Most people don't really need advice. They just need support and discipline in doing what they already know works.
Marianne Williamson
Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage. The way in which power works is a mystery.
Albert Schweitzer
The first proof of a well-ordered mind is to be able to pause and linger with itself.
Seneca
There is in the body a current of energy, affection and intelligence, which guides, maintains and energizes the body and mind. Discover that current and stay with it.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all!
Rumi
You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.
Aristotle
We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.
William Shakespeare
If we face our unpleasant feelings with care, affection, and nonviolence, we can transform them into the kind of energy that is healthy and has the capacity to nourish us.
Thich Nhat Hanh
If you follow the present-day world, you will turn your back on the Way; if you would not turn your back on the Way, do not follow the world.
Takuan
Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.
Robert F. Kennedy
Each of us as we journey through life, has the opportunity to find and give his or her unique gift. Whether this gift is quiet or small in the eyes of the world does not matter at all-- not at all; it is through finding and the giving that we may come to know the joy that lies at the center of both the dark times and the light.
Helen Luke
Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you're alive, it isn't.
Richard Bach
A wise man is he who does not grieve for the thing which he has not, but rejoices for those which he has.
Epictetus
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
Richard Bach
Sow an act and you reap a habit. Sow a habit, and you reap a character. Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.
Charles Reade
To develop understanding, you have to practice looking at all living beings with the eyes of compassion. When you understand, you love. And when you love, you naturally act in a way that can relieve the suffering of people.
Thich Nhat Hanh
There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
Carl Jung
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, or not to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.
Buddha
Everything has its beauty, but not everyone sees it.
Confucius
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting--a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible.
Marion C. Garretty
Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.
Nicholas Murray Butler
You can't wring your hands and roll up your sleeves at the same time.
Patricia Schroeder
I often compare the mind in meditation to a jar of muddy water: The more we leave the water without interfering or stirring it, the more the particles of dirt will sink to the bottom, letting the natural clarity of the water shine through.
Sogyal Rinpoche
Love is eternal--the aspect may change, but not the essence...love makes one calmer about many things, and that way, one is more fit for one's work.
Vincent Van Gogh
The wise man does not lay up his treasures. The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own.
Lao-tzu
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
William Blake
When a person responds to the joys and sorrows of others as though they were his own, he or she has attained the highest spiritual union.
Bhagavad Gita
The sun and the moon are not mirrored in cloudy water. Thus the almighty cannot be mirrored in a heart that is obsessed by the idea of me and mine.
Ramakrishna
Of the desires expressed, the one which is most right is the desire to be "master of oneself," because without this nothing else is possible.
G. I. Gurdjieff
The highest wisdom is kindness.
Talmud
Teach us love, compassion, and honor that we may heal the earth and heal each other.
Prayer, Ojibwa Tribe
Thought held in mind reproduces after its kind, just like a seed in the ground that's nourished reproduces after its kind. In this moment, you are free to plant again.
Mary Manin MorrisseyThe intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Albert Einstein
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
All speech, action, and behavior are fluctuations of consciousness. All life emerges from, and is sustained in, consciousness. The whole universe is the expression of consciousness. The reality of the universe is one unbounded ocean of consciousness in motion.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
It is impossible for the human mind to remain completely without thought for long times. On the other hand, too many small, unimportant thoughts can fill the mind to the extent that no meaningful thought takes place.
Tomio Hirai in Zen Meditation Therapy
Man's mind once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimension.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
George Eliot
Every person has free choice. Free to obey or disobey the Natural Laws. Your choice determines the consequences. Nobody ever did, or ever will, escape the consequences of his choices.
Alfred A. Montapert
Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
We must all live so that our children do not have to pay for our deeds.
Andrejs Upits
You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.
Mahatma Gandhi
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
Marcus Aurelius
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Valor grows by daring, fear by holding back.
Publilius Syrus
When a deep injury is done us, we can never recover until we forgive.
Alan Paton
Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.
Sigmund Freud
Our real blessings often appear to us in the shapes of pains, losses and disappointments; but let us have patience, and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.
Joseph Addison
We lift ourselves by our thought, we climb upon our vision of ourselves. If you want to enlarge your life, you must first enlarge your thought of it and of yourself. Hold the ideal of yourself as you long to be, always, everywhere - your ideal of what you long to attain - the ideal of health, efficiency, success.
Orison Swett Marden
Three candles dispel the darkness: truth, knowledge, and the ways of nature.
Chinese proverb
A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
If you're going through hell, keep going.
Sir Winston Churchill
The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind.
Dr. Wayne W. Dyer
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
Henry David Thoreau
I have never felt that anything really mattered but the satisfaction of knowing that you stood for the things in which you believed and had done the very best you could.
Eleanor Roosevelt
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have 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
True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.
William Penn
If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Evil (ignorance) is like a shadow--it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stomp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.
Shakti Gawain
Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.
William James, Principles of Psychology
If you listen both to the sound of the bell and to the silence between its strokes, the whole of that listening is attention. Similarly, when someone is speaking, attention is the giving of your mind not only to the words but also to the silence between the words.
Jiddu Krishnamurti in Listening To The Silence
Ignorance of remote causes disposeth men to attribute all events to the causes immediate and instrumental: for these are all the causes they perceive.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope . . . and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
Robert F. Kennedy
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
George Bernard Shaw
A man needs self-acceptance or he can't live with himself; he needs self-criticism or others can't live with him.
James A. Pike
Choice of attention--to pay attention to this and ignore that--is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both choices man is responsible for his choices and must accept the consequences.
W. H. Auden
Love is infallible; it has not errors, for all errors are the want of love.
Andrew Bonar Law
The more I can love everything--the trees, the land, the water, my fellow men, women and children, and myself--the more health I am going to experience and the more of myself I am going to be.
Carl Simonton
If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
Jack Kornfield
Nothing would be done at all if a man or woman waited until they could do it so well that no one could find fault with it.
Cardinal Newman
Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out.
Art Linkletter
A step in the wrong direction is better than staying on the spot all your life. Once you're moving forward you can correct your course as you go. Your automatic guidance system cannot guide you when you're standing still.
Maxwell Maltz
See everything. Overlook a great deal. Improve a little.
Pope John XXIII
God dances in rapture and waves of form arise from his dance.
Kabir
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
William Blake
What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.
Zig Ziglar
You are what you repeatedly do. Excellence is not an event--it is a habit.
Aristotle
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
Mother Teresa
When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall - think of it, ALWAYS.
Mahatma Gandhi
The key to success is to keep growing in all areas of life - mental, emotional, spiritual, as well as physical.
Julius Erving
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.
Denis Waitley
Friendship with oneself is all-important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.
Eleanor Roosevelt
It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.
Irish proverb
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
©2015 Tom Barrett