Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.
Hafiz
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Jalal ad-Din Rumi
If you think you're enlightened go spend a week with your family.
Ram Dass
To give real service you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money, and that is sincerity and integrity.
Douglas Adams
The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
Quentin Crisp
I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Agatha Christie
The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping.
Izaak Walton
I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
Abraham Maslow
All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
Blaise Pascal
In deep self-acceptance grows a compassionate understanding. As one Zen master said when I asked if he ever gets angry, 'Of course I get angry, but then a few minutes later I say to myself, 'What's the use of this,' and I let it go.'
Jack Kornfield
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell
Hanging onto resentment is letting someone you despise live rent-free in your head.
Ann Landers
Inner peace can be reached only when we practice forgiveness. Forgiveness is letting go of the past, and is therefore the means for correcting our misperceptions.
Gerald Jampolsky
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
Havelock Ellis
How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then to rest afterward.
Spanish Proverb
The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the Universe to do.
Galileo Galilei
In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
Albert Schweitzer
There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.
Meister Eckhart
Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.
Maria Robinson
Wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair and all the terrible things that happen to us, come because we actually deserve them?
Marcus Cole
Don't fight forces, use them.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Common sense dictates that we evaluate our beliefs on the basis of how they affect us. If they make us more loving, creative, and wise, they are good beliefs. If they make us cruel, jealous, depressed and sick, they cannot be good beliefs.
Barbara Marx Hubbard
We all have the extraordinary coded within us, waiting to be released.
Jean Houston
To be natural means not to force things. When you act natural, you get what you need, but to know what is natural, you have to cultivate tranquility.
Hsieh
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
Norman MacFinan
I cannot tell if what the world considers 'happiness' is happiness or not. All I know is that when I consider the way they go about attaining it, I see them carried away headlong, grim and obsessed, in the general onrush of the human herd, unable to stop themselves or to change their direction. All the while they claim to be just on the point of attaining happiness.
Chuang-tzu
My advice is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it is on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
Delusion arises from anger. The mind is bewildered by delusion. Reasoning is destroyed when the mind is bewildered. One falls down when reasoning is destroyed.
Bhagavad Gita
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you're the easiest person to fool.
Richard Feynman
Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.
Henry James
Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
William James
I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.
Emo Philips
To hear, one must be silent.
Ursula K. LeGuin
As we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence actually liberates others.
Marianne Williamson
If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
George Bernard Shaw
Aspire to be like Mt. Fuji, with such a broad and solid foundation that the strongest earthquake cannot move you, and so tall that the greatest enterprises of common men seem insignificant from your lofty perspective. With your mind as high as Mt Fuji you can see all things clearly. And you can see all the forces that shape events; not just the things happening near to you.
Miyamoto Musashi
When despair for the world grows in me, 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 or 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.
Wendell Berry
The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Do not despise your own place and hour. Every place is under the stars. Every place is the center of the world.
John Burroughs
Great minds have always seen it. That is why man has survived his journey this long. When we fail to wish any longer to be otherwise than what we are, we will have ceased to evolve. Evolution has to be lived forward. I say this as one who has stood above the bones of much that has vanished, and at midnight has examined his own face.
Loren Eiseley
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.
Desmond Tutu
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
Carl Jung
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Maya Angelou
Our life is what our thoughts make it. A man will find that as he alters his thoughts toward things and other people, things and other people will alter towards him.
James Allen
There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
Aldous Huxley
As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.
Helen Keller
Most of us go through each day looking for what we saw yesterday. And, not surprisingly, that is what we find.
James A. Kitchens
I think these difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way that so many things that one goes around worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.
Isak Dinesen
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
To think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral down into ever increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline–training–is about.
James Clavell
Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.
Groucho Marx
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
Viktor E. Frankl
We do not need to be shoemakers to know if our shoes fit, and just as little have we any need to be professionals to acquire knowledge of matters of universal interest.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
To be old can be glorious if one has not unlearned how to begin.
Martin Buber
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Let go. Why do you cling to pain? There is nothing you can do about the wrongs of yesterday. It is not yours to judge. Why hold on to the very thing which keeps you from hope and love?
Leo Buscaglia
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
Henry Miller
Have patience with all things, but first of all with yourself.
Saint Francis de Sales
The secret of forming a successful relationship is for both parties to win.
John Gray
When I'm trusting and being myself as fully as possible, everything in my life reflects this by falling into place easily, often miraculously.
Shakti Gawain
Success in life has been achieved when all that one wants is finely balanced by all that one needs.
Sufi saying
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
Anais Nin
Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.
Samuel Johnson
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Jung
In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
Bertrand Russell
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.
Dr. Seuss
Those who have not encountered the differences among people in ways that interrupt their certainties do not make good thinkers; they also make poor citizens of democracies.
Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
William James
Meditation is 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
Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.
Carl G. Jung
To be "viable," livable, or merely practical, life must be lived as a game—and the "must" here expresses a condition, not a commandment. It must be lived in the spirit of play rather than work.
Alan Watts
People only see what they are prepared to see.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.
Thomas Huxley
Life is a song - sing it. Life is a game - play it. Life is a challenge - meet it. Life is a dream - realize it. Life is a sacrifice - offer it. Life is love - enjoy it.
Sai Baba
If you aren't playing well, the game isn't as much fun. When that happens I tell myself just to go out and play as I did when I was a kid.
Thomas J. Watson
When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find, peace of mind is waiting there.
George Harrison
Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.
James Barrie
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
Abraham Lincoln
The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart. To the degree that you didn't understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you're given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to open further.
Pema Chodron
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over the self.
Aristotle
The day, water, sun, moon, night--I do not have to purchase these things with money.
Plautus
If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is a law, and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.
Dan Millman from The Way of the Peaceful Warrior
The most complete revenge is not to imitate the aggressor.
Marcus Aurelius
Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.
Oscar Wilde
It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.
George Harrison
The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy.
H.H. the Dalai Lama
Buddha was once threatened with death by a bandit called Angulimal. “Then be good enough to fulfill my dying wish,” said Buddha. “Cut off the branch of that tree.” One slash of the sword, and it was done! “What now?” asked the bandit. “Put it back again,” said Buddha. The bandit laughed. “You must be crazy to think that anyone can do that.” “On the contrary, it is you who are crazy to think that you are mighty because you can wound and destroy. That is the task of children. The mighty know how to create and heal.”
Anthony DeMello in The Heart of the Enlightened
I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, also occupied in the search, that certain environments, certain modes of life, certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.
Ann Morrow Lindbergh
Happiness, then, is the confidence that pain and disappointment can be tolerated, that love will prove stronger than aggression. It is release from the attachment to pleasant feelings, and faith in the capacity of awareness to guide us through the inevitable insults to our own narcissism.
Mark Epstein
You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.
Isak Dinesen
Serving the world with love and cooperation, you will find your own true Self. As you help those in need, selfishness will fall away, and without even noticing you will find your own fulfillment.
Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi Devi)
Don't fall into the trap that there is only one special person that you are able to love. Instead, try to develop the expectation that the world is full of people that you can love and that can love you.
Ken Keyes, Jr.
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
George Santayana
We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
In each of us there is a king. Speak to him and he will come forth.
Danish Proverb
Empty-handed I entered the world
Kozan Ichikyo
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going --
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.
Heaven is my father and earth is my mother and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in its midst. That which extends throughout the universe, I regard as my body and that which directs the universe, I regard as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters and all things are my companions.
Chang Tsai
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
John Muir
Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity.
Plato
More important than learning how to recall things is finding ways to forget things that are cluttering the mind.
Eric Butterworth
One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and wisdespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.
Frank Herbert
Let him that would move the world first move himself.
Robert Frost
Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.
Lord Byron
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
Charles Darwin
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
John Keats
Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
Oscar Wilde
Selfishness comes from poverty in the heart, from the belief that love is not abundant.
Don Miguel Ruiz
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
Jorge Luis Borges
…human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but…life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
John Dewey
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle
It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.
Epicurus
One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.
Eleanor Roosevelt
©2021 Tom Barrett