Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.
Ovid
We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew....Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful...and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.
Desmond Tutu
Enlightenment consciously chosen means to relinquish your attachment to past and future and to make the Now the main focus of your life.
Eckhart Tolle
Smiling is very important. If we are not able to smile, then the world will not have peace. It is not by going out for a demonstration against nuclear missiles that we can bring about peace. It is with our capacity of smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Celebrate what you want to see more of.
Tom Peters
The more willing you are to surrender to the energy within you, the more power can flow through you.
Shakti Gawain
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. LeGuin
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein
Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
Rabindranath Tagore
but to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain,
but for the heart to conquer it.
Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved,
but hope for the patience to win my freedom.
It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.
Arnold Bennett
If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude.
Maya Angelou
Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.
Benjamin Disraeli
The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.
Henry Miller
Happy is the man who can endure the highest and lowest fortune. He who has endured such vicissitudes with equanimity has deprived misfortune of its power.
Seneca
I live by one principle: Enjoy life with no conditions! People say, "If I had your health, if I had your money, oh, I would enjoy myself." It is not true. I would be happy if I were lying sick in a hospital bed. It must come from the inside. That is the one thing I hope to have contributed to my children, by example and by talk: to make no conditions, to understand that life is a wonderful thing and to enjoy it, every day, to the full.
Artur Rubenstein
I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
Albert Schweitzer
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
When you take your attention into the present moment, a certain alertness arises. You become more conscious of what's around you, but also, strangely, a sense of presence that is both within and without.
Eckhart Tolle
The real glory of meditation lies not in any method but in its continual living experience of presence.
Sogyal Rinpoche
Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says 'I need you because I love you.'
Erich Fromm
Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts.
Nikki Giovanni
When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the morning light, for your life and strength. Give thanks for your food and the joy of living.
Tecumseh
To be truly conscious, go beyond the words into the silence within. Be content for it to be beyond description.
John MacEnulty
Love seeketh not itself to please,
William Blake
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.
George Washington Carver
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
HH the Dalai Lama
The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Meditation is to be aware of what is going on--in our bodies, in our feelings, in our minds, and in the world...Life is both dreadful and wonderful. To practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects. Please do not think we have to be solemn to meditate. In fact, to meditate well, we have to smile a lot.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realization that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realization that everything is as right as it can be. Or better, everything is as It as it can be.
Alan Watts
That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.
Simone de Beauvoir
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
Leo Tolstoy
Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.
Michel de Montaigne
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
Albert Camus
A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party: there is no battle unless there be two.
Seneca
You cannot have the peace you seek until you let go of what is taking its place.
Beth Johnson
We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.
Charles R. Swindoll
Our choice is to be in love or to be in fear. But to choose to be in love means to have a mountain inside of you, means to have the heart of the world inside you, means you will feel another's suffering inside your own body and you will weep. You will have no protection from the world's pain because it will be your own.
China Galland
Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards for integrity.
John D. MacDonald as Travis McGee from The Turquoise Lament
submitted by Juliette Borchers
While God waits for His temple to be built of love, men bring stones.
Rabindranath Tagore
Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within the reach of every hand.
Mother Teresa
We must find our own particular way of loving the world and put our energy into it. Decide your way of loving and you will be rewarded.
Bernie Siegel
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton
Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
Ursula K. LeGuin
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James
We do not create our destiny; we participate in its unfolding. Synchronicity works as a catalyst toward the working out of that destiny.
David Richo, The Power of Coincidence: How Life Shows Us What We Need to Know
I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.
Abraham Lincoln
We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew...Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful...and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.
Desmond Tutu
The best portion of a good man's life are the little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.
William Wordsworth
The most important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative, and the second disastrous.
Margaret Fontey
The road to happiness lies in two simple principles: find what it is that interests you and that you can do well, and when you find it, put your whole soul into it -- every bit of energy and ambition and natural ability you have.
John D. Rockefeller III
The best part of life is not just surviving, but thriving -- with passion and compassion, and humor and style, and generosity and kindness.
Maya Angelou
Dwelling on past mistakes is a waste of time. If the Ego needs to rectify a misdeed, have it do something that creates good in the present, this will certainly spawn good will for the future and create balance in your life.
Beth Johnson
What you have become is the price you paid to get what you used to want.
Mignon McLaughlin
Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being.
Mahatma Gandhi
The Sufis advise us to speak only after our words have managed to pass through three gates. At the first gate, we ask ourselves,"Are these words true?" If so, we let them pass on; If not, back they go. At the second gate, we ask, "Are they necessary?" At the last gate, we ask, "Are they kind?"
Eknath Easwaran
The only myth that's going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one talking about the planet -- not this city, not these people, but the planet and everybody on it.
Joseph Campbell
I searched through rebellion, drugs, diets, mysticism, religions, intellectualism and much more, only to begin to find...that truth is basically simple -- and feels good, clean and right.
Chick Corea
The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more you try to avoid suffering the more you suffer.
Thomas Merton
Do not say, "I follow the one true path of the Spirit," but rather, "I have found the Spirit walking on my path," for the Spirit walks on all paths.
Khalil Gibran
At times helping happens simply in the way of things. It's not something we really think about, merely the instinctive response of an open heart. Caring is a reflex...You live, you help.
Ram Dass & Paul Gorman in How Can I Help? Stories and Reflections on Service
It is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. What creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand.
Andre Dubus
The horizon leans forward,
Maya Angelou
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.
Hal Borland
Time is a created thing. To say 'I don't have time,' is like saying, 'I don't want to.
Lao Tzu
But what minutes! Count them by sensation, and not by calendars, and each moment is a day.
Benjamin Disraeli
Life will bring you pain all by itself. Your responsibility is to create joy.
Milton Erickson, M.D.
Doubt isn't the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.
Paul Johannes Tillich
Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.
Eckhart Tolle
Expectancy is the atmosphere for miracles.
Edwin Louis Cole
I will love the light for it shows me the way. Yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.
Og Mandino
All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The awakening of consciouness is not unlike the crossing of a frontier--one step and you are in another country.
Adrienne Rich
Life is both dreadful and wonderful. To practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects.
Thich Nhat Hanh
In the face of uncertainty, there is nothing wrong with hope.
O. Carl Simonton
Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.
Vaclav Havel
Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you've got to start young.
Fred Astaire
Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.
Anne Lamott Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Love is above all, the gift of oneself.
Jean Anouilh
If you don't know where you are going, you'll end up somewhere else.
Yogi Berra
To fight fear, act. To increase fear, wait, put off, postpone.
David Joseph Schwartz
It is what we think we know already that often prevents us from learning.
Claude Bernard
Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.
Helen Keller
Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.
Cicero
I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
Robert A. Heinlein
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
Ann Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, 1947
By the presence of good, evil is cast out, just as by the presence of light, the darkness disappears.
Ernest Holmes
Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.
William Shakespeare
If we live in peace ourselves, we in turn may bring peace to others. A peacable man does more good than a learned one.
Thomas A Kempis
Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.
Helen Keller
Thoughts lead on to purposes; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny.
Tryon Edwards
©2014 Tom Barrett