Just as treasures are uncovered from the earth, so virtue appears from good deeds, and wisdom appears from a pure and peaceful mind. To walk safely through the maze of human life, one needs the light of wisdom and the guidance of virtue. --Buddha (in The Three Building Blocks of Virtue)

Each resolve to live more kindly loosens restrictive knots of self-interest. Life then flows more freely on its true course. The way an unfettered river runs swift to the ocean. --Daily Good Editors (in A New Kind of New Year's Resolution)

Once you bring life into the world, you must protect it. We must protect it by changing the world. --Elie Wiesel (in Mother Robin: Delivering Hope & Babies)

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 Life Is Easy ...When You Simplify)

Life is no "brief candle" to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. --George Bernard Shaw (in Inside Tim Tebow's World of Kindness)

Lasting change happens when people see for themselves that a different way of life is more fulfilling than their present one. --Eknath Easwaran (in Man Builds Fairy Tale Home -- For $4700)

There is nothing still. Life is never still. No plant, no animal no river. Can we think of Nature as a metaphor and keep ourselves constantly evolving? --Anil Gupta (in Redefining What it Means to Grow)

Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. And between the two my life flows. --Nisargadatta Maharaj (in Valentine's Day Wisdom)

When a child enters your life it's time to learn [not time to teach]. --Jaggi Vasudev (in High Schooler Devises Potential Cancer Cure )

Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with the truth. --Thich Nhat Hanh (in 7 Habits of Mindful Eating)

There is no greater joy nor greater reward than to make a fundamental difference in someone's life. -- Sr. Mary Rose McGeady (in The Kindness Boomerang)

A different language is a different vision of life. --Federico Fellini (in How Language Enabled Innovation and Evolution)

To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded --Ralph Waldo Emerson (in Office Workers Raise 5 Day Old Kitten)

It is only when we silent the blaring sounds of our daily existence that we can finally hear the whispers of truth that life reveals to us, as it stands knocking on the doorsteps of our hearts. --K.T. Jong (in How to Be Alone)

Half the spiritual life consists of remembering what we are up against and where we are going. --Ayya Khema (in Broken Bodies, Broken Minds, Amazing Spirits)

We are the living links in a life force that moves and plays around and through us, binding the deepest soils with the farthest stars. --Alan Chadwick (in Seeing in the Dark)

Human life runs its course in the metamorphosis between receiving and giving. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (in From Selling to Serving)

The mother's battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival. --Adrienne Rich (in Five Poverty-fighting Women to Watch)

This mind-and-body is the vessel of my life. I want to know it with the same organic immersion that sets a snow goose flying ten thousand miles every winter and spring. --Paul R. Fleischman (in Meditation: A Compass and a Path)

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe to match your nature with Nature. --Joseph Campbell (in 20 Amazing Photos From Outer Space)

Life is like a ten-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use. --Charles M. Schulz (in 10 Keys To Happier Living)

Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. --Plato (in Henry, an iPod and Music's Alchemy)

All of the troubles of life come upon us because we refuse to sit quietly for a while each day in our rooms. --Blaise Pascal (in Meditating with Dinosaurs ... Really?)

Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life forms, plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future. --Terry Tempest Williams (in What A Plant Knows)

Optimism is invaluable for the meaningful life. With a firm belief in a positive future you can throw yourself into the service of that which is larger than you are. --Martin Seligman (in The Importance of Learned Optimism)

There is more to life than increasing its speed. --Mohandas K. Gandhi (in Starting A Slow Story Movement)

A different language is a different vision of life. --Federico Fellini (in Vanishing Voices: The World's Endangered Languages)

In life, it is never the big battle, the big moment, the big speech, the big election. That does not change things. What changes things is every day, getting up and rendering small acts of service and love beyond that what's expected of you or required of you. --Cory Booker (in A Conspiracy of Love: Stanford Graduation Speech)

Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is. --Saul Bellow (in Guerilla Gardener Plants Joy in Potholes)

How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it. --Charles Eisenstein (in The Spirit of Gift)

Life offers its wisdom generously. Everything teaches. Not everyone learns. --Rachel Naomi Remen (in The Literary Physician & How Stories Heal)

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. --Mary Oliver (in What I Learned From 30 Years Of Watching A River)

Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. --Ansel Adams (in The Point of Being Alive)

I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance. --Pablo Casals (in One Hat, One Heart)

We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations. --David Brower (in New Zealand's River That Is A Person)

Excellence in health means devoting your life to ending poverty. --Patch Adams (in Your Health Is Bigger Than Your Body)

Human life runs its course in the metamorphosis between receiving and giving. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (in Somebody Tagged Me!)

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. --Confucius (in Solving Gen Y's Passion Problem)

Our life is composed greatly from dreams from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together. --Anais Nin (in A Weaver's Reflections)

Don't be content in your life just to do no wrong. Be prepared every day to try to do some good. --Nicholas Winton (in The 29-Year-Old Stockbroker Who Saved 699 Lives)

Never become so much of an expert that you stop gaining expertise. View life as a continuous learning experience. --Denis Waitley (in Throw Your Life a Curve)

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else. --Joseph Campbell (in The Man Who Left Hollywood For His True Calling)

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. --Wendell Berry (in Soil, Soul and Society)

Each of us will one day be judged by our standard of life -- not by our standard of living; by our measure of giving -- not by our measure of wealth; by our simple goodness -- not by our seeming greatness. --William Arthur Ward (in Untrack: Letting Go of the Stress of Measuring)

And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see - it is, rather, a light by which we may see - and what we see is life. --Robert Penn Warren (in The Benefits of Poetry for Professionals)

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change. --Buddha (in Creativity Blossoms in Beijing)

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain.
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain. --Emily Dickinson (in My Brother & The Power of Milk Moments)

Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way. --John Muir (in The Kindness of Beasts)

We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations. --David Brower (in Are You Building Your Legacy?)

Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment --Eckhart Tolle (in Stop Focusing On Your Performance)