No experience is negative, there is a positive lesson in all of it. No relationship is ever a waste of time.
Betty Bethards
There’s a British physicist and philosopher who has a great message on his answering machine. It says, ‘this is not an answering machine. It is a questioning machine. Who are you and what do you want?’ And then it continues ‘most people come to this earth and leave it again without answering either one.’
Joan Borysenko
God put beautiful spirits into these bodies, all kinds of bodies. There’s men and women and white and black and beautiful and ugly and old and young and oh, just everything. And we dumb humans are confused by the outside. We keep looking at the outside, instead of the inside . . . We can’t see anything. He put spirits in everyone of us and trees and cats and everything. So maybe we aren’t the same outside, maybe we are unequal, but inside, the soul is pure. All souls are equal. If only we could see the soul . . . we are one.
Rita Mae Brown from her book “Southern Discomfort”
Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.
Buddha
When I’m totally 100% grounded in myself, then I see all of relative reality as the lively co-existence of extreme opposites. Pain and pleasure on one side, darkness and light, the co-existence of suffering and joy, these are the banks along which the river of life flows. And if the river is to flow it’s going to bump into both banks. There is going to be periods of joy and there are going to be periods of sorrow. There is going to be pain; there is going to be pleasure. The problem is when we get stuck at the banks, then the flow stops.
Deepak Chopra
Suffering is grace to the soul, suffering stinks to the personality, the ego. And I saw that if I’m going to be impeccable, I have got to be fully with my heart open which is breaking at the suffering of everything around me, and at the same moment understanding the grace of it. And that balancing is where the compassion lies.
Ram Dass
When you squeeze an orange, you get orange juice because that’s what’s inside. The very same principle is true about you. When someone squeezes you - puts pressure on you - what comes out is what’s inside.
Wayne Dyer
I guess that’s all forever is . . . Just one long trail of nows. And I guess all you can do is try and live one now at a time without getting too worked up about the last now or the next now.
Nicholas Evans from “The Horse Whisperer”
Five basic ways to care for self well:
- Eat well and selectively
- Exercise regularly
- Sleep optimum numbers of hours
- Take daily private time and engage in those activities when alone that are appealing
- Define one’s own ethical priorities and honor them.
Mary Jean Finkle
Every fight is one between different angles of vision, illuminating the same truth.
Mahatma Gandhi
Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights is worthy of all else from you. And he who had deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.
Kahil Gilbran
Our thoughts are creative . . . One idle thought does not mean very much, but thoughts that we think over and over are like drops of water. And at first there’s just a few, but after a while you create a puddle and then a pond and then a lake and then an ocean. And by our thinking if it is negative we can drown in a sea of negativity. Or if it is positive we can float on the ocean of life.
Louise Hay
. . . we are never ever alone and that we are surrounded by these beings who guide us, who love us, who protect us, who try to direct us to help us to go on the track where we have to be to fulfill our own destiny. Maybe in times of great pain of great sorrow of great loneliness we can get tuned in and become aware of their presence. We can communicate with them at night before we fall asleep and we can ask them to make their presence known to us. We can ask them questions before we are asleep and we can ask them to give us an answer in our dreams.
Elizabeth Kubler Ross
Most people who say they have their shit together are standing in it at the time.
Stephen Levine
Death is not your enemy. You wouldn’t take the risks you’ve taken in your life if you weren’t absolutely sure that if something went wrong you couldn’t get out. Death is your friend.
Jacob Liberman
I’m a person who believes deeply in the importance and the value of stories in people’s lives. I believe that your stories are your most genuine gift to anyone. I think that they are the greatest gift . . . your stories are who you are . . .
Susan McElroy
Soul doesn’t need any answers. It can live with ambiguity with paradox and with mystery.
Thomas Moore
. . . unless your work is interwoven with love, it is useless. To work without love is slavery.
Mother Teresa
Do not overlook tiny good actions, thinking they are of no benefit; even tiny drops of water in the end will fill a huge vessel.
Sogyal Rinpoche
Better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
Eleanor Roosevelt
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Death ends a life, not a relationship
Morrie Schwartz
To thine own self be true. Then it shall follow, as night the day. One cannot be untrue to another man/woman.
Shakespeare
It’s okay to say no to the world sometimes and yes to yourself.
Bernie Siegel
Don’t you know that love’s the key to open any door?
Roz Thomas
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Thoreau
The depth of darkness to which you can descend and still live is an exact measure of the height to which you can aspire to reach.
Laurens Van der Post
. . . Never are we nearer the light than when darkness is deepest.
Swami Vivekananda
God asks only that you include yourself among those you love.
God through Neale Donald Walsh
So money is just like everything else. It is used either for purposes of love or purposes of fear.
Marianne Willliamson
Each one of us has a little spark, our life force is a spark of God. And to bring our own little spark into harmony with the great spark is to allow that immense energy to flow through us . . .
Marion Woodman
If a person consistently experiences the pains in their life with precision and openness, then, as time passes, the energy in that pain begins to break up the blockages in one’s deep being. Life gets easier and negative habits go away and we feel happy, independent of conditions and circumstances.
Shinzen Young
To realize that you’re not here forever may make an enormous difference in what you choose to do while you are here. To realize that each moment is precious and unrecoverable, may change the way you capture those moments in your relationships with the people that you encounter.
Jon Kabat Zinn
Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him.
Viktor Frankl
Just as logic leads the mind, desire guides the soul. We live in a world that trusts logic, and from that commitment we distrust desire; but if we lived in a world that validated desire, we would know how to trust it.
Thomas Moore
The life in us is diminished by judgment far more frequently than by disease. Our own self judgment or the judgment of other people can stifle our life force, it’s spontaneity and natural expression . . . . it is as rare to find someone who loves us as we are as it is to find someone who loves themselves whole.
Rachel Naomi Remen
Approval is also a form of judgment. When we approve of people we sit in judgment on them as surely as when we criticize them. . . . To seek approval is to have no resting place, no sanctuary. Like all judgment, approval encourages a constant striving. It makes us uncertain of who we are and our true value. . . . Approval can’t be trusted, it can be withdrawn at any time . . .
Rachel Naomi Remen
. . . blame creates guilt and guilt always seeks punishment and punishment creates pain. So being kind to yourself means stopping all blame, all guilt, all punishment and all pain. Respond to yourself and to life in a loving way.
Louise Hay
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an eradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity - even under the most difficult circumstances - to add a deeper meaning to life.
Viktor Frankl
Whether our suffering is great or small, if someone can respond to us with compassion and understanding, at least some of the hurt is soothed, and the agony can begin to give way to a feeling that our burden is shared.
Richard Heckler
Fear wraps our bodies in clothing, love allows us to stand naked. Fear clings to and clutches all that we have. Love gives all that we have away. Fear holds close, love holds dear. Fear grips, loves lets go. Fear rankles, love soothes, Fear attacks, love amends.
God through Neale Donald Walsh
. . . the heart may be a way of seeing life, the capacity to know a fundamental connection to others and see them whole. . . . the opening of the heart seems to go far beyond love to an experience of belonging which heals our most profound wounds. When people look at others in this way the connection they experience makes it a simpler thing to forgive to have compassion to serve and to love.
Rachel Naomi Remen
Just as sleep and rest bring the body back into balance, so the dream brings the psyche back into balance each night.
Marion Woodman
. . . many of the things I once believed to be my shortcomings have turned out in the long run to be my strengths. And other things of which I was unduly proud have revealed themselves in the end to be among my shortcomings. Things that I have hidden from others for years turned out to be the anchor and enrichment of my middle age. What a blessing it is to outlive your self judgments and harvest your failures.
Rachel Naomi Remen
Never go too long without watching a sunset
Atticus
The only thing necessary for tranquility in the world is that every child grow up happy.
Chief Dan George From Karl Herrmann
War may sometimes be a necessary evil.
But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good.
We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.
Jimmy Carter
Let all your affairs take place with love.
St. Paul
Ask questions from your heart, and you will be answered from the heart.
Omaha Pardo
A life well lived rarely has a clear path forward. It meanders through shadows and clearings. The challenge is to retain a sense of grace and peace, especially within the face of that which frightens us most.
Paul Bond
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Yesterday is history, tomorrow is mystery, today is a gift from God, that is why it is called the present.
Bil Keane and/or Alice Morse Earle
If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends, you talk to your enemies.
Moshe Dayan
Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart
And try to love the questions themselves.
Do not seek the answers that cannot be given to you
Because you would not be able to live them,
And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will gradually,
Without noticing it,
Live along some distant day
Into an answer.
Ranier Maria Rilke
We cannot do great things on this earth, only small things with great love.
Mother Teresa
The highest reward for man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.
John Ruskin
If we are to reach real peace in the world, we shall have to begin with children.
Gandhi
One person can make a difference – and every person must try.
John F. Kennedy
I am only one, I cannot do everything. But I will not refuse to do the something that I can.
Helen Keller
To know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived – that is to have succeeded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Continue to love your enemies, to do good to those hating you.
Jesus
Small things done with great love, bring joy and peace.
Mother Teresa
Let a man overcome anger by kindness, evil by good…
Never in the world does hatred cease by hatred; hatred ceases by love.
Buddha
The real voyage of discovery consists in not seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
If I have learned anything in my life, it is that bitterness consumes the vessel that contains it.
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter
So long as little children are allowed to suffer, there is no true love in this world.
Isadora Duncan
We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken away from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Viktor Frankl
Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time, there would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed.
Thomas Merton
Compassion is not at all weak. It is the strength that arises out of seeing the true nature of suffering in the world. Compassion allows us to bear witness to that suffering, whether it is in ourselves or others, without fear; it allows us to name injustice without hesitation, and to act strongly, with all the skill at our disposal. To develop this mind state of compassion…is to learn to live, as the Buddha put it, with sympathy for all living beings, without exception.
Sharon Salzberg
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
Anne Frank
If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each person’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
There are three truths: my truth, your truth, and the truth.
Chinese Proverb
Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?
Henry David Thoreau
…love every man because God loves him.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other people’s models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.
Shakti Gawain
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
Tears are like rain. They loosen our soil so we can grow in new directions.
Virginia Casey
…the love we hold back is the only pain that follows us…
from the movie “Always” directed by Steven Spielberg
Learn to savor the moment, even if it does not last forever…Moments of our lives can be eternal without being everlasting.
Harold Kushner
Trust in yourself. Your perceptions are often far more accurate than you are willing to believe.
Claudia Black
Your heart really is just spring-loaded to open wide, it just doesn’t get the chance.
Belleruth Naparstek
I define spirituality as feeling a part of something good that’s larger than yourself and that’s what we feel when we are most joyful.
Stella Resnick
The journey is not about controlling what you get, but embracing whatever comes.
Caroline Myss
Sometimes God calms the storm, sometimes He lets the storm rage and calms His child.
aurhor unknown
Each one of us has all the wisdom and knowledge we ever need right within us. It is available to us through our intuitive mind, which is our connection with universal intelligence.
Shakti Gawain
When we stop searching for the Great Answer, the Immortal Deed which will give our lives ongoing meaning, and instead concentrate on filling our individual days with moments that gratify us, then we will find the only possible answer to the question, What is life about? …It is about loving and being loved. It is about enjoying your food and sitting in the sun rather than rushing through lunch and hurrying back to the office.
Harold Kushner
Kabbalah teaches us that everything in this universe happens in relationship. All events and experience occur in relationship. It also teaches us that there’s no separation between ourselves and others. All is one.
Myrna Finn
If we could only just be who we are to ourselves and each other, we would know joy all the time.
Sarah Ban Breathnach
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?
Eleanor Roosevelt
In your awareness of the present moment is the nourishment that you’re looking for, and the opportunity of the present moment is fleeting.
Ronna Kabatznick
The heart never knows the colour of the skin.
Chief Dan George
While the loss of my father charted my course in life, it also taught me that aging is a gift not everyone gets.
Frances Park
If you are going to pray, then don’t worry. And if you are going to worry, then don’t bother praying. You can’t be doing both.
Sister Alice Martin
We don’t easily allow ourselves enjoyment of even the simplest pleasures we could enjoy – time for a little extra sleep, a leisurely walk, comfortable clothing.
Anodea Judith
Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier.
Mother Teresa
It is no wonder we neglect the natural world outside ourselves when we do not have the interest to know the one within.
Gretel Ehrlich from the book “A Match To The Heart”
… sometimes the most profound love is that which can simply let things be the way they are.
Anodea Judith
To get peace, if you want, make yourself a nest of pleasant thoughts to curl up inside each night.
John Ruskin
…The great gift to me of being vulnerable…in our woundings are openings to other places, we become deeply available to other people and then can call forth beyond their wounding, the treasures that are there.
Jean Houston
When you come to the edge of all the light you have, and must take a step into the darkness of the unknown, believe that one of two things will happen. Either there will be something solid for you to stand on – or you will be taught how to fly.
Patrick Overton
Time is a very precious gift – so precious that it is only given to us moment by moment.
Amelia Barr
That is the simple secret. Always take your heart to work.
Meryl Streep
We talk about finding God…as if He could get lost.
Jerome Horton
Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor to measure words but to pour them all out, just as it is, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keeping what is worth keeping, and then, with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
George Eliot
I have never been a millionaire. But I have enjoyed a crackling fire, a glorious sunset, a walk with a friend and a hug from a child. There are plenty of life’s tiny delights for all of us.
Jack Anthony
No man consciously chooses evil because it is evil: he only mistakes it for the happiness that he seeks.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.
Old Proverb
How odd that we walk around with these bodies, live in them, die in them, make love with them, yet know almost nothing of their intimate workings, the judicious balancing act of homeostasis, the delicate architecture of their organs and systems, or the varying weather of their private, internal environments. Up to this point my living and breathing had been an act of faith. I existed but I didn’t know how.
Gretel Ehrlich from the book “A Match To The Heart”
People see God every day, they just don’t recognize him.
Pearl Bailey
What do you mean, you don’t have time? Time is all you have. You’re born. You die. In between, you have time.
Jan Phillips
When nothing is sure, everything is possible.
Libbie Fudim
At night I turn my problems over to God. He’s going to be up all night anyway.
Carrie Westingson
True education is not pumped and crammed in from outward sources, but aids in bringing to the surface the infinite hoard of wisdom within.
Rabindranath Tagore
Always be a little kinder than necessary.
J M Barrie
Amma says that her only religion is love. Although people may come from different religious faiths and have different cultures and ways of thinking, the language of the heart is always the same – and that language is love.
Judith Cornell
Forgiveness gives you back the laughter, and the lightness in your life
Joan Lunden
I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God’s business.
Michael J. Fox
What lies before us and what lies behind us are small matters compared to what lies within us. And when we bring what is within out into the world, miracles happen.
Henry David Thoreau
The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair but manifestations of strength and resolution.
Kahlil Gibran
We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.
Sir Winston Churchill
Dance as is no one were watching,
Sing as if no one were listening,
And live every day as if it were your last.
Irish Proverb
Never regret. If it’s good, it’s wonderful. If it’s bad, it’s experience.
Victoria Holt
Sorrow has its reward. It never leaves us where it found us.
Mary Baker Eddy
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.
Helen Keller
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
George Elliot
Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world would do this, it would change the earth.
William Faulkner
Trust what lights you up, brings you alive, animates you.
Lori Cash Richards
Love is never guilty. It comes to us, always to be welcomed, from whatever source, at whatever time. One love does not displace another. Each love is added richness.
Pearl S. Buck
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.
Albert Einstein
Many people spend their entire life indefinitely preparing to live.
Paul Tournier
If you can’t figure out your purpose, figure out your passion. For your passion will lead you right into your purpose.
Bishop T. D. Jakes
…God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed – much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The grass is not greener on the other side. It is greener where you water it.
Lori Cash Richards