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
Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.
Theodore Isaac Rubin
Almost anything you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
Mohandas Gandhi
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
John Muir
Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has plenty; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.
Charles Dickens
Just as a solid rock is not shaken by the storm, even so the wise are not affected by praise or blame.
The Dhammapada
We all have the same world to respond to. What we practice, we become. If we practice looking at each day as a new adventure, so it will be.
Earnie Larsen and Carol Larsen Hegarty
Changes in consciousness are a very strange thing. Suddenly we see what was there all the time. And we wonder how it could for so long have been invisible to us.
Riane Eisler, Sacred Pleasure
Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue. A man who has learned not to fear will find the fatigue of daily life enormously diminished.
Bertrand Russell
The beginning of meditation is self-knowledge, which means being aware of every movement of thought and feeling.
J. Krishnamurti
The highest form of wisdom is kindness.
The Talmud
Happiness comes most to persons who seek her least, and think least about it. It is not an object to be sought; it is a state to be induced. It must follow and not lead. It must overtake you, and not you overtake it.
John Burroughs
Changes in consciousness are a very strange thing. Suddenly we see what was there all the time. And we wonder how it could for so long have been invisible to us.
Riane Eisler, Sacred Pleasure
Most people don't know how to listen because the major part of their attention is taken up by thinking.
Eckhart Tolle
Let the movement be slow and savour of solidity at the base and rise quivering to the tree tops and to the sky, always rising to meet it joyously and tremulously... the spirit must be... perpetually moving through, carrying on and inducing a thirst for more and a desire to rise.
Emily Carr
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
If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.
Lucy Larcom
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
We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started... and know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot
In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience.
W.B. Prescott
Being nice is one of many bridges on the road to happiness.
Donna A. Favors
There's only one reason why you're not experiencing bliss at this present moment, and it's because you're thinking or focusing on what you don't have.
Anthony de Mello
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
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 eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.
Henry David Thoreau
We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore 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
Once our hearts are open, all existence appears naturally beautiful and harmonious.
Tarthang Tulku
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
Douglas Adams
Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in the mind. Anger will disappear just as soon as thoughts of resentment are forgotten.
Buddha
The problem is...basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.
Ann Morrow-Lindbergh
In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.
Robert Green Ingersoll
We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity, but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Thomas Merton
The important thing is to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could be.
Charles DuBois
A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities, and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.
Harry Truman
Endeavour to play easy pieces well and with elegance; that is better than to play difficult pieces badly.
Robert Schumann, Advice to Young Musicians
Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.
Marie Curie
You have not lived a perfect day unless you've done something for someone who will never be able to repay you.
Ruth Smeltzer
It is wrong to think that misfortunes come from the east or from the west; they originate within one's own mind. Therefore, it is foolish to guard against misfortunes from the external world and leave the inner mind uncontrolled.
Buddha
Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.
Joseph Campbell
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.
John Muir
Only that in you which is me can hear what I'm saying.
Baba Ram Dass
Sometimes life pushes us, and there is usually wisdom in it that we only see later.
Diane Gilman
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.
Kendall Hailey
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
Mary Wollstonecraft
The course of human history is determined, not by what happens in the skies, but by what takes place in the hearts of men.
Arthur Keith
Good actions ennoble us, and we are the sons of our own deeds.
Miguel d Cervantes
Slight not what's near, when aiming at what's far.
Euripides
The four agreements for success:
Don Miguel Ruiz
Be impeccable with your word.
Don't take anything personally.
Don't make assumptions.
Always do your best.
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.
Victor Frankl
Knowledge dwells in heads replete with thoughts of other men; wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
William Cowper
Accept everything about yourself - I mean everything. You are you and that is the beginning and the end - no apologies, no regrets.
Clark Moustakas
Politeness is to human nature what warmth is to wax.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Drag your thoughts away from your troubles...by the ears, by the heals, or any other way you can manage it.
Mark Twain
You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.
Bruce Lee
The great use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
William James
I slept and dreamt that life was joy,
Rabindranath Tagore
I awoke and saw that life was service,
I acted and behold, service was joy.
It's taken me all my life to understand that it is not necessary to understand everything.
Rene' Coty
Life, like all other games, becomes fun when one realizes that it's just a game.
Nerijus Stasiulis
Truth is a river that is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between the arms, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the main river.
Cyril Connolly
The education of the will is the object of our existence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
Mary Oliver
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Dr.Martin Luther King Jr.
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
Buddha
Anger itself does more harm than the condition which aroused anger.
Samurai Maxim
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
Carl Jung
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)
There's only one reason why you're not experiencing bliss at this present moment, and it's because you're thinking or focusing on what you don't have.
Anthony de Mello
All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
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
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
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
Out of compassion I destroy the darkness of their ignorance. From within them I light the lamp of wisdom and dispel all darkness from their lives.
Bhagavad Gita
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
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
All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
Havelock Ellis
In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience.
W.B. Prescott
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
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
To me, if life boils down to one thing, it's movement. To live is to keep moving.
Jerry Seinfeld
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
In the healthiest organizations the taboo is not on making mistakes, it's on concealing them.
John Cleese
Whenever you are confronted with an opponent. Conquer him with love.
Mahatma Gandhi
We have been created for greater things, not just to be a number in the world, not just to go for diplomas and degrees, this work and that work. We have been created in order to love and to be loved.
Mother Teresa
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
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
We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.
John Dryden
If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
John Wooden
When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
Jacob Riis
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
Concentration is the secret of strength.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For him who has no concentration, there is no tranquility.
Bhagavad Gita
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!
In order to carry a positive action we must develop here a positive vision.
Dalai Lama
I consider those are rich who are doing something they feel worthwhile and which they enjoy doing.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
Mahatma Gandhi
Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.
Alfred Adler
Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside.
Ramana Maharshi
It's helpful to remind yourself that meditation is about opening and relaxing with whatever arises, without picking and choosing.
Pema Chodron
Mindfulness is simply being aware of what is happening right now without wishing it were different; enjoying the pleasant without holding on when it changes (which it will); being with the unpleasant without fearing it will always be this way (which it won't).
James Baraz
Be happy in the moment, that's enough. Each moment is all we need, not more.
Mother Teresa
Restore your attention or bring it to a new level by dramatically slowing down whatever you're doing.
Sharon Salzberg
The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.
Eckhart Tolle
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....
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds!
Bob Marley
We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.
William Faulkner
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
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Speak properly, and in as few words as you can, but always plainly; for the end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood.
William Penn
Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.
Basho
Fear not that your life shall come to an end. But rather fear that it never has a beginning.
John Henry Cardinal Newman
If you see good in people, you radiate a harmonious loving energy which uplifts those who are around you. If you can maintain this habit, this energy will turn into a steady flow of love.
Annamalai Swami
The broadminded only see the goodness in people and in things; the narrowminded only perceive the evil.
Chinese parable
There is a spark of good in everybody, no matter how deeply it may be buried.
Peace Pilgrim
The future is not something we enter. The future is something we create.
Leonard I. Sweet
Learn to wish that everything should come to pass exactly as it does.
Epictetus
If you can solve your problem, then what is the need of worrying? If you cannot solve it, then what is the use of worrying?
Shantideva
Say to yourself at daybreak: I shall come across the busybody, the thankless, the overbearing, the treacherous, the envious, the unneighborly. All this has befallen them because they know not good from evil.
Marcus Aurelius Antonius
Any fool can be fussy and rid himself of energy all over the place, but a man has to have something in him before he can settle down and do nothing.
J. B. Priestley
We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore 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
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons.
Douglas Adams
Most of the mistakes in thinking are inadequacies of perception rather than mistakes of logic.
Edward de Bono
The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and 'consciousness' cannot evolve unconsciously.
G. Gurdjieff
The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and 'will' cannot evolve involuntarily.
The evolution of man is the evolution of his power of doing, and 'doing' cannot be the result of things which happen.
Anger will never disappear so long as thoughts of resentment are cherished in the mind. Anger will disappear just as soon as thoughts of resentment are forgotten.
Buddha
The problem is...basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.
Ann Morrow-Lindbergh
In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.
Robert Green Ingersoll
As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.
Bill Cosby
We cannot be happy if we expect to live all the time at the highest peak of intensity. Happiness is not a matter of intensity, but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.
Thomas Merton
The important thing is to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could be.
Charles DuBois
A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities, and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.
Harry Truman
The best way to know God is to love many things.
Vincent Van Gogh
The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.
Dolly Parton
Think of your thoughts as a kind of worship, and every time you think of something, you are paying a kind of homage to that thing. So what are you worshipping that you don't mean to be?
Holiday Mathis
There are so many hungry children in the world for whom the face of God appears as a loaf of bread.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
You have not lived a perfect day unless you've done something for someone who will never be able to repay you.
Ruth Smeltzer
It is wrong to think that misfortunes come from the east or from the west; they originate within one's own mind. Therefore, it is foolish to guard against misfortunes from the external world and leave the inner mind uncontrolled.
Buddha
©2014 Tom Barrett