“I want my kids to be curious, to be interested in a lot of things, to be confident, and to feel they belong in any number of situations.”
“It is important for women to know who they are, and to know what makes their hearts sing.”
“When you don’t feel good about yourself, it colors everything about your life.”
“There is no dramatic difference in happiness on the part of people who are wealthy.”
“I’m about as straight an arrow as you’ll find out there.”
“I’ve learned to find blessings in my disappointments so there really are no big ones.”
“How do I recharge? I organize. I work out. Those two activities help me get back that sense of balance I need to keep going. If I open a drawer or closet and see things tidy, I feel a sense of control. When I get an hour all to myself to do a great, sweaty workout I feel good all day.”
“For me, changing the way I eat has been a game-changer in my life. It changes your mentality, it changes your energy level.”
“I’ve been blessed. I think I look pretty darn good.”
“‘Thank you power’ is writing down the moments that are good in your life so that you can go back and reflect on them… so you’ve got this sort of repository of good stuff in your past.”
“What I’ve learned is there’s a scientifically proven phenomenon that’s attached to gratitude, and that if you consciously take note of what is good in your life, quantifiable benefits happen. And grateful people may recover faster from trauma.”
“Why wouldn’t you want to be more grateful if it is going to mean a longer life?”
“A thankful outlook smoothes the rough edges of life.”
Related: Ann Curry quotes.
