NOTE: While the date of this post is 2008, it is regularly updated. Newer quotes are added to the bottom of the page.
I’m a quote-a-holic. I believe in the power of words to reshape thoughts, thereby changing our feelings and perceptions. Here are some of my favorites.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls the butterfly.
Richard Bach
Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.
Shakespeare, Henry V
To be in harmony with the oneness of life is to be without anxiety about imperfection.
Zen Master Dzogen
I made a list of things I have to remember and a list of things I want to forget, but I see they are the same list.
From Linda Pastan’s poem Lists
The attitude of surrender is the best antidote to one’s own anger, anxiety, and fear.
Sally Kempton Yoga Journal
All of our emotions are our babies. Treat them tenderly, care for them. Be with them. Understanding and compassion will ultimately transform them.
Thich Nhat Hanh in Walking Meditation
There will be a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.
Louis L’Amour
Suffering is not the nature of our experience. It comes from misunderstanding our experience.
Ethan Nichtern in One City
The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.
Tacitus
The Buddha’s Five Remembrances:
I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation
All stress comes from resisting the present moment.
Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth
The most important relationship you will ever have is with yourself.
Nicole S. Urdang
When Krista Tippett asked eighty year old Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arche Communities, what he was doing these days he replied:
I’m doing what I’ve been doing for the past 40 years: learning to love reality.
Comparison is misery.
The Buddha
If I only had three words of advice I could give you they would be : Tell the Truth.
If I were allowed three more, they would be: All the time.
From Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture
Everyone, and everything, is our teacher.
Yogic aphorism
One is one’s own refuge. Who else could be the refuge?
The Buddha
Nemo dat quod non habet. (Latin for: You cannot give what you do not have.)
We give what we desperately want. We say what we need to hear.
Robyn Posin
You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.
C.S. Lewis
Forgiving before you are ready is an act of violence against yourself. And, you may never be ready.
Nicole S. Urdang
Never give the devil a ride, because if he likes the ride pretty soon he’ll want to drive.
Anne Lamott
The sun is always behind the clouds.
Truism
I love you, I will never leave you, I will always take care of you. (Said to oneself.)
Elizabeth Gilbert
What would it be like if I could accept life, accept this moment, exactly as it is?
Tara Brach
The best way way out is always through.
Robert Frost
One of the secrets to a happy life is continuous small treats.
Iris Murdoch
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday and all is well.
Dale Carnegie (with add-on by NSU)
I go out for a walk every day because the demons don’t like fresh air.
Ingmar Bergman
The choice is pain or paralysis.
Florence Nightingale
That which you seek is already within you.
Yogic aphorism
Expectations are resentments under construction.
Anne Lamott
There is no other person in the whole world more deserving of compassion than you.
The Budddha
It’s your life. If you’re not going to be enthusiastic about it who will be?
Nicole S. Urdang
One heals suffering only by experiencing it to the full.
Marcel Proust
Sometimes, you just have to let everything fall apart.
Pema Chodron
When you find yourself reacting to someone’s behavior, imagine that person as a seven year old. If you see their hurt and pain it’s easier to have compassion and move on.
Gurmukh
Be here now.
Ram Dass
Believing in life before death is hard enough.
“Shoe” in the comic strip Crow
Revenge is like drinking rat poison and expecting the rat to die.
Anne Lamott
When the horse is dead it’s time to dismount.
Attributed to Dakota Indians
We have all experienced abandonment. What we need to learn is to never abandon our own self.
John Selby
Forgiveness means that it’s finally unimportant that you hit back–you’re done. It doesn’t necessarily mean you want to have lunch with the person.
Anne Lamott
Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what is going on.
Pema Chodron
What we practice we become.
Yogic Aphorism
When we let go our hand opens and we are able to receive.
Rolf Gates
Never ruin an apology with an excuse.
Kimberly Johnson
Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
Dr. Seuss
Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts.
Pema Chodron
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.
C.G. Jung
Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.
Paul Dickson
My beloved child, break your heart no longer. Each time your judge yourself you break your heart.
Bapuji
Rest is a sacred act.
Robyn Posin
A life truly lived constantly burns away veils of illusion, burns away what is no longer relevant, reveals our essence, until, at last, we are strong enough to stand in our naked truth.
Marion Woodman
Now that my ladders gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart
W.B. Yeats
We can’t heal what we can’t feel.
Debbie Ford
barn’s burnt down;
now I can see
the moon
Haiku by Masahide
Tenderly, I now touch all
things,
knowing one day we will
part.
St. John of the Cross
He who has injured thee was either stronger or weaker than thee. If weaker, spare him; if stronger, spare thyself.
William Shakespeare
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way….
Charles Dickens
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Reinhold Neibuhr
Some days you eat the bear, some days the bear eats you.
Ian Matthews
If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, “thank you,” that would suffice.
Meister Eckhart
A Spiritual Journey
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.
Wendell Berry
If you don’t risk anything you risk even more.
Erica Jong
Referring to meditation, an old Chinese Zen Master once said, “Some of you are taking me literally when I say, ‘Don’t think,’ and you are making your minds like a rock. This is a cause of insentiency and an obstruction to the Way. When I say not to think, I mean that if you have a thought, think nothing of it.”
The heart, like the grape, is prone to delivering its harvest in the same moment it is crushed.
Roger Housden
Transcending boundaries is one of the joys of life.
Cedar Barstow
The Heart Sutra: Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha.
“Gone, gone, gone to the other shore beyond.”
Buddha
You can’t escape from a prison unless you know you are in it.
Anonymous
When life descends into the pit
I must become my own candle
Willingly burning my self
To light up the darkness around me.
Alice Walker
Sadness is information from the soul.
C.G. Jung
Courage is the ability to create a relationship with the unknown.
David Whyte
Be happy for no reason.
Alan Finger
The thread is spun under the tears, the cloth bleached with tears, the shirt sewn with tears; but then too it is a better protection than iron and steel….The secret in life is that everyone must sew it for himself….Then, there is peace and rest and comfort in sorrow.
Kierkegaard comparing the final stage of human consciousness to the shirt in an old fable.
Confidence comes from doing difficult things.
Anonymous
Man is what he makes of himself. And the courage to be as oneself is the courage to make of oneself what one wants to be.
Paul Tillich
In some ways the trauma of separation is a welcome contrast to the boredom that underlies many marriages.
Abigail Trafford
The hardest experiences of our lives crack us open to that which connects us all.
Maria Coffey
To attain clarity, allow confusion.
The Tao of Healing, Haven Trevino
If you can’t get out of it get into it.
Saying from Outward Bound
Man is unhappy because he doesn’t know he’s happy. It’s only that. That’s all, that’s all! If anyone finds out he’ll become happy at once, that minute…. It’s all good. I discovered it all of a sudden.
Dostoyevsky, The Possessed
A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with all the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world no one is all-knowing and therefore all of us need both love and charity.
Eleanor Roosevelt
We are all one, contributing our part to the wholeness of the universe. Each like a petal: unique, though an integral part of creating the flower’s beauty. Complete as we are, right this minute.
Nicole S. Urdang
When two people decide to get a divorce it isn’t a sign they don’t understand one another, but a sign that they have, at last, begun to.
Helen Rowland
If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart.
Socrates
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
Dalai Lama
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Ghandi
Buddhist Prayer For Peace:
May all beings everywhere plagued with sufferings of body and mind quickly be freed from their illnesses.
May those frightened cease to be afraid, and may those bound be free.
May the powerless find power and may people think of befriending one another.
May those who find themselves in trackless, fearful wilderness—the children, the aged, the unprotected—be guarded by beneficial celestials, and may they swiftly attain Buddhahood.
If you’re going through hell, keep going.
Winston Churchill
When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
Helen Keller
If you believe you can or believe you can’t, you’re right.
Henry Ford
Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.
Richard Bach
An emotional wound requires the same priority attention as a physical wound. Set time aside for mourning.
Melba Colgrove, Harold H. Bloomfield, & Peter Williams
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
Naomi Shabib Nye
I don’t know anything. Whatever I thought I knew was shattered. Whatever I anticipated never happened, and what I never anticipated did.
Terry Tempest Williams
Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.
Terry Tempest Williams
When you close your doors, and make darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not alone; nay, God is within and your genius is within. And what need have they of light to see what you are doing?
Epictetus (1st Century AD)
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn whatever state I am in, therein to be content.
Helen Keller
Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.
W. R. Inge
Far too frequently we see ourselves as doers. This means that in order to feel worthy in our own or [Spirit’s] eyes, we feel we must endlessly work and achieve. We have not always learned just to be receptive, to be in the presence of [Spirit] – quiet, available….
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
The great error of this age is that activity has increased so much that there is little margin left in one’s everyday life for repose.
Repose is the secret of all contemplation and meditation, the secret of getting in tune with that aspect of life which is the essence of all things.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
Listen in deep silence. Be very still and open your mind…. Sink deep into the peace that waits for you beyond the frantic, riotous thoughts and sights and sounds of this insane world.
A Course in Miracles
You do not need to leave your room…Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even 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
Ultimately, healing is a coming to terms with things
as they are, rather than struggling to force them to
be as they once were, or as we would like them to be
to feel secure
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass…it’s about learning how to dance in the rain.
Source unknown to me
Life is so short
We must move more slowly
Thich Nhat Hanh
You are a volume in the divine book
A mirror to the power that created the universe
Whatever you want, ask it of yourself
Whatever you’re looking for can only be found
Inside of you.
Rumi
The deep attending to hard knots of holding is a powerfully compassionate act, a turning toward rejected parts of our being. As this newly compassionate observing occurs, the object of observation, the body/self is transformed and we move from denial to acceptance, from rejection to inclusion. This is the beginning of…loving kindness for the self.
Katherine Thanas in Being Bodies
All of our emotions are our babies. Treat them tenderly, care for them. Be with them. Understanding and compassion will ultimately transform them.
Thich Naht Hanh
Growth and forward motion continue whether we are vigilant or not. Pushing ourselves often slows the process: it stirs resistance in the healthy parts of us that are protecting the natural flow from being overthrown or interfered with. When things feel really hard, slowing way down allows the internal, organic balancing process to work its magic. When you get scared that you’ll never come out of this (or any other place in which you find yourself) remember that everything in us always moves toward growth and change–no matter how it looks to our outside eye.
Robyn Posin
Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart.
Try to allow the questions themselves,
like locked rooms,
and like books that are written in a very foreign language.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually,
without noticing,
live along some distant day into the answer.
Rilke
Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don’t want it.
What appears as bad manners, an ill temper or cynicism
is always a sign of things no ears have heard,
no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on
down there where the spirit
meets the bone.
Miller Williams
For those of you still facing challenges, here’s something key I’d like to share that I’ve learned. Please know that a wholeness exists in you even in the midst of adversity. There is a light in you even now. You may not be able to see it at the end of the tunnel, but it is in you. Right this moment. A wholeness that’s untouched by what you’re facing. Maybe it seems very small. Maybe you don’t even believe it’s there. But it is. If you take a moment to close your eyes, feel it there. That’s the part of you that already knows how to face the challenge, that’s already transformed it and learned from it. It’s the part that will lead you to whatever other guidance you might need along the way. This in no way minimizes the challenge. It’s just that this other piece exists simultaneously and is with you always. And no matter how alone you feel, know that you are not alone. Others feel as you do. If you believe in spirit or the power of love, these are with you always, along with the wholeness inside you.
Alissa Lukara
Grief is a form of loneliness.
Source unknown to me.
Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the over-fraught heart, and bids it break.
William Shakespeare
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
Henry David Thoreau
You are the thinker not the thought.
Anonymous
Most of the shadows of this life are caused by our standing in our own sunshine.
Emerson
Temporary defeat is not failure.
Napoleon Hill
Learning how to be kind to ourselves, learning how to respect ourselves, is important. The reason it’s important is that, fundamentally, when we look into our own hearts and begin to discover what is confused and what is brilliant, what is bitter and what is sweet, it isn’t just ourselves that we’re discovering. We’re discovering the universe.
Pema Chodron
We think that the point is to pass the test or 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 Chodron
Every breakdown is a breakthrough.
Buckminster Fuller
We can’t feel gratitude and stress at the same time.
Max Strom
Tension is who you think you should be, relaxation is who you are.
Chinese proverb
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
Carl Jung
Even if we are determined to block the magic it will get through.
Pema Chodron
Mindfulness is simply being aware of what is happening right now without wishing it were different; enjoying the pleasant without holding on when it changes (which it will); being with the unpleasant without fearing it will always be this way (which it won’t).
James Baraz
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.
Frederick Buechner
If God had a refrigerator your picture would be on it.
Max Lucado
My vision can be so limiting. I often think the only possible outcomes are those I can imagine.
The Courage To Change, Al-Anon
It’s better to want something you don’t have than to have something you don’t want.
Denny Crane, Boston Legal
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment.
Eckhart Tolle
The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears, or the sea.
Isak Dinesen
If you can sit quietly after difficult news;
If in financial downturns you remain perfectly calm;
If you can see your neighbors travel to fantastic places without a twinge of jealousy;
If you can happily eat whatever is put on your plate;
If you can fall asleep without a drink or a pill;
If you can always find contentedness just where you are – you are probably a dog.
The one who knows realizes that difficulties are a part of every human life.
Jack Kornfield
It’s not your job to like me–it’s mine.
Byron Katie
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
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.
Georgia O’Keeffe
Patience is the best remedy for every trouble.
Titus Maccius Plautus
The spiritual path is all about self-acceptance.
Jack Kornfied
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.
Erich Fromm
You have to know how to accept rejection, and reject acceptance.
Ray Bradbury
Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
We have to face the pain we have been running from. In fact, we need to learn to rest in it and let its searing power transform us.
Charlotte Joko Beck
The wind of divine grace is always blowing. You just need to spread your sail. Whenever you do anything, do it with your whole heart concentrated on it. Think day and night, I am of the essence of that Supreme Being-Consciousness-Bliss. What fear and anxiety have I?
Swami Vivekananda
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
Plato
Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.
Oscar Wilde
He who is not contented with what he has would not be contented with what he would like to have.
Socrates
May today there be peace within.
May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be.
May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.
May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you.
May you be content knowing you are a child of God.
Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love.
It is there for each and every one of us.
Thérèse de Lisieux
I must be a mermaid. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
Anaïs Nin
What progress, you ask, have I made? I have begun to be a friend to myself.
Hecato, Greek philosopher
Repetition is the mother of transformation.
David Magone
Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.
Rainer Maria Rilke
On Meditation:
I’m simply saying that there is a way to be sane.
I’m saying that you can get rid of all this insanity
created by the past in you. Just by being a simple
witness of your thought processes.
It is simply sitting silently, witnessing the thoughts,
passing before you.
Just witnessing, not interfering not even judging,
because the moment you judge, you have lost the
pure witness. The moment you say “this is good, this
is bad,” you have already jumped onto the thought process.
It takes a little time to create a gap between the
witness and the mind. Once the gap is there,
you are in for a great surprise,
that you are not the mind, that
you are the witness, A watcher.
And this process of watching is the very alchemy
of real religion. Because as you become more and
more deeply rooted in witnessing, thoughts start
disappearing. You are, but the mind is utterly empty.
That’s the moment of enlightenment.
That is the moment that you become for
the first time an unconditioned, sane,
really free human being.
Osho
I have learned … tolerance from the intolerant and kindness from the unkind. I should not be ungrateful to these teachers.
Kahlil Gibran
We might also ask: Given my present situation, how long should I stay with uncomfortable feelings?
This is a good question, yet there is no right answer.
We simply get accustomed to coming back to the present just as it is for a second,
for a minute, for an hour—whatever is currently natural—without its becoming an endurance trial.
Just pausing for two to three breaths is a perfect way to stay present.
This is a good use of our life.
Indeed, it is an excellent, joyful use of our life.
Pema Chodron
“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you, you just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”
Bob Marley
Our true nature is like a precious jewel: although it may be temporarily buried in mud, it remains completely brilliant and unaffected. We simply have to uncover it.
Pema Chodron
What is at the end of any plunge but solid ground?
Nicole S. Urdang
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
Louise Erdrich
“Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.” It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment—not discouragement—you will find the strength there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege!! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures, followed by wreckage, were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.”
Joseph Campbell Quotes from A Joseph Campbell Companion
Wisdom’s not cheap, we pay for it.
Kevin Kling
I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
Samuel Beckett
If it’s out of proportion to the moment it’s probably about the past.
Deidre Fay
…But loving-kindness toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. It means that we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to change ourselves. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are. That’s the ground, that’s what we study, that’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.
Pema Chodron
Relaxation is who you really are. Tension is who you think you should be.
Lee Holden
Before you heal someone ask him if he is willing to give up the things that make him sick.
Hippocrates
May you discover it is you you are yearning to love most and you who will show you how. It is you you are most longing to know.
Sarah Blondin
If it’s hysterical it’s historical.
Jewel
Boats that stay in the harbor are safe but that’s not what they’re built for.
Frederick Backman
The world breaks everyone and afterword many are stronger in the broken places.
Ernest Hemingway
You can’t chase fear out you can only bring love in.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The brighter the light the darker the shadow.
Nicole Urdang
In an imperfect world we make the best of what has already been done.
Alexander McCall Smith
Success is not final, failure is not final. It is the courage to go on that counts.
Churchill
When you realize nothing is lacking the whole world belongs to you.
Lao Tzu
To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
Soren Kierkegaard
I have yet to meet a day when struggle and suffering are not offered to me.
Sarah Blondin
Resisting is the suffering, letting go and accepting is where the healing is found.
Emily Toner
Do no harm but take no shit.
Elizabeth Lesser
Meditation is an evolutionary sport.
Robert Thurman
There is no rejection only redirection.
Matt Haig
Never underestimate the big importance of small things.
Matt Haig
Compassion is the basis of morality.
Arthur Schopenhauer
The needle breaks the fabric in order to repair it.
Katherine May (Wintering)
Childhood is a darkened fantasy-filled theater in which, after a long or a short while, the house lights are turned on, and the brightness makes you blink, and then you see the candy wrappers under the seats and the lines for the bathrooms. That moment can happen at any time.
Ian Fraser December 14 New Yorker personal history
If you are searching for that one person who will change your life, take a look in the mirror.
Unkown
On a walk one day, a Buddhist teacher asked his students if a huge boulder was heavy. They said of course it is. He said, only if you try to pick it up.
Why worry if you can do something about it, and why worry if you can do nothing about it?
Shantideva 8th century monk
Not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
James Baldwin
Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.
Emily Dickinson
There is nothing wrong with you that what’s right with you can’t cure.
Aldous Huxley
Hope is a tease designed to prevent us accepting reality.
Lady Grantham, Sr., Downton Abbey
Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.
Michel de Montaigne
Do not look for healing at the feet of those who broke you.
Rupi Kaur
As you come to terms with the endings of things (recognize) there’s too much holding back because we fight the endings.
…
There are cycles in your life that must come to an end and it’s pointless to resist what is inevitable.
Let all the pieces fall apart because the one piece you cannot lose is you.
Nico Luce, Yoga teacher on Gaia
Real power doesn’t come from having a million followers, good hair, a Louis Vuitton purse, a new car, a new home, a title, a partner, or anything that can be weighed, measured, or acquired. Real power is the thing you’ve always had inside you. Real power doesn’t need to be demonstrated or boasted. Real power is the ability to be in your skin, to know who you are, to know you will always be okay. Real power comes from your gut and your heart and your courage and your bravery and your love. Real power can never be taken away from you and never lost once it’s found. It’s the kind of power that people like Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks and the Dalai Lama all had or have—a quality within unaffected by outer circumstances, an eternal flame that cannot be touched.
Holly Whitaker
Where we think we need more discipline, we usually need more self-love.
Tara Mohr
Grief unresisted is grace.
Adyashanti
It takes time to become what we already are.
Rick Hanson PhD
For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.
Cynthia Occelli
The only people who get upset when you set boundaries are the ones who benefited from you having none.
Unknown
One day in retrospect the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.
Sigmund Freud
At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self.
Brendan Francis
Honor the space between no longer and not yet.
Nancy Levin
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas
It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.
Krishnamurti
We are turtles, not birds. We take our childhood home with us wherever we go. We cannot fly away from it.
David Richo
Ultimately, healing is a coming to terms with things
as they are, rather than struggling to force them to
be as they once were, or as we would like them to be
to feel secure.
Jon Kabat Zinn
If everything is coming your way you’re in the wrong lane.
Old saying
The body feels stressed when we bring the mind into the past or the future.
David Gandelman
The more one knows the more one is protected by the truth.
Harlan Coben
Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.
Winnie the Pooh
Hope, the source of all our suffering.
Harlan Coben
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
e. e. cummings
If you want to clean the house you have to see the dirt.
Louise Hay
You always know when you’re doing something for the first time, and you almost never know when you’re doing something for the last time.
William Irvine
Healing is not an accident it’s a practice.
Deirdre Fay
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
Epicurus
There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there’s only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running around after happiness.
Edith Wharton
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
Albert Camus
If you truly loved yourself you would never harm another.
The Buddha
We do not worship gods because they dress well.
Bradford Morrow
It’s easier to make your way when you can choose your own sound track.
Fredrik Backman
There are no dark nights of the soul. Your soul is doing just fine. There are only dark nights of the ego.
Robert Holden
We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.
Margaret Mead
Sleep is the best meditation.
Dalai Lama
Remember: You’re not the candle or the flame you’re the light.
And in the light you watch.
Nico Luce
All emotions are just there to keep me safe and help me thrive.
Felix New
I look at “No” as next opportunity.
Felix Now
But who pretends that life is one slowly ascending curve of human development? Most of the time you have to smash into something: the death, the broken relationship, the horrible career moment. Then you think: Well, what matters to me? What do I enjoy? Or even just, I’m still here.
Kenneth Branagh
You teach people how to treat you.
Maya Angelou
Who looks outside dreams, who looks inside awakens.
Carl Jung
On grief:
Don’t lose what you have to what you have lost.
Dr. Lucy Hone
There is always a road back if we have the courage to look for it and take it.
I’m sorry, I was wrong, I didn’t know, I need help.
Those are the signposts, the cardinal directions.
Louise Penny’s Commander Gamache talking to the graduating class of police cadets in A Great Reckoning, ch. 43.
It (mindfulness) does provide a greater basket for tenderly holding and intimately knowing our suffering in any and all circumstances, and that, it turns out, is transformative, and can make all the difference between endless imprisonment in pain and suffering and freedom from suffering.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Each of us is deserving of a little forgetting.
Jason Mott in Hell of a Book
When we try to deny our vulnerability, we lose touch with our heart.
Richard C. Schwartz
This moment is the perfect teacher.
Pema Chodron
Our emotions are manifestations of human weather, nothing more, nothing less.
Brigid Lowry
The trauma is not a story about something that happened in the past. The trauma is how the past is alive and well and living in your body in 2022. It’s happening right now. How do you deal with these parts of you that are getting stirred up continuously right now?
Bessel Van Der Kolk
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit
A lot of times we are angry at other people for not doing what we should have done for ourselves.
Rupi Kaur
The most difficult things are not outside, they’re inside you.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Chemists say the glass is neither half empty nor half full. It’s full: half with water and half with gas.
Weike Wang
Don’t you know yet? It is your light that lights the world.
Rumi
It’s such a relief that we can change.
Celine Sciamma
Know this: When you lose someone or something, you have not lost yourself.
Annemaree Rowley
For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.
C.S. Lewis
Who is your enemy? Mind is your enemy. No one can harm you more than your own mind untamed. And who is your friend? Mind is your friend. No one can help you more than your own mind, wisely trained—not even your own mother and father.
The Buddha
Little breath, breathe me gently, row me, for I am the river I am learning to cross.
W. S. Merwin
A long time Buddhist teacher talked about her experiences of depression, terror and helplessness (that arose from a family history of abuse and parentheses). Through her practice she learned to make space for those feelings. She learned that depression is just depression, and that when we are afraid of our feelings we make them as powerful as demons. It’s just depression she said. If we let it in, inhale it, feel it and exhale it, it will naturally transform, like all phenomenal existence. The most important thing is to not deny or avoid the experience.
Katherine Thanas
Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion.
The Buddha
There is nothing so bad that it can’t be worse.
Irish proverb
Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed.
Rumi
There is no love of life without despair of life.
Albert Camus
Fear is a universal experience. Even the smallest insect feels it. We wade in the tidal pools and put our finger near the soft, open bodies of sea anemones and they close up. Everything spontaneously does that. It’s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown. It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.
If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.
Pema Chodron
We can be with what’s happening and not dissociate. Awakeness is found in our pleasure and our pain, our confusion and our wisdom, available in each moment of our weird, unfathomable, ordinary everyday lives.
Pema Chodron
Peace, satisfaction, true repose, come only through effort, and then not for long.
John Burroughs
The meaning of life is to find one’s gift.
The purpose of life is to give it away.
Picasso
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
Henry David Thoreau
When nothing goes right…go left.
Martha Cecilia
To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world.
Dr. Seuss
Every storm runs out of rain.
Maya Angelou
Whenever I’m suffering, I find this war with reality to be at the heart of the problem.
Stephen Cope
Our discomfort arises from all our effort to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant OK-ness.
Pema Chodron
What is it like to realize we can never, and finally, get it all together?
Pema Chodron
I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.
John O’Donohue
No one actually needs different circumstances, they only need greater support for the experiences they’re having.
Matt Kahn
The less there was of me, the happier I got.
Leonard Cohen
Be a lamp unto yourself.
Be a lamp unto yourself.
Be a refuge to yourself.
Take yourself to no external refuge.
The Buddha
You can’t think yourself through a feeling, you can only feel yourself through a feeling.
Selena Lael
Life is pain management and a slow march toward death. But here’s to having fun while we’re marching.
Alan Cumming
I used to worry about fitting in until I realized the reason I didn’t fit in was because I didn’t want to.
Matt Haig
What you resist persists.
Carl Jung
What you resist will persist; what you befriend, you will transcend.
Robin S. Sharma
Your expectations are valid. You don’t have to invalidate them. You just have to know that they are not realistic.
Mark Epstein, MD
Now that I’m enlightened, I’m just as miserable as ever.
Zen Monk
Never forget:
we walk on hell,
gazing at flowers.
Issa
I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.
June Jordan
The man who can keep a secret may be wise, but he is not half as wise as the man with no secrets to keep.
Edgar Watson Howe
Resisting reality is a losing battle.
Catherine Ingram
The seeker is what’s sought.
Lisa Romano
There is a story of a man who right before dying said to his daughter: What was that all about?
Set your heart on doing good. Do it over and over again and you will be filled with joy.
The Buddha
Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger than we were before.
Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant.
But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be…for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.
Alice Walker
The saddest thing in life is that the best thing in life is courage.
Robert Frost
Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise. Loneliness is an absolute discovery.
Marilynne Robinson
(Regarding his getting lost on purpose.)
I want to be lost because I need to know that I can always find my way back.
Ira Sukrungruang
The meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away. Pablo Picasso
The only person you’re destined to become is the person you decide to be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.
Epicurus
The highest spiritual path is life itself.
Michael A. Singer
If we want a better world we have to make it ourselves.
Alice Walker
Life is so very difficult at times. It’s natural for us to tense our muscles, harden our hearts, and disengage emotions that feel unbearable. It’s part of how the wisdom of our bodies protects us.
David Chernikoff
The good news is that we can learn to relinquish our obsession with the information, mastery, and control we imagine will assuage our existential anxiety. Opening to things as they are, on a moment-to-moment basis, we gradually learn to trust our unfolding lives and to relax into the not-knowing that is ever present and ultimately unavoidable.
David Chernikoff
It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Wendell Berry
The dharma in six words:
Pay attention; don’t cling; be kind.
Sally Armstrong
Despair is the necessary prerequisite for the next level of consciousness.
Ram Dass
I want to enjoy less more.
Nicole Urdang
I simply don’t do things I hate.
Amemiya (woman quoted in The Abundance of Less by Andy Couturier)
If we want to have a happy ending it depends on where we stop the story.
Orson Welles
It is very simple to be happy, but very difficult to be simple.
Rabinranath Tagore
There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.
R.D. Laing
Liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.
Louisa May Alcott
Wisdom is only found at the bottom of the well.
Anonymous
I never aimed for normalcy, a land for middle children and people who knew how to drive – – I liked feeling different from everyone else, and I felt that way as long as I can remember. What I wanted was to feel OK about those differences, to feel their power instead of their weight.
Whoopi Goldberg
Assimilation is a grieving process: losing the very essence of you for the comfort of acceptance.
Jazmine Hughes
Grief is the doorway to the soul.
Cheryl Richardson
If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.
Henry David Thoreau
A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.
Viktor Frankl
From the movie: 23 Walks
Two older people talking…
He: Where’s your favorite place in the world?
She: Somewhere inside me.
Oh Lucy, don’t you sometimes feel sorry for everyone in this whole wide world?
Elizabeth Strout in Lucy by the Sea
Nothingness will not leave you empty. It will fill you up.
Epiphany Mason
The person who thinks they know goes to war and the person who doesn’t know listens.
Tiger Singleton
Accept what is.
Let go of what was.
Have faith in what will be.
Annamarie Rowley
I do not want to fight myself every day for the rest of my life.
Paulina Porizkova
Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes…including you.
Anne Lamott
Suffering is a disharmony with myself.
Sarah Blondin
Presence is the portal to everything we cherish.
Tara Brach
Whatever arises has the potential to awaken wisdom and love.
Tara Brach
Here’s to less and the more that comes with it!
Jonathan Foust
Everything is imperfect, impermanent, and impersonal.
Ruth King
The only advantage of disaster is that all other evils are swallowed up in it.
Anne Perry
A battle against what is is always destined for defeat.
Tony Brady
If it’s hysterical, it’s historical.
Anonymous
If we shall be quiet and ready enough we will find consolation in every disappointment.
Henry David Thoreau
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
Anonymous
Sadness does not arise to be healed. It arises to be heard, held in the loving arms of awareness.
Jeff Foster
Our sadness, pain, and struggle are like a child wandering in a storm that has come knocking at the door asking to come in. Can we welcome it? Allowing it to be what it is, a painful sensation in this moment. It doesn’t mean we’re wrong, failed, or broken. It’s simply a painful feeling here in the body, in this moment, asking to be held.
Nick Kientsch
Obstacles do not block the path, they are the path.
Zen proverb
If I were you, I would lower my expectations.
Star Trek: Picard S3 E1
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
Lao Tse
On addiction:
It’s hard to get enough of something that almost works.
Vincent Felitti
