High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring.
Edward Abbey
When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.
Peace Pilgrim
Through meditation and by giving full attention to one thing at a time, we can learn to direct attention where we choose.
Eknath Easwaran
If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.
Eleonora Duse
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
George Bernard Shaw
We don't stop playing because we grow old; We grow old because we stop playing.
George Bernard Shaw
The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.
Yasutani Roshi
It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.
Alan Cohen
We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.
Alan Watts
When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.
Thomas Carlyle
I look upon all creatures equally; none are less dear to me and none more dear. But those who worship me with love live in me, and I come to life in them.
Bhagavad Gita
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
Mark Twain
We must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.
Indira Gandhi
All the masters tell us that the reality of life---which our noisy waking consciousness prevents us from hearing---speaks to us chiefly in silence.
Karlfried Graf Durckheim
The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
Albert Einstein
I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.
Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
I relax my body completely, relax my mind completely, and then imagine myself at a level where anything can happen.
Richard Bach
Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still.
Chinese Proverb
Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy.
Chogyam Trungpa
Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.
Chuang Tzu
As a rock remains unmoved by a storm, so the wise man remains unmoved by praise or blame.
The Dhammapada
Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn't you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are.
Rachel Naomi Remen
We are all cells in the same body of humanity.
Peace Pilgrim
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
Winston Churchill
It reduces itself to this. You have to be in the right place at the right time, but when it comes, you better have something on the ball.
Groucho Marx
The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.
George Sheehan
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.
Carl Jung
Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent.
Krishnamurti
Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.
Rabbinical Saying
Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
Samuel Butler
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
Martin Luther King Jr.
The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.
Marty Feldman
Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.
Dorothy Day
The realization of Truth is brought about by perception, and not in the least by ten millions of facts.
Sankara
Integrity is the essence of everything successful.
R. Buckminster Fuller
The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.
Zeno The Stoic
Contrary to what the politicians and religious leaders would like us to believe, the world won't be made safer by creating barriers between people.
Michael Palin
Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
Robert Frost
We are what our thoughts have made us: so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.
Swami Vivekananda
As irrigators lead water where they want,
Buddha
as archers make their arrows straight,
as carpenters carve wood,
the wise shape their minds.
Happiness is not a reward--it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment--it is a result.
Robert G. Ingersoll
Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
William James
The world is a spell, an enchantement, an amazement, an arabesque of such stunning rhythm and a plot so intriguing that we are drawn by its web into a state of involvement where we forget that it is a game.
Alan Watts
Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.
Alan Keightly
Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.
Marion Wright Edelman
Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.
Marcus Aurelius
We find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.
Maxwell Maltz
The key to wisdom is this - constant and frequent questioning, for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.
Peter Abelard
Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.
Ambrose Bierce
If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.
Epicurus
Nothing is harder to direct than a man in prosperity; nothing more easily managed than one in adversity.
Plutarch
The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.
Antisthenes
Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.
Shakti Gawain
We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.
Blaise Pascal
Observation, not old age, brings wisdom.
Publilius Syrus
Do good to thy Friend to keep him, to thy enemy to gain him.
Benjamin Franklin
Just as a picture is drawn by an artist, surroundings are created by the activities of the mind.
Buddha
Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things.
Dogen
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
Carl Gustav Jung
It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.
Isaac Asimov
When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
Alexander Graham Bell
Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself.
Walter Anderson
If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.
Calvin Coolidge
Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.
Georg Christoph Litchenberg
As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.
Henry Van Dyke
There is only one reason
Hafiz
We have followed God into this world:
To encourage laughter, freedom, dance
And love.
When you're finally up on the moon, looking back at the earth, all these differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you're going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people?
Frank Borman
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.
Helen Keller
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
Albert Einstein
The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.
Kay Redfield Jamison
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
Carl Sagan
Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they're yours.
Richard Bach
Your duty is to be; and not to be this or that.
Sri Ramana Maharishi
We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.
Marian Wright Edelman
The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.
King Whitney Jr.
It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.
W. Edwards Deming
Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach their objectives despite all obstacles and barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder them, but impossible to stop them.
Jose Marti
[INTERLUDE HOME][THOUGHT ARCHIVE][MEDITATE][MEDITATION ARCHIVE]
[PRAYERS][POETRY][LINKS][BOOKSHOP][COMMENTS]©2018 Tom Barrett