Every person has free choice. Free to obey or disobey the Natural Laws. Your choice determines the consequences. Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices.
Alfred A. Montapert
Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
We must all live so that our children do not have to pay for our deeds.
Andrejs Upits
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Marcus Aurelius
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Valor grows by daring, fear by holding back.
Publilius Syrus
If your head or dress caught fire, in haste you would extinguish it. Do likewise with desire, which whirls the wheel of wandering-on and is the root of suffering. No better thing to do!
Nagarjuna
When you stand outside my thatched hut, could you guess how spacious it is inside? There is a galaxy of worlds in here. And space for as much love as I can find.
Ishikawa Jozan
When a deep injury is done us, we can never recover until we forgive.
Alan Paton
Our real blessings often appear to us in the shapes of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience, and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.
Joseph Addison
We lift ourselves by our thought, we climb upon our vision of ourselves. If you want to enlarge your life, you must first enlarge your thought of it and of yourself. Hold the ideal of yourself as you long to be, always, everywhere–your ideal of what you long to attain–the ideal of health, efficiency, success.
Orison Swett Marden
He who knows little quickly tells it.
Italian proverb
Three candles dispel the darkness: truth, knowledge, and the ways of nature.
Chinese proverb
A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
When you hear the words renunciation and austerity, they refer to this–the renunciation of the insanity of the ego. That's what has to be given up. And that's where true freedom is found.
Andrew Cohen
If you're going through hell, keep going.
Sir Winston Churchill
There is a Secret One inside us.
Kabir
The planets in all the galaxies
pass through his hands like beads.
In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.
Deepak Chopra
The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind.
Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
I have never felt that anything really mattered but the satisfaction of knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.
William Penn
If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Evil (ignorance) is like a shadow–it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stomp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.
Shakti Gawain
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
The Dalai Lama
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The burden of self is lightened when I laugh at myself.
Rabindranath Tagore
It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it…
Somerset Maugham
Meditation is not a technique of practice but a universal state of Being, where the Soul abides in the Ocean of the Now.
Aziz Kristof
Accustomed long to contemplating Love and Compassion, I have forgotten all difference between myself and others.
Milarepa
It may be necessary temporarily to accept a lesser evil, but one must never label a necessary evil as good.
Margaret Mead
Hold fast to time! Use it! Be conscious of each day, each hour! They slip away unnoticed all too easily and swiftly.
Thomas Mann
Mindfulness refers to keeping one's consciousness alive to the present reality. It is the miracle by which we master and restore ourselves.
Thich Nhat Hanh
As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
I do not think of all the misery, but of the glory that remains. Go outside into the fields, nature and the sun, go out and seek happiness in yourself and in God. Think of the beauty that again and again discharges itself within and without you and be happy.
Anne Frank
The meaning of life is not to be found in a distant world of abstraction, but in paying attention to everyday happenings and details in one's life. One's perception has to be in the field of living. In contemplating where the truth may be found, it just might be right before you.
Yuezhou Quianfeng
When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.
Helen Keller
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.
Franz Kafka
I have realized that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist only in the present, which is what there is and all that there is.
Alan Watts
The most powerful thing you can do to change the world is to change your own beliefs about the nature of life, people and reality to something more positive…and begin to act accordingly.
Shakti Gawain
All you have shall some day be given; Therefore give now, that the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors.
Kahlil Gibran
Mercy has no enemies. In the face of compassion, all perverse and evil forces melt into nothingness.
Venerable Master Hsing Yun
Do not become attached to the things you like; do not maintain an aversion to the things you dislike. Sorrow, fear and bondage come from likes and dislikes.
Gautama Buddha
When water surrenders to the flow of the river it reaches the ocean, so also must we surrender in order to reach our Source.
Anonymous
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving and that's your own self.
Aldous Huxley
Most people don't really need advice. They just need support and discipline in doing what they already know works.
Marianne Williamson
Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage. The way in which power works is a mystery.
Albert Schweitzer
Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.
John F. Kennedy
The first proof of a well-ordered mind is to be able to pause and linger with itself.
Seneca
There is in the body a current of energy, affection and intelligence, which guides, maintains and energizes the body and mind. Discover that current and stay with it.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
Martin Luther King Jr.
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all!
Rumi
We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.
William Shakespeare
If we face our unpleasant feelings with care, affection, and nonviolence, we can transform them into the kind of energy that is healthy and has the capacity to nourish us.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Cultivate peace first in the garden of your heart by removing the weeds of lust, hatred, greed, selfishness, and jealousy. Then only you can manifest it externally. Then only, those who come in contact with you, will be benefited by your vibrations of peace and harmony.
Sivananda
If you follow the present-day world, you will turn your back on the Way; if you would not turn your back on the Way, do not follow the world.
Takuan
Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.
Robert F. Kennedy
Each of us as we journey through life, has the opportunity to find and give his or her unique gift. Whether this gift is quiet or small in the eyes of the world does not matter at all–not at all; it is through finding and the giving that we may come to know the joy that lies at the center of both the dark times and the light.
Helen Luke
A wise man is he who does not grieve for the thing which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.
Epictetus
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
Richard Bach
Sow an act and you reap a habit. Sow a habit, and you reap a character. Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.
Charles Reade
To develop understanding, you have to practice looking at all living beings with the eyes of compassion. When you understand, you love. And when you love, you naturally act in a way that can relieve the suffering of people.
Thich Nhat Hanh
There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
Carl Jung
Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.
Nicholas Murray Butler
You can't wring your hands and roll up your sleeves at the same time.
Patricia Schroeder
Sacred refers to that which helps take us out of our little selves into the whole mountains-and-rivers mandala universe.
Gary Snyder
I often compare the mind in meditation to a jar of muddy water: The more we leave the water without interfering or stirring it, the more the particles of dirt will sink to the bottom, letting the natural clarity of the water shine through.
Sogyal Rinpoche
Love is eternal–the aspect may change, but not the essence…love makes one calmer about many things, and that way, one is more fit for one's work.
Vincent Van Gogh
The wise man does not lay up his treasures. The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own.
Lao-tzu
I take the assumption that every religion has been rooted in some mystical or transcendent experience. From that assumption, I just look at all the different systems as metaphors or doorways to God.
Ram Dass
When a person responds to the joys and sorrows of others as though they were his own, he or she has attained the highest spiritual union.
Bhagavad Gita
The sun and the moon are not mirrored in cloudy water. Thus the almighty cannot be mirrored in a heart that is obsessed by the idea of me and mine.
Ramakrishna
Anyone who is truly kind can never be unhappy. Anyone who is truly wise can never be muddled.
Confucius
©2026 Tom Barrett