Collected Quotes
On knowing and Trusting Your Truth:
“Truth is powerful and it prevails.”
— Sojourner Truth
“It is actually corrosive on the personality and character
of the one who repeatedly says no
to something that keeps on whispering yes.”
— David Whyte
“The wisdom we know deep inside ourselves is infinitely richer than anything we can be taught.”
—Elizabeth Andrew
“You were made to be yourselves.
You were made to enrich the world with a sound, a tone, a shadow.”
— Herman Hesse
“If we cling to any point of view,
even a deeply realized point of view,
that view will often leave something out."
— Adyashanti
“Loving your parents and being committed to them
doesn't mean you have to be blind to their failings,
especially at your own deficit.”
— Brihanna Joy Gray
“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.”
— Confucius
“Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know,
but not a single human being can be taught to feel.
Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know,
you're a lot of other people:
but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself -
-in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -
- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight;
and never stop fighting.
— e.e. cummings
“The nice thing about your true nature is that no one can give it to you.”
— Adyashanti
“The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.”
— Alain de Botton
“One has to be done with the pretense of being just fine, unscarred, perfectly self-sufficient.
No one is.”
— Anne Lamott
“The most beautiful people we have known
are those who have known defeat,
known suffering, known struggle, known loss,
and have found their way out of the depths.
These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life
that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern.
Beautiful people do not just happen.”
— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be.
When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying,
‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.’
I don't try to control a sunset.
I watch with awe as it unfolds.”
— Carl Rogers
"There is something in every one of you that waits and listens
for the sound of the genuine in yourself.
It is the only true guide you will ever have.
And if you cannot hear it, you will all your life spend your days
on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls."
— Howard Thurman
“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals
that deep inside us something is valuable,
worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch.
Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight
or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”
— e. e. cummings
“We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value
that we forget the inner value,
the rapture that is associated with being alive.”
— Joseph Campbell
“Do not compare, do not measure.
No other way is like yours.
All other ways deceive and tempt you.
You must fulfill the way that is in you.”
— Carl Jung
“Being a chameleon might seem like a good thing,
until you realize it doesn’t make you versatile:
it makes you invisible.”
— Ash Ambrige
"... goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished."
— Nelson Mandela
"One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world
is to stand up and show your soul.
Struggling souls catch light from other souls
who are fully lit and willing to show it."
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“You are only free when you realize
you belong no place—you belong every place—no place at all.
The price is high. The reward is great.”
— Maya Angelou
"Don't be eye candy. Be soul food."
— Elaine Welteroth
"Culture steals us away from ourselves by day and we need to take ourselves back by night."
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“A meaningful life is not a popularity contest.”
— Marianne Williamson
“Nothing is more powerful than individuals acting out of their own conscience.”
— Vaclav Havel
“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
"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it.
Because the world needs more people who have come alive."
— Howard Thurman
"When you're in a state of open-heartedness, what's important to you?
What do you value when your heart is open?"
— Adyashanti
“True vitality is hidden within longing.
When you give in to creative passion,
it will bring you to the ultimate thresholds of transfiguration and renewal.
This growth causes pain, but it is a sacred pain.
It would be much more tragic to have cautiously avoided these depths
and remained marooned on the shiny surfaces of the banal.”
— John O'Donohue
"Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness.
It comes from letting the whole world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart."
— Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
"There's nothing in your life or in our collective problems
that does not require our ability to put our attention to what we care about."
— Tristan Harris
“Life is long if you know how to use it.”
— Seneca
“What is precious inside us
does not care to be known to the mind
in ways that diminish its presence.”
— David Whyte
“Half-heartedness doesn't reach into majesty.”
— Rumi
“The opposite of sensitive is not brave.
It’s not brave to refuse to pay attention, to refuse to notice, to refuse to feel and know and imagine. The opposite of sensitive is insensitive, and that’s no badge of honor.”
— Glennon Doyle
“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. Y
ou begin to discover how much warmth and gentleness is there, as well as how much space.”
— Pema Chodron
"Addiction to distraction is the death of creative production"
— Robin Sharma
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
— Pablo Picasso
“The things you do not have to say make you rich.
Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk.
Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing.
And things you know before you hear them — those are you,
those are why you are in the world.”
— William Stafford
oN SELF-coMPASSION and Personal accountability:
“Walking
I am listening to a deeper way.
Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me.
Be still they say
Watch and listen.
You are the result of love of thousands.”
— Linda Hogan
"I failed my way to success."
— Thomas A. Edison
“If you believe you have the power to ruin it,
believe you have the power to fix it.”
— Rabbi Nachman
“Until we stop ourselves or more often have been stopped
we hope to put certain of life’s events behind us and get on with our living.
After we stop we see that certain of life’s issues will be with us for as long as we live.
We will pass through them again again
each time with a new story, each time with greater understanding,
until they become undistinguishable from our blessings and our wisdom.
It’s the way life teaches us how to live.”
— Rachel Naomi Remen
"To be humbled is to be delivered back into the truth of your humanity."
— Adyashanti
“Bless the torn part of each day
The ruptures in us that caused it to tear where it did.
Bless the green heart of each rupture
The small green kernel of hope saved for replanting.”
— Eillen Mueller
“Like failure,
chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom.
Like art.”
— Toni Morrison
"If you want a quick way to be happy,
just let yourself embrace your imperfection for a moment."
— Adyashanti
“When we forgive ourselves for not always getting it right,
we don't become more self-absorbed and narcissistic.
We become more available.”
— Julia Aziz
“All of the lenses in which we view the world have blindspots.”
— Cornell West
“The splinter in one’s own eye is the biggest magnifying glass.”
— Theodore Adorno
“The way you tell your story to yourself matters.”
— Amy Cuddy
"Symmetry may have its appeal but it is inherently stale.
Some kind of imbalance is behind every transformation."
— Marcelo Gleiser
“You can't do anything wonderful by being perfect.
You can only do wonderful things, imperfectly.
You might feel awkward, and you might not know what to expect,
and you might not know how it's going to go.
But it's better to be an accomplished fool, than an unfulfilled perfectionist,
forever waiting for her break.”
— Ash Ambrige
“Failure is the foundation to success, and the means by which it is achieved.”
— Lao Tzu
“It is not hard to stand behind one’s successes.
But to accept responsibility for one’s failures,
to accept them unreservedly as failures that are truly one’s own,
that cannot be shifted somewhere else or onto something else,
and actively to accept the price that has to be paid for it:
that is devilishly hard!
But only thence does the road lead to the renewal of sovereignty…,
to a radically new insight into the mysterious gravity of…
existence as an uncertain enterprise, and to its transcendental meaning.
And only this kind of inner understanding can ultimately lead to what might be called
true “peace of mind,” to that highest delight, to genuine meaningfulness, to that “joy of Being.”
If one manages to achieve that, then all one’s worldly privations cease to be privations,
and become[…] grace.
Václav Havel
”...It is only when compassion is present that people will allow themselves to see the truth.
Where there is no compassion there is no trust.”
— A.H. Almaas
“Where you are understood, you are home.”
— John O'Donohue
"Self compassion means something else is possible [for you], and you are worth that possibility."
— Gabor Mate
“The way we relate to our experience is the difference between freedom and bondage.”
— Adyashanti
"If we take good care of ourselves, we help everyone.
We stop being a source of suffering to the world,
and we become a reservoir of joy and freshness.
Here and there are people who know how to take good care of themselves,
who live joyfully and happily.
They are our strongest support.
Whatever they do, they do for everyone.”
— Thich Nhat Hahn
"Setting a limit doesn't mean you don't love somebody.
It just means you are claiming the right to love yourself, too."
— Lindsay Gibson
“The places where we are seen and heard are holy places.”
— Rachel Naomi Remen
"Thinking is difficult. That's why most people judge."
— Carl Jung
“Life really does begin at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.”
— Carl Jung
“[The heart] doesn't define freedom as any kind of escape.
It defines freedom as a deep inclusion.”
— Adyashanti
“If you’re never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you never take any chances.”
— Julia Sorel
On Relationships, conflict, and repair:
"The ability for a couple to hold difference and difficulties and ambivalence
and talk about it with openness, kindness, and care
is the heart and soul of a great relationship."
— Ken Page
“Accountability is love.”
— Whitney Goodman
“It’s the breaking and the welding and the mending that creates the real beauty of relationship.”
—Richard Rohr
“You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that’s okay, love is better.”
— Caroline Paul
“What’s the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as-you-were?”
— Mary McCarthy
“Our task is not to lose our fear of intimacy.
Our task is to stop fleeing the intimacy that presents itself in our lives,
to learn how to wisely and [compassionately] navigate our personal minefields around intimacy."
— Ken Page
“Real love . . . changes outcomes and creates whole new people.”
— Cynthia Bourgeault
“...Love is anything but sentimental.
In fact, it is the most real and creative form of human presence.”
— John O'Donohue
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.
I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being,
or a state of grace -
not in the infantile American sense of being made happy
but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”
― James Baldwin
“That’s why I believe deep friendships, family, sexual intimacy, marriage, and even celibacy
are not given to us to solve our problem,
but actually to reveal the problem.
All of these life stances show us that we still don’t know how to love.
At the same time, if we are conscious and aware,
they give us the daily practice and opportunity to try one more time!”
— John Welwood
“We don't get wounded alone and we don't heal alone.”
— Carl Jung
“Immature love says, “I love you because I need you.”
Mature love says, “I need you because I love you.”
— Erich Fromm
“Be the change you want to see in your relationships.”
— Terri Cole
"Love is not just an enthusiasm; it's a skill.”
— Alain de Botton
"A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“We can only love and be loved as much we are willing to have our heart broken.”
— Brene Brown
"The meat and potatoes of beautiful intimacy work is learning to work with our walls,
to learn the language of our walls,
so we can begin to deconstruct them and protect ourselves in more conscious ways."
— Ken Page
“Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place.”
— Zora Neale Hurston
“If there is a secret to love’s transforming power,
surely it must lie in its uncanny ability to call forth who we truly are.”
— Cynthia Bourgeault
“There is no such thing as complete independence from others or over-dependence.
There is only effective or ineffective dependence.
Secure dependence fosters autonomy and self-confidence.”
— Susan Johnson
"There is no such thing as winning an argument."
—Stephen Porges
“Forgiveness is not an obligation.
It is not a requirement.
It is an organic gift that comes with intention and desire over time.”
— Ken Page
“The most intense conflicts, if overcome,
leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed.
It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed
to produce valuable and lasting results.”
— Carl Jung
“Unity is not the same as uniformity.
Unity, in fact, is the reconciliation of differences, and those differences must be maintained.”
— Richard Rohr
On healing and transformation:
“No resistance, no new arising!”
— Richard Rohr
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing.
We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem,
but the truth is that things don’t really get solved.
They come together and they fall apart.
Then they come together again and fall apart again.
It’s just like that.
The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen:
room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
— Pema Chödrön
“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”
-—Virginia Woolf
"Even if you are in the process of healing something huge,
even if you are in the process of a messy situation in life that has gray areas and uncertainties,
it doesn't mean you're not invited to the table of life today."
— Sarah Vrba
“The transformation of the heart is a wondrous thing, no matter how you land there.”
— Patti Smith
"The word change normally refers to new beginnings.
But the mystery of transformation more often happens not when something new begins,
but when something old falls apart."
— Richard Rohr
"Deep in the wintry parts of our minds
we know that there is no such thing as work-free transformation.
We know we will have to burn to the ground in one way or another,
and then sit right in the ashes of who we once thought we were and go on from there."
— Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“The question isn’t whether we’re going to have to do hard, awful things, because we are.
We all are.
The question is whether we have to do them alone.”
— Kate Braestrup
On PERIODS OF WAITING, UNCERTAINTY, and mystery:
“It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”
—Abraham Maslow
“There is a way that nature speaks,
that land speaks.
Most of the time we are simply not patient enough,
quiet enough,
to pay attention to the story.”
—Linda Hogan
“What makes an animal very smart and very successful is [their] ability to wait.”
— Cesar Milan
“I remember one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the bark of a tree
just as the butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out.
I waited a while but [they were] too long appearing and I was impatient.
I bent over [them], breathed onto [them] to warm [them].
I warmed [them] as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes,
faster than life.
The case opened. The butterfly started slowly crawling out.
And I shall never forget my horror when I saw how [their] wings were folded back and crumpled.
The wretched butterfly tried with its whole trembling body to unfold them.
Bending over, I tried to help [them] with my breath -- in vain.
[They] needed to be hatched out patiently
and the unfolding of the wings needed to be a gradual process in the sun.
Now it was too late.
My breath had forced the butterfly to appear all crumpled before [their] time.
[They] struggled desperately and a few seconds later died in the palm of my hand.
That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscious.
For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the greatest laws of nature.
We should not hurry. We should not be impatient.
But we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm.”
— Nikos Kazantzakis
"Delays are reminders of what really matters in this life and what our hearts are really asking for."
—Sarah Vrba
"The word change normally refers to new beginnings.
But the mystery of transformation more often happens
not when something new begins,
but when something old falls apart."
— Richard Rohr
"...The speed at which we find explanations for things that happened
makes it difficult for us to learn the deep truth.
And the deep truth is that the world is much more uncertain than we feel it is.
We see a version of the world that is simplified and just a lot simpler
and a lot more certain than the world really is."
— Daniel Kahneman
"You can always tell someone who is in great doubt because they're a zealot."
— Adyashanti
“Just because we don’t know the way doesn’t mean that there is no way.”
— Joyce Meyer
"There is deep beauty in the darkness, in the unknowing, in the indescribable,
if only we can open ourselves to its purpose. . . .
The primal howl of existential suffering holds within it the lesson
that we all must learn at some time in our lives:
To heal from our suffering — not merely to ease or palliate it,
but to transform it into the source and substance of our growth and wisdom —
requires a journey through it."
— LaVera Crawley
“Our waiting is not nothing.
It is something -- a very big something --
because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for.”
— Barbara Brown Taylor
“To learn which questions are unanswerable,
and not to answer them:
this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”
—Ursula Le Guin
“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been I
have great faith in a seed.
Convince me you have a seed there and I am prepared to expect wonders.”
—Henry David Thoreau
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
— Zora Neale Hurston
“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
“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
"No matter how deeply we engage the world,
no matter how far we manage to penetrate into the mystery,
there will always be more mystery.
It’s always deeper, it’s always bigger,
it’s always wider than our possible imagination at any given moment.
But it’s always an invitation.
It’s not a wall before which we have to give up, but rather, a kind of find the door.
Where is that little chink that allows you to peer through
and then gradually to open up and find resources and capacities in yourself
to take a little step or to put the horizon a little further away?"
— Arthur Zajonc
“Deep acceptance of ultimate mystery
is ironically the best way
to keep the mind and heart spaces always open and always growing.”
— Richard Rohr
"We are the closest to the divine, to the source,
when we we aren't so certain how the story is going to play out."
— Sarah Vrba
“Science is very seductive.
It offers us the dream of mastery.
But we’ve traded mystery for mastery,
and we’ve gotten a very bad deal from this."
— Rachel Naomi Remen
“Faith is not a belief in something you don't know to be true.
It's moving on or letting go in the face of the unknown.
In the face of something you don't know, you don't understand you cannot comprehend,
[faith is] moving in that direction anyway;
moving into it anyway;
letting go anyway.”
— Adyashanti
"Acceptance is not a static goal but a beginning point of engagement with life.
So you accept so that a deeper engagement, a deeper activity can flow forth from the acceptance.
But you have to accept first."
— Adyashanti
"We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn."
— Mary Catherine Bateson
“Until our certitudes and our own little self-written success stories begin to fall apart,
we usually won’t touch upon any form of deeper wisdom.”
— Richard Rohr
“Any ‘mystery’, by definition, is pregnant with many levels of unfolding and realization.”
— Richard Rohr
“The authentic emergence of some fact, concept, or interaction
unfolds over time in a way that is free of restrictive constraints
that are cobwebs of the past,
distortions in the present,
or fears that limit our experience of the future.”
— Daniel Siegel
On dark times and loss:
“It is in the midnight battle with the elements
that the oak [tree] develops its rugged fiber
and becomes the [queen or king] of the forest.”
— L.B. Cowman
“Might your bitter pain not be the voice of destiny,
might that voice not become sweet once you understand it?”
— Herman Hesse
“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul
than it does for a solider to fight on a battle field.”
— Cornell West
“Every time you lean into [your] full experience...
not just the desirable parts, but the shadow too
You expand.
More of you comes online.
More of you is seen.
And more of you becomes available to love.”
Stefanos Sifandos
“The beauties of nature come after the storm.
The rugged beauty of the mountains is born in a storm,
and the heroes of life are the storm-swept and battle-scarred.”
— L.B. Cowman
“It’s easy to fixate on everything that goes to the ground as time goes by:
the disintegration of a relationship,
the disappearance of good work well done,
the diminishment of a sense of purpose and meaning.
But as I’ve come to understand that life ‘composts’ and ‘seeds’ us as autumn does the earth,
I’ve seen how possibility gets planted in us even in the hardest of times.”
— Parker Palmer
“You have been in the storms and swept by the raging winds.
Have they left you broken, weary, and beaten in the valley,
or have they lifted you to the sunlit summits
of a richer, deeper, more abiding manhood, womanhood, or [personhood]?
Have they left you with more sympathy for the storm-swept and the battle-scarred?”
— L.B. Cowman
"Hard and soft,
difficult and easy,
pain and ecstasy
do not eliminate one another,
but actually allow each other."
— Richard Rohr
"...In the course of time, the very healing we seek can emerge
by our journeying through liminal space,
listening attentively to what the liminal seeks to tell us."
— LaVera Crawley
“Every transformation is invariably a loss,
and the transformed must be mourned
before the transformed-into can be relished.”
— Maria Popova
“Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted...
Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes.
Grief will do whatever it wants to you,
whenever it wants to.
In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert
“Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief
turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe
will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,
nor find in the darkness glimmering
the small round coins
thrown by those who wished for something else.”
— David Whyte
“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
“Something in you dies when you bear the unbearable.
And it is only in that dark night of the soul
that you are prepared to see as God sees and to love as God loves.”
— Ram Das
“You darkness from which I come,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence out the world,
for the fire makes a circle
for everyone
so that no one sees you anymore.
But darkness holds it all:
the shape and the flame,
the animal and myself,
how it holds them,
all powers, all sight—
and it is possible: its great strength
is breaking into my body.
I have faith in the night.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“There is no map for the landscape of loss,
no established itinerary, no cosmic checklist, where each item ticked off gets you closer to success. You cannot succeed in mourning your loved ones.
You cannot fail.
Nor is grief a malady, like the flu.
You will not get over it.
You will only come to integrate your loss. . . .
The death of a beloved is an amputation.
You find a new center of gravity, but the limb does not grow back.”
— Mirabai Starr
“When inspiration has become hidden,
when we feel ready to give up,
this is the time when healing can be found in the tenderness of pain itself...
In the midst of loneliness, in the midst of fear, in the middle of feeling misunderstood and rejected
is the heartbeat of all things.”
— Pema Chödrön
“Wisdom is seeing the shape of your life without obliterating, getting over,
a single instant of it.”
— Albert Huffstickler
“Not everything that is faced can be changed.
But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
— James Baldwin
"The beautiful thing about [remembering your deepest intentions]
is that it can carry us through the most difficult situations.
If you remember what really matters [to you],
when you hit the hard stuff,
your intention can carry you."
— Tara Brach
“Make from your confrontation with despair a tiny little margin of beauty.
The more you choose to see, the more you will see.
In the end, the only things worth doing are the things that might possibly break your heart.”
— Colum McCann
“Everywhere [people] are confronted with fate,
with the chance of achieving something through [their] own suffering.”
— Viktor Frankl
“I will not give up.
I will use to the full every resource in me and about me to answer life with life.
In so doing I shall affirm that this is the kind of universe that sustains, upon demand,
the life that is in it.”
— Howard Thurman
“I have come to believe that coming true is not the only purpose of a dream.
Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from,
where passion comes from, where happiness comes from.
Even a shattered dream can do that for you.”
— Lisa Bu
“I now see the soul as that wild creature way back there in the woods
that knows how to survive in very hard places,
knows how to survive in places where the intellect doesn’t,
where the feelings don’t,
and where the will cannot.”
— Parker Palmer
“If you want to have a life that is worth living,
a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams,
you have to fight for it.
— Alice Walker
“I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots.
Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows,
with a harp and sword in my hands.”
— Zora Neale Hurston
“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 only true way to expand your world is to inhabit an otherness beyond ourselves.
There is one simple word for this: empathy.
Don't let them fool you.
Empathy is violent. Empathy is tough. Empathy can rip you open.
Once you go there, you can be changed.”
— Colum McCann
“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
“People who bring light into the world wrench it out of darkness
and contend openly with darkness all of their days.”
— Krista Tippett
“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake,
not by mechanical aid, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“Suffering passes, but the fact of having suffered never passes.”
— Leon Bloy
“Life's recurring difficulties push us into what remains half-done.”
— Belden Lane
ON GRATITUDE AND PRESENCE:
“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
— Rumi
“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”
— Rabindranath Tagore
“Acceptance is where transformation happens.”
— Adyashanti
"This is a wonderful day. I have never seen this one before."
— Maya Angelou
“In our mediocrity and distraction,
we forget that we are privileged to live in a wondrous universe.
Each day, the dawn unveils the mystery of this universe.”
— John O'Donohue
“Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“This life is a miracle.
Even if it's a bummer, it's still a miracle.
Having a brain, lungs, blood, the Universe, planets, sun...
So trust the wisdom of your life force.
I guarantee it will lead you to freedom."
— Jon Bernie
“The god of dirt
came up to me many times and said
so many wise and delectable things,
I lay
on the grass listening
to his dog voice,
frog voice; now,
he said, and now,
and never once mentioned forever.”
— Mary Oliver
“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple
in a field somewhere and don't notice it.
People think pleasing God is all God cares about.
But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”
— Alice Walker
"The arrival of spring is a miracle of the richest color,
yet we always seem to forget that all of these beautiful colors have been born in darkness."
— John O'Donohue
"On a withered branch, a flower blooms."
— Zen Buddhism quote
On Social justice and facing the world:
“There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.”
— Barbara Ehrenreich
"Trauma decontextualized in a person looks like personality.
Trauma decontextualized in a family looks like family traits.
Trauma in a people looks like culture."
— Resmaa Menakem
“The only way that one can speak about hope
is to break free from a non-reality based belief system.”
— Chris Hedges
“When horror breaks one heart, all hearts are broken.”
— Peter Grimes
"When we are all empowered to live in a just society,
when you have the commitment to deepen a practice
in which you reconnect with those parts of yourself you left behind,
when you practice centering into presence as many times as you possibly can,
over and over again,
when you choose not just to love but to be you, then, and only then,
you may just have room to love me too."
— angel Kyodo williams
"I promise you that no matter how much you want to believe in the power of love,
as long as the disconnect from it lives inside of you,
you will continue to uphold structures of division and separation unconsciously,
or you'll simply learn to ignore them."
— angel Kyodo williams
"I have faith in the inner rambunctiousness of the American people."
— Marianne Williamson
“How you're caring for yourself as you move through this world
is one of the greatest things you can do for this planet.”
Asia Suler
"Sometimes cause and effect are centuries apart."
— Rebecca Solnit
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic.
It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty
but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.
If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.
If we remember those times and places,
and there are many,
where people have behaved magnificently,
this gives us the energy to act
and at least the possibility of sending
this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way,
we don’t have to wait for some grand, utopian future.
The future is an infinite succession of presence
and to live now as we think human beings should live
in defiance of all that is bad around us,
is itself a marvelous victory.”
— Howard Zinn
"Always do right. This will gratify some, and astonish the rest."
— Mark Twain
“Evil is unbalanced force.
It is a byproduct of evolution,
resulting from a stage of evil (or imbalance) in one Sephira (sphere on the Tree of Life),
and prior to the mitigating emergence of another.”
Robert Wang
“The essence of what is human is the ability
to make a decision about what is right in life,
regardless of the consequences.
If a critical mass of people do that,
you get what might be called the great awakening.”
— Roger Hallam
"You don't have to save the world.
Just connect to what matters to you."
— angel Kyodo williams
“The only way to deal with an unfree world
is to become so absolutely free
that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
Albert Camus
"Elisabet Sahtouris notes that nature fosters collaboration and reciprocity.
Competition in nature exists, she says, but it has limits,
and the true law of survival is ultimately cooperation."
— Lynne Twist
"Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world.
All things break and all things can be mended.
Not with time, as they say, but with intention.
So go, love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally.
The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you."
-— L.R. Knost
“Care of the body, care of the soul, care of the spirit...
How do we care for each of these so that when we [do] act,
we don’t act with partial information, with only part of who we are,
but we bring all of who we are to all that the world is?”
— Arthur Zajonc
“What is thoroughly understood will not repeat itself.”
— J.Krishnamurti
“Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions
and a growing honesty about our actual motives.
It is hard work.
Most often we don't pay attention to that inner task
until we have had some kind of fall or failure in our outer tasks.”
— Richard Rohr
“The duty of privilege is absolute integrity.”
— John O'Donohue
"There are beautiful and wild forces within us."
— Saint Francis
"We can do no great things, only small things. with great love."
— Mother Teresa
"In a gentle way, you can shake the world."
— Gandhi
“The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics
which isolate slaves from each other,
obscure the reality of a common condition,
and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.”
— Andrea Dworkin
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. "
— Jiddu Krishnamurti
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.”
— Alice Walker
“To dare to be aware of the facts of the universe in which we are existing calls for courage.”
— W. R. Bion
"The planet longs for a body of wild souls who will love it intensely, acting boldly on its behalf."
— Belden Lane
”Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism.
It is not the conviction that something will turn out well,
but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.
It is the ability to work for something because it is good, not because it stands a chance to succeed.”
— Vaclav Havel
“Nothing about repression will lead to anything other than greater resistance.”
Catherine Elias Curran-Groome
Spirituality that does not name power, history, and truth is just another form of escapism.
But spirituality that roots us deeply
in the full reality of what has been stolen, erased, and weaponized
is a spirituality that can change the world.
— Sarah Jenks
“The struggle of [a person] against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
— Milan Kundera
“I would rather be the unwilling subject of an absolute monarch
than the willing slave of my own ignorance.”
— Victoria Woodhull
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.
Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
— Rumi
“If you believe you have the power to ruin it, believe you have the power to fix it.”
— Rabbi Nachman
“I am reminded daily that the little things are the big things,
especially in periods of uncertainty,
where feelings of helplessness, betrayal, anger, fear and sorrow run rampant.”
— Gayle Coleman
“The greatest gift you could give a child is a sense of wonder so indestructible
that it would last throughout life,
as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments…
the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial,
the alienation from the sources of our strength.”
— Rachel Carson
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The time is always right to do what is right.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
“How conscious we are as human beings really has impact.
Even if each one of us is seemingly only an infinitesimally small part of our collective consciousness
it would be an interesting world if each person took the responsibility they could for their part.
Who knows what could happen.”
Adyashanti
“The solution is to stop asking what the solution is and to start asking what the moral imperative is.” — Chris Hedges
On silence and listening:
'“Our world is becoming more busy and noisy. We are pushing silence out of our lives at a rate that suggests a fear of what it has to say about ourselves.”
— John O'Donohue
“There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks.
Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough,
to pay attention to the story.”
— Linda Hogan
"Let the silence of your being speak for itself."
— Jon Bernie
"When you listen you become nourished. That's how you know you're listening."
— Jon Bernie
"Let silence be your medicine."
— Esther Eckhart
"Silence is a great friend to one seeking the truth."
— Ghandi
Quotes for Spiritual exploration
"Hardly anything turns out the way you expected it to, and you’re frequently ready to write life off as too paradoxical and too difficult to endure. Then some indescribable light fights its way through the impenetrable dark—an unpredictable, unimportant, runaway moment that lights up everything you’ve been unable to see until then. That light removes all the shoulds and oughts, all the illusions about fairness. You enter liminal space . . . In that space you take your first script, the one that weighs five hundred pounds, the script that was cutting into your heart all along, bleeding you to death but you didn’t realize the wound or its seriousness—and you simply let it go."
— Paula D'Arcy
"...There is more reality and sacredness in a blade of grass than in all of our thoughts and ideas about reality."
— Adyashanti
“You might say that [an enlightenment experience] is the end of suffering, but it's not the end of the human condition revealing itself and unfolding.”
— Jon Bernie
"Meditation is throwing all the ways that we can listen wide open. until we're really just the listening."
— Adyashanti
"Genuine spirituality is the thirst to understand the life that we currently have, and the person we currently are, and the experience that makes up our human existence on a day-to-day basis."
— Reggie Ray
"...Spirituality is not a flight from the world...or from life. If it is, spirituality degrades into another form of narcissism. It's important we translate our insight, experiences and revelatory moments down into human terms. Otherwise they remain as states of experience we hope to cling to to protect ourselves from suffering."
— Adyashanti
“Spiritual practice doesn't begin until we can sit down right in the middle of wherever we are, whatever we're experiencing, and allow it to be as it is.”
— Adyashanti
"There's only one thing better than 'I'm bad' or 'I'm good' and that's 'I am.’”
— Adyashanti
"What would it be like to act and move and do and relate from whatever your current version of the deeper place within you is? It's one of the most powerful spiritual practices there is."
— Adyashanti
“If we're faithful to our practice, our practice will be faithful to us. . . ."
— James Finley
“The outer guru can do a lot but only the inner guru can deliver.”
— Adyashanti
"Meditation isn't about getting ourselves into another state of mind. It's undoing reactivity so we can arrive at what's already here."
— Tara Brach
“The world itself is the primary locus of the sacred.”
— Richard Rohr
"One of the doorways into knowing [enlightenment] is to offer your attention to the long ignored silence and presence and awareness that's part of every moment of experience. And just that is perhaps the most powerful spiritual practice of all. It's not conceptually complicated or impressive. But it is experientially profound."
— Adyashanti
“The holy is where you least expect it.”
— Belden Lane
