"It’s perfectly safe. It’s like taking off a tight shoe." (Emmanuel)
"We men die because our faces were not watered enough." (Pat Conroy, Beach Music)
"To die will be an awfully big adventure." (James M. Barrie)
“Grief turns into healing when you relinquish the pain and helplessness you feel, because there is nothing you can do to bring the deceased person back, and shift your thoughts to what you can do to honor that person’s memory. The best remembrance of a loved one is to carry on what that person stood for. What unique qualities did that person possess? What were his or her interests or wishes? To insure that the meaning of that person’s life continues after death, you can’t dwell on your feelings of loss indefinitely. If you allow them to consume you, your focus becomes fixed on you – your rage, your sorrow, your loneliness – rather than the person who is gone. Shift your focus to doing justice to that person’s memory, and your pain will begin to diminish.” Maxine Schnall from: What Doesn't Kill You Makes you Stronger: Turning Bad Breaks into Blessings
"Death is nature’s way of saying, ‘your table is ready." Robin Williams, taken from Do It! Let's Get Off Our But's (The Life 101 Series) John Roger and Peter Mcwilliams)
"All men should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why." (James Thurber)
"Death has to be waiting at the end of the ride, before you truly see the earth, and feel your heart, and love the world." (Jean Anouilh)
"Death is not a period but a comma in the story of life." (author unknown)
"The end is where we start from." (T. S. Eliot)
"It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives." (Denis Diderot)
"Among the dead there are those that still have to be killed." (Desnoyers)
"Imagination is more important than knowledge." (Einstein)
"Dreams are illustrations…from the book your soul is writing about you." (Marsha Norman)
"Our dreams are the sequel of our waking knowledge." (Emerson)
"As in dreams, so in the scarcely less fluid events of the world, every man sees himself in colossal, without knowing that it is himself. The good, compared to the evil which he sees, is as his own good to his own evil." (Emerson)
"The habit most worth cultivating is that of thinking clearly even though inspired."
"Reality can destroy the dream; why shouldn’t the dream destroy reality?" (George Moore)
"Picture in your mind a sense of personal destiny." (Wayne Oats)
"Vision is the art of seeing things invisible." (Swift)
"Do something worth remembering." (Elvis Presley)
"Your reason and your passions are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can toss and drift, or else be held at a stand still in midseas." (Kahil Gibran)
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. (Edmund Burke)
"We must describe with our lives the future we want to see for our children." (Rich Heffern)
"Where there is no vision, the people perish." (Proverbs)
"What is now proved was once only imagined." (William Blake)
"You see things; and say, Why?" But I dream things that never were; and say, "Why not?" (Geroge Bernard Shaw)
"It is our thinking that we must modify if we are to make and implement the decisions necessary to protect the world we live in." (Margaret Mead)
"Vision is the art of seeing things invisible." (Swift)
"Education is too important to be left solely to the educators." (Frances Keppel)
"The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one." (author unknown)
"We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it – and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again- and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore." (Mark Twain)
"Everything is practice." (Pele)
Enlightenment and Self Discovery
"It is what you do daily, not occasionally, that ultimately determines your outcomes in life." (E. Edmeades)
"Some people say they haven’t yet found themselves. But the self is not something one finds; it is something one creates." (Thomas Szasz)
"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake." (Thoreau)
"With enlightenment and self-awareness, we can reguide and realign our whole selves: our bodies, by finding new ways of moving and celebrating them and by adding good foods in amounts they tell us they need; our soul, our sense of ourselves as good and worthwhile, by connecting them to the earth and to each other." (Diana Roesch)
"Whatever makes us jump back seems at the very least worthy of being examined carefully for its potential usefulness." (Clarissa Pinkola Estes)
"Adventure is not outside us but within." (Eric Sloane)
"You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself." (Alan Alda)
"The more I attempted to be ‘me’ the more ‘me’s I found there were." (Hugh Prather)
"The unrest you are experiencing is not individual psychological difficulty but rather, part of a widespread spiritual awakening." (Carol Osborn)
"We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves." (Martin Buber)
"Man is a stream whose source is hidden." (Emerson)
"Faith is, above all, open-ness – an act of trust in the unknown." (Alan Watts)
"Faith is to believe what you do not yet see; the reward for this faith is to see what you believe." (Saint Augustine)
"If you want faith, you have to work for it." (Flannery O’Connor)
"Human misery is too great for men to do without faith." (author unknown)
"To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness to accept pain and disappointment." (Erich Fromm)
"Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow-men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received." (Albert Einstein)
"Lots of people think they are charitable if they give away their old clothes and things they don't want." (Myrtle Reed)
"Service is the rent that you pay for room on this earth." (Shirley Chisholm)
"We are not here to see through one another, but to see one another through." (Anne Lamott)
"The cost of giving is receiving." (A Course in Miracles)
"He who helps in the saving of others, saves himself as well." (Hartman Von Aue)
"There is nothing so rewarding as to make people realize they are worthwhile in this world." (Robert Anderson)
"I shall pass through this world but once. If therefore there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do, let me do it now; let me not deter it or neglect it." (Etienne de Grellet)
"You cannot do a kindness too soon because you never know how soon it will be too late." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
"What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?" (George Eliot)
"The longer you live the more you realize that forgiveness, consideration and kindness are three of the great secrets in life." (Author Unknown)
"No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave." (Calvin Coolidge)
"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found a way to serve." (Albert Schweitzer)
"We seldom think of what we have but always what we lack." (Schopenhauer)
"Do not spoil wht you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for." (Epicurus)
"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life... It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow." (Melody Beattie)
"The more I wonder, the more I love." (Alice Walker)
"We teach our children how to measure, how to weigh. We fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. The sense of the sublime, the sign of the inward greatness of the human soul and something which is potentially given to all men, is now a rare gift." (Abraham Joshua Herschel)
"Do our experiences become more marvelous with age or is it just that we don’t realize when they occur how really beautiful and precious they are? (Joseph Campbell)
"Don’t think: Look!" (Wittgenstein)
"There are two things to aim at in life: First, to get what you want, and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second." (Logan Pearsall Smith)
"Life is a great bundle of little things." (Oliver Wendell Holmes)
"This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it." (Thomas Carlyle)
"We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive, and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos." (D.H. Lawrence)
"The world will never starve for want of wonders." (G. K. Chesterson)
"I think one must finally take one’s life is one’s arms." (Arthur Miller)
"We ourselves cannot put any magic spell on this world. The world is its own magic." (Suzuki Roshi)
"We have buried so much of the delicate magic of life." (D.H. Lawrence)
"The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself." (Henry Miller)
"If the only prayer you say in your whole life is ‘thank you,’ that would suffice." (Meister Eckhart)
"Try to keep your soul young and quivering right up to old age, and to imagine right up to the brink of death that life is only beginning. I think that is the only way to keep adding to one's talent, to one's affections, and one's inner happiness." (George Sand)
"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But, it is, perhaps the end of the beginning." (Winston Churchill)
"What a blessing it is to outlive your self-judgments and harvest your failures." (Rachel Naomi Remen)
"How old would you be, if you didn't know how old you was?" (Satchel Paige)
God never puts anyone in a place too small to grow. (author unknown)
"To grow mature is to separate more distinctly, to connect more closely." (Hugo Von Hofmannsthal)
"Suffer the growing pains." (Liv Ullman)
"To grow up is to assume responsibility for the child within." (author unknown)
"Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn’t original sin. He’s born with the tragedy that he has to grow up. A lot of people don’t have the courage to do it." (Helen Hayes)
"...for in every adult there lurks a child- an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the human personality that wants to develop and become whole." (Carl Jung)
"You don't stop laughing because you grow old; you grow old because you stop laughing." (Michael Pritchard)
"The man who views the world at fifty the same way he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life." (Muhammad Ali)
"To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion." (Camus)
"He not busy being born is busy dying." (Bob Dylan)
"The years teach much which the days never know." (Waldo Emerson)
"Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure." (George Santayana)
"Don’t forget the lessons your mistakes have taught you or you’ll learn them all over again." (Dan Folgelberg)
"To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old." (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.)
"Do our experiences become more marvelous with age or is it just that we don't realize when they occur how really beautiful and precious they are?" (Joseph Campbell)
"Old age, to the unlearned, is winter; to the learned, it is harvest time."
"They saw a woman in a wheel chair taking quiet pleasure in her view. It was a mirage. She was really a young girl on tiptoes. Arms outstretched. Ready to run. Everything wonderful waited for Elizabeth Quigley." (Helen Van Slyke)
"The evening of life brings with it its own lamp." (Joseph Joubert)
"True and lasting happiness begins with the sudden all-encompasing realization by each member of the human family, that we are truly all limbs of one body, that we cannot find our true selves until we recognize that everyone is us and we are everyone. In truth there is no separation." (Maya Sarada Devi)
"Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their mind and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities." (Aristotle)
"Happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance…Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person." (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
"Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don’t set any condition." (Arthur Rubenstein)
"Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be." (Lincoln)
"In order to be utterly happy the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past, which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future." (Andre Gide)
"It is neither wealth nor splendor, but tranquility and occupation, which give happiness." (Thomas Jefferson)
"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you sit down quietly, may alight upon you." (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
"We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it." (Bernard Shaw)
"Happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance...Happiness in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person." (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
BirthQuake: The Journey to Wholeness
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