I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
Rabindranath Tagore
Every time and every place is uniquely different. There is no need to compare it with any other time and place. Just carefully taste the present - that is enough!
Zen saying
Everything in this world is transitory and fleeting...No man was ever born who could stop his body from changing constantly. Body is the name of a series of changes.
Paramanananda
Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't.
Richard Bach
Believing someone will change won't make it so. If you're going to invest in a belief, invest in the belief that acceptance heals. The only change you control is your own, and that's found through acceptance, too.
Holiday Mathis
What we have to learn, in both meditation and in life, is to be free of attachment to the good experiences, and free of aversion to the negative ones.
Sogyal Rinpoche
If you want congenial companionship, if you want to be loved, you must first think thoughts of love and good-will.
Emmet Fox
So you want to know what my secret is? You see, I don't mind what happens.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt
Opportunities multiply as they are seized.
Sun Tzu
Always remember that the only thought that you need to concern yourself with is the present one. The thoughts of yesterday or of last year do not matter now, because if you can get the present thought right it will make everything else right here and now.
Emmet Fox
When you give a lesson in meanness to a critter or a person don't be surprised if they learn their lesson.
Will Rogers
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
Live your life each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance toward the summit keeps the goal in mind, but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vantage point. Climb slowly, steadily, enjoying each passing moment; and the view from the summit will serve as a fitting climax for the journey.
Harold B. Melchart
The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.
Zeno of Citium
Whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy-meditate on these things.
Phillippians 4:8
I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.
Kurt Vonnegut
We have an opportunity to live in joy. Do not postpone happiness until the debts are settled and relationships rearranged. Joy doesn't exist out in the world somewhere; we find it inside.
Rev. Mary Manin Morrissey
You have to accept whatever comes and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best you have to give.
Eleanor Roosevelt
A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.
Kurt Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan
Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.
Dag Hammarskjold
Is there a difference between happiness and inner peace?
Eckhart Tolle
Yes. Happiness depends on conditions being perceived as positive; inner peace does not.
A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
Albert Einstein
While meditating I sit quietly and rest in the nature of mind; I don't question or doubt whether I am in the "correct" state or not. There is no effort, only rich understanding, wakefulness, and unshakable certainty. When I am in the nature of mind, the ordinary mind is no longer there. There is no need to sustain or confirm a sense of being: I simply am.
Sogyal Rinpoche
Peace starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us. When our community is in a state of peace, it can share peace with neighboring communities, and so on. When we feel love and kindness towards others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.
Dalai Lama
If you understand, things are as they are.
Gensha
If you do not understand, things are as they are.
Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom? Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word "Attention."
Zen story
The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.
Abraham Lincoln
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In our daily lives, we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but the gratefulness that makes us happy.
Albert Clarke
Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry.
Richard P. Feynman
Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude.
Alfred North Whitehead, in Time/Infinity
The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
When the idea of any pleasure strikes your imagination, make a just computation between the duration of the pleasure and that of the repentance that is likely to follow it.
Epictetus
There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.
Leo Tolstoy
If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?
Stephen Levine
Good judgment comes from experience... and a lot of that comes from bad judgment!
Will Rogers
We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.
Aristotle
Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
Eric Hoffer
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
Mohandas Gandhi
A person desperately searching for love is like a fish desperately searching for water.
Deepak Chopra
When we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Marianne Williamson
Don't feel sorry for yourself if you have chosen the wrong road - turn around!
Edgar Cayce
Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.
Helen Keller
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
George Bernard Shaw
The best way to know God is to love many things.
Vincent Van Gogh
If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition;
Padmasambhava
if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.
Every child looses his innocence, becomes corrupted, and then searches for the lost paradise. Meditation is the royal method to pierce through the smoke screen of mind, to find integration again.
Khoji
Be wise in the use of time. The question in life is not how much time do we have. The question is: what shall we do with it?
Anna Robertson Brown
When we cannot find contentment in ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.
Fancois La Rochefoucauld
Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted but getting what you have, which once you have got it you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.
Garrison Keillor
It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.
Maya Angelou
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.
Mahatma Gandhi
You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live.
Joan Baez
It's said that 'power corrupts,' but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.
David Brin, The Postman
Neither genius, fame, nor love show the greatness of the soul. Only kindness can do that.
Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
Wherever I go it will be well with me, for it was well with me here, not on account of the place, but of my judgments which I shall carry away with me, for no one can deprive me of these; on the contrary, they alone are my property, and cannot be taken away, and to possess them suffices me wherever I am or whatever I do.
Epictetus
Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Patience is power. Patience is not an absence of action; rather it is "timing." It waits on the right time to act, for the right principles and in the right way.
Fulton J. Sheen
True peace is not the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice.
Martin Luther King, Jr
Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.
St. Augustine
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas Edison
He is a wise man who does not grieve for the things which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.
Epictetus
The willing, Destiny guides them; the unwilling, Destiny drags them.
Seneca
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair
To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.
Thomas Merton
Even as a youngster, though, I could never bring myself to believe that when knowledge presented danger, the solution was ignorance. To me, it always seemed the answer had to be wisdom. You did not refuse to look at the danger, rather you learned to handle it safely.
Isaac Asimov
The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.
John Ruskin
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
If you can, help others.
The Dalai Lama
If you can't, at least don't hurt others
Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.
Alice Miller
We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so to have the life that is waiting for us.
Joseph Campbell
Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.
May Sarton
Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.
Thomas Merton
Thoughts are like breath, they come and go. Continue breathing and you will find that once you let a thought go, you are back in the gift of life, the present.
Ozzie Gontang
Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius.
Isaac D'Israeli
A job is something we do to get a paycheck and pay our bills. Jobs are legitimate, at times, but work is why we are here in the universe. Work and calling often go together.
Matthew Fox
©2017 Tom Barrett