Collected Quotes
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Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
— Carl Jung
The idea [of therapy] isn’t to give people answers, or lead their bark of longing into a safe, dull, protected harbor, but to make people aware of the depths of possibility in their hearts and lives; help them remove the barriers that keep them from being the people they were meant to be.
— John O’Donohue
We’re out there somewhere between the known and the unknown, trying to reel in both for a closer look.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
All thought begins with the recognition that something is out of place.
— Plato
Eventually we realize that not knowing what to do is just as real and just as useful as knowing what to do. Not knowing stops us from taking false directions. Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention. Just as people lost in the wilderness, on a cliff face or in a blizzard pay attention with a kind of acuity that they would not have if they thought they knew where they were. Why? Because for those who are really lost, their life depends on paying real attention. If you think you know where you are, you stop looking.
— David Whyte
Love’s function is to fabricate unknownness
— e. e. cummings
One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.
— Abigail Adams
I want to live the real life.
I want to my live life close to the bone.
— John Mellencamp, The Real Life, The Lonesome Jubilee
There’s more than just one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line.
The less I seek my source for some definitive,
The closer I am to fine.
— Indigo Girls, Closer to Fine, Indigo Girls
It’s not always about survival, this life we are given; it’s usually so much easier than that. It’s about trusting the eternal life force that is flowing within us—letting that force lead the way through all of the inevitable changes we will face across the span of our time here on Earth.
— Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open
The world breaks everyone and afterward some are strong at the broken places.
— Ernest Hemingway
It is not only that some [people] become strong at the broken places; it is also that, through trauma, others become strong, and discover that they are strong in ways they never knew.
— Diana Fosha, Trauma Reveals the Roots of Resilience
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. Not a better you, but a realer you.
— Rachel Naomi Remen
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
— Carl Rogers
As long as we are alive, we feel fear. It is an intrinsic part of our makeup, as natural as a bitter cold winter day or the winds that rip branches off trees. If we resist it or push it aside, we miss a powerful opportunity for awakening.
— Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance
There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it.
— Romaine Rolland
To the world you may be just one person. To one person you may be the world.
— Anonymous
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
— Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.
— Confucius
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
— Franz Kafka
Curiosity restores is a state of heightened awareness. Culturally, this has been considered a child’s activity. By the time we’re grown, we’re supposed to know enough not to get bogged down in life’s miraculous detail. But the spiritual journey reactivates our sense of miracle and invites us to pause again, squatting over the sidewalk cracks, to ponder the lives of ants and stars.
— Christina Baldwin, Life’s Companion
You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
— Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living
I feel like a small battlefield in which the problems, or some of the problems, of our time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is keep oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield. After all, the problems must be accommodated, have somewhere to struggle and come to rest and we, poor little humans, must put our inner space at their service and not run away.
— Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life
Between endings and beginnings there is a blank time where nothing is supposed to happen. It’s frustrating, fearful, but it’s supposed to be this way. Like a tree in winter, on the outside there is nothing going on, but inside is hidden growth. This growth explodes in spring. Spring can’t happen without the blank time.
— Peter McDonald
To find in ourselves what makes life worth living is risky business, for it means that once we know we must seek it. It also means that without it life will be valueless.
— Marsha Sinetar, Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics
To get to the simplicity of a thing, you have to go through the complexity, and only once you’ve gone into and through the complexity can you state the simplicity. What never rings true is the person who states the simplicity without understanding the complexity.
— Susan Slater Blythe
Even a thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us.
— Neitzsche
In many ways, constancy is an illusion. . . . Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.
— Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Life
A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem.
— Carl Jung
Despair is our chance to wrestle with fire and come through.
— Christina Baldwin, Life’s Companion
In the dark times, will there be singing?
Yes. There will be singing about the dark times.
— Bertolt Brecht
Art can compel people freely, gladly, and spontaneously to sacrifice themselves in the service of man.
— Tolstoy
A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.
— Tobias Wolff
Nothing is more powerful than individuals acting out of their own conscience.
— Vaclav Havel
Every death is like the burning of a library.
— Alex Haley
The character of a society is the cumulative result of countless small actions, day in and day out, of millions of people.
— Duane Elgin
The real voyage of discovery is not in seeking new places, but in seeing with new eyes.
— Marcel Proust
The secret to having good ideas is to have a lot of ideas, then throw away the bad ones.
— Linus Pauling
The rocks in the water don’t know how the rocks in the sun feel.
— Haitian Proverb
That which is spoken from the heart is heard by the heart.
— Jewish saying
Change occurs when deeply felt private experiences are given public legitimacy.
— Ghandi
Ten times a day something happens to me like this—some strengthening throb of amazement—some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.
— Mary Oliver
This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.
— George Bernard Shaw
If you’re never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances.
— Julia Sorel
Let’s dare to be ourselves, for we do that better than anyone else.
— Shirley Briggs
Family and work. Family and work. I can let them be at war, with guilt as their nuclear weapon and mutually assured destruction as their aim, or I can let them nourish each other.
— Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life
A hundred times a every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
— Albert Einstein
At one level inspiration is the ability to see beauty and mystery in everything men and women do.
— Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life
Wisdom resides inherently within experiences of hardship.
— Elizabeth Andrew, Writing the Sacred Journey
When you set out on a journey and night covers the road, you don’t conclude that the road has vanished. How else could we discover the stars?
— Nancy Willard
Imagination is a memory that, while perhaps not accurate in its facts, is reliable in describing emotional truth.
— Elizabeth Andrew, Writing the Sacred Journey
Even those truths that are painful will ultimately increase my wisdom, undergird my strength, make possible my art.
— Pat Schneider, Writing Alone and With Others
There is ecstasy in paying attention. You can get into a kind of Wordsworthian openness to the world, where you see in everything the essence of holiness.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid.
— Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
The essence of who you are is ultimately mysterious, ungraspable and numinous—completely different from every other structure of matter.
— John O’Donohue
When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision—then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
— Audre Lorde
Professionals give advice; pilgrims share wisdom.
— Bill Moyers
The worst thing that happens in life is not death. The worst thing would be to miss it. . . . I think the great danger in life is not showing up.
— Rachel Naomi Remen
Wonder is not a Pollyanna stance, not a denial of reality; wonder is an acknowledgement of the power of the mind to transform, to notice, to decide what experience shall mean.
— Christina Baldwin, Life’s Companion
Emotional attachment is probably the primary protection against feelings of helplessness and meaninglessness.
— McFarlane and van der Kolk
There is no such thing as complete independence from others or overdependence. There is only effective or ineffective dependence. Secure dependence fosters autonomy and self-confidence.
— Susan Johnson
In care of the soul there is trust that nature heals, that much can be accomplished by not-doing.
— Thomas Moore
Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.
— Zora Neale Hurston
No one suspects the days to be gods.
— Emerson
Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
Spiritual life is contractual. The sacred cannot dialogue with the unresponsive.
— Christina Baldwin, Life’s Companion
Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life. . . . Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw at it still.
— Thoreau
When people get into therapy, or when they need healing, their real hope is that they’ll come to the secret frontier in themselves, some unknown source of energy and healing in themselves, where the divinity of who-ness is protected. This is a spiritual quest.
— John O’Donohue
Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
— Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching
We cannot solve our problems in the same state of consciousness in which we created them.
— Albert Einstein
By nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.
— Confucius
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you….As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
—- Nelson Mandela
No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that’s both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
— Twila Tharp, The Creative Habit
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
Dare to be naïve.
— Buckminster Fuller
One of the reasons I am happy now is that I did the work I had always dreamed of doing. But I didn’t start doing it seriously and professionally until I was forty years old.
— Ellen Gilchrist, The Writing Life
Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.
— John Quincy Adams
With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.
— Keshavan Nair
One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.
— Maya Angelou
Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.
— Confucius
To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself.
— Soren Kierkegaard
Rituals are a good signal to your unconscious that it’s time for it to kick in.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
We learn what we have said from those who listen to our speaking.
— Kenneth Patton
That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.
— Emily Dickinson
Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.
— Benjamin Disraeli
When you begin to touch your heart or let your heart be touched, you begin to discover that it’s bottomless, that it doesn’t have any resolution, that this heart is huge, vast, and limitless. You begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.
— Pema Chodron
At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.
— Albert Schweitzer
Appreciation can make a day, even change a life. Your willingness to put it into words is all that is necessary.
— Margaret Cousins
Be open to unexpected words and adventures. Spend time being in a state of quiet expectation and see what (or who) comes your way.
— Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge, Poemcrazy
I have no idea about what death is, but because I have been in association with it so intimately, I have a much greater sense of the value of life and of what life can be.
— Rachel Naomi Remen
A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them.
— Carl Jung
Don’t keep it all inside.
Don’t keep your aching, celebrating,
wonder making heart alone. . .
Write your own song.
— Blue October, Inner Glow
Meaning drives us from despair to wonder, from confusion to clarity, from hesitance to confidence. And the only place to find meaning is in the importance of small things.
— Christina Baldwin, Life’s Companion
Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.
— Joseph Campbell
If sequestered pain made a sound, the atmosphere would be humming all the time.
— Stephen Levine, Unattended Sorrow
Your unconscious can’t work when you are breathing down its neck.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothing to set a man’s mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were. And if you done something wrong just stand up and say you done it and say you’re sorry and get on with it. Don’t haul stuff around with you.
— Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
The routine is as much a part of the creative process as the lightening bold of inspiration, maybe more. And this routine is available to everyone.
— Twila Tharp, The Creative Habit
Keeping a [journal] need not be a major chore—just a few minutes of notes each day can be valuable. Writing crystallizes insights, fools the defense of forgetfulness, and builds a collection of ideas and reflections that can spur further insights even years later.
— Roger Walsh, Essential Spirituality
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.
— Confucius
There is nothing selfish about enjoying yourself. In fact, as wise people have long said and psychologists have since discovered, happiness makes people less self-focused and more altruistic.
— Roger Walsh, Essential Spirituality
Development involves giving up a smaller story in order to wake up to a larger story.
— Jean Houston
Satisfaction isn’t so much getting what you want as wanting what you have.
— David Myers
Suffering is a call for inquiry, all pain needs investigation.
— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
— Helen Keller
The unexpected brings us light and darkness, joy and sorrow, life and death. And it brings discovery. Some of our most important discoveries are made when we’re not looking.
— Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge, Poemcrazy
The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.
— M. Scott Peck
Nothing on earth is more gladdening than knowing we must roll up our sleeves and move back the boundaries of the humanly possible once more.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
— Anais Nin
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
— Henry David Thoreau
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
— Henry Miller
Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
— James Thurber
People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.
— Albert Einstein
Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction.
— Annie Sullivan
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
— Arthur Koestler
The wisdom we know deep inside ourselves is infinitely richer than anything we can be taught.
— Elizabeth Andrew, Writing the Sacred Journey
In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
— Eric Hoffer
You must learn day by day, year by year, to broaden your horizon. The more things you love, the more you are interested in, the more you enjoy, the more you are indignant about, the more you have left when anything happens.
— Ethel Barrymore
A master can tell you what he expects of you. A teacher, though, awakens your own expectations.
— Patricia Neal
It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
— Dale Carnegie
I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.
— Frank Lloyd Wright
When we turn to our innate wisdom for the harmony of mind and gut, we heal the entrance to the heart as it seeks to beat in rhythm with the world.
— Stephen Levine, Unattended Sorrow
Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal: my strength lies solely in my tenacity.
— Louis Pasteur
Although seemingly mundane, ordinary experiences contain within them a vivacity, a sense of wholeness, and a will beyond our own.
— Elizabeth Andrew, Writing the Sacred Journey
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.
— Steve Jobs
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
— Victor Frankl
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 art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
— Alfred North Whitehead
Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
— David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
— Anais Nin
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
— Charles Darwin
Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.
— George Eliot
… without darkness?
Nothing comes to birth,?
As without light?
Nothing flowers.
— May Sarton
There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.
The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.
And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.
— Mary Oliver,
Excerpt from Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does the Temple End?
There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.
— Denis Diderot
A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the why for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any how.
— Victor Frankl
Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.
— Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.
Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss or the fierce individuality of passion with the dulling universal certainty of platitude.
— Mark Doty, Dog Years
It helps to resign as the controller of your fate. All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what’s keeping things running right. We’re bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below. With that fact in mind, people like me make up all these rules to give us the illusion that we are in charge. I need to say to myself, they’re not needed, hon. Just take in the buggy pleasures. Be kind to the others, grab the fleck of riverweed, notice how beautifully your bug legs scull.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.
— Thomas Jefferson
There’s nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
— Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art
I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.
— Frank Lloyd Wright
Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not easy.
— Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics
Our passions, when well exercised, have wisdom; they guide our thinking, our values, our survival.
— Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence
Curiosity in the service of intimacy can be scary and exciting (much like rafting or canoeing down the rapids). . . Shame imprisons curiosity and curiosity, welcomed, banishes shame.
— Ken Benau
They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
— Andy Warhol
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
— African proverb
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.
— Gilda Radner
Freedom from the desire for an answer is essential to the understanding of a problem…. 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
A ship is safe in harbor, but that is not what a ship is for.
— Thomas Aquinas
Wise elders will likely be those individuals who stay both mentally and physically vital throughout life.
— Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships
We need to live in mindful harmony with our feelings, not attempt to control them.
— Leslie Greenberg and Sylvia Paivio, Working With Emotions in Psychotherapy
Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.
— Robert Heinlein
Help me to find myself as I walk in another’s shoes.
— from prayer song from Ghana
We [humans] are the only creatures who are in-between. We’re of the earth, but don’t belong to it, because we strain after the heavens; and yet the heavens aren’t full in us. So this wonderful, restless, eternal longing in us has us always on a quest.
— John O’Donohue
I don’t think there’s such a thing as a bad emotion. The only bad emotion is a stuck emotion.
— Rachel Naomi Remen
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.
Let me keep my company always, with those who say
Look! and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.
— Mary Oliver, from Mysteries, Yes
Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
The truth is not for all men, but only for those who seek it.
— Ayn Rand
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
— Oscar Wilde
Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.
— Albert Einstein
One certain lesson life has taught us: that authentic identity derives from facing reality, not ignoring it.
— Jane Adams, I’m Still Your Mother
Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it. Without the time and effort invested in getting ready to create, you can be hit by a thunderbolt and it’ll just leave you stunned.
— Twila Tharp, The Creative Habit
Remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall—think of it, ALWAYS.
— Mahatma Gandhi
I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
Men have forgotten this truth, said the fox. But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
It’s not enough to have a dream unless I’m willing to pursue it. It’s not enough to know what’s right unless I’m strong enough to do it. It’s not enough to join the crowd, to be acknowledged and accepted. I must be true to my ideals, even if I’m excluded and rejected. It’s not enough to learn the truth unless I also learn to live it. It’s not enough to reach for love unless I care enough to give it.
— Source Unknown
Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people.
— Spencer Johnson
What you perceive, your observations, feelings, interpretations, are all your truth. Your truth is important. Yet it is not The Truth.
— Linda Ellinor
Keep the company of those who seek the truth. Run from those who have found it.
— Vaclav Havel
There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.
— Alfred North Whitehead
There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.
— Niels Bohr
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
— Galileo
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
— George Orwell
Love truth, but pardon error.
— Voltaire
Most people spend their whole lives using their strengths to cover up and hide their weaknesses. They expend tremendous energy in keeping themselves a house divided. But if you surrender to your weakness, therein lies your pathway to genius. A person who knows and utilizes his true weakness and uses his strength to include it is a whole person. He may seem rough around the edges, but there are so few people like that that they lead their generation.
— Feldenkrais
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
— Maya Angelou
The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
— David Foster Wallace
Couples are jigsaw puzzles that hang together by touching in just enough points. They’re never total fits or misfits. In time, a pair invents its own commonwealth, complete with anthems, rituals, and lingos—a cult of two with fallible gods.
— Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love
Creative exploration [is] impossible, without (humble) acknowledgement of the unknown.
— Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning
How can we know ourselves by ourselves? . . . Soul needs intimate connection, not only to individuate, but simply to live. For this we need relationships of the profoundest kind through which we can realize ourselves, where self-revelation is possible, where interest in and love for soul is paramount.
— James Hillman, Myth of Analysis
Owning and integrating our own past—the good and the bad—is the way we can make the present better.
— Jane Adams, I’m Still Your Mother
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
— Steve Jobs
Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it.
— Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning
Wholeness is not achieved by cutting off a portion of one’s being, but by integration of the contraries.
— C.G. Jung
The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
— William Butler Yeats
All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.
— Thomas Jefferson
If you ever find you’re the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.
— Austin Kleon
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
— Mother Teresa
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
— Winston Churchill
Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.
— Abraham Lincoln
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 Feynman
Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.
— Stephen Hawking
The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
— Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
Being safe is about being seen and heard and allowed to be who you are and to speak your truth.
— Rachel Naomi Remen
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
— Maya Angelou
If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.
— Margaret Mead
Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.
— Anne Lamott
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.
— Helen Keller
People living deeply have no fear of death.
— Anais Nin
Take risks and you’ll get the payoffs. Learn from your mistakes until you succeed.
— Bobby Flay
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.
— Mark Twain
There should be a word that means beginning/end because nothing begins without something dying.
— Rachel Naomi Remen
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
— Mark Twain
We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.
— C.G. Jung
Don’t ask what the world needs.
Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
— Howard Thurman
Refuse to deny what you know but consent to how little that will always be, and, when the moment comes, the sky will open and the liberating intrusion will descend upon you.
— Jack Miles, The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004
I did not have to believe. I only had to wonder.
— Patricia Monaghan, Physics and Grief (in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004)
In nature nothing remains constant. Everything is in a perpetual state of transformation, motion, and change. However, we discover that nothing simply surges up out of nothing without having antecedents that existed before. Likewise, nothing ever disappears without a trace, in the sense that it gives rise to absolutely nothing existing in later times.
— David Bohm, (in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004)
There is a way of beholding nature which is a form of prayer, a way of minding something with such clarity and aliveness that the rest of the world recedes. It . . . gives the brain a small vacation.
— Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love
I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.
— Anne Lamott
Coming to the city was like entering a tunnel, he said, and finding to your surprise that the light at the end didn’t matter; sometimes in fact the tunnel made the light tolerable.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, “Nothing is more important than an unread library.”
— Austin Kleon
We bring about a world in consciousness that is partly what is given, and partly what we bring, something that comes into being through this particular conjunction and no other. And the key to this is the kind of attention we pay to the world.
— Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
— C.G. Jung
She whispered, as though revealing a secret, “God waits for us to create Him…” She was telling us that we have the responsibility to reveal God, each in our own way, moment by moment… as we breathe, as we speak, as we move through our life. We create God by being. Without us God is invisible.
— Fariha de Menil Friedrich, talking about her mother Dominque de Menil’s thoughts and words as she was dying
Spiritual forces are of consequence in real world affairs and a capacity for reverence sustains a commitment to justice.
— Emilee Dawn Whitehurst
The attitude of receptivity, indispensible in art, is also the attitude necessary for ecumenism—TO LISTEN.
— Dominique de Menil
A thing that is really done from the heart will one day or another again touch the hearts of others.
— Marie-Alain Couturier
In order to keep our balance, we need to hold the interior and exterior, visible and invisible, known and unknown, temporal and eternal, ancient and new, together.
— John O’Donohue
When a great moment knocks on the door of your life, it is often no louder than the beating of your heart, and it is very easy to miss it.
— Boris Pasternak
Reductionism is merciless.
— Douglas Hofstadter
It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter. Or to put it in a slightly different way, experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them—as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go—end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.
— Daniel Coyle
If you look into your own heart, and you find nothing wrong there, what is there to worry about? What is there to fear?
— Confucius
Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is a triumph of some enthusiasm.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don’t look for the big, quick improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at time. That’s the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.
— John Wooden
A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn’t protect itself and it doesn’t hide. It stands out, like a baby’s fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Being young and trying to catch a glimpse of the depths, of the true self, of the soul, or whatever human beings have called it over the centuries, we often find ourselves surrounded by bossy, hectoring voices trying to short-circuit our personal experience by super-imposing their own disappointments. Much of this bossiness masquerades as an education.
— David Whyte
Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage; vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.
— Brene Brown
If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
— Ken Robinson
Real security is contemplating death, not pretending it doesn’t exist.
— Eve Ensler
To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.
— Confucius
Being alive is being aware, being able to be touched and moved and changed, being able to respond rather than to react, being able to see and hear.
— Rachel Naomi Remen
To be seen and understood by the one we love best may be the most powerful weapon against shame.
— Susan Johnson
Most of us bring to everyday life a somewhat naïve psychological attitude in our expectations that our lives and relationships will be simple. Love of the soul asks for some appreciation for its complexity.
— Thomas Moore
We still and always want waking.
— Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
There is a delicate balance that we need to honor as we try to find meaning in any event or state of mind: Many people confuse finding meaning with finding a reason, putting our finger on something or someone for blame.
— Stephen Levine, Unattended Sorrow
There’s a paradox in the notion that creativity should be a habit. We think of creativity as a way of keeping everything fresh and new, while habit implies routine and repetition. That paradox intrigues me because it occupies the place where creativity and skill rub up against each other.
— Twila Tharp, The Creative Habit
Every child is an experiment of nature. Children need their parents’ curiosity about them as an avenue of self-discovery.
— Louis Cozolino, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships
Emotion is not opposed to reason. Emotions guide and manage thought in fundamental ways and complement the deficiencies of thinking.
— Leslie Greenberg and Sylvia Paivio, Working With Emotions in Psychotherapy
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
— David Foster Wallace, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Despite not knowing if what he felt from moment to moment would pass or last forever, he entered fully into his shifting states of violent rage, self-pity, longing, heartbreak, cynicism, without losing the ability to think about what was happening to him. That took courage, I thought, living with the suffering in a mindful way, as an artifact of being, neither good nor bad.
— Diane Ackerman, One Hundred Names for Love
The decisions for which we bear responsibility are the ones we make.
— Jane Adams, I’m Still Your Mother
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
— Steve Jobs
If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.
— C.G. Jung
I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.
— Abraham Lincoln
A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
— Margaret Mead
Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you’re lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who’ve been around awhile know it’s just a thing that changes day by day.
— Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
If I’d waited to know who I was or what I was about before I started “being creative,” well, I’d still be sitting around trying to figure myself out instead of making things. In my experience, it’s in the act of making things and doing our work that we figure out who we are.
— Austin Kleon
While the left hemisphere’s raison d’être is to narrow things down to a certainty, the right hemisphere’s is to open them up into possibility. In life we need both. In fact for practical purposes, narrowing things down to a certainty, so that we can grasp them, is more helpful. But it is also illusory, since certainty itself is an illusion – albeit, as I say, a useful one.
— Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning
Love and the search for truth are unifying principles.
— Dominique de Menil
Though the human body is born complete in one moment, the birth of the human heart is an ongoing process. It is being birthed in every experience of your life. Everything that happens to you has the potential to deepen you. It brings to birth within you new territories of the heart.
— John O’Donohue
Suffering passes, but the fact of having suffered never passes.
— Leon Bloy
If you’re really listening, if you’re awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold ever-more wonders.
— Andrew Harvey
The capacity for inner dialogue is a touchstone for outer objectivity.
— Carl Jung, “The Transcendent Function”
We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority.
— James Hillman, Healing Fiction
When we have for so long been judged by everyone we meet, just to look into the eyes of another who does not judge us can be extraordinarily healing.
— Jack Kornfield, A Path With Heart
And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick
I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a thing I wanted to do.
— Georgia O’Keefe
The soul that beholds beauty becomes beautiful.
— Ploteinus
Melancholy gives the soul an opportunity to express a side of its nature that is as valid as any other but is hidden out of our distaste for its darkness and bitterness.
— Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
Where danger is, there is salvation also.
— Holderlin
No one should deny the danger of the descent, but it can be risked. No one need risk it, but it is certain that someone will. And let those who go down the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods. Yet every descent is followed by an ascent.
— Carl Jung
One of the first things to learn if you want to be a contemplative is to mind your own business. Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.
— Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
When beliefs need some modification,
We make it with much trepidation,
For our world is then new,
And things seem all askew,
‘til we’re used to the new formulation.
— Professor Arnold Tustin
To dare to be aware of the facts of the universe in which we are existing calls for courage.
— W. R. Bion
Trust in what you love, continue to do it, and it will take you where you need to go.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
Then to the depths! – I could as well say height:
It’s all the same.
— Goethe, Faust
If you want the whole thing,
the gods will give it to you.
But you must be ready for it.
— Joseph Campbell, The Joseph Campbell Companion
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
Learning always involves self-transcendence. Learning calls forth what is in us, helping us to move toward authenticity and wholeness.
— Karl Rahner
Open your heart, your gaze, to the visitations of angels, even if the gifts they bring may not be centeredness and balance but eccentricity and a wholly unfamiliar sense of pleasure called joy.
— James Hillman, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart
These are little packets of light and you need to plant them early in the year and remember to mark where they were because lots of times they look like weeds in the beginning and it’s not until later that you see how beautiful they really are.
— Brian Andreas, Going Somewhere Soon
It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.
— Pablo Picasso
No man can change himself into anything from sheer reason; he can only change into what he potentially is.
— Carl Jung
Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
— Gertrude Stein
Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with the magic.
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick
There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.
— Tennessee Williams
In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
— Albert Einstein
Being is the great explainer.
— Henry David Thoreau
Actually, every time we begin, we wonder how we did it before, Each time is a new journey with no maps.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
The twisting of a familiar theme into a new shape is sometimes more revealing and ultimately more significant than acquiring new knowledge and a new set of principles. Often when imagination twists the commonplace into a slightly new form, suddenly we see soul where formerly it was hidden.
— Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
— Pablo Picasso
If there were already a path,
it would have to be someone else’s;
the whole point is to find your own way.
— Joseph Campbell, The Joseph Campbell Companion
Life is a daring adventure or it is nothing.
— Helen Keller
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.
— Voltaire
We would like otherworldly visitations to come as distinct voices with clear instructions, but they may only give small signs in dreams, or as sudden hunches and insights that cannot be denied. They feel more as if they emerge from inside and steer you from within like an inner guardian angel. . . . And, most amazing, it has never forgotten you, although you may have spent most of your life ignoring it.
— James Hillman, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart
Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.
— A. A. Milne
Enjoy what you have.
Hope for what you lack.
— fortune cookie
There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered.
— William Shakespeare
Even in our sleep
Pain which cannot forget
Falls drop by drop upon the heart
Until, in our own despair,
Against our will,
Comes wisdom
Through the awful grace of God.
— Aeschylus
The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.
— Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
Doe the Nexte Thinge.
— from an ancient parsonage in England
When you are pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen, brush the honey off your nose and spruce yourself up as best you can, so as to look Ready for Anything.
— A. A. Milne
One poem or story doesn’t matter one way or the other. It’s the process of writing and life that matters.
— Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones
The soul presents itself in a variety of colors, including all the shades of gray, blue, and black. To care for the soul, we must observe the full range of all its colorings, and resist the temptation to approve only of red, white, and orange—the brilliant colors.
— Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
— epitaph on the grave of an unknown astronomer
God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.
Each note is a need coming through one of us,
a passion, a longing-pain.
Remember the lips
where the wind-breath originated,
and let your note be clear.
Don’t try to end it.
Be your note.
— Rumi, The Essential Rumi
Opportunities
to find deeper powers
within ourselves
come when life
seems most challenging.
— Joseph Campbell, The Joseph Campbell Companion
Only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the “treasure hard to attain.” He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself. This experience gives him faith and trust.
— Carl Jung, Jung on Mythology
Most people have turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.
— Joseph Campbell, The Joseph Campbell Companion
What you plan
is too small
for you to live.
— David Whyte, excerpt from “What to Remember When Waking,” in The House of Belonging
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. . . .
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
— T.S. Eliot
If the angel
deigns to come
it will be because
you have convinced
her, not by tears
but by your humble
resolve to be always
beginning; to be a beginner.
— Rainer Maria Rilke
It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.
— May Sarton
Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is strengthened by doing it.
— Robbie Gass
It seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance—aye, chance, freewill, and necessity—no-wise incompatible—all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course—its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions modified by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turn rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
— Carl Jung
It is our commitment to wholeness that matters, the willingness to unfold in every deep aspect of our being.
— Jack Kornfield, A Path With Heart
More important for our children than merely what happened to us in the past is the way we have come to process and understand it. The opportunity to change and grow continues to be available throughout our lives.
— Dan Siegel and Mary Hartzell, Parenting From the Inside Out
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
— Joseph Chilton Pearce
There will be many times when we won’t look good—to ourselves or anyone else. We need to stop demanding that we do. It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time.
— Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
— Carl Jung
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Roar, lion of the heart,
and tear me open!
— Rumi, The Essential Rumi
In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. . . . Each moment, taken alone, [is] always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right.
— Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
What we think of as “laziness” in ourselves is often simply fear.
— Jeanne Guy
A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.
— Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect, there will be a fish.
— Ovid
Every need brings in what’s needed.
Pain bears its cure like a child.
— Rumi, The Essential Rumi
This divineness had that in it which, though commanding worship, at the same time enforced a certain nameless terror.
— Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have believed would have come his way.
— W. H. Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition
We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other peoples’ models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.
— Shakti Gawain
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.
— Martha Graham
It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.
— Joseph Campbell, The Joseph Campbell Companion
The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
— W. H. Auden
In a dark time, the eye begins to see.
— Theodore Roethke
Look and you will find it—what is unsought will go undetected.
— Sophocles
True life is lived when tiny changes occur.
— Leo Tolstoy
Courage is the foundation of integrity.
— Keshavan Nair
Integrity is its own reward.
— Rod Russell
A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation:
“As you go the way of life,
you will see a great chasm.
Jump.
It is not as wide as you think.
— Joseph Campbell, The Joseph Campbell Companion
Children learn whether it is safe to learn.
— Dorothy Corkille Briggs
Your desire is your prayer.
— Dr. Joseph Murphy
Learning is movement from moment to moment.
— J. Krishnamurti
In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
— Albert Einstein
Anything you grab hold of on the bank breaks with the river’s pressure. When you do things from your soul, the river itself moves through you. Freshness and a deep joy are signs of the current.
— Coleman Barks, The Essential Rumi
Play is the exultation of the possible.
— Martin Buber
The best of modern therapy is much like a process of shared meditation, where therapist and client sit together, learning to pay close attention to those aspects and dimensions of the self that the client may be unable to touch on his or her own.
— Jack Kornfield, A Path With Heart
Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
— Joseph Campbell, The Joseph Campbell Companion
Had you restrained your love, you would be free of sorrow. The greater the love, while one possesses it, the greater the sorrow when one is deprived of it.
— Von Tepl
Because life involves taking risks, and thereby kindling fear, you must possess the ability—but more importantly the willingness—to have a relationship with your fears, to examine the experience of fear when it arises. Just as you cannot acquire immunity to a disease without first coming into contact with it, you will never move through your fears until you move through them, not around them.
— Gregg Levoy, This Business of Writing
To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.
— George Eliot
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
You cannot teach a child to take care of himself unless you will let him try to take care of himself. He will make mistakes and out of these mistakes will come his wisdom.
— Francis Bacon
When you are dealing with a child, keep all your wits about you, and sit on the floor.
— Austin O’Malley
Treat a child as though he already is the person he’s capable of becoming.
— Haim Ginott
If you want to hit home runs, you’ve go to swing a lot.
— Babe Ruth
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
— Albert Einstein
Then I buckled up my shoes, and I started.
— James Baldwin, from “The Threshing Floor”
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
— Helen Keller
The most influential of all educational factors is the conversation in the child’s home.
— William Temple
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.
— Theodore Roethke
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
— Albert Einstein
Whether you are dealing with an animal or a child, to convince is to weaken.
— Colette
We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
— Marcel Proust
Tears are like rain. They loosen up our soil so we can grow in different directions.
— Virginia Casey
I still believe that people are really good at heart.
— Anne Frank
Education is the best provision for old age.
— Aristotle
The great man is he who does not lose his child’s heart.
— Mencius
The mind, stretched to a new idea, can never return to its original dimension.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Feelings refuse to bow to command.
— Dorothy Corkille Briggs
What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.
— Joseph Campbell, The Joseph Campbell Companion
The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it.
— Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
The adventurous life is not one exempt from fear, but on the contrary, one that is lived in full knowledge of fears of all kinds, one in which we go forward in spite of our fears.
— Paul Tournier
Life must be understood backwards.
— Soren Kierkegaard
Neither despise nor oppose what thou dost not understand.
— William Penn
One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore.
— Andre Gide
Motherhood . . . is an act of infinite optimism.
— Gilda Radner
Every psychic advance of man arises from the suffering of the soul.
— Carl Jung, Psychotherapists or the Clergy
Work well done is art.
— Unknown
Don’t wait for your ship to come in. Row out to meet it.
— Unknown
To show a child what has once delighted you, to find the child’s delight added to your own, so that there is now a double delight seen in the glow of trust and affection. This is happiness.
— J. B. Priestley
Ritual maintains the world’s holiness. Knowing that everything we do, no matter how simple, has a halo of imagination around it and can serve the soul enriches life and makes the things around us more precious, more worthy of our protection and care.
— Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
Spoon-feeding in the long run teaches us nothing by the shape of the spoon.
— E. M. Forster
Groundless hope, like unconditional love, may be the only kind that counts.
— John Perry Barlow
Ultimately the only way to get through something is to get through it—not over, not under, or around it, but all the way through it. And it takes as long as it takes.
— Alla Bozarth Campbell
between the seed
and the sprout,
darkness
— Unknown
The heart that has truly loved never forgets.
— Thomas More
The spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit—the two being really one.
— Carl Jung, The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man
The irony is this—
If you don’t go in . . .
You can’t find out.
— Richard Stine
Every writer, by the way he uses the language, reveals something of his spirit, his habits, his capacities, his bias. This is inevitable as well as enjoyable…. Creative writing is communication through revelation—it is the Self escaping into the open.
— Strunk and White, The Elements of Style
If you are at all faithful to your dreams, they will often lead you to a point of decision. Here you must decide whether to say yes or no, now or later, ready or not. And they will keep coming back until you give them an answer.
Each transition requires that you end one thing—a mind-set, a lifestyle, a trade—before beginning another, and as such these transitions involve both fear and elation, terrible anxiety and tremendous freedom, the freedom to make new choices, to redefine your life. Transition is very much about feeling caught in the middle, between the known and the unknown, and I think it is one of the peculiarities of successful people that they can tolerate prolonged periods of uncertainty and, most importantly, hang onto their faith.
At some point you simply have to make a leap of at least some distance. But you also have to be gentle with yourself. Big transitions are by their very nature dramatic and effortful, and growth always in some sense violent and disruptive. Treat yourself as if you were in a cocoon, not a padded cell. On the other hand, do not be so easy on yourself that you cheat yourself out of changes you really need to make.
— Gregg Levoy, This Business of Writing
This is enough was always true. We just haven’t seen it.
— Rumi, The Essential Rumi
Aging brings out the flavors of a personality. The individual emerges over time, the way fruit matures and ripens. In the Renaissance view, depression, aging, and individuality all go together: the sadness of growing old is part of becoming an individual. Melancholy thoughts care out an interior space where wisdom can take up residence.
— Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
— Joseph Campbell, The Joseph Campbell Companion
Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.
— David Whyte, excerpt from “The Winter of Listening,” in The House of Belonging
Setting skepticism aside, even briefly, can make for very interesting explorations. . . . It is not necessary that we change any of our beliefs. It is necessary that we examine them.
— Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
Only a deep attention to the whole of our life can bring us the capacity to love well and live freely.
— Jack Kornfield, A Path With Heart
Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again. — Joseph Campbell