Quotes

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

If you set out to be less than capable of being, I warn you, you will be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life.
–Abraham Maslow

If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito.
— African Proverb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes I arrive just when God’s ready to have someone click the shutter.
— Ansel Adams

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

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 Philips

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

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

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

It’s not what you do, but how much love you put into it that matters.
— Mother Theresa

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