Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. --Melody Beattie (in Gratitude)

You learn quickly that unnecessary possessions are unnecessary burdens. You soon realize what the essentials of life are -- warmth when you are cold, a dry spot on a rainy day, the simplest food when you are hungry, pure cool water when you are thirsty. You soon put material things in their proper place. --Peace Pilgrim (in Sharing Warmth)

An act that positively influences the life of both the giver and the receiver is a kindness. It doesn't have to cost money or be difficult to perform. It can be spontaneous or premeditated. It can be as simple as a smile or a thank you, or as complicated as starting a non-profit organization to benefit those in need. Actively seeking out opportunities to assist others will naturally bring a certain amount of warmth and feeling of self-worth to each of us. It feels good to help others and others feel good knowing someone wants to help them. --Chuck Wall (in Giver and Receiver)

To explain that which is simple can be difficult indeed. If we can understand even one simple thing in depth, we will have greatly expanded our capacity for comprehending the nature of the universe and life itself. --David Hawkins (in Measuring Emotions)

The ongoing *WOW* is happening right now. We are all co-authors of this dancing exuberance, for even our inabilities are having a roast. We are the authors of ourselves, co-authoring a gigantic Dostoevsky novel starring clowns. This entire thing we're involved with called the world is an opportunity to exhibit how exciting alienation can be. Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments flabbergasted to be in each others' presence. The world is an exam, to see if we can rise into the direct experiences. Our eyesight is here as a test, to see if we can see beyond it. Matter is here as a test for our curiosity. Doubt is here as an exam for our vitality. --Timothy Levitch (in The Ongoing Wow)

Love is the form that gives life to the process and is itself increased by its own endeavor. Love becomes quite literally all. In states of coherence one is marrying oneself on all levels. Love then takes the next quantum leap and one loves all others in one's immediate reality. This then moves to an all-encompassing love for all and everything. And so loves becomes the most gentle and most powerful agent for the fielding and forming of reality. In love the lenses fall away. In love one forms all formings. In loves one arrives home at last. --Jean Huston (in Lenses Fall Away)

Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with the truth. --Thich Nhat Hanh (in Technology and Honesty)

My life seems to be an increasing revelation of the intimate face of universal struggle. You begin with your family and the kids on the block, and next you open your eyes to what you call your people, and that leads you into land reform into Black English into Angola leads you back to your own bed where you lie by yourself, wondering if you deserve to be peaceful, or trusted or desired or left to the freedom of your own unfaltering heart. And the scale shrinks to the size of a skull: your own interior cage. And then if you’re lucky, and I have been lucky, everything comes back to you. And then you know why one of the freedom fighters in the sixties, a young Black woman interviewed shortly after she was beaten up for riding near the front of the interstate bus––you know why she said, 'We are all so very happy'? It’s because it's on. All of us and me by myself: we’re on. --June Jordan (in We're On!)

Every person must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life's most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others? --Martin Luther King Jr. (in Ten Thousand Dollar Bills)

The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it. --William James (in Capitalism to Clean the Sky)

I've never planned my life. So that makes for some bumpy transitions but sometimes you end up in unbelievable situations. --Sarah Chayes (in Never Planned My Life)

The reason you want to make money is to be secure to live a certain way. Simply having wealth doesn't produce that end. It doesn't matter if you have a six-figure salary if you can't breathe the air or drink the water. A better question to ask would be, What are the elements of a life worth living, and how can I assemble them? --Jed Emerson (in Life Worth Living)

I don't want to be a great leader. I want to be a man who goes around with a little oil can and when he sees a breakdown, offers his help. To me, the man who does that is greater than any holy man in saffron-colored robes. The mechanic with the oilcan, that is my ideal in life. --Baba Amte (in Mechanic With an Oil Can)

Life is a mystery until you touch the reality beyond the veil. When the mind is still and the search is intense, we have the vision to see reality all around us. Every person you meet is in a world you could know. Nature waits for our entrance, whether it is a forest or a rose. All around us is the presence waiting for a quiet mind and an open heart. Walking through the markets and riding in the subway, we can be close to the reality. We are moving through various states of reality during the day. --Herman Rednick (in Reality Beyond The Veil)

Life is a pilgrimage. The wise man does not rest by the roadside inns. He marches direct to the illimitable domain of eternal bliss, his ultimate destination. --Oscar Wilde (in Rolling For Peace)

At every moment in every person’s life there is work to be done, always work to be done, some of it small, some of it Great. The Great Work, in a sense, always has to do with healing the world, changing the world, and, as a necessary predicate to that, understanding the world. You rise every morning aware that you are called to this work. You won’t live to see it finished. But if you can’t hear it calling, you aren’t listening hard enough. It’s always calling, sometimes in a big voice, sometimes in a quiet voice. --Tony Kushner (in The Great Work)

When life gives you lemons... make lemonade! --Author Unknown (in When Life Gives You Lemons...)

The best things in life aren't things. --Art Buchwald (in Best Things in Life)

The real questions are the ones that obtrude upon your consciousness whether you like it or not, the ones that make your mind start vibrating like a jackhammer, the ones that you "come to terms with" only to discover that they are still there. The real questions refuse to be placated. They barge into your life at the times when it seems most important for them to stay away. They are the questions asked most frequently and answered most inadequately, the ones that reveal their true natures slowly, reluctantly, most often against your will. --Ingrid Bengis (in The Real Questions)

You are not just a meaningless fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between life and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation. Underneath your outer form, you are connected with something so vast, so immeasurable and sacred, that it cannot be spoken of. --Eckhart Tolle (in Power of Now)

You learn to cultivate other areas of your life that are there, that are untapped. When someone is in that frame of mind you can handle anything, you can be more compassionate. You don't put yourself down so much, you don't have to struggle with yourself trying to be perfect. --Dalia Isicoff (in Meditation and Arthritis)

You are held within the web of life, within flows of energy and intelligence far exceeding your own. --Joanna Macy (in 'V' Formation)

My only regret of a fabulous life was that I didn’t have any children, but now I am blessed with over 100! --Rosamond Carr, founder of an orphanage (in Land of Thousand Hills)

Everything you see has its roots in the unseen world. The forms may change, yet the essence remains the same. Every wonderful sight will vanish; every sweet word will fade, but do not be disheartened; the source they come from is eternal, growing, branching out, giving new life and new joy. Why do you weep? The source is within you; and this whole world is springing up from it. --Rumi (in Clandestine Brain Activity)

It is the story of two young men who leave on an adventurous journey throughout an unknown continent, and this journey of discovery becomes one of self-discovery as well. This is a film about the emotional and political elections we have to make in life. It’s also about friendship, about solidarity. Finally, it's about finding one's place in the world, one that is worth fighting for. --Walter Salles, on 'Motorcycle Diaries' (in An Adventurous Journey)

When you have seen beyond yourself, then you may find, peace of mind is waiting there. And the time will come, when you see that we're all one, and life flows on, within you and without you. --George Harrison (in Untitled)

When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it, explaining and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect, all these experiences in self-gratification seem pure fantasy. --Stephen Covey (in When I Look Back)

Share with others the fullness of spirit that flows from your religious life. Give of yourself: give time, not just money; give directly, not just impersonally; above all, give love. --Arthur Green (in Journey is the Destination)

The mystery, the essence of all life is not separate from the silent openness of simple listening. --Toni Packer (in Simple Listening)

And that is why I have to go back to so many places in the future, there to find myself and constantly examine my life with no witness but the moon and then whistle with joy ambling over rocks and doors of Earth with no task but to live, with no family but the road. --Pablo Neruda (in No Task But To Live)

Whoever saves one life, saves the world in time. --Talmud (in 130,000 And Counting)

Life is not a dress rehearsal. Everyday, you should have at least one exquisite moment. --Sally Karioth (in A Dying Man's Dream Fulfilled)

You cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To "have" running water you must let go of it and let it run. --Alan Watts (in Let It Run)

To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance. --Oscar Wilde (in Untitled)

You can go your whole life and not need math or physics for a minute, but the ability to tell a joke is always handy. --Garrison Keillor (in A brain walks into a bar...)

All of life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly --Martin Luther King (in Engineers Without Borders)

There is a vitality, a life force that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. --Martha Graham (in The Only You)

I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to Swaraj for the hungry and the spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubt and your self melting away. --M.K. Gandhi (in A Talisman)

The best and most beautiful things in life cannot be seen, not touched, but felt in the heart. --Helen Keller (in City Repair)

As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will not be poverty, nor weakness weakness. --Henry David Thoreau (in The Rural Studio)

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. --Winston Churchill (in Clean Water World)

He who binds to himself a Joy, Does the winged life destroy; He who kisses the Joy as it flies, Lives in Eternity's sunrise. --William Blake (in Kissing Joy)

A different language is a different vision of life. --Federico Fellini (in Rosetta Project)

Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still. For once on the face of the earth let's not speak in any language, let's stop for one second, and not move our arms so much. It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines, we would all be together in a sudden strangeness. Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales and the man gathering salt would look at his hurt hands. Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire, victory with no survivors, would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade, doing nothing. What I want should not be confused with total inactivity. Life is what it is about; I want no truck with death. If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps the earth can teach us as when everything seems dead and later proves to be alive. Now I'll count up to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go. --Pablo Neruda (in Keeping Quiet)

All things are parts of one single system, which is called Nature; the individual life is good when it is in harmony with Nature. --Zeno, 300 - 260 B.C. (in Endangered Species Chocolate)

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. --George Bernard Shaw (in Song Bird)

Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence, the other from pride or fear. --Horace Mann (in Empty Pockets, Full Heart)

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life. --Jane Addams (in The Garbage Lady)

We don't realize that the gods are not out there somewhere. They live in us all. They are the energies of life itself. --Joseph Campbell (in Elves)

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. --Albert Einstein (in Mosaic Music)