"I found out, almost after it was too late, that my children were not born to learn from my experiences; they were born to learn from their own…" (Richard Bode)
"It is a wise father that knows his own child." (Shakespeare)
"Nobody knows a mother like her daughter." (Nancy Friday)
"The mother’s lap is the child’s first classroom" (old proverb)
"You want to protect your child from pain, and what you get instead is life, and grace; and though theologians insist that grace is freely given, the truth is that sometimes you pay for it through the nose. And you can't pay your child's way." (Anne Lamott)
"There is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The Materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement." (Adrienne Rich)
"Dear son, So often parents think of their children as failing investments whose cost in time and money outweighs the return. Whenever I find myself thinking of you in that way, I picture God looking at me." (Hugh Prather)
"…our parents always fail us massively and decisively. Why is this so? Because they are limited human beings; and for the same reason we, too, will fail our children." (Larry Jaffee)
" …a mother must not feel obligated to give up herself. Not unless she wants to raise a motherless child." (Lisa Cronin Wohl)
"There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots; the other, wings." (Hodding Carter)
"Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them." (James Baldwin)
"I do not possess what I remember so much as it possesses me." (Richard Bode)
"The trouble with you is you think you have time." (Don Juan to Carlos Costaneda)
"One can never change the past, only the hold it has on you." (Merle Shain)
"Among the dead there are those that still have to be killed." (Fernad Desnoyers)
"What’s past is prologue." (Shakespeare)
"The past should be a springboard, not a hammock." (unknown)
"Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false naming of real events." (Adrienne Rich)
"Life is thickly sewn with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is there power to harm us." (author unknown)
"Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards." (Soren Kierkegaard)
"One must never lose time in vainly regretting the past or in complaining against the changes which cause us discomfort, for change is the essence of life." (Antole France)
"It's but little good you'll do watering last years crops." (Frederick Loomis)
"Did you know that both the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, and the Jewish Talmud teach that we will be called to account for every permissible pleasure life offered us but which we refused to enjoy while on earth?" (Sara Ban Breathnach)
"That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest." (Thoreau)
"Most men that do thrive in the world do forget to take pleasure during the time that they are getting their estate, but reserve it till they have got one, and then it is too late for them to enjoy it." (Samuel Pepys)
"There are few pleasures in the world so reasonable and so cheap as the pleasure of giving pleasure." (anonymous
"All animals, except man, know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it." (Samuel Butler)
"There is only one question: how to love this world." (Mary Oliver)
"I don’t know anyone who wished on his death bed that he had spent more time at the office." (Peter Lynch)
"He preyed not to have more but to be more." (author unknown)
"We do not acquire goods in order to live, instead we live in order to acquire goods." (Peter Singer)
"There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way." (Christopher Morley)
"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it..." (Thoreau)
"Presence entails fully knowing that babies, women, and the old are starving and being maimed by militarism justified by high ideals; that forests and seas are dying that there are fewer butterflies in our gardens, and more homeless on our streets." (Don Hanlon Johnson)
"One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much." (Anne Morrow Lindbergh)
"Our life is frittered away by details...Simplify, simplify." (Thoreau)
"The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but what one pays for it - what it costs us." (Nietzsche)
"There is no wealth but life." (John Ruskin)
"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about." (Charles Kingsley)
"Greatness is not found in possessions, power, position or prestige. It is discovered in goodness, humility, service and character." (William Ward)
"If I were to name the three most precious resources of life, I should say books, friends, and nature; and the greatest of these, at least the most constant and always at hand, is nature." (John Burroughs)
"The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it." (William James)
"Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich." (Sarah Bernhardt)
"It was probably a presumptuous error to confuse the progress of science with the progress of humanity." (Andre George)
"So it is not what comes but what is coming that makes for troubled sleep. The white man, ever moving forward, never looking back, is now the inheritor of his progress." (Gerald Hausman)
"Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one’s horse as he is leaping." (Julius and Augustus Hare, Guesses at Truth)
"Without risk, you don’t experience life." (author unknown)
"There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity." (Douglas Macarthur)
"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love of truth; and the truth rewarded me." (Simone De Beauvoir)
"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." (Andre Gide)
"Fortune sides with those who dare." (Virgil)
"We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth." (Mary Antin, the Promised Land, 1969)
"While spirituality can be discovered in solitude – by retreating to a cell of some kind, by reading, by thinking, meditating, praying – it can be fulfilled only in community." (Earnest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham)
"True spirituality, however, is about power. It is about developing the powers of creativity, justice, and compassion in all persons. It is about unleashing the divine powers in us all. It is about grounding persons and communities in the powers that will enable them to survive and even flourish in the midst of adversity." (Mathew Fox,)
"Physical strength can never permanently withstand spiritual force." (Franklin Roosevelt)
"The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the soul of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us." (Black Elk)
"The soul loves and creates." (Sue Monk Kid)
"The body must be nourished, physically, emotionally and spiritually. We’re spiritually starved in this culture – not underfed but undernourished." (Carol Horning)
"God has no religion." (Gandhi)
"Soul is what connects you to everyone and everything else. It is the sum of all the choices you make. It is where your beliefs and values reside. Soul is at the center of our relationships to others, and for me it is at the center of the business enterprise." (Tom Chappel)
"With knowledge and no faith, we may well see a world destroyed. With faith and no knowledge, we may still see a world destroyed. With faith and knowledge bound together, we can hope to cherish and protect the lives of the men and the life of the world." (Margaret Mead)
"Every soul is a melody which needs renewing." (unknown)l
"Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune." (William James)
"I found God in myself and I loved her fiercely." (Ntosake Shange)
"I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind can comprehend it." (Harry Emerson Fosdick)
"What characterizes our modern humanity, therefore, is not the absence of spiritual values…but rather the fact that these values no longer have any decisive influence upon the destiny of culture." (Paul Tournier)
"Man cannot dispense with the spirit. The attempt is made to deprive him of it; so he invents surrogates for it." (Paul Tournier)
"Consult the spirit within you first." (Oprah Winfrey)
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." (Einstein)
"We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." (Thoreau)
"You are a soul with a body, rather than a body with a soul." (Wayne W. Dyer)
"The best way to know God is to love many things." (Van Gough)
"You may have a success in life, but then just think of it - what kind of life was it? What good was it- you've never done the thing you most wanted to do in all your life...go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don't let anyone throw you off." (Joseph Cambell)
"It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness." (Seneca)
"I have studied in many schools, but the school in which I studied the longest and learned the most was the school of adversity." (Malcolm X)
"Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire." (Reggie Leach)
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
"The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge of life, and then the promise of future accomplishments." (Gustave Flaubert)
"There is only one success – to be able to live your life in your own way." (Christopher Morley)
"It’s not whether you get knocked down. It’s whether you get up again." (Vince Lombardi)
"There are defeats more triumphant than victories" (Michel de Montaigne)
"Those who succeed are the ones who look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them." (George Bernard Shaw)
"I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed." (Booker T. Washington)
"The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can’t be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it." (Harry Fosdick)
"Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." (Thomas Edison)
"Success can only be measured in distance traveled." (Mavis Gallant)
"The price of greatness is responsibility." (Winston Churchill)
"Wise men make more opportunities than they find." (Francis Bacon)
"“I have never changed out of joy. Joyful experiences have not forced me to change. What forces me to change is something stressful, something very painful most of the time. That is what forces me to go inside myself and see what I’ve got to deal with. What are my resources?…” Isabel Allende in The Gift of Pain: Transforming Hurt into Healing by Barbara Altemus
"The greatest grief's are those we cause ourselves." (author unknown)
"The world breaks everyone and after many are strong at the broken places." (Hemingway)
"Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it." (Helen Keller)
"All the best transformations are accompanied by pain. That’s the point of them." (Fay Weldon)
"A wounded deer leaps highest" (Emily Dickinson)
"Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something that wants help from us." (Rainer Maria Rilke)
"Let your tears come. Let them water your soul." (Eileen Mayhew)
"Where there is sorrow there is holy ground." (Oscar Wilde)
"Sorrow makes us very good or very bad." (George Sand)
"That which oppresses me, is it my soul trying to come out in the open, or the soul of the world knocking at my heart for entrance." (Ravindranath Tagore)
"There is no birth of consciousness without pain." (Carl Jung)
"It is significant that the experience of despair is a yoga. Despair is often the first step on the path to spiritual life, and many people do not awaken to the reality of God and the experience of transformation in their lives until they go through the experience of emptiness, disillusion, and despair." (Bede Griffith)
"Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on." (Samuel Beckett)
"God comes through the wound." (Marion Woodman)
"…my deprivation had been my greatest blessing. What counts is not what you have lost but what you have left." (Harold Russell)
"It’s hard to tell our bad luck from our good luck sometimes. Hard to tell sometimes for many years to come." (Merle Shain)
"All suffering prepares the soul for vision." (Martin Buber)
"The heart that breaks open can contain the whole universe." (Joanna Macy)
"Those times of depression tell you that it’s either time to get out of the story your in and move into a new story, or that you’re in the right story but there’s some piece of it you are not living out." (Carol S. Pearson)
"We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full." (Marcel Proust)
"I bend but I do not break" (Jean de La Fontaine)
"The greater the obstacle , the more glory in overcoming it." (Moliere)
"Rebellion against your handicaps gets you nowhere. Self-pity gets you nowhere. One must have the adventurous daring to accept oneself as a bundle of possibilities and undertake the most interesting game in the world - making the most of one's best." (Harry Emerson Fosdick)
"Holiness has most often been revealed to me in the exquisite pun of the first syllable, in holes - in not enough help, in brokenness, mess. High holy places, with ethereal sound and stained glass, can massage my illusion of holiness, but in holes and lostness I can pick up the light of small ordinary progress, newly made moments flecked like pepper into the slog and the disruptions." (Anne Lamott)
"The tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst." (author unknown)
"Either war is obsolete or men are." (Buckminister Fuller)
"Little girl….sometimes they’ll give a war and nobody will come." (Carl Sandburg)
"No soldier starts a war – they only give their lives to it. Wars are started by you and me, by bankers and politicians, excitable women, newspaper editors, clergymen who are expacifists, and congressmen with vertebrae of putty. The youngsters yelling in the streets, poor kids, are the ones who pay the price. (Frances P. Duffy)
"The next World War will be fought with stones." (Albert Einstein)
"The world would be a much better place if it was as hard to start a war as to stop one." (author unknown)
"There never was a good war and a bad peace." (Benjamin Franklin)
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding." (Albert Einstein)
"Paying attention to simple little things that most men ignore makes a few men rich." (Henry Ford)
"The real measure of our wealth is our worth if we lost our money." (author unknown)
"It is only by spending ourselves that we become rich." (Sarah Bernhardt)
"The dignity of man depends on creating and not on possessing." (Theo Spoerri)
"The best things in life are free but it costs you a lot of time and money before you find this out." (author unknown)
" There is nothing in the nature of money to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one." (Benjamin Franklin)
"Enough money always means more then you have now." (Author unknown)
"The world is full of men making good livings but poor lives." (Author Unknown)
"I want you to know that possessions have made more people unhappy than happy, because they define the limits of your life and keep you from the freedom of choice that comes with traveling light upon the earth." (Ken Nerburn)
"…I have become all the more convinced that the most valuable fortune anyone can amass during a life time is not material wealth but the things he learns." (Eric Sloane)
"Everyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor." (James Baldwin)
"He profits most who serves best." (A.F. Sheldon)
"Poverty of purpose is worse than poverty of purse." (Author Unknown)
"There is an Indian proverb or axiom that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time, but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person." (Rumer Godden)
"According to ancient Chinese and Indian wisdom, small minds perceive the separateness of things but great minds perceive the unity of all." (N.S. Xavier)
"A person cannot do right in one department whilst attempting to do wrong in another department. Life is one indivisible whole." (Mahatma Gandhi)
"Creativity is the urge to wholeness, the urge to individuation or to the becoming of what one truly is. And in that becoming we bring the cosmos into form." (Jean Houston)
"Many receive advice, only the wise profit by it." (Syrus)
"Ben was an intellectual, and intellectuals, say what you like, seemed to last longer than anyone else." (Muriel Spark)
"Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time." (Theodore Roosevelt)
"The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there." (Robert Pirsig)
"There is in us something wiser then our head." (Schopenhauer)
"To question a wise man is the beginning of wisdom. (old proverb)
"Who is wise? He who learns from all men, as it is said, From all my teachers have I gotten understanding." (Ben Zoma)
"The difference between a great teacher and a mediocre one is that the latter speaks from without while the former speaks from within." (author unknown)
"Wisdom is a healthy balance of reason and intuition." (N.S. Xavier)
"The wizard is inside you, and he wants only to be born." (Deepak Chorpra)
"We arrive at truth, not by reason only, but also by the heart." (Pascal)
"Wisdom is oft times nearer when we stoop than when we soar." (William Wordsworth)
"Women’s lives are made up of cycles of descent and ascent." (Sue Monk Kid)
"It is observed that women are closer to the earth." (Susan Griffin)
"The queens in history compare favorably with the kings." (Susan B. Anthony)
"The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, it is deep." (Audre Lorde)
"One is not born a woman, one becomes one." (Simone de Beauvoir)
"But why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t you take the job? Why didn’t you marry the other man? She would always insist it didn’t matter, she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, ‘If I’d left you never would have been born.’ I always thought but never had the courage to say: ‘But you might have been born instead." (Gloria Steinhem)
"In the womb we all begin as female." (author unknown)
"Women have a tendency to assess their sense of self worth in relation to the condition of their intimate relationships." (Maggie Scarf)
"A woman is a full circle. Within her is the power to create, nurture, and transform. A woman knows that nothing can come to fruition without light. Let us call upon woman's voice and woman's heart to guide us in the age of planetary transformation." (Diane Mariechild)
"Women can talk to each other in short hand…They possess highly tuned powers of empathy – being able to sense what another feels because they must. They have to know which way to jump; it is only dominant people who can afford to be insensitive." (Gail Sheehy)
"…many women truly cannot tolerate or allow themselves to feel that their life activities are for themselves." (Jean Baker Miller)
"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." (Muriel Rukeyser)
"Responsible work is an embodiment of love...We lose ourselves in our love of the task before us and, in that moment, we learn an identity that lives both within and beyond us." (Theodore Roszak)
"I pray every single second of my life; not on my knees, but with my work." (Susan B Anthony)
"When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece." (John Ruskin)
"Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live." (Margaret Fuller)
"Always you have been told that work is a curse and labor of misfortune. But I say to you that when you work you fulfil a part of earth’s furthest dream…" (Kahill Gibran)
""Seems to me that the highest possible reward for any man's labor is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it." (Brock Bell)
"Work is love made visible." (Kahill Gibran)
"Before the enlightenment, carry the water, till the soil. After enlightenment, carry the water, till the soil." (Zen teaching)
"Almost anything you do will seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it." (Gandhi)
BirthQuake: The Journey to Wholeness
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