When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don't blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.
S:Thich Nhat Hanh
We are not channels, we are instruments. Channels give nothing of their own; they just let water run through them. In our action, we are instruments in God's hand and He writes beautifully.
S:Mother Teresa of Calcutta
We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers.
S:Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
S:Theodore Geisel/Dr. Seuss
When one dreams alone, it is only a dream. When many people dream together, it is the beginning of a new reality.
S:Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Austrian Painter
The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been kindness, beauty, and truth.
S:Albert Einstein
Sometimes God calms the storm.
Sometimes God lets the storm rage and calms His child.
S:Author unknown
Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice.
S:Reinhold Niebuhr
To be revolutionary is to love your life enough to change it, to choose struggle instead of exile, to risk everything.
S:Andrew Kopkind
Wisdom is not a product of thought. The deep Knowing that is wisdom arises through the simple act of giving someone or something your full attention.
S:Eckhart Tolle
The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
S:Saul Alinksy (from his book, Rules for Radicals)
Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.
S:Dennis Waitley
The healing Social Life is found when, in the mirror of each human soul, the whole community finds its reflection and when, in the community, the virtue of each is living.
S:Rudolf Steiner
People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light within.
S:Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
Be a sweet melody in the great orchestration, instead of a discordant note. The medicine this sick world needs is love. Hatred must be replaced by love, and fear by faith that love will prevail.
S:Peace Pilgrim
Free your mind and your heart power will follow.
S:Headline - Veggie Avenger Website
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.
S: The Talmud
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it.
S:Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.
S:Ralph Waldo Emerson
But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
S:Camus
The future is not some place we are going, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made. And the activity of making them changes both the maker and their destination.
S:John Schaar
The Aquarian Age is the age of the Man with the Water Pot ("Seek ye a man bearing a pot of water")--and who is the man with the water pot? Why, the gardener, of course, and so the intepretive symbol of the New Age is to be the Gardener.
S:Emmet Fox, Victoria Hall, London, 1933
We find common ground by raising to higher ground.
S:Jim Wallis
There's nothing like defeat to make you re-assess.
S:Jim Wallis (during an interview with Michael Enright)
Stay together, Friends. Don't scatter and sleep. Our friendship is made of being awake.
S:Jalaluddin Rumi
To keep something, you must care for it. More, you must understand what kind of care it requires.
S:Dorothy Parker
A psychotic drowns in the very same stuff a mystic swims in.
S:Pema Chodron
By the accident of fortune a man may rule the world for a time, but by virtue of love and kindness he may rule the world forever.
S:Lao Tsu
Kindness is the light that dissolves all walls between souls, families, and nations.
S:Paramahansa Yogananda
Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, "You owe me." Look at what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole sky.
S: Hafiz, 14th century Persian poet
A friend is someone who reaches for your hand and touches your heart.
S: Anonymous
Patience is the companion of wisdom.
S: St. Augustine
I honour the place in you where the entire universe resides. I honour the place in you where lies your love, your light, your truth and your beauty. I honour the place in you where ... if you are in that place in you...and I am in that place in me...then there is only one of us.
S: Ram Dass: The Definition of "Namaste"
Real education consists in drawing the best out of yourself. What better book can there be than the book of humanity?
S: Mohandas K. Gandhi
Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either.
S: Golda Meir
If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.
S: Francis Bacon
To be aware of a single shortcoming within oneself is more useful than to be aware of a thousand in somebody else.
S: His Holiness The Dalai Lama
The miracle is not to fly in the air, or to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth.
S: Chinese Proverb
Love alone can unite living beings so as to complete and fulfill them... for it alone joins them by what is deepest in themselves. All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth.
S: Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.
S: Albert Einstein
All that is in my universe is not merely mine – It is me
S: John A. Livingston, The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation
What you are is what you have done, and what you will be is what you do now.
S: The Buddha
No road up the mountain but the one you walk. No victory at the top, but the view of your road and the valleys below. Walk freely and take in the scenery.
S: Harry Bateman
Do not limit life to your beliefs. Instead, expand your beliefs to embrace all that life has to offer.
S: Alan Cohen
When a pickpocket sees a saint, he sees only his pockets.
S: Hari Dass Baba
Joy is not the result of getting what you want; it is the way to get what you want. In the deepest sense, joy is what you want.
S: Alan Cohen
It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
S: Chinese Proverb
Love will raise you up on eagle's wings,
bear you on the breath of God,
cause you to shine like the sun,
and hold you in the palm of God's hand.
S: Adapted from "On Eagle's Wings" by Michael Joncas
Do not walk in front of me I may not follow. Do not walk behind me I may not lead. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
S: Albert Camus
Integrity has no need of rules.
S: Albert Camus
Asking for help is an affirmation that you believe in yourself, you recognize an answer is available, and you are open to receive it.
S: Alan Cohen
'Now' is the operative word. Everything you put in your way is just a method of putting off the hour when you could actually be doing your dream. You don't need endless time and perfect conditions. Do it now. Do it today. Do it for twenty minutes and watch your heart start beating.
S: Barbara Sher
To see a World in a grain of sand, and a Heaven in a wild flower, is to hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.
S: William Blake
So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion, respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and bow to none. When you arise in the morning, give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no living thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. So live your life that you can sing your death song and die like a hero going home.
S: Tecumseh
We must learn not to disassociate the airy flower from the earthy root, for the flower that is cut off from its root fades, and its seeds are barren, whereas the root, secure in mother earth, can produce flower after flower and bring their fruit to maturity.
S: Kabbalah
Arise and listen:
Cast off your tatters of consciousness,
And know the new that seeks birth within you.
Take comfort from this and feel not alone.
The world moves into a new cycle.
Come forth, you builders,
And build the new heaven and the new earth.
S: David Spangler
Life is far too important to talk seriously about it.
S: Oscar Wilde
The first duty of love is to listen.
S: Paul Tillich
Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.
S: Mary Byrant
In a gentle way, you can shake the world.
S: Mahatma Gandhi
That the soft overcomes the hard, and the yielding overcomes the resistant, is a fact known by all, but practiced by few.
S: Lao Tse
When I loved myself enough I realized my mind can torment and deceive me, but in the service of my heart it is a great and noble ally.
S: Kim Mc Millen
Standing quietly by the fence, you smile your wondrous smile. I am speechless, and my senses are filled by the sounds of your beautiful song, beginningless and endless. I bow deeply to you.
S: Anonymous ~ spoken to a dahlia and quoted by Thich Nhat Hanh
Whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy-meditate on these things.
S: The Bible - Phillippians 4:8