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)

There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life -- happiness, freedom, and peace of mind -- are always attained by giving them to someone else. --Peyton Conway March (in Fairy Godmother)

The pressure of the hands causes the springs of life to flow. --Tokujiro Namikoshi (in Human Touch)

We are not seeking a meaning of life, we are seeking an experience of being alive. --Joseph Campbell (in Untitled)

Where there is love there is life. --Gandhi (in Untitled)

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

If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be unhappy for the rest of your life." --Abraham Maslow (in Born to Run)

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 Co-Housing)

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. --Ralph Waldo Emerson (in Operation Katrina)

Live your life and forget your age. --Norman Vincent Peale (in Love Life)

“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, poet (in Untitled)

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; Where there is injury, pardon; Where there is discord, union; Where there is doubt, faith; Where there is despair, hope; Where there is darkness, light; Where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek To be consoled as to console; To be understood as to understand; To be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; It is in pardoning that we are pardoned; And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. --The Prayer of St Francis (in The Prayer of St Francis)

The day I saw beneath dark clouds the passing light over the water and I heard the voice of the world speak out, I knew then, as I had before life is no passing memory of what has been nor the remaining pages in a great book waiting to be read. It is the opening of eyes long closed. It is the vision of far off thinks seen for the silence they hold. It is in the heart after years of secret conversing speaking out loud in the clear air. It is Moses in the desert fallen to his knees before the lit bush. It is the man throwing away his shoes as if to enter heaven and finding himself astonished, opened at last, fallen in love with solid ground. --David Whyte (in The Opening of Eyes)

Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. --Alan Watts (in Cerebral Calasthenics)

At the end of our life our questions are simple: Did I live fully? Did I love well? --Jack Kornfield (in Near Death)

If we sell you the land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. --Chief Seattle (in The Value of Earth)

I have one life and one chance to make it count for something . . . I'm free to choose what that something is, and the something I've chosen is my faith. Now, my faith goes beyond theology and religion and requires considerable work and effort. My faith demands -- this is not optional -- my faith demands that I do whatever I can, wherever I am, whenever I can, for as long as I can with whatever I have to try to make a difference. --Jimmy Carter (in Faith)

We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later; and the birth and growth of the spirit, in those who are attentive to their own inner life, are slow and exceedingly painful. Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth. --Mary Antin, 1912 (in Birth Pains)

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself. --Ralph Waldo Emerson (in Tsunami Service)

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. --Barbara Kingsolver (in Social Capitalists)

Learn from the lowliest in the earth, in the birds, in the trees, in the grass, in the flowers, in the bees -- likewise listen to the birds, watch the blush of the rose, listen to the life rising in the tree. --Edgar Cayce (in Honey Bee Network)