"No mud, no lotus." (Thich Nhat Hanh)
"What is most personal is most universal." (Carl Rogers)
“One moment of unconditional love may call into question a lifetime of feeling unworthy, and invalidate it.” (Rachel Remen)
To be human
is to become visible
While carrying
What is hidden
As a gift to others.
(David Whyte)
"People say that we are seeking a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.” (Joseph Campbell)
"In an age of distraction, nothing could feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still." (Pico Iyer)
"Change is the only constant in life." (Heraclitus)
“Drink from the well of yourself and begin again.” (Charles Bukowski)
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” (Thoreau)
"The beginning of wisdom is the same as its attainment: wonder. The truest statement in the world is ‘you never know.’ There is always something to evoke wonder, to wonder about, because this world, this life, this universe, this reality is far more than the sum of its parts. Even the slightest detail contains much more. The overwhelming awe and wonder we feel teach us more than we can ever glean or come to know of things. In this wonder, the head has no answers and the heart has no questions."
(Richard Wagamese)
"Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place." (Zora Neale Hurston)
“Only paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life." ( Carl Jung)
"I have been knocking on a door. It opens. I have been knocking from the inside." (Rumi)
"Mystery is the place where we can finger the ragged edges of what we know and begin to make peace with what we will not know. It is the nature of mystery, after all, that the more we know about it the more mysterious it becomes."
(Stephen Jenkinson)
"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom." (Anais Nin)
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” (Rumi)
“I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.” (Carl Gustav Jung)
“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.” (Louis L’Amour)
“We need to tell new stories about ourselves, new myths to guide us forward, and new manifestos that celebrate our integration with the natural world. Our… spirit needs to rise again in a weaving of … stories of growth, regeneration, rites of passage, motion, energy, illumination, magic, decay, and all the Earth’s processes that dwell … in us.” (Pegi Eyers)
"The truth about stories is, that’s all we are." (Thomas King)
"The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain." (Gibran)
"There is no love without loss. And there is no moving beyond loss without some experiences of mourning. To be unable to mourn is to be unable to enter into the great human lifecycle of death and rebirth – to be unable, that is, to live again. "
(Lifton)
"Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others." (Swift)
“Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act.” (Joanna Macy)
"Nature is not a place to visit. It is home. We belong to this world.” (Gary Snyder)
"To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are a part of a part and that the whole is made of parts, each of which is a whole. You start with the part you are whole in. " (Gary Snyder)
"It was a queerly assorted company, indeed, for there are more quaint and unusual characters in Oz than in all the rest of the world, and Ozma was more interested in unusual people than in ordinary ones – just as you and I are. "
(L. Frank Baum, The Magic of Oz)
"So, what can we really do for each other except–just love each other and be each other's witness? And haven't we got the right to hope–for more? So that we can really stretch into whoever we really are?" (James Baldwin)
"These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep." (Lorde)
“Boundaries are the distance where I can love you and me simultaneously.” (Unknown)
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” (Carl Rogers)
"There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life." (Tara Brach)
"The quality of strength lined with tenderness is an unbeatable combination." (Maya Angelou)
"Between stimulus and response there lies a space. In that space is our power to choose a response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." (Victor E. Frankl)
“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 feelings 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 nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”
(Albert Einstein)
"The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget… another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."
(Arundhati Roy)
"Faith is knowing you are on a team even if you don’t know the players. Life is not a solo sport. (Simon Sinek)
“Shame cannot survive being spoken. It cannot survive empathy.” (Brene Brown)
"Notice it, sit with it, put it into perspective." (Angela Ducksworth)
"Be my companion on this journey between dusts." (Naomi Shihab-Nye)
“Safety isn’t just the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection. Real security comes from a connection in which one is held emotionally and compassionately.” (Stephen Porges)
"I do not understand human existence . . . apart from hope and dream . . .And hopelessness is but hope that has lost its bearings." (Freire)
“Unrealistic expectations are premediated resentments." (Johnson)
"Life sometimes is hard. There are challenges. There are difficulties. There is pain. As a younger man I sought to avoid them and only ever caused myself more of the same. These days I choose to face life head on — and I have become a comet. I arc across the sky of my life and the harder times are the friction that lets the worn and tired bits drop away. It's a good way to travel; eventually I will wear away all resistance until all there is left of me is light. I can live towards that end."
(Richard Wagamese)
“Stories are a communal currency of humanity.” (Tahir Shah )
“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”
(Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
“You have to grow from the inside out.” (Swami Vivekananda)
“Do, or do not. There is no “try"." (Yoda, 'Star Wars', 2008)
“Make each day your masterpiece.” (John Wooden)
“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” (Epictetus)
“Everything started as nothing.” (Ben Weissenstein)
“You will either step forward into growth, or you will step backward into safety.” (Abraham Maslow)
"Bloom where you are planted." (French proverb)
"The meaning of life is to give life meaning." (Ken Hudgins)
"It's not only children who grow. Parents do, too. As much as we watch to see what our children do with their lives, they are watching us to see what we do with ours. I can't tell me children to reach for the sun. All I can do is reach for it, myself." (Joyce Maynard)