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Life and Living

"Life is a dynamic process.  It welcomes anyone who takes up the invitation to be an active part of it.  What we call the secret of happiness is no more a secret than our willingness to choose life." (Leo Buscaglia)

"This is your life, and nobody is going to teach you - no book, no guru.  You have to learn from yourself, not from books.  It is an endless thing, it is a fascinating thing, and when you learn about yourself from yourself, out of that learning wisdom comes.  Then you can live a most extraordinary, happy, beautiful life."   (J. Krishnamutri).   

"The fundamental fact of human awareness is this: I am life that wants to live in the midst of other life that wants to live." (Albert Schweitzer)

"We have the human trait of holding on, past the seasons and cycles of our lives. We can miss the preciousness of the beauty of the moment and hold on, often when it is too late to hold on. We fear endings. We resent change. We ignore the seasons and cycles of our lives. "  (Henry David Thoreau)

"I don't want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it.  I want to have lived the width of it as well." (Diane Ackerman)

"The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life." (Robert Louis Stevenson)

"When we draw inspiration from nature we turn to a timeless source. Whether it comes in the cooing gurgles of an infant, the crash of a wave or the soft beginnings of a sunrise, nature makes both her physical and spiritual presence known. Only when we have allowed ourselves to be dulled by nature is this source of inspiration lost to us. Getting it back, if lost, requires little more than simply paying attention."  (Henry David Thoreau)

"It is said that there is a grave high in the mountains of Switzerland with the simple inscription ‘He died climbing.’ This is a metaphor for life. At least, it is a metaphor for the fulfilling life, which is an ongoing struggle to reach new heights." (Robert and Jeannette Lauer)

"You get what you settle for." (from Thelma and Louise)

"You know, life is short, but it's also very wide."  (Naomi Judd)

"Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t." (Richard Bach)

"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived in order to be understood." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"Live your own life, for you will die your own death." (old proverb)

"You should live so that when you die, God is in your debt." (Bernard Shaw)

"If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches." (Rainer Maria Rilke)

"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval." (George Santayana)

"Life is a great big canvass, and you should throw all the paint on it you can."  (Danny Kaye)

"Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after-lightly because you realize you paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again." (Louise Erdrich)

"There are years that ask questions and years that answer." (Zora Neale Hurston)

"You can always live on less when you have more to live for." (author unknown)

"You only live once - but if you work it right, once is enough." (Joe E Lewis)

"Life moves on whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we could but realize it, than to accept life unquestionably. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such." (Henry Miller)

"Live your life in one day packages." (Criswell Freeman)

"The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it, - what did it cost us." (Nietzsche)

"People who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks." (Randall Jarrell)

"Life is an infant that must be rocked in its cradle before it falls to sleep." (Voltaire)

"We are always getting ready to live, but never living." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." (Soren Kierkegaard)

"If I should begin life again, I should want it just as it was; only I would open my eyes a little more." (Jules Renard)

Longing/ Searching

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after." (Henry David Thoreau)

"You can never have enough of that which we really do not want." (Eric Hoffer)

"Every great achievement is the story of a flaming heart."  (Harry Truman)

"One should never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar." (Helen Keller)

"Adventure is not outside; it is within." (David Grayson)

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." (Marcel Proust)

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and learn to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live with them." (Rainer Maria Rilke)

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"   (Robert Browning)

"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up.  The most certain way to succeed is to always try just one more time."  (Thomas Edison)

Loneliness/Solitude

"Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self. (May Sarton)

"Being alone is a markedly different experience than being lonely." (author unknown)

"People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges." (Joseph F. Newton)

"For loneliness is but cutting adrift from our moorings and floating out to the open sea; an opportunity for finding ourselves, our real selves, what we are about, where we are heading during our little time on this beautiful earth."  (Anne Shannon Monroe)

"It would do the world good if every man would compel himself occasionally to be absolutely alone.  Most of the world's progress has come out of such loneliness."   (Bruce Barton)

"This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences.  We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree."  (Alan Watts)

Love/Marriage

"A divorce is like an amputation; you survive but there's less of you." (Margaret Atwood)

"Sometimes it is worth all the disadvantages of marriage just to have that: one friend in an indifferent world." (Erica Jong)

"There is no remedy for love but to love more." (Thoreau)

"Intimacy is spelled H-O-N-E-S-T-Y." (author unknown)

"Seldom, or perhaps never, does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crises; there is no coming to consciousness without pain."   (Carl Gustav Jung)

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." (A Course in Miracles)

"It is better to get rid of the problem and keep the person than to get rid of the person and keep the problem." (author unknown)

"For one human being to love another, that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation." (Rainer Maria Rilke)

"Beyond the element of giving, the active character of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love.   These are care, responsibility, respect and  knowledge."  (Erich Fromm)

Meaning

"You come into the world with nothing, and the purpose of your life is to make something out of nothing."  (Henry Louis Mencken)

"…it is not so much a matter of passively judging whether life is or is not worth living, but of consciously choosing a way of living that is worth living." (Peter Singer)

"The purpose of life is a life of purpose." (Robert Byrne)

"A man without purpose is like a ship without a rudder."  (Thomas Carlyle)

"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how."  (Fredrich Nietzshe)

"Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself."  (Erich Fromm)

Miracles

"Miracle is simply the wonder of the unique that points us back to the wonder of everyday" (Maurice Friedman)

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." (Albert Einstein)

"A miracle is a shift in perception." (A course in Miracles)

"Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits."  (Thomas Edison)

Nature

"We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."  (Navajo Proverb)

"Cutting down a tree before its time is like killing a soul."  (author unknown)

"Nature never did betray the heart that loved her." (William Wordsworth)

"This feeling of being lonely and very temporary visitors in the universe is in flat contradiction to everything known about man (and all other living organisms) in the sciences. We do not ‘come into’ the world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree." (Alan Watts)

"Like water, be gentle and strong. Be gentle enough to follow the natural paths of the earth, and strong enough to rise up and reshape the world."   (Brenda Peterson)

"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." (John Muir)

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God."  (Anne Frank)

"The more lightly we walk on this earth the more she gives to us." (Rich Heffern)

"My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing." (Aldous Huxley)

"Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another." (Author unknown)

"I think it annoys God if you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice."  (Alice Walker from The Color Purple)

"An echo is nature’s instant reply." (author unknown)

"We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table." (D. H. Lawrence)

"Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God." (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

"The world has enough for every man’s need but not enough for every man’s greed." (Gandhi)

"The real miracle is not to walk on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

"The world will never starve for wonder, but only for want of wonder."  (G.K. Chesterson)

"Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man does not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." (Chief Seattle)

"The first step in the ecological journey is to fall in love with the beauty of this place, so that we will defend it and liberate it when justice threatens and abuses it." (Mathew Fox)

"If we are to restore some kind of balance to the relationship between population and earth resources, we will have to find ways to shift human beings from the present retreat from individual responsibility to a recognition of just how creative and significant each individual can be."  (Margaret Mead)

"I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."  (John Muir)

Opportunity

"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds." (Frances Bacon, Essays)

"God makes opportunities but he expects us to hunt for them." (Author Unknown)

"The greatest opportunities occur during depressed and discouraging periods, but it is very difficult to recognize them at such times."  (Author Unknown)

"Problems are only opportunities in work clothes."  (Henry J. Kaiser)

"Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"There is the greatest practical benefit in making a few failures early in life."  (Thomas Henry Huxley)

"The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes."  (Benjamin Disraeli)

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are...The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them."  (George Bernard Shaw)

"We are continually faced with great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems."  (Author unknown)

"Failure is only the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently."   (Henry Ford)

BirthQuake: The Journey to Wholeness

Index to quotes

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