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.
Bishop Desmond Tutu
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen, nor touched ... but are felt in the heart.
Helen Keller
The story of the human race is characterized by efforts to get along much more than by violent disputes, although it's the latter that make the history books. Violence is actually exceptional. The human race has survived because of cooperation, not aggression.
Gerard Vanderhaar
Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannont keep it from themselves.
J. M. Barrie
If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.
Meister Eckhart
Nothing is more honorable than a grateful heart.
Seneca
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Alvin Toffler
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
Zig Ziglar
Always keep your mind as bright and clear as the vast sky, the great ocean, and the highest peak, empty of all thoughts. Always keep your body filled with light and heat. Fill yourself with the power of wisdom and enlightenment.
Morihei Ueshiba
Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long shot.
Charlie Chaplin
Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.
John Steinbeck
The Master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.
Zen Buddhist Text
He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye.
Bhagavad Gita
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.
Meng-tse (Mencius) (b. 371 or 372 B.C.)
Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Carl Jung
All of us can work for peace. We can work right where we are, right within ourselves, because the more peace we have within our own lives, the more we can reflect into the outer situation.
Peace Pilgrim
Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.
Richard Bach
He who wished to secure the good of others, has already secured his own.
Confucius
The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
Thomas Merton
Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment.
Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching
A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.
Hugh Downs
We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
Enlightenment is not an attainment; it is a realization. When you wake up, everything changes and nothing changes. If a blind man realizes that he can see, has the world changed?
Dan Millman
A person should contemplate the workings of the universe with reverence and introspection. In this way expression is given to the effects of these laws upon his own person. This is the source of a hidden power.
I Ching
Joy comes not through possession or ownership but through a wise and loving heart.
Jack Kornfield
Resentment or grudges do no harm to the person against whom you hold these feelings but every day and every night of your life, they are eating at you.
Norman Vincent Peale
Pure love and suspicion cannot dwell together: at the door where the latter enters, the former makes its exit.
Alexandre Dumas
The tendency of man's nature to good is like the tendency of water to flow downwards. There are none but have this tendency to good, just as all water flows downwards.
Now by striking water and causing it to leap up, you may make it go over your forehead, and, by damming and leading it, you may force it up a hill; but are such movements according to the nature of water? Is it the force applied which causes them? When men are made to do what is not good, their nature is dealt with in this way. Meng-tse (Mencius)
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
Walt Whitman
I discovered I always have choices and sometimes it's only a choice of attitude.
Judith M. Knowlton
The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.
Jim Rohn
Many search for happiness as we look for a hat we wear on our heads.
Nikolaus Lenus
The strength of man consists in finding out the way in which God is going, and going that way too.
Henry Ward Beecher
If you give your life as a wholehearted response to love, then love will wholeheartedly respond to you.
Marianne Williamson
The best way of seeing divine light is to put out your own little candle.
English proverb
People wish to be settled. It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be awake is to be alive... We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.
Henry David Thoreau
The greatest miracle is the discovery that all is miraculous. And the nature of the miraculous is--utter simplicity.
Henry Miller
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
The more liberated one feels the less one needs.
Henry Miller
When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird.When I fall
Wendell Berry
let me fall without regret
like a leaf.
Peace is not the absence of war; it is a virtue; a state of mind; a disposition for benevolence; confidence; and justice.
Baruch Spinoza
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Mark Twain
The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
Rabindranath Tagore
To understand truth one must have a very sharp, precise, clear mind; not a cunning mind, but a mind that is capable of looking without any distortion, a mind innocent and vulnerable.
Krishnamurti
You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land, there is no other life but this.
Henry David Thoreau
Lord make us mindful of the little things that grow and blossom in these days to make the world beautiful for us.
W. E. B. Du Bois
Time is what prevents everything from happening at once.
John Archibald Wheeler
Suffering usually relates to wanting things to be different from the way they are.
Allan Lokos
With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The high,
Hildegard of Bingen
the low,
all of creation,
God gives to humankind to use. If this privilege is misused,
God's justice permits creation to punish humanity
For the world is not to be narrowed till it will go into the understanding (which has been done hitherto), but the understanding is to be expanded and opened until it can take in the image of the world.
Francis Bacon
Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water.
Dogen
The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.
Although its light is wide and great,
The moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide.
The whole moon and the entire sky
Are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass.
I have never met a person whose greatest need was anything other than real, unconditional love. You can find it in a simple act of kindness toward somone who needs help. There is no mistaking love. You feel it in your heart. It is the common fiber of life, the flame that heals our soul, energizes our spirit and supplies passion to our lives. It is our connection to God and to each other.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
Robert Frost
Enjoy present pleasures in such a way as not to injure future ones.
Seneca
Love is the true means by which the world is enjoyed.
Thomas Traherne
The sun shines not on us, but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing.
John Muir
Stillness, insight, and wisdom arise only when we can settle into being complete in this moment, without having to seek or hold on to or reject anything.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast--you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.
Eddie Cantor
We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we stop trying to conform to our own or to other peoples' models, learn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.
Shakti Gawain
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.
Martha Graham
You leave old habits behind by starting out with the thought, 'I release the need for this in my life'.
Wayne Dyer
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
You cannot have peace in your outer life unless and until you have first established peace in your inner life. It is in the inner world that everything starts.
Sri Chinmoy
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
I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
Helen Keller
Bless a thing and it will bless you. Curse it and it will curse you....If you bless a situation, it has no power to hurt you, and even if it is troublesome for a time, it will gradually fade out, if you sincerely bless it.
Emmet Fox
Lives based on having are less free than lives based on either doing or on being.
William James
Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell
Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here.
Marianne Williamson
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
Nothing great is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let the tree first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.
Epictetus
Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.
Cicero
The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and 'consciousness' cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and 'will' cannot evolve involuntarily.
Gurdjieff
Reflect on your present blessings, of which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
Charles Dickens
If we work in marble, it will perish; if we work upon brass, time will efface it; if we rear temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal minds and instill into them just principles, we are then engraving upon tablets which no time will efface, but will brighten and brighten to all eternity.
Daniel Webster
We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.
Thich Nhat Hanh
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love; the more they give, the more they possess.
Rainer Maria Rilke
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.
Urusla K. Le Guin
The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.
Eric Hoffer
When you realize the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.
Dian Fossey
Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculptor of his own brain.
Santiago Ramon y Cajal
I have discovered that patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.
Joyce Meyer
The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.
Robert Frost
Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come.
Rabindranath Tagore
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads.
Erica Jong
Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now--always.
Albert Schweitzer
The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.
Marcus Aurelius
Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
Margaret Mead
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Bertrand Russell
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
If you judge people you have no time to love them.
Mother Theresa
I destroy my enemy when I make him my friend.
Abraham Lincoln
Wise sayings often fall on barren ground; but a kind word is never thrown away.
Sir Arthur Helps
Life is not what it's supposed to be. Its what it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference.
Virginia Satir
Take someone who doesn't keep score, who's not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing, who has not the slightest interest even in his own personality: he's free.
Rumi
To be tolerant in any situation is to make room for goodness to shine--other people's and your own as well. When people are tolerant, there is time for the splendor of trust to shine forth.
Gurumayi Chidvilasananda
An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
Mahatma Gandhi
Make your space as beautiful as you can, because the Great Spirit chooses where it will dwell, and it always chooses beauty over chaos.
Native American saying
For everything you have missed, you have gained something else.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Cowardice asks the question - is it safe?
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Expediency asks the question - is it politic?
Vanity asks the question - is it popular?
But conscience asks the question - is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position
that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular;
but one must take it because it is right.
Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.
Sir Winston Churchill
Whenever there is attachment in my mind
Shantideva
And whenever there is the desire to be angry,
I should not do anything nor say anything,
But remain like a piece of wood.
I think I've discovered the secret of life - you just hang around until you get used to it.
Charles Schulz
Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, 1964
Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
Khalil Gibran
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Thomas Paine
Let a man (or woman) strive to purify his thoughts. What a man thinketh, that is he; this is the eternal mystery. Dwelling within himself with thoughts serene, he will obtain imperishable happiness.
Upanishads
The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
George Bernard Shaw
Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.
Niels Bohr
Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.
Leo Buscaglia
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.
For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love - this is an old rule.
The Dhammapada
You cannot direct which way the winds of adversity will blow, but you can adust your sails.
Shantidasa
Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for human survival.
Dalai Lama
Frequently people think compassion and love are merely sentimental. No! They are very demanding. If you are going to be compassionate, be prepared for action.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu
What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?
Mary Ann Evans [George Eliot]
In meditation go deep in the heart. In dealing with others be gentle and kind.
Lao Tsu
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought.
Basho
Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.
Arthur Somers Roche
The greatest gift we can give one another is rapt attention to one another's existence.
Sue Atchley Ebaugh
Resolve to be thyself; and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.
Matthew Arnold
A great many people think they are thinking--when they are really rearranging their prejudices and superstitions.
Edward R. Morrow
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.
Aldous Huxley
Your duty is to be; and not to be this or that.
Sri Ramana Maharishi
A good deal of what passes for religion is often designed to prop up and endorse the ego that the founders of the faith told us to abandon.
Karen Armstrong in Buddha
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival.
W. Edwards Deming
Your everyday mind--that is the Way!
Wu-men
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
Albert Einstein
We all make mistakes, have struggles, and even regret things in our past. But you are not your mistakes, you are not your struggles, and you are here NOW with the power to shape your day and your future.
Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
A great source of calamity lies in regret and anticipation; therefore a person is wise who thinks of the present alone, regardless of the past or future.
Oliver Goldsmith
It makes no sense to worry about things you have no control over because there's nothing you can do about them, and why worry about things you do control? The activity of worrying keeps you immobilized.
Wayne Dyer
The pursuit of truth shall set you free - even if you never catch up with it.
Clarence Darrow
Doing the right thing is our best gift
The Ashem Vohu Prayer - Zoroastrian
That is what brings us bliss and happiness.
Happy and blissful is the person who does what is right,
Because it is the right thing to do.
I will be truthful.
Mahatma Gandhi
I will suffer no injustice.
I will be free from fear.
I will not use force.
I will be of good will to all men.
Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow; it only saps today of its strength.
A. J. Cronin
A problem is your chance to do your best.
Duke Ellington
If others tell us something we make assumptions, and if they don't tell us something we make assumptions to fulfill our need to know and to replace the need to communicate. Even if we hear something and we don't understand we make assumptions about what it means and then believe the assumptions. We make all sorts of assumptions because we don't have the courage to ask questions.
Miguel Ruiz
Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
Leo Buscaglia
Pain comes from experiencing life just as it is, with no trimmings. We can even call this direct experiencing joy. But when we try to run away and escape from our experience of pain, we suffer. Freedom is the willingness to risk being vulnerable to life.
Charlotte Joko Beck
Ritual is routine infused with mindfulness. It is habit made holy.
Kent Nerburn
For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
Nelson Mandela
Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
Oscar Wilde
I am determined to be cheerful and happy in whatever situation I may find myself. For I have learned that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness is determined not by our circumstance but by our disposition.
Martha Washington
Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.
Dalai Lama
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.
John Lubbock
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Way of the sage is to act but not to compete.
Lao Tzu
If you're riding ahead of the herd, take a look back every now and then to make sure it's still there.
Will Rogers
Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.
Bertrand Russell
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David Thoreau
Do not think of your faults; still less of others' faults; look for what is good and strong; and try to imitate it. Your faults will drop off, like dead leaves, when their time comes.
John Ruskin
Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.
Mohandas Gandhi
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned.
Probably mistakenly attributed to The Buddha.
Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
Mark Twain (sometimes attributed to Seneca)
It is wise to direct your anger towards problems -- not people; to focus your energies on answers -- not excuses.
William Arthur Ward
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mahatma Gandhi
Leadership is getting someone to do what they don't want to do, to achieve what they want to achieve.
Tom Landry
After all the cheers have died down and the stadium is empty, after the headlines have been written, and after you are back in the quiet of your room and the championship ring has been placed on the dresser and after all the pomp and fanfare have faded, the enduring thing that is left is the dedication to doing with our lives the very best we can to make the world a better place in which to live.
Vince Lombardi
No one can predict the future now. No one can make long range plans. The best we can hope for, to quote Robert Bridges, is 'the masterful administration of the unforeseen.' Ride the whirlwind. That's the most we can do.
Arthur C. Clarke
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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
Samadhi means concentration. In order to be concentrated, we should be mindful, fully present and aware of what is going on. Mindfulness brings about concentration. When you are deeply concentrated, you are absorbed in the moment. You become the moment.
Thich Nhat Hanh
For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst and provide for it.
Patrick Henry
It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.
Abraham Lincoln
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