All things are already complete in us. There is no greater delight than to be conscious of right within us. If one strives to treat others as he would be treated by them, he shall not fail to come near the perfect life.
Mencius (aka Mengzi)
I've learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
Igor Stravinski
As one acts and conducts himself so does he become. The doer of good becomes good. The doer of evil becomes evil. One becomes virtuous by virtuous action, bad by bad action.
Upanishads
In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience.
W.B. Prescott
Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried.
Shakespeare
This world is but a canvas to our imaginations.
Henry David Thoreau
You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.
Pearl S. Buck
All numbers are multiples of one, all sciences converge to a common point, all wisdom comes out of one center, and the number of wisdom is one.
Paracelsus
Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth–that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams
Once we open up to the flow of energy within our body, we also open up to the flow of the energy in the universe.
Wilhelm Reich
As the fletcher whittles and makes straight his arrows, so the master directs his straying thoughts.
The Buddha
Would that life were like the shadow cast by a wall or a tree, but it is like the shadow of a bird in flight.
The Talmud
The contemplation of truth and beauty is the proper object for which we were created, which calls forth the most intense desires of the soul, and of which it never tires.
William Hazlitt
Never mind whom you praise, but be very careful whom you blame.
Edmund Grosse
How poor are they that have no patience!
William Shakespeare
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
If everybody's opinion of us matters so much, it should be a short leap to "I care about everybody." Turn fear to love and you are there.
Tom Barrett
There is one art of which man should be master, the art of reflection.
Samuel Coleridge
Good work and joyous play go hand in hand. When play stops, old age begins. Play keeps you from taking life too seriously.
George Byron
Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear.
Upanishads
In the healthiest organizations the taboo is not on making mistakes, it's on concealing them.
John Cleese
When despair for the world grows in me
Wendell Berry
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.
Corrie Ten Boom
Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love.
Mahatma Gandhi
Be wiser than other people if you can; but do not tell them so.
Lord Chesterfield
If you pursue evil with pleasure, the pleasure passes away and the evil remains; if you pursue good with labor, the labor passes away but the good remains.
Cicero
You know what meditation is when your Self is purified of all hocus-pocus about mind, soul, spirit, and other intellectual jargon.
Alan Watts
The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.
Elbert Hubbard
The more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end, you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.
J. Krishnamurti
The things that will destroy us are: politics without principle; pleasure without conscience; wealth without work; knowledge without character; business without morality; science without humanity; and worship without sacrifice.
Mahatma Gandhi
We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.
John Dryden
Cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity.
Joseph Addison
Virtues are virtues because they give joy once they are practiced. If a virtue does not give joy, it is not a virtue.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.
Aart Van Der Leeuw
Life is short and no one knows what the next moment will bring. Open your mind while you have the opportunity, thereby gaining the treasures of wisdom, which in turn you can share abundantly with others, bringing them happiness.
Dogen
Old cranks have practiced all their lives, just as old saints have likewise practiced all their lives. They just practiced different life principles.
John Powell
In and through community lies the salvation of the world.
M. Scott Peck
A lifetime without Love is of no account
Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi
Love is the Water of Life
Drink it down with heart and soul!
At the still point of the
T.S. Eloit, Burnt Norton
turning world…
Neither from nor towards;
at the still point,
there the dance is…
I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.
Aldous Huxley
When you feel yourself in the grip of an emotion such as jealousy or anger or sorrow, detach yourself from it. Take a step back. When you do that, you can allow the emotion to run through you without causing negative thoughts or actions.
Gary Zukav
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.
Basho
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
Dale Carnegie
One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.
Blaise Pascal
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
Galileo Galilei
The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.
Baruch Spinoza
Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident, riches take wing, and only character endures.
Horace Greeley
The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he's born.
William R. Inge
Character is simply habit long continued.
Plutarch
The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.
Baron Thomas Babington Macauley
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Thomas Paine
No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave.
Calvin Coolidge
If someone is too tired to give you a smile, leave one of your own, because no one needs a smile as much as those who have none to give.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch
Things are beautiful if you love them.
Jean Anouilh, Mademoiselle Colombe
Science may have found a cure for most evils, but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all–the apathy of human beings.
Helen Keller
The Zen master Ling Chi said that the miracle is not to walk on burning charcoal or in the thin air or on the water; the miracle is just to walk on earth. You breathe in. You become aware of the fact that you are alive. You are still alive and you are walking on this beautiful planet. The greatest of all miracles is to be alive.
Thich Nhat Hanh
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
William Morrow
You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving.
St. Francis De Sales
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you will help them become what they are capable of becoming.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
It is an illusion to think that more comfort means more happiness. Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.
Storm Jameson
What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.
Lewis Mumford
If you affirm the positive, the negatives will drop off by themselves.
Ramana Maharishi
Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.
Betty Smith
To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.
Stephen Covey
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better to take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
Carl Gustav Jung
Our real blessings often appear to us in the shapes of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience, and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.
Joseph Addison
Our separation from each other is an illusion of consciousness.
Albert Einstein
Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear but around in awareness.
James Thurber
Soft sweet speech is the expression of genuine Love. Hate screeches, fear squeals, conceit trumpets, but love sings lullabies; it soothes, it applies balm. Practice the vocabulary of love.
Sathya Sai Baba
We see ourselves as broken, and then set out on a long and frustrating journey to fill our emptiness. But it is not fixing that we require; it is awakening.
Alan Cohen
Spread love everywhere you go; first of all in your own house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor…Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier.
Mother Teresa
In-between stimulus and response is a space. In that space lies our power and freedom to choose. How we wield those choices determines our happiness.
Steven R. Covey
You don't create your mission in life. You detect it.
Victor Frankl
Our true nationality is mankind.
H. G. Wells
While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness is not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.
H. G. Wells
You may follow one stream. Know that it leads to the Ocean, but do not mistake the stream for the Ocean.
Jan-Fishan
The witness is always in the here and now and it lives in each instant of living. To be in the witness is to listen with a still heart, with a waiting, open soul, without clinging, without opinions.
Ram Dass
Habit is the best of servants, or the worst of masters.
Nathaniel Emmons
Put from your belief that "I have have been wronged," and with it will go the feeling. Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears.
Marcus Aurelius
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
Charles Mayes
To teach another is the best way to learn for yourself.
Tryon Edwards
For as long as every man holdeth this right, of doing anything he liketh, so long are all men in the condition of war.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.
Leo Buscaglia
It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander Time; for that's the stuff Life is made of.
Benjamin Franklin
©2024 Tom Barrett