quotes

Jules Petit-Senn: “It’s not what we have that constitutes our abundance, but what we appreciate.”

“No single event can awaken within us a stranger whose existence we had never suspected. To live is to be slowly born.”
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry

Milarepa: “When you run after your thoughts, you are like a dog chasing a stick: every time a stick is thrown, you run after it. Instead, be like a lion who, rather than chasing after the stick, turns to face the thrower. One only throws a stick at a lion once.”

“To be nobody but yourself  in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.”  e.e. cummings

Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that’s why we decide we’re done. It’s getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.” Natalie Goldberg

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. —Bertrand Russell

My religion is simple.  My religion is kindness.  Dalai Lama

There are times when silence is a lie.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.  Franz Kafka

Re/mindfulness:  As Sherlock Holmes pointed out, “I only see what you see, Doctor Watson, but I have trained myself to notice what I see.”

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.  Henry David Thoreau

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.  Oscar Wilde

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will. Simone Weil

If you wish to create, as quickly as possible, real shelter from sorrow for both yourself and others – you should practice the holy secret teaching of the transposition of self and other.  Shantideva

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.”
- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

“Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.”
- William James

Do not trample the earth, do not crush the sweet-smelling fruit.
For love of it, bend down, smell it and give it your mouth. – Gabriela Mistral

 You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger. – Buddha

 

 poet Mary Oliver, “…Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

 Staying with the “what is this?” quality of our experience, and allowing it to just be, basically requires a critical practice understanding: that it’s more painful to try to push away our own pain than it is to feel it. This understanding is not intellectual but something that eventually takes root in the core of our being.  Ezra Bayda, Zen Heart

“We now know that human transformation does not happen through didacticism or through excessive certitude, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality.” - Walter Brueggemann

Every breathing moment of our lives presents us with the possibility of awakening to wisdom. Every action, every thought we generate leads us constantly to the brink of discovering our true selves.  –Ajahn Sumano Bhikkhu with Emily Popp

The root of all difficulty and conflict lies in the mind; therefore, the solution to all difficulty and conflict lies in changing the mind.  Kusan Sunim

Where would I possibly find enough leather
With which to cover the surface of the earth?
But just leather on the soles of my shoes
Is equivalent to covering the earth with it

Likewise it is not possible for me
To restrain the external course of things
But should I restrain this mind of mine
What would be the need to restrain all else?

—Shantideva

“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.”
- David Foster Wallace

We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full.”

— Marcel Proust

Through the disciplined precision of our efforts, we’ll come again and again to our edge—the difficult places beyond which we’ve previously been unable to move. Through the willingness to soften and surrender to what is, we learn that we can gradually move beyond that edge. It is only through this interplay of hard and soft, of effort and letting be, of will and willingness, that we learn to our amazement that we can emerge from the lifelong tunnel of fear that constitutes our substitute life into the nitty-gritty reality of our genuine one.  -Ezra Bayda

In the end these things matter most:

How well did you love?  

How fully did you live?

How deeply did you let go?

~The Buddha

 The point here is to take life in all its rich variety just as it is, with its ten thousand opposites, and to go along with whatever circumstances require, embracing things after their own inclination or according to chance, letting things be rather than getting in their way, and thus allowing each and every thing, each and every appearance, to pursue a meaning and purpose distinct from my own.”
- Kato Totsudo

Eventually, we all need to be willing to face the deepest, darkest beliefs we have about ourselves. Only in this way can we come to know that they are only beliefs, and not the truth about who we are.   – Ezra Bayda

The word “spiritual”  includes all those whose deepest values lead them to challenge the ethos of selfishness and materialism that has led people into a frantic search for money and power and away from a life that places love, kindness, generosity, peace, nonviolence, social justice, awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation, thanksgiving, humility and joy at the center of our lives.  Rabbi Micael Lerner

“I have learned to be happy where I am. I have learned that locked within the moments of each day are all the joys, the peace, the fibers of the cloth we call life. The meaning is in the moment. There is no other way to find it. You feel what you allow yourself to feel, each and every moment of the day.”
- Russ Berrie

Finally I am coming to the conclusion
that my highest ambition is to be what I already am.
That I will never fulfill my obligation
to surpass myself
unless I first accept myself,
and if I accept myself fully in the right way,
I will already have surpassed myself.
- Thomas Merton

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” 

~Hans Hoffman