Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
People of this world are deluded. They're always longing for something, always, in a word seeking. But the wise wake up. They choose reason over custom. They fix their minds on the sublime and let their bodies change with the seasons.
Bodhidharma
All our discontents about what we want appeared to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.
Daniel Defoe
You can't have a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.
John Wooden
A finger points at the moon, but the moon is not at the tip of the finger. Words point at the truth, but the truth is not in words. To seek illumination through words is to get lost in the web of words and not see the truth.
Huineng
When reality is perceived in its nature of ultimate perfection, the practitioner has reached a level of wisdom called non-discrimination mind--a wondrous communion in which there is no longer any distinction made between subject and object.
Thich Nhat Hahn
The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment; it is to pay attention even at extraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-in-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.
Peter Matthiessen
There is a famous saying: "If the mind is not contrived, it is spontaneously blissful, just as water, when not agitated, is by nature transparent and clear."
Sogyal Rinpoche
In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.
Robert Ingersoll
Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.
Chuang Tzu
If you want to know your past life, look into your present condition; if you want to know your future life, look at your present actions.
Padmasambhava
Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.
M. Scott Peck
The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
Abraham Maslow
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
Carl Gustav Jung
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
Erich Fromm
The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.
Alfred Adler
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
Carl Gustav Jung
It takes a real storm in the average person's life to make him realize how much worrying he has done over the squalls.
Bruce Barton
If you will not fight your battle of life because in selfishness you are afraid of the battle, your resolution is in vain: nature will compel you.
from the Bhagavad Gita
The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear. It is the storm within that endangers him, not the storm without.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is the only game in which the object of the game is to learn the rules.
Ashleigh Brilliant
Only when you awaken do you realize you were dreaming.
John Wareham
We can be spacious yet full of loving kindness; full of compassion, yet serene. Live like the strings of a fine instrument---not too taut but not too loose.
The Buddha
Courage does not always roar. Sometimes, it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "I will try again tomorrow."
Anonymous
People should not worry so much about what they should do; rather about what they should be. If we and our ways are good, then what we do will be radiant.
Meister Eckhart
To live in the presence of great truths and eternal laws, to be led by permanent ideals - that is what keeps a man patient when the world ignores him, and calm and unspoiled when the world praises him.
Honore De Balzac
In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.
Leonardo da Vinci
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
George Orwell
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear from Dune by Frank Herbert
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Bertrand Russell
The habit of ignoring our present moments in favor of others yet to come leads directly to a pervasive lack of awareness of the web of life in which we are embedded.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Enthusiasm moves the world.
Arthur Balfour
As one may bring himself to believe almost anything he is inclined to believe, it makes all the difference whether we begin or end with the inquiry, 'What is truth?'
Richard Whately
The world gives itself to us. It gives itself freely to us, if we just allow it. It showers us with gifts.
David Steindl-Rast
Happy were men if they but understood
John Fountain
There is no safety but in doing good.
When I dare to be powerful--to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
Audre Lorde
If you wait to do everything until you're sure it's right, you'll probably never do much of anything.
Win Borden
In seeking wisdom, the first stage is silence, the second listening, the third, remembrance, the fourth practicing, the fifth, teaching
Solomon Ibn GabirolOne's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes ... and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.
Eleanor Roosevelt
We are here to add what we can to, not what we can get from, life.
Sir William Osler
It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.
Epicurus
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle
Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.
John Dewey
...human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but...life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
Jorge Luis Borges
Selfishness comes from poverty in the heart, from the belief that love is not abundant.
Don Miguel Ruiz
Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
Oscar Wilde
Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.
William Hazlitt
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
John Keats
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
Charles Darwin
Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.
Lord Byron
Let him that would move the world first move himself.
Robert Frost
When your soul experiences memories (replaying as problems), say to them mentally or silently: ‘I love you dear memories. I am grateful for the opportunity to free all of you and me.’ ‘I love you’ can be repeated quietly again and again. Memories never go on vacation or retire unless you retire them. ‘I love you’ can be used even if you are not conscious of problems.
Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len
One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and wisdespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.
Frank Herbert
More important than learning how to recall things is finding ways to forget things that are cluttering the mind.
Eric Butterworth
Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity.
Plato
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.
John Muir
Heaven is my father and earth is my mother and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in its midst. That which extends throughout the universe, I regard as my body and that which directs the universe, I regard as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters and all things are my companions.
Chang Tsai
Empty-handed I entered the world
Kozan Ichikyo
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going --
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.
In each of us there is a king. Speak to him and he will come forth.
Danish Proverb
We often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude.
Cynthia Ozick
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
George SantayanaDon't fall into the trap that there is only one special person that you are able to love. Instead, try to develop the expectation that the world is full of people that you can love and that can love you.
Ken Keyes, Jr.
Serving the world with love and cooperation, you will find your own true Self. As you help those in need, selfishness will fall away, and without even noticing you will find your own fulfillment.
Amma (Mata Amritanandamayi Devi)
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
You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Happiness, then, is the confidence that pain and disappointment can be tolerated, that love will prove stronger than aggression. It is release from the attachment to pleasant feelings, and faith in the capacity of awareness to guide us through the inevitable insults to our own narcissism.
Mark Epstein
I have learned by some experience, by many examples, and by the writings of countless others before me, also occupied in the search, that certain environments, certain modes of life, certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others. There are, in fact, certain roads that one may follow. Simplification of life is one of them.
Ann Morrow Lindbergh
Buddha was once threatened with death by a bandit called Angulimal. "Then be good enough to fulfill my dying wish," said Buddha. "Cut off the branch of that tree."One slash of the sword, and it was done! "What now?" asked the bandit. "Put it back again," said Buddha. The bandit laughed. "You must be crazy to think that anyone can do that." "On the contrary, it is you who are crazy to think that you are mighty because you can wound and destroy. That is the task of children. The mighty know how to create and heal."
Anthony DeMello in The Heart of the Enlightened
The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy.
H.H. the Dalai Lama
It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.
George Harrison
Our ambition should be to rule ourselves, the true kingdom for each one of us; and true progress is to know more, and be more, and to do more.
Oscar Wilde
The most complete revenge is not to imitate the aggressor.
Marcus Aurelius
If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is a law, and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.
Dan Millman from The Way of the Peaceful Warrior
The most complete revenge is not to imitate the aggressor.
Marcus Aurelius
The day, water, sun, moon, night--I do not have to purchase these things with money.
Plautus
I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over the self.
Aristotle.A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
Henry David Thoreau
The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart. To the degree that you didn't understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you're given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to open further.
Pema Chodron
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
Abraham Lincoln
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
Douglas Adams
Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.
James Barrie
When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find, peace of mind is waiting there.
George Harrison
If you aren't playing well, the game isn't as much fun. When that happens I tell myself just to go out and play as I did when I was a kid.
Thomas J. Watson
Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.
Voltaire
Life is a song - sing it. Life is a game - play it. Life is a challenge - meet it. Life is a dream - realize it. Life is a sacrifice - offer it. Life is love - enjoy it.
Sai Baba
The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.
Thomas Huxley
Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
People only see what they are prepared to see.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To be "viable," livable, or merely practical, life must be lived as a game -and the "must" here expresses a condition, not a commandment. It must be lived in the spirit of play rather than work.
Alan Watts
Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is.
Carl G. Jung
Meditation is 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
Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity.
Paul Goodman
Happy the man, and happy he alone, he who can call today his own; he who, secure within, can say, tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.
John Dryden
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
William James
Those who have not encountered the differences among people in ways that interrupt their certainties do not make good thinkers; they also make poor citizens of democracies.
Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.
Dr. Seuss
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
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Jung
Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.
Samuel Johnson
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
Anais Nin
Success in life has been achieved when all that one wants is finely balanced by all that one needs.
Sufi saying
When I'm trusting and being myself as fully as possible, everything in my life reflects this by falling into place easily, often miraculously.
Shakti Gawain
The secret of forming a successful relationship is for both parties to win.
John Gray
Have patience with all things, But, first of all with yourself.
Saint Francis de Sales
Tell everyone what you want to do and someone will want to help you do it.
W. Clement Stone
To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act.
Anatole France
Sadness is a natural human feeling. I would be worried if someone never felt sad. We are not looking for constant happiness. Rather we are looking for the sense that life is flowing along the way it should be.
Leslie Gray
It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.
Samuel Johnson
An optimist is someone who gets treed by a lion but enjoys the scenery.
A pessimist is one who builds dungeons in the air.
Walter Winchell
Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Gilda Radner
What matters is to live in the present, live now, for every moment is now. It is your thoughts and acts of the moment that create your future. The outline of your future path already exists, for you created its pattern by your past.
Sai Baba
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, stamp 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
You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.
Ayn Rand
A man who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.
Soren Kierkegaard
Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
James Baldwin
All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.
Samuel Johnson
Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.
John Lubbock
For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin... But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid.Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.
Alfred Souza
Pure love and suspicion cannot dwell together: at the door where the latter enters, the former makes its exit.
Alexandre Dumas
One of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely to the intelligence.
Lewis Mumford
We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
Richard P. Feynman
If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?
William Somerset Maugham
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
Marshall McLuhan
The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.
John Cage
The blossom vanishes of itself as the fruit grows, so will your lower self vanish as the divine grows in you.
Ramakrisna Parmahansa
Love without conversation is impossible.
Mortimer Adler
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana
What is important in life is life, and not the result of life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Our past is a story existing only in our minds. Look, analyze, understand, and forgive. Then, as quickly as possible, chuck it.
Marianne Williamson
The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?
Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Don't wait for the last judgment - it takes place every day.
Albert Camus
People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
Barbara Kingsolver
Nothing that is not a real crime makes a man appear so contemptible and little in the eyes of the world as inconstancy.
Joseph AddisonIn the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.
Albert Camus
It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.
Marie Curie
Most people we perceive as 'antagonists' are merely struggling individuals trapped in their bounded worldview, desperately trying to pursue their own happiness.
Robert Thurman
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Howard Thurman
The difference between school and life? In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson.
Tom Bodett
Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.
William James
It is only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it were the only one we had.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
We build too many walls and not enough bridges.
Isaac Newton
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
Charles Darwin
When man awakens, he finds that he is part of the one great Reality and he realizes his union with all things.
Paramananda
When your sense of self is no longer tied to thought, is no longer conceptual, there is a depth of feeling, of sensing, of compassion, of loving, that was not there when you were trapped in mental concepts. You are that depth.
Eckhart Tolle
Dwell not on the past. Use it to illustrate a point, then leave it behind. Nothing really matters except what you do now in this instant of time. From this moment onwards you can be an entirely different person, filled with love and understanding, ready with an outstretched hand, uplifted and positive in every thought and deed.
Eileen Caddy...love the universe as one's city, one's native country, the beloved fatherland of every soul.
Simone Weil
We have free will, but our free will lies in our choice of thought.
Emmet Fox
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Fear not to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
Bertrand Russell
Only they who obey a rhythm superior to their own are free.
Nikos Kazantzakis
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
Frank Herbert
Men are not punished for their sins but by them.
Elbert Hubbard
The Zen master Ling Chi said that the miracle is not to walk on burning charcoal or in the thin air or on the water; the miracle is just to walk on earth. You breathe in. You become aware of the fact that you are alive. You are still alive and you are walking on this beautiful planet…The greatest of all miracles is to be alive.
Thich Nhat Hanh
To the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mercy has no enemies. In the face of compassion, all perverse and evil forces melt into nothingness.
Venerable Master Hsing Yun
You just do whatever you do to serve in a way that increases the connection of humanity, the awareness of the interrelatedness of all things. You are more effective and efficient in any action when you are capable of being totally involved in what you're doing, and totally non-attached.
Ram Dass
The conscious mind may be compared to a fountain playing in the sun and falling back into the great subterranean pool of unconscious from which it rises.
Sigmund Freud
There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.
Epictetus
You must have faith that the Universe will unfold as it should.
Spock
For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is sweet to let the mind unbend on occasion.
Horace
To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter... to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring--these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
John BurroughsNot 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
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
Thomas Henry Huxley
We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon.
Konrad Adenauer
© 2009 Tom Barrett