Some people confuse acceptance with apathy, but there's all the difference in the world. Apathy fails to distinguish between what can and what cannot be helped; acceptance makes that distinction. Apathy paralyzes the will-to-action; acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens.
Arthur Gordon
You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.
Pearl S. Buck
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you will help them become what they are capable of becoming.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Those who seek the easy way do not seek the true way.
Dogen
It is in giving oneself that one receives.
St. Francis of Assisi
The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end, you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.
J. Krishnamurti
Know that every right thing you do - every good word you say - every positive thought you think - has good effect.
Peace Pilgrim
Learn to be pleased with everything; with wealth, so far as it makes us beneficial to others; with poverty, for not having much to care for, and with obscurity, for being unenvied.
Plutarch
Gratitude is what opens the spiritual doors to all the blessings. Everything becomes clear, you see, you feel, you live.
Omraam M. Aivanhov
The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.
Baruch Spinoza
A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all other virtues.
Cicero
Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.
Melodie Beattie
A relationship is like a garden. If it is to thrive it must be watered regularly. Special care must be given, taking into account the seasons as well as any unpredictable weather. New seeds must be sown and weeds must be pulled.
John Gray
Inner peace can be reached only when we practice forgiveness. Forgiveness is letting go of the past, and is therefore the means for correcting our misperceptions.
Gerald Jampolsky
It is an illusion to think that more comfort means more happiness. Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.
Storm Jameson
You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
Jack Kornfield
Few people realize how much you have to know, in order to know how little you know.
Albert Einsten
Anything you cannot relinquish when it has outlived its usefulness possesses you, and in this materialistic age a great many of us are possessed by our possessions.
Peace Pilgrim
Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.
Maurice Maeterlinck
The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.
Rainer Maria Rilke
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
Richard P. Feynman
It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English -- up to fifty words used in correct context -- no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.
Carl Sagan
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.
Mahatma Gandhi
The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace. A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being that places harmony in one's life.
Peace Pilgrim
Don't expect politicians, even good ones, to do your job for you. Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind blow.
David Brower
What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.
Lewis Mumford
The small ruby everyone wants has fallen out on the road.
Kabir
Some think it is east of us, others west of us.
Some say, "among primitive earth rocks," others, "in the deep waters."
Kabir's instinct told him it was inside, and what it was worth,
and he wrapped it up carefully in his heart cloth.
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Mahatma Gandhi
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.
Barack Obama
Our doubts are traitors
William Shakespeare
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt.
When you do nothing, you feel overwhelmed and powerless. But when you get involved, you feel the sense of hope and accomplishment that comes from knowing you are working to make things better.
Pauline R. Kezer
It is only the dead who have seen the end of war.
Plato
War would end if the dead could return.
Stanley Baldwin
To have courage for whatever comes in life - everything lies in that.
Saint Teresa of Avila
We are fascinated by the darkness in ourselves, we are fascinated by the shadow, we are fascinated by the boogeyman.
Anthony Hopkins
In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing. To know music.
Leonard Bernstein
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
Kahlil Gibran
Life is full of beauty. Notice it. Notice the bumble bee, the small child, and the smiling faces. Smell the rain, and feel the wind. Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams.
Ashley Smith
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
Camille Pissarro
In the Midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.
Deepak Chopra
I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
Albert Camus
Of course there is no formula for success except perhaps, an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings.
Arthur Rubinstein
Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
Thomas a Kempis
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched ... but are felt in the heart.
Helen Keller
We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire; the more we see, the more we are capable of seeing.
Maria Mitchell
Man can not always do harm. So even amongst pirates there must be some pleasant hours when, in their sinister vessel, you think you are, as it were, sitting in a swing.
Honore' de Balzac
The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.
Joseph Joubert
Living well and beautifully and justly are all one thing.
Socrates
Since we cannot change reality, let us change the eyes which see reality.
Nikos Kazantzakis
It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.
W. Edwards Deming
Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.
King Whitney Jr.
The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.
Marian Wright Edelman
Your duty is to be; and not to be this or that.
Sri Ramana Maharishi
Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they're yours.
Richard Bach
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
Carl Sagan
The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.
Kay Redfield Jamison
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
Albert Einstein
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.
Helen Keller
When you're finally up on the moon, looking back at the earth, all these differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you're going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people?
Frank Borman
There is only one reason
Hafiz
We have followed God into this world:
To encourage laughter, freedom, dance
And love.
As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.
Henry Van Dyke
Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
Georg Christoph Litchenberg
If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.
Calvin Coolidge
Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself.
Walter Anderson
When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
Alexander Graham BellIt has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.
Isaac Asimov
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
Carl Gustav Jung
Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things.
Dogen
Just as a picture is drawn by an artist, surroundings are created by the activities of the mind.
Buddha
Do good to thy Friend to keep him, to thy enemy to gain him.
Benjamin Franklin
Observation, not old age, brings wisdom.
Publilius Syrus
We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.
Blaise Pascal
Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.
Shakti Gawain
The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.
Antisthenes
Nothing is harder to direct than a man in prosperity; nothing more easily managed that one is adversity.
Plutarch
If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.
Epicurus
The key to wisdom is this - constant and frequent questioning, for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.
Peter Abelard
We find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.
Maxwell Maltz
Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.
Marcus Aurelius
Think with your whole body.
Taisen Deshimaru
Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.
Marion Wright Edelman
Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.
Alan Keightly
The world is a spell, an enchantement, an amazement, an arabesque of such stunning rhythm and a plot so intriguing that we are drawn by its web into a state of involvement where we forget that it is a game.
Alan Watts
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
William James
Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.
Krishamurti
Happiness is not a reward--it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment--it is a result.
Robert G. Ingersoll
As irrigators lead water where they want,
The Buddha
as archers make their arrows straight,
as carpenters carve wood,
the wise shape their minds.
We are what our thoughts have made us: so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.
Swami Vivekananda
To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is disease.
Lao Tzu
Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
Robert Frost
Contrary to what the politicians and religious leaders would like us to believe, the world won't be made safer by creating barriers between people.
Michael Palin
The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.
Zeno The Stoic
The realization of Truth is brought about by perception, and not in the least by ten millions of facts.
Sankara
Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.
Dorothy Day
The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.
Marty Feldman
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
Samuel Butler
Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
Rabbinical Saying
Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent.
Krishnamurti
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
Carl Jung
The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.
George Sheehan
It reduces itself to this. You have to be in the right place at the right time, but when it comes, you better have something on the ball.
Groucho Marx
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
Winston Churchill
Of one thing I am certain, the body is not the measure of healing - peace is the measure.
George Melton
We are all cells in the same body of humanity.
Peace Pilgrim
Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn't you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are.
Rachel Naomi Remen
As a rock remains unmoved by a storm, so the wise man remains unmoved by praise or blame.
The Dhammapada
Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.
Chuang Tzu
Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy.
Chogyam Trungpa
Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still.
Chinese Proverb
When you locate good in yourself, approve of it with determination. When you locate evil in yourself, despise it as something detestable.
Xun Zi
Let men decide firmly what they will not do, and they will be free to do vigorously what they ought to do.
Mencius
The will to win, the desire to succeed, the urge to reach your full potential... these are the keys that will unlock the door to personal excellence.
Confucius
When I talk about having good hearing, I don't mean just listening, but listening to yourself. When I talk about good eyesight, I don't mean just looking, but looking at yourself.
Chuang Tzu
The sage seeks freedom from desire. He does not collect precious things. He learns not to hold on to ideas. He brings men back to what they have lost.
Lao Tzu
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up every time we do.
Confucius
I relax my body completely, relax my mind completely, and then imagine myself at a level where anything can happen.
Richard Bach
I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.
Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein
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
All the masters tell us that the reality of life---which our noisy waking consciousness prevents us from hearing---speaks to us chiefly in silence.
Karlfried Graf Dürckheim
We must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.
Indira Gandhi
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
Mark Twain
I look upon all creatures equally; none are less dear to me and none more dear. But those who worship me with love live in me, and I come to life in them.
Bhagavad Gita
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
Thomas Carlyle
We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
Alan Watts
It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.
Alan Cohen
The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.
Yasutani Roshi
We don't stop playing because we grow old; We grow old because we stop playing.
George Bernard Shaw
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
George Bernard Shaw
If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.
Eleonora Duse
Through meditation and by giving full attention to one thing at a time, we can learn to direct attention where we choose.
Eknath Easwaran
When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.
Peace Pilgrim
High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring.
Edward Abbey
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck
The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but reveal to them their own.
Benjamin Disraeli
Enjoy each moment. Appreciate what is. Be completely here and now. That is where eternity is found.
Peter McWilliams
We must always seek to ally ourselves with that part of the enemy that knows what is right.
Mahatma Gandhi
If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.
Alan Watts
Vision is not enough, it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.
Vaclav Havel
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.
Chinese Proverb
I must learn to love the fool in me--the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries.
Theodore Isaac Rubin
Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.
Betty Smith
The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.
Eden Phillpotts
Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.
Wayne Dyer
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud became more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin
If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing.
Zimbabwe proverb
Life is a long lesson in humility.
James M. Barrie
I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.
Edith Cavell
A man's country is not a certain area of land, of mountains, rivers, and woods, but it is a principle and patriotism is loyalty to that principle.
George William Curtis
Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.
Mary Wollstonecraft
The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
e.e. cummings
The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.
Theodore Isaac Rubin
Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
Rabindranath Tagore
Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun.
Colleen C. Barrett
When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely-- the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears-- when you give your whole attention to it.
Krishnamurti
Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people.
Jawaharlal Nehru
Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.
Henry Van Dyke
The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.
Tacitus
What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.
J. Krishnamurti
Everything is dependent on everything else, everything is connected, nothing is separate. Therefore everything is going in the only way it can go. If people were different everything would be different. They are what they are, so everything is as it is.
G.I. Gurdjieff
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.
William Shakespeare
What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
John Lubbock
Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.
Blaise Pascal
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away.
Elvis Presley
That which one wants to hide most are one's own faults, but on the contrary, they should not be hidden but rather acknowledged, if one has any real desire to be free from them. By acknowledging one's faults, one destroys them or finds a way to improve on them.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.
J. Krishnamurti
It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
Anne Sexton
For instance, the bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created: Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon.
Bill Strickland, The Quotable Cyclist
The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.
Peter Abelard
Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.
Pete Seeger
Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
Lin Yutang
Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand.
Neil Armstrong
We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.
Swami VivekanandaSomeday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de ChardinMay you have the hindsight to know where you've been,
An Irish Blessing
The foresight to know where you are going,
And the insight to know when you have gone too far.Do not consider painful what is good for you.
EuripidesThe highest result of education is tolerance.
Helen KellerCease to ask what the morrow will bring forth. And set down as gain each day that Fortune grants.
HoraceThe sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.
Alexander HamiltonIf you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work.
Kahlil GibranYes, there is a Nirvana; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.
Kahlil Gibran
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