There are many things in life that will catch your eye, but only a few will catch your heart...pursue those. --Michael Nolan (in Peru's Home of Miracles)

When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore. --Shunryu Suzuki (in A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality)

The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always. --William Faulkner (in Secret to Long Life: School)

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. --Immanuel Kant (in South Africa's Free Science Texts)

Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things. --William Golding (in Pedals for Progress)

There comes that mysterious meeting in life when someone acknowledges who we are and what we can be, igniting the circuits of our highest potential. --Rusty Berkus (in The Baby Academy)

How do you go from where you are to where you want to be? I think you have to have an enthusiasm for life. You have to have a dream, a goal, and you have to be willing to work for it. --Jim Valvano (in Running A Marathon On Crutches)

Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more. --Anthony Robbins (in Doctor Inspires Service To Ethiopia)

You would know the secret of death. But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life? --Kahlil Gibran (in Ethical Wills: Legacies of Wisdom)

We don't accomplish anything in this world alone ... and whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one's life and all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that creates something. --Sandra Day O'Connor (in Bangladeshi Housewives Overcome TB)

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof. --Richard Bach (in Breakthrough In Blood Types)

You can understand and relate to most people better if you look at them -- no matter how old or impressive they may be -- as if they are children. For most of us never really grow up or mature all that much -- we simply grow taller. O, to be sure, we laugh less and play less and wear uncomfortable disguises like adults, but beneath the costume is the child we always are, whose needs are simple, whose daily life is still best described by fairy tales. --Leo Rosten (in 13 Child Jurors & Their Verdict)

We are coming to understand health not as the absence of disease, but rather as the process by which individuals maintain their sense of coherence (i.e. sense that life is comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful) and ability to function in the face of changes in themselves and their relationships with their environment. --Aaron Antonovsky (in World's First PhD Program In Happiness)

Being healthy means a wholeness in the living of one's life -- a dynamic and constantly changing balance that acknowledges the soundness of our physical state, the wholesomeness of lifestyle, the values that define our behavior, our intimate and collective relationships, the meaning and purpose of our work in the world, and the spiritual dimension of our existence. --William B. Stewart (in Seven Simple Health Habits)

If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes. --Albert Einstein (in The Art of Powerful Questions)

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. --Hermann Hesse (in Guardian of Earth's Trees)

I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again. --William Penn (in Kindness Meters)

Don't seek to merely get rid of the negative things in your life. Instead, transform their energy into something of real positive value. --Ralph Marston (in Transforming a Village on $3 a Month)

When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. --Alan Watts (in Commuting to Inner Peace)

Rhythm and harmony are essential to the whole of life. --Plato (in Music As A Tool For Learning)

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit. --Nelson Henderson (in Small Farmer, Big Benefactor)

My goal in life is to be as good of a person my dog already thinks I am. --Author Unknown (in Dogs Think More Than We Know)

Life has meaning only if one barters it day by day for something other than itself. --Antoine de Saint-Exupery (in The Time Bank: Better Than Barter)

I believe it to be perfectly possible for an individual to adopt the way of life of the future. . . without having to wait for others to do so. --Mahatma Gandhi (in Making Cars Not Garbage)

We generate our own environment. We get exactly what we deserve. How can we resent a life we've created ourselves? Who's to blame, who's to credit but us? Who can change it, anytime we wish, but us? --Richard Bach (in The New French Revolution)

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream. --Martin Luther King Jr. (in Triple Amputee Earns Medical Degree)

A man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied; he must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which it is enwrapped, for everything cannot be equally considered; in a word, he must be able to simplify his duties, his business and his life. --Henri Frederic Amiel (in The Year Without Toilet Paper)

Money is only useful when it is moving and flowing, contributed and shared, directed and invested in that which is life affirming. --Lynne Twist (in Neurosurgeon Gives $20 Million for Village)

I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other. --Sean O'Casey (in Your Stories Of The Good Life)

The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind. --William James (in The Brain Is A Muscle)

The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense his life. . . . The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds -- how many human aspirations are realised in their free, holiday-lives -- and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song! --John Burroughs (in The Generosity of Birds)

Take your needle, my child, and work at your pattern; it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that - one stitch at a time taken patiently and the pattern will come out all right like the embroidery. --Oliver Wendell Holmes (in Sewing For Hope In The Favela)

Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world. --John Milton (in Message in a Wallet)

Gratitude is something of which none of us can give too much. For on the smiles, the thanks we give, our little gestures of appreciation, our neighbors build their philosophy of life. --A.J. Cronin (in Secrets of a Successful Relationship)

So often in time it happens, we all live our life in chains, and we never even know we have the key. --The Eagles (in Around the World and Bach)

Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. --Rossiter Worthington Raymond (in A 9 Year-Old Writes of Loss)

People are hungry for messages of hope and life. --Morgan Brittany (in Know a Word? Then, Donate Rice.)

It is worth reminding ourselves that what brings us the greatest joy and satisfaction in life are those actions we undertake out of concern for others. Indeed we can go further. For whereas the fundamental questions of human existence, such as why we are here, where we are going, and whether the universe had a beginning, have each elicited different responses in different philosophical traditions, it is self-evident that a generous heart and wholesome actions lead to greater peace. --Dalai Lama (in What Makes Us Moral?)

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself. --Anais Nin (in Live Like Andrew)

We are all too much inclined to walk through life with our eyes shut. There are things all around us, and right at our very feet, that we have never seen; because we have never really looked. --Alexander Graham Bell (in Unleashing Creativity)

Life is a celebration of awakenings, of new beginnings, and wonderful surprises that enlighten the soul. --Cielo (in The Mystery Muffin Giver)

When I look back, I am so impressed again with the life-giving power of literature. If I were a young person today, trying to gain a sense of myself in the world, I would do that again by reading, just as I did when I was young. --Maya Angelou (in World's Fastest Literacy Program)

To maintain a skillful balance between the inner and outer aspects of our lives is an enormously challenging and continuously changing process. The objective is not to dogmatically live with less, but is a more demanding intention of living with balance in order to find a life of greater purpose, fulfillment and satisfaction. --Duane Elgin (in The Story of Stuff)

A flower's appeal is in its contradictions -- so delicate in form yet strong in fragrance, so small in size yet big in beauty, so short in life yet long on effect. --Adabella Radici (in Kindness In Full Bloom)

I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened. --Mark Twain (in 10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong)

Essentially, a story expresses how and why life changes. --Robert McKee (in Storytelling That Moves People)

If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert. He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator. He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself. He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day. --W. Beran Wolfe (in The Geography of Bliss)

It does not seem to be true that work necessarily needs to be unpleasant. It may always have to be hard, or at least harder than doing nothing at all. But there is ample evidence that work can be enjoyable, and that indeed, it is often the most enjoyable part of life. --Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (in The 7 Keys To Joy at Work)

The joy is that we can take back our bodies, reclaim our health, and restore ourselves to balance. We can take power over what and how we eat. We can rejuvenate and recharge ourselves, bringing healing to the wounds we carry inside us, and bringing to fuller life the wonderful person that each of us can be. --John Robbins (in What The World Eats In A Week)

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are travelling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind. --Henri-Frederic Amiel (in For the Homeless From the Heart)