"A soul who is not close to nature is far away from what is called spirituality. In order to be spiritual one must communicate, and especially one must communicate with nature; one must feel nature." ~Hazrat Inayat Khan
"A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he or she who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form." ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"A warm breeze blew through my window like a gentle wave lapping the sandy shore in summer at low tide, and as I took in a breath of air that blanketed my body like tall grass in a field I felt for just that moment in time, like I did when I was a child. I felt that I had not one worry, not one burden, nothing was on my mind except that breeze that made the curtains swell like balloons." ~Christina Pagliarulo
"As I look back at the entire tapestry of my life, I can see from the perspective of the present moment that every aspect of my life was necessary and perfect. Each step eventually led to a higher place, even though these steps often felt like obstacles or painful experiences." ~Wayne Dyer
"Because all existence is founded upon the ever-present state of union, everything already exists in a state of tranquility. However, this state of tranquility is masked from us by our assumption that there is a separation, that there is a problem." ~Suzuki Roshi
"Emotional and psychological pain were to become, perhaps, the most powerful force in molding the course of my life. For some people, pain and hurt breed bitterness and cynicism. For others it causes them to look deeply into themselves and into life itself in an attempt to understand the meaning beneath seemingly capricious or arbitrary happenings." ~Joseph F. Girzone
"Go with the pain, let it take you. . . . Open your palms and your body to the pain. It comes in waves like a tide, and you must be open as a vessel lying on the beach, letting it fill you up and then, retreating, leaving you empty and clear. . . . With a deep breath--it has to be as deep as the pain--one reaches a kind of inner freedom from pain, as though the pain were not yours, but your body's. The spirit lays the body on the altar." ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"Hospitality is always an act that benefits the host even more than the guest. The concept of hospitality arose in ancient times when the reciprocity was easier to see: in nomadic cultures, the food and shelter one gave to a stranger yesterday is the food and shelter one hopes to receive from a stranger tomorrow. By offering hospitality, one participates in the endless reweaving of a social fabric on which all can depend--thus the gift of sustenance for the guest becomes a gift of hope for the host." ~Parker J. Palmer from LLF
"Humility is vastly undervalued in our modern Western culture. It is a prevalent belief that humility is fine for the pious or holy, but in the "real" world it won't get you very far. Many people consider pride and aggressiveness as virtues and humility as a weakness. This may be because they don't understand the meaning of humility. They may equate humility with self-debasement and a sense of inferiority when, in fact, this is not true humility. Actually, the opposite is true. Most really great people are humble. Those among the most respected who have ever lived acknowledge that their greatness came, not from their personal self, but from a higher power working through them." ~John Marks Templeton from LLF
"I love the mysteries in life. I could list tons of them, but that would take too long. Rather, I simply like to appreciate them when I come across them and allow them to be without trying to explain them. When we're able to accept mystery without a need for explanation, then we're on the road to living our lives fully, to accepting life for what it is and letting it be just what it is without trying to control it." ~Living Life Fully
"I realized that living in the present is not an idea. It’s reality. It’s like taking one step at a time. Sounds good. Good philosophy, right? Then it occurred to me, Have you ever taken two steps at a time? We can’t. It’s as simple as that: we can’t. It’s the same with living in the present. Our thoughts may wander to the past or the future. Yet, our thoughts are just thoughts. Our bodies are in the present. We are in the present. That’s just the way it is." ~Anne Wilson Schaef
"I think luck is the sense to recognize an opportunity and the ability to take advantage of it. Everyone has bad breaks, but everyone also has opportunities. People who can smile at their breaks and grab their chances get on." ~Samuel Goldwyn
"Ideals are like stars. You will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like seafarers on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny." ~ Carl Schurz from Living Life Fully
"Ideals do not determine what we do to make a living in life; They govern what we become as we do it." ~Joan Chittister from LLF
"If a child smiles, if an adult smiles, that is very important. If in our daily lives we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. If we really know how to live, what better way to start the day than with a smile? Our smile affirms our awareness and determination to live in peace and joy. The source of a true smile is an awakened mind." ~Thich Nhat Hanh
"If one's life is simple, contentment has to come. Simplicity is extremely important for happiness. Having few desires, feeling satisfied with what you have, is very vital: satisfaction with just enough food, clothing, and shelter to protect yourself from the elements." ~the Dalai Lama
"If you really want to help, then help others to be more present. Help others to free themselves from the past. Help others to take responsibility for themselves. Help them to see how they are creating their own suffering. Every now and then, you will encounter innocent ones who are suffering through no fault of their own, particularly animals and children. Do not hesitate! Help them." ~Leonard Jacobson
"In a true family, the people can depend upon each other for encouragement, support, love, and compassion. When people know that they can depend upon these things when hard times come, they're more likely to be able to take risks in the world, to contribute to the world in their own unique and wonderful ways. If we do our best to provide our family members with a family that loves and trusts and provides, we're providing a wonderful service to the world around us, to the people in our families, and to life." ~Living Life Fully
"It does take work to find inspiration, but that work can be enjoyable. It can be a pleasant search or a grueling quest, but either way it promises to be rewarding once we find what we're looking for. One problem is, though, that many of us think that we know exactly what we're looking for, exactly what form the inspiration should take. We know what this picture should look like or what this poem should be, and if that's the case, it's not inspiration that we're looking for, but confirmation of what we think is best. Inspiration will open new roads to us, not take us down the same tired roads." ~Living Life Fully
"It's so hard to live without prejudices. The word, of course, refers to "pre-judging," our tendency to think that certain people will act certain ways and do certain things simply because of some trait that they share with others who we also think do certain things or act in certain ways. A member of a certain race will act in a certain way because, of course, "all of them act that way." And they act in ways that we don't like, so therefore we can't like the people, either. I saw a man with green skin shirking on the job and saying terrible things about someone else, so now when I see someone with green skin, I'm going to know that that person is a lazy worker and says terrible things." ~LLF
"It would do the world good if every person in it would compel themselves occasionally to be absolutely alone. Most of the world's progress has come out of such loneliness." ~Bruce Barton
"Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the ploughshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guest, an altar for the unknown God." ~Henri Frederic Amiel
"Let us not get so busy or live so fast that we can't listen to the music of the meadow or the symphony that glorifies the forest. Some things in the world are far more important than wealth; one of them is the ability to enjoy simple things." ~Dale Carnegie
"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
"Nature is another important aspect of nourishing the soul. After a hike in the mountains where we live, for instance, I feel a remarkable sense of gratitude and awe. My mind quiets down and allows me to see more clearly the beauty of creation. And through that gratitude, the beauty of the universe is reflected back to the creator." -Joan Borysenko
"One does not need to fast for days and meditate for hours at a time to experience the sense of sublime mystery which constantly envelops us. All one need do is to notice intelligently, if even for a brief moment, a blossoming tree, a forest flooded with autumn colors, an infant smiling." ~Simon Greenberg
"One of the most important elements of living life fully is awareness-- awareness of our surroundings, of other people and their motives and fears and desires, of the things that affect us most in our lives, both positively and negatively." ~Living Life Fully
"People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future." ~Chuck Palahniuk
"Smile at each other, smile at your wife, smile at your husband, smile at your children, smile at each other--it doesn't matter who it is--and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other." ~Mother Teresa
"Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn." ~Peter Matthiessen
"Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down." -Natalie Goldberg
"Stress is the resistance to what's happening right now. As we allow ourselves to open to this moment fully, there is absolutely no stress." ~Stephan Rechtschaffen
"The choice of solitude is not so much a rejection of community as a recognition that certain experiences and truths are so alien to ordinary consciousness that the individual must withdraw in order to experience them." ~Carol P. Christ
"The ego is often deeply involved in the desire to help others. If you do not want your ego to be involved in this way, do not be available for others unless you really want to be available. Do not feel that you should be available. Don't sacrifice yourself in any way. Don't go against your true feelings. Don't carry the cross for anyone else. Make sure that there's no sense that helping others makes you a better person or that it will gain you easy access into Heaven. Don't be a martyr." ~Leonard Jacobson
"The good among the great understand that every choice we make adds to the strength or weakness of our spirits—ourselves, or to use an old fashioned word for the same idea, our souls. That is every human’s life work: to construct an identity bit by bit, to walk a path step by step, to live a life that is worthy of something higher, lighter, more fulfilling, and maybe even everlasting." ~Donald Van de Mark from Living Life Fully
"The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all." ~Ted Hughes from LLF
"The present is passed over in the race for the future; the here is neglected in favor of the there. Enjoy the moment, even if it means merely a walk in the country." ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day. . . we become seekers." ~Peter Matthiessen
"The true teachers defend their pupils against their own personal influence. They inspire self-trust. They guide their student's eyes from themselves to the spirit that quickens them. They will have no disciple." ~Amos Bronson Alcott
"There is a wise being living inside of you. It is your intuitive self. Focus your awareness into a deep place in your body, a place where your "gut feelings" reside. You can communicate with it by silently talking to it, making requests, or asking questions. Then relax, don't think too hard with your mind, and be open to receiving answers. They are usually very simple and relate to the present moment, not the past or the future, and they feel right." ~Shakti Gawain, from Living Life Fully
"To a large degree, the measure of our peace of mind is determined by how much we are able to live in the present moment. Irrespective of what happened yesterday or last year, and what may or may not happen tomorrow, the present moment is where you are--always!" ~Richard Carlson
"Today expect something good to happen to you no matter what occurred yesterday. Realize the past no longer holds you captive. It can only continue to hurt you if you hold on to it. Let the past go. A simply abundant world awaits." ~Sarah Ban Breathnach
"Use those talents you have. You will make it. You will give joy to the world. Take this tip from nature: The woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except those who sang best." ~Bernard Meltzer
"We are always surrounded by doors of opportunity. That’s the way life is. Often, opportunities do not come in packages wrapped in the colors we expected. When an unexpected surprise happens, we refuse to see it and so we miss the opportunity. Sometimes we are so focused on a goal far out in the future that we do not see what is right in front of us, or we get so busy hurrying and rushing around that we lose all perspective." ~Anne Wilson Schaef
"We like to put band-aids on things and consider them taken care of. As long as the surface looks okay, we tend not to worry too much about what's going on inside. You can't heal diseases by covering up the sores that they cause--we can only make things look a little better. If we want to heal--physically, emotionally, spiritually--we have to work at the core of the issue, and we have to take care of it fully and completely." ~Living Life Fully
"We restore the holiness of the world through our loving-kindness and compassion. Everyone participates. It is a collective task. Every act of loving-kindness, no matter how great or small, repairs the world. All those ever born have shared this collective work since the beginning of time." ~Rachel Naomi Remen
"What if we--just you and me--made a commitment to mindfully integrate kindness into each and every day of our lives? We would start a kindness revolution. Let's do it. Let's become the proverbial pebbles in the pond and send out ripples of kindness into the world each day. Those whose hearts are touched by our kindness will, hopefully, be encouraged to pass it on, and a revolution of much-needed kindness will have begun." ~Sue Patton Thoele
"When you practice humility, you want to become as accomplished and evolved as you can possibly be, yet you are willing to submit to the expertise of others to do so. You understand the scope of your aptitudes yet you choose to eradicate arrogance from your attitude, and you can distinguish the value you possess as an individual while still acting in the interests of your fellow human beings. Humility, simply put, is a form of balance in which you can celebrate your own worth while sincerely believing that every other person on the planet is just as worthy as you." ~Unattributed from Living Life Fully
"Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality—not as we expect it to be but as it is—is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love." ~Frederick Buechner
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"One does not need to fast for days and meditate for hours at a time to experience the sense of sublime mystery which constantly envelops us. All one need do is to notice intelligently, if even for a brief moment, a blossoming tree, a forest flooded with autumn colors, an infant smiling." ~Simon Greenberg
"One of the most important elements of living life fully is awareness-- awareness of our surroundings, of other people and their motives and fears and desires, of the things that affect us most in our lives, both positively and negatively." ~Living Life Fully
"People are all over the world telling their one dramatic story and how their life has turned into getting over this one event. Now their lives are more about the past than their future." ~Chuck Palahniuk
"Smile at each other, smile at your wife, smile at your husband, smile at your children, smile at each other--it doesn't matter who it is--and that will help you to grow up in greater love for each other." ~Mother Teresa
"Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn." ~Peter Matthiessen
"Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down." -Natalie Goldberg
"Stress is the resistance to what's happening right now. As we allow ourselves to open to this moment fully, there is absolutely no stress." ~Stephan Rechtschaffen
"The choice of solitude is not so much a rejection of community as a recognition that certain experiences and truths are so alien to ordinary consciousness that the individual must withdraw in order to experience them." ~Carol P. Christ
"The ego is often deeply involved in the desire to help others. If you do not want your ego to be involved in this way, do not be available for others unless you really want to be available. Do not feel that you should be available. Don't sacrifice yourself in any way. Don't go against your true feelings. Don't carry the cross for anyone else. Make sure that there's no sense that helping others makes you a better person or that it will gain you easy access into Heaven. Don't be a martyr." ~Leonard Jacobson
"The good among the great understand that every choice we make adds to the strength or weakness of our spirits—ourselves, or to use an old fashioned word for the same idea, our souls. That is every human’s life work: to construct an identity bit by bit, to walk a path step by step, to live a life that is worthy of something higher, lighter, more fulfilling, and maybe even everlasting." ~Donald Van de Mark from Living Life Fully
"The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all." ~Ted Hughes from LLF
"The present is passed over in the race for the future; the here is neglected in favor of the there. Enjoy the moment, even if it means merely a walk in the country." ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh
"The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day. . . we become seekers." ~Peter Matthiessen
"The true teachers defend their pupils against their own personal influence. They inspire self-trust. They guide their student's eyes from themselves to the spirit that quickens them. They will have no disciple." ~Amos Bronson Alcott
"There is a wise being living inside of you. It is your intuitive self. Focus your awareness into a deep place in your body, a place where your "gut feelings" reside. You can communicate with it by silently talking to it, making requests, or asking questions. Then relax, don't think too hard with your mind, and be open to receiving answers. They are usually very simple and relate to the present moment, not the past or the future, and they feel right." ~Shakti Gawain, from Living Life Fully
"To a large degree, the measure of our peace of mind is determined by how much we are able to live in the present moment. Irrespective of what happened yesterday or last year, and what may or may not happen tomorrow, the present moment is where you are--always!" ~Richard Carlson
"Today expect something good to happen to you no matter what occurred yesterday. Realize the past no longer holds you captive. It can only continue to hurt you if you hold on to it. Let the past go. A simply abundant world awaits." ~Sarah Ban Breathnach
"Use those talents you have. You will make it. You will give joy to the world. Take this tip from nature: The woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except those who sang best." ~Bernard Meltzer
"We are always surrounded by doors of opportunity. That’s the way life is. Often, opportunities do not come in packages wrapped in the colors we expected. When an unexpected surprise happens, we refuse to see it and so we miss the opportunity. Sometimes we are so focused on a goal far out in the future that we do not see what is right in front of us, or we get so busy hurrying and rushing around that we lose all perspective." ~Anne Wilson Schaef
"We like to put band-aids on things and consider them taken care of. As long as the surface looks okay, we tend not to worry too much about what's going on inside. You can't heal diseases by covering up the sores that they cause--we can only make things look a little better. If we want to heal--physically, emotionally, spiritually--we have to work at the core of the issue, and we have to take care of it fully and completely." ~Living Life Fully
"We restore the holiness of the world through our loving-kindness and compassion. Everyone participates. It is a collective task. Every act of loving-kindness, no matter how great or small, repairs the world. All those ever born have shared this collective work since the beginning of time." ~Rachel Naomi Remen
"What if we--just you and me--made a commitment to mindfully integrate kindness into each and every day of our lives? We would start a kindness revolution. Let's do it. Let's become the proverbial pebbles in the pond and send out ripples of kindness into the world each day. Those whose hearts are touched by our kindness will, hopefully, be encouraged to pass it on, and a revolution of much-needed kindness will have begun." ~Sue Patton Thoele
"When you practice humility, you want to become as accomplished and evolved as you can possibly be, yet you are willing to submit to the expertise of others to do so. You understand the scope of your aptitudes yet you choose to eradicate arrogance from your attitude, and you can distinguish the value you possess as an individual while still acting in the interests of your fellow human beings. Humility, simply put, is a form of balance in which you can celebrate your own worth while sincerely believing that every other person on the planet is just as worthy as you." ~Unattributed from Living Life Fully
"Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality—not as we expect it to be but as it is—is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love." ~Frederick Buechner
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