Every creature was designed to serve a purpose. Learn from animals for they are there to teach you the way of life. --Suzy Kassem (in The Animal Rescuer of Assam)

I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light. --Barbara Brown Taylor (in Why We Need Darkness)

Life can survive in the constant shadow of illness, and even rise to moments of rampant joy, but the shadow remains, and one has to make space for it. --Diane Ackerman (in Diane Ackerman: 100 Names for Love)

There is more to life than increasing its speed. --Mahatma Gandhi (in Why Busyness is Actually Modern Laziness)

Faith means living with uncertainty--feeling your way through life, letting your heart guide you like a lantern in the dark --Dan Millman (in The Religious Value of the Unknown)

Interaction with self, with other human beings, and with Nature, all should lead to harmony and peace. That is the purpose of life. --Anand Damani (in Wild Borders)

The true life of the bowl began the moment it was dropped. --Ancient Kintsugi quote (in Kintsugi: The Golden Joinery of Love)

Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life. --Nelson Mandela (in Humanizing Aid with Dignity)

We have now felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise means for maintaining the permanence of its relations to the fields, the meadows and the pastures, to the rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with which it waters down the earth. --George Perkins Marsh (in 1864 (in 20-Year Reforestation Project Plants 2.7 Million Trees)

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. --Rachel Carson (in Falling in Love With the Earth)

The connections we make in the course of a life--maybe that's what heaven is. --Fred Rogers (in Why We Turn to Mr. Rogers)

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. --Stella Adler (in John Barton: A Certain Mathematics)

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. --Carl Jung (in Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results)

I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion--and where it isn't, that's where my work lies. --Ram Dass (in Be Love Now)

Safety and security don't just happen, they are the result of collective consensus and public investment. We owe our children, the most vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear. --Nelson Mandela (in METAdrasi: Escorting Children to Freedom and Hope)

The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness,
And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream. --Kahlil Gibran (in Kahlil Gibran on Befriending Time)

Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it till the end. That is what I have found in nonviolence. --Martin Luther King, Jr. (in Understanding King's Nonviolence)

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife. --Kahlil Gibran (in Meaning and the Song of the Soul)

In our estrangement from nature we have severed our sense of the community of life and lost touch with the experience of other animals. ...understanding the human animal becomes easier in context, seeing our human thread woven into the living web among the strands of so many others. --Carl Safina (in Of Wild Wolves And Bottle-Fed Squirrels)

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 W. Raymond (in Love Letters from La Pineta)

Everything we see and touch consists of matter rearranged by information and energy. Everything is in connections and bonds. Life, mind, and love, our human nature, have been created in partnership with the rules that run the world. --Paul R. Fleischman (in The Wonder of the Universe is Wondering in Us)

Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky. --Ursula K. Le Guin (in Jane Rosen: Stay Here. Tell My Story.)

Trees do not preach learning and precepts. They preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. --Herman Hesse (in 111 Trees)

Love, oneness, is no separation between you and life. It is a progressive letting go, a progressive not fault finding... It's very beautiful and very deep. --Ajahn Brahm (in The Monkey and the River)

We -- young and old together -- hold the future in our hands. If our common life is to become more compassionate, creative, and just, it will take an intergenerational effort. --Parker Palmer (in Courage & Vulnerability: Corona & the Wisdom of Elders)

Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value. --Desmond Tutu (in SUPERHERO: A Music Video for Our Times)

Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me. --Albert Schweitzer (in How I am Finding Purpose and Connection in a Pandemic)

I would not give a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. --Oliver Wendell Holmes (in Turning Ourselves Towards Stability and Hospitality)

Science and poetry are, in fact, inseparable. By providing a vision of life, of Earth, of the universe in all its splendor, science does not challenge human values; it can inspire human values. It does not negate faith; it celebrates faith. --Jacques-Yves Cousteau (in The Poet & the Scientist)

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. --Henry David Thoreau (in The Taste of Wild Water)

What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving from the heart. --Marshall B. Rosenberg (in Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life)

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, a human cannot live without a spiritual life. --The Buddha (in Reduced or Realigned?)

Listen. Are you breathing just a little and calling it a life? --Mary Oliver (in Breathing Miracles Into Being: The Linda Scotson Technique)

By activating your own goodness within, under any circumstances --especially in hard or difficult conditions -- life itself will lead to goodness. --Master Mingtong Gu (in What Qi Gong Taught One Doctor About Healing)

That which secures life from exhaustion lies in the unseen world, deep at the roots of things. --Rudolf Steiner (in The Soil's Story is the Story of Us)

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all. --Richard Wright (in Human Connections in 'This Brilliant Darkness')

...to begin always anew, to make, to reconstruct, and to not spoil, to refuse to bureaucratize the mind, to understand and
to live life as a process --live to become... --Paulo Freire (in Teaching to Transgress: bell hooks on Education)

We cannot create compartments in life -- political, economic, social, environmental. Whatever we do or don't do affects and touches the wholeness, the homogeneity. We are forever organically related to wholeness. --Vimala Thakar (in Spirituality and Social Action: A Holistic Approach)

This is the real secret of life -- to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. --Alan Watts (in Kiran Khalap: Navigating Business, Creativity and Spirituality)

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. --Susan Sontag (in Life in the Time of Cholera: Lessons on a Pandemic)

Deep trust in life is not a feeling but a stance that you deliberately take. It is the attitude we call courage. --Br. David Steindl-Rast (in Deepening Our Comfort With Uncertainty)

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it. --Gabriel Garcia Marquez (in Remembering Our Way Forward)

I love a broad margin to my life. --Henry David Thoreau (in Time Confetti and the Broken Promise of Leisure)

Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them. --Marcus Aurelius (in A Case for Wonder)

Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone -- we find it with another. --Thomas Merton (in Top 10 Insights from the Science of a Meaningful Life)

There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light. -- (in Barry Lopez: Lyrical Writer and Thoreau of Our Times)

Although we are in different boats you in your boat and we in our canoe we share the same river of life. --Chief Oren Lyons (in Lottie Cunningham: Dedicated to Indigenous Rights)

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself. --Anais Nin (in Matthew Fox: How Important is Truth?)

We cannot, of course, save the World because we do not have authority over its parts. We can serve the world though. That is everyone's calling, to lead a life that helps. --Barry Lopez (in Writers & Artists on the Influence of Barry Lopez)

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. --Martha Graham (in Fatherland)