What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.
Helen Keller
The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
Henry Miller
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Let go. Why do you cling to pain? There is nothing you can do about the wrongs of yesterday. It is not yours to judge. Why hold on to the very thing which keeps you from hope and love?
Leo Buscaglia
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned how to begin.
Martin Buber
We do not need to be shoemakers to know if our shoes fit, and just as little have we any need to be professionals to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
Viktor E. Frankl
Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.
Groucho Marx
To think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral down into ever increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline - training - is about.
James Clavell
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Life does not accomodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to, and it couldn't do it better. Every seed desstroys its container or else there would be no fruition.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
I think these difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way that so many things that one goes around worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.
Isak Dinesen
Most of us go through each day looking for what we saw yesterday. And, not surprisingly, that is what we find.
James A. Kitchens
As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.
Helen Keller
It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.
Lillian Hellman
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Aldous Huxley
Our life is what our thoughts make it. A man will find that as he alters his thoughts toward things and other people, things and other people will alter towards him.
James Allen
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Maya Angelou
All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.
Henry Miller
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Carl Jung
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
Desmond Tutu
Great minds have always seen it. That is why man has survived his journey this long. When we fail to wish any longer to be otherwise than what we are, we will have ceased to evolve. Evolution has to be lived forward. I say this as one who has stood above the bones of much that has vanished, and at midnight has examined his own face.
Loren Eiseley
The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars. Every place is the center of the world.
John Burroughs
When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be -- I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
Aspire to be like Mt. Fuji, with such a broad and solid foundation that the strongest earthquake cannot move you, and so tall that the greatest enterprises of common men seem insignificant from your lofty perspective. With your mind as high as Mt Fuji you can see all things clearly. And you can see all the forces that shape events; not just the things happening near to you.
Miyamoto Musashi
We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
George Bernard Shaw
If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
As we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence actually liberates others.
Marianne Williamson
To hear, one must be silent.
Ursula K. LeGuin
May the sun bring you new energy by day,
Apache Blessing
May the moon softly restore you by night,
May the rain wash away your worries,
May the breeze blow new strength into your being,
May you walk gently through the world and know its beauty all the days of your life.
I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.
Emo Philips
Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
William James
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
Henry James
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool.
Richard Feynman
Delusion arises from anger. The mind is bewildered by delusion. Reasoning is destroyed when the mind is bewildered. One falls down when reasoning is destroyed.
Bhagavad Gita
My advice is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy you ice cream while it is on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
I cannot tell if what the world considers 'happiness' is happiness or not. All I know is that when I consider the way they go about attaining it, I see them carried away headlong, grim and obsessed, in the general onrush of the human herd, unable to stop themselves or to change their direction. All the while they claim to be just on the point of attaining happiness.
Chuang-tzu
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Norman MacFinan
To be natural means not to force things. When you act natural, you get what you need, but to know what is natural, you have to cultivate tranquility.
Hsieh
We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released.
Jean Houston
Common sense dictates that we evaluate our beliefs on the basis of how they affect us. If they make us more loving, creative, and wise, they are good beliefs. If they make us cruel, jealous, depressed and sick, they cannot be good beliefs.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
Don't fight forces, use them.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair and all the terrible things that happen to us, come because we actually deserve them?
Marcus Cole
You must pass your days in song. Let your whole life be a song.
Sai Baba
Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.
Maria Robinson
There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.
Meister Eckhart
In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
Albert Schweitzer
The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the Universe to do.
Galileo Galilei
The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
You have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.
James Matthew Barrie
How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then to rest afterward.
Spanish Proverb
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
Havelock Ellis
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
Hanging onto resentment is letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head.
Ann Landers
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell
In deep self-acceptance grows a compassionate understanding. As one Zen master said when I asked if he ever gets angry, 'Of course I get angry, but then a few minutes later I say to myself, 'What's the use of this,' and I let it go.'
Jack Kornfield
The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.
Meister Eckhart
All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
Blaise Pascal
I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
Abraham Maslow
The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping.
Izaak Walton
I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Agatha Christie
The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
Quentin Crisp
To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.
Douglas Adams
If you think you're enlightened go spend a week with your family.
Ram Dass
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Jalal ad-Din Rumi
Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.
Hafiz
As the births of living creatures are at first ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time.
Francis Bacon
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana
For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
Baruch Spinoza
The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
R.D. Laing
I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."
Kurt Vonnegut
What we have to learn, in both meditation and in life, is to be free of attachment to the good experiences, and free of aversion to the negative ones.
Sogyal Rinpoche
There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
I've found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often.
Brian Tracy
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
Dalai Lama
The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.
Robert Frost
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Philip K. DickGood for the body is the work of the body, and good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other.
Henry David Thoreau
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
James Baldwin
It takes great courage to see the world in its tainted glory and still love it.
Oscar Wilde
Always meet petulance with gentleness, and perverseness with kindness. A gentle hand can lead even an elephant by a hair. Reply to thine enemy with gentleness. Opposition to peace is sin.
Zoroaster
Whenever you have truth it must be given with love, or the message and the messenger will be rejected.
Mahatma Gandhi
The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world.
Max Born
What you perceive, your observations, feelings, interpretations, are all your truth. Your truth is important. Yet it is not The Truth.
Linda Ellinor
By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is the easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.
Confucius
When the body is in pain, a distorted area of awareness is crying out to the rest of awareness for help.
Deepak Chopra
When walking through the "valley of shadows," remember, a shadow is cast by a Light.
Austin O'Malley
The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.
Reinhold Niebuhr
Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?
Henry James
If I were to begin life again, I should want it just as it was; only I would open my eyes a little more.
Jules Renard
The art of life lies in a constant re-adjustment to our surroundings.
Kakuzo Okakura
Living well and beautifully and justly are all one thing.
Socrates
If you understand, things are just as they are; If you do not understand, things are just as they are.
Zen Proverb
As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did except in my own imagination.
Thomas Merton
A finger points at the moon, but the moon is not at the tip of the finger. Words point at the truth, but the truth is not in words. To seek illumination through words is to get lost in the web of words and not see the truth.
Huineng
Buddha left a road map, Jesus left a road map, Krishna left a road map, Rand McNally left a road map. But you still have to travel the road yourself.
Stephen Levine
A clay pot sitting in the sun will always be a clay pot. It has to go though the white heat of the furnace to become porcelain.
Mildred White Struven
People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
Barbara Kingsolver
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T.S. Eliot
To bear defeat with dignity, to accept criticism with poise, to receive honors with humility -- these are marks of maturity and graciousness.
William Arthur Ward
... almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Steve Jobs
Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I'll try again tomorrow.
Mary Anne Radmacher
Better indeed is knowledge than mechanical practice. Better than knowledge is meditation. But better still is surrender of attachment to results, because there follows immediate peace.
Bhagavad GitaIt's not necessarily the amount of time you spend at practice that counts; it's what you put into the practice.
Eric Lindros
Olympism seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of a good example and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.
Pierre de Coubertin
True wealth is not measured in money or status or power. It is measured in the legacy we leave behind for those we love and those we inspire.
Cesar Chavez
It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
Joseph Campbell
A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein
To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
Robert Pirsig
Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we are listening to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.
Alan Watts
A one word solution to all the problems the world is facing today is "Compassion."
Amma
Only when the clamor of the outside world is silenced will you be able to hear the deeper vibration. Listen carefully.
Sarah Ban Breathnach
If you have much, give of your wealth; if you have little, give of your heart.
Arabian Proverb
Our single grateful thought raised to heaven is the most perfect prayer.
G.E. Lessing
We are one, after all, you and I. Together we suffer, together exist, and forever will recreate each other.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.
Bruce Lee
Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama.
Ram Dass
Thought held in mind reproduces after its kind, just like a seed in the ground that's nourished reproduces after its kind. In this moment, you are free to plant again.
Mary Manin Morrissey
Teach us love, compassion, and honor that we may heal the earth and heal each other.
Prayer, Ojibwa Tribe
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Albert Einstein
All speech, action, and behavior are fluctuations of consciousness. All life emerges from, and is sustained in, consciousness. The whole universe is the expression of consciousness. The reality of the universe is one unbounded ocean of consciousness in motion.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
It is impossible for the human mind to remain completely without thought for long times. On the other hand, too many small, unimportant thoughts can fill the mind to the extent that no meaningful thought takes place.
Tomio Hirai in Zen Meditation Therapy
Our single grateful thought raised to heaven is the most perfect prayer.
G.E. Lessing
When we are afraid we ought not to occupy ourselves with endeavoring to prove that there is no danger, but in strengthening ourselves to go on in spite of the danger.
Mark Rutherford
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
Imagination is the living power and prime agent of all human perception.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
It is not that age brings childhood back again. Age merely shows what children we remain.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
What happens to the turkey can happen to the rooster too.
Haitian proverb
Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.
Jack Welch
Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else's can shorten it.
Cullen Hightower
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine Saint-Exupéry
To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.
George Orwell
Truth exists. Only falsehood has to be invented.
Georges Braque
Simplicity before understanding is simplistic; simplicity after understanding is simple.
Edward De Bono
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
Charity is the pure gold which makes us rich in eternal wealth.
Jean P. Camus
I have told you of the Spaniard who always put on his spectacles when about to eat cherries, that they might look bigger and more tempting. In like manner I make the most of my enjoyments; and though I do not cast my cares away, I pack them in as little compass as I can, and carry them as conveniently as I can for myself, and never let them annoy others.
Robert Southey
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
Epictetus
Language... has created the word "loneliness" to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word "solitude" to express the glory of being alone.
Paul Tillich
I want to share something with you: The three little sentences that will get you through life. Number 1: Cover for me. Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss! Number 3: It was like that when I got here.
Homer Simpson
Your conscious mind puts filters on everything you perceive and tries to make sense of it. Therefore, imagery that arises unbidden and may not appear to make sense quite likely represents far more data than is usually available to the conscious mind.
Richard Bartlett
Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
Dalai Lama
Never let a problem to be solved become more important than the person to be loved.
Barbara Johnson
Anger: an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca (A similar quote is also attributed to Mark Twain)
Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.
Marcus Aurelius
Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheeplike passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving.
John Dewey
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell
We seek peace, knowing that peace is the climate of freedom.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.
Maria Robinson
New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
Mark Twain
Matter is less material and the mind less spiritual than is generally supposed. The habitual separation of physics and psychology, mind and matter is metaphysically indefensible.
Bertrand Russell
In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
One of the tragedies of modern times is that people have come to believe that something said by someone in the past, perhaps for illustrative or provocation purposes, actually represents that person's beliefs at the time.
Idries Shah
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
Orson Welles
If we examine every stage of our lives, we find that from our first breath to our last we are under the constraint of circumstances. And yet we still possess the greatest of all freedoms, the power of developing our innermost selves in harmony with the moral order of the Universe, and so winning peace at heart whatever obstacles we meet.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheThere is one spectacle grander than the sea; that is the sky. And there is one spectacle grander than the heavens; that is the interior of the psyche.
Victor Hugo in Les MisérablesNo act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.
Aesop
Real generosity is doing something nice for someone who'll never find out.
Frank A. Clark
How wonderful it is that nobody needs to wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
Anne Frank
If you give what can be taken, you are not really giving. Take what you are given, not what you want to be given. Give what cannot be taken.
Idries Shah
The greatest gift we can give one another is rapt attention to one another's existence.
Sue Atchley Ebaugh
When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.
Roy E. Disney (January 10, 1930 – December 16, 2009)
One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'
Ludwig Wittgenstein
You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.
Maimonides
When the will and imagination are in conflict, the imagination invariably wins the day.
Emile Coue
One's first step in wisdom is to question everything--and one's last is to come to terms with everything.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.
Dag Hammarskjold
If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.
Nelson Mandela
Non-violence in its dynamic condition means conscious suffering. It does not mean meek submission to the will of the evil-doer, but it means the pitting of one's whole soul against the will of the tyrant.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Common sense dictates that we evaluate our beliefs on the basis of how they affect us. If they make us more loving, creative, and wise, they are good beliefs. If they make us cruel, jealous, depressed and sick, they cannot be good beliefs.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
This is the way of peace: Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love.
Peace Pilgrim
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
You don't have to go looking for love when it's where you come from.
Werner Erhard
The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.
Deepak Chopra
If, with the rope of mindfulness,
Shantideva in Engaging in the Conduct of a Bodhisattva, V, 3
You bind firm the elephant of the mind,
You will let go of every fear
And find virtue close at hand.
To undertake a genuine spiritual path is not to avoid difficulties but to learn the art of making mistakes wakefully, to bring to them the transformative power of our heart.
Jack Kornfield
While you are walking, smile and be in the here and now, and you will transform that place into paradise.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
John Muir
Failure is not fatal but failure to change might be.
John Wooden
Evil does exist, but we do not have to accept it as an inevitable fact of life.
Paramananda
© 2010 Tom Barrett