10 Notable Quotes

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Possibly the only fear greater than death is love, real love. Finding out that you do love, that this is your nature, is the beginning of the end for everything in you that thinks it is separate. —Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing

Dear incomprehension,

it’s thanks to you I’ll be myself, in the end.

I, of whom I know nothing,

I know my eyes are open, because of the tears that pour from them unceasingly.

What makes me weep so? Fromtime to time. There is nothing saddening here…

All this business of a labour to accomplish, before I canend, ofwords to say, a truth to recover, in order to say it, before I can end, of an imposed task, once known, long neglected, finally forgotten, to perform, before I can be done with speaking, done with listening, I invented it all, in the hope it would console me, help me to go on, allow me to think of myself as somewhere on a road, moving, between a beginning and an end, gaining ground, losing ground, getting lost, but somehow in the long run making headway.

Perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of mystory, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am,

I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t again, a stranger first, then little by little the same as always, in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing, being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking, but of which little by little, in spite of these handicaps, I shall begin to know something, just enough for it to turn out to be the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want, take your choice, which spews me out or swallows me up, I’ll never know, which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess, or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back, and ever murmuring my old stories, my old story,

as if it were the first time. —Samuel Becket, The Unnamed

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. —G.K. Chesterton

Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. —James Neil Hollingworth

Some people have a way with words, and other people…oh, uh, not have way. —Steve Martin

Be like a tree in pursuit of your cause. Stand firm, grip hard, thrust upward. Bend to the winds of heaven. And learn tranquility. —Memorial Dedication to forester Richard St. Barbe Baker

Wisdom tells me I’m Nothing. Love tells me I’m Everything. Between the two flows the river of my life. —Nisargadatta Maharaj

Each of you is perfect the way you are … and you can use a little improvement. —Shunryu Suzuki

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire. —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

The first duty of love is to listen. —Paul Tilich

 

Honorable Mention

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Enlightenment is nothing more than the complete absence of resistance to what is. —Adyashanti, Emptiness Dancing

Asceticism is not that you should not own anything, but that nothing should own you. —Ali ibn Abi Talib

If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough. —Mario Andretti

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. —Maya Angelou

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die. —W.H. Auden

Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand-and melting like a snowflake… —Francis Bacon Sr.

Your work is to discover your work, and then to give yourself to it with all of your heart. —Buddha

There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work . . . (and) the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. —Fred Buechner

You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone. —Al Capone

Photography is not like painting,..There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative. Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever. —Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Washington Post in 1957.

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
—Chinese Proverb

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self. —Cyril Connolly

The loneliest people can be the kindest. The saddest people sometimes smile the brightest. The most damaged people are filled with wisdom. All because they do not wish the pain they’ve endured on another soul. —Timothy Delvecc

Everything that can be invented has been invented. —Charles H. Duell, Commissioner U.S. Patent Office 1899

Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine. —Lawrence Durrell, Clea

What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place—for that is history—but in the order in which they first became significant for me. —Lawrence Durrell, Justine

You cannot write more than a dozen love-letters without finding yourself graveled for fresh matter. The richest of human experiences is also the most limited in its range of expression. Words kill love as they kill everything else. —Lawrence Durrell, Mountolive

My object in the novels? To interrogate human values through an honest representation of the human passions. A desirable end, perhaps a hopeless objective. —Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar

Once you can accept the universe as being something expanding into an infinite nothing which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy. —Albert Einstein

[Our] opinion of the world is also a confession of character.—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Last night I neglected to mention something that bears repeating. —Ron Fairly San Francisco Giants announcer.

All of Narcissa’s instincts had been antipathetic to him, his idea was a threat and his presence a violation of the very depths of her nature, in the headlong violence of him she had been like a lily in a gale which rocked it to its roots in a sort of vacuum, without any actual laying-on of hands. And now the gale had gone on, the lily had forgotten it as its fury died away into the fading vibrations of old terrors and dreads, and the stalk recovered and the bell itself was untarnished save by the friction of its own petals. The gale is gone, and though the lily is sad a little with vibrations of ancient fears, it is not sorry. —William Faulkner, Flags In the Dust

It did not do to think, nor, for the matter of that to feel. She gave up trying to understand herself, and joined the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go. They have sinned against Eros and against Pallas Athene, and not by any heavenly intervention, but by the ordinary course of nature, those allied deities will be avenged. —E. M. Forrester, A Room With A View

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. —Viktor Frankl

There is really nothing you must be.
And there is nothing you must do.
There is really nothing you must have.
And there is nothing you must know.
There is really nothing you must become.

However, it helps to understand that fire burns,
And when it rains, the earth gets wet.

-Zen Buddhist Temple in Kyoto, Japan (retold by Robert Fulghum)

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. —Buckminster Fuller

It is one of the paradoxes of art that work can only be universal if it is rooted in a part of its creator which is most privately and particularly himself. – Tyrone Guthrie

Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other “sins” are invented nonsense. ― Robert A. Heinlein

If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven. —Charles Ives

Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in. –Andrew Jacskson quoting Napoleon Bonaparte

Silence is God’s first language. –John of the Cross

The time is always right to do what is right. —Martin Luther King, Jr.

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. —Lao Tzu

He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know. —Lao Tzu

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. —Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear. —Joanna R. Macy

When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: “Whose?”—Don Marquis

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, concerned citizens can change world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has. —Margaret Mead

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as courses, and they come back to us as effects. —Herman Melville

Separation: Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
—W. S. Merwin

When you look into a pool of water,
if the water is still,
you can see the moon reflected.

If the water is agitated,
the moon is fragmented and scattered.
It’s harder to see the moon.

Our minds are like that.
When our minds are agitated,
we cannot see the true world.
—John J. Muth

Each tree grows in two directions at once, into the darkness and out to the light with as many branches and roots as it needs to embody its wild desires. – John O’Donohue

There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. —Joseph O’Neill, Netherland: A Novel

Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book. —Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

He fell in love with Manhattan’s skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. —Arthur Phillips, The Song Is You: A Novel

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized God doesn’t work that way, so I stole one and prayed for forgiveness. —Emo Phillips

See everything; overlook a great deal; correct a little. —Pope John XXIII

Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’ —Mary Anne Radmacher

My fellow Americans…I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes. —President Ronald Reagan

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess. —Rainer Maria Rilke

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility. —Eleanor Roosevelt

My lifetime listens to yours. – Muriel Ruckeyser

I’d rather attempt to do something great and fail than to attempt to do nothing and succeed. —Robert Schuller

Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. —Tom Schulman

Everyone looks retarded once you set your mind to it. —David Sedaris

…there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Shakespeare, Hamlet

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself. —Mark Twain

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right —Mark Twain

It’s not alway the best solution that takes hold, it’s the one that reaches more people. anyone can make a better hamburger than mcdonalds. – Unknown

This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will. You can waste it or use it for good. What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it. When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever; in its place is something that you have left behind…let it be something good. —Unknown

What you hope, you will eventually believe. What you believe you will eventually know. What you know, you will eventually create. What you create, you will eventually experience. What you experience you will eventually express. What you express you will eventually become. This is the formula for all of life. —Neale Donald Walsch

Flatter me, and I may not believe you. Criticize me, and I may not like you. Ignore me, and I may not forgive you. Encourage me, and I will not forget you. Love me and I may be forced to love you. —William Arthur Ward

Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is about thinking more of others. —Rick Warren

When we seek for connection, we restore the world to wholeness. Our seemingly separate lives become meaningful as we discover how truly necessary we are to each other. —Margaret Wheatley

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. —E. B. White

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. —Marianne Williamson