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)

We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one. --Jacques Cousteau (in The Song of Grandmother Cricket)

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth. --Raymond Carver (in Click Here for Unconditional Love )

Poetry is life distilled. --Gwendolyn Brooks (in Discovering Poetry En Route to Life)

Water flows from high in the mountains
Water runs deep in the Earth
Miraculously, water comes to us,
And sustains all life. --Thich Nhat Hanh (in Our Memories of Water)

The animals of the planet are in desperate peril. Without free animal life, I believe we will lose the spiritual equivalent of oxygen. --Alice Walker (in The Caribou Guardians)

Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life.
--Wislawa Szymborska (in A Few Words on the Soul)

You enter life a ship laden with meaning, purpose and gifts
sent to be delivered to a hungry world.
And as much as the world needs your cargo,
you need to give it away.
Everything depends on this. --Greg Kimura (in The World Needs Your Cargo: Kozo Hattori & Sue Cochrane )

No water, no life. No blue, no green. --Sylvia Earle (in The Nature of Plastics)

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next. --Ursula Le Guin (in Grace in Uncertainty)

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 Buy Nothing Project Gift Economies)

In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life. --Vandana Shiva (in Reclaiming Our Common Home)

Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. --Confucius (in An Illustrated Poster for People Who Love Their Work)

A life without festivity is a long road without an inn. --Democritus (in For Small Creatures Such as We)

Walk boldly through your life with an open, broken heart.
--Joanna Macy (in The Shambhala Warrior's Weapon)

It seems to me that when I have a positive view towards anything, a positive result will more likely occur. Now being 79 years old and living a life that 99% of the time was spectacular, Ive proven my theory over and over again. --David Hoffman (in David Hoffman: A Positive View)

Trees do not preach learning and precepts. They preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life --Hermann Hesse (in How Trees Secretly Talk To Each Other)

In the tapestry of life, we're all connected. Each one of us is a gift to those around us helping each other be who we are, weaving a perfect picture together. --Sandra Day O'Connor (in The Art of Weaving)

Stillness and silence allow us to see things that were previously invisible, regardless of your walk of life. --Steve Elkins (in Echoes of the Invisible)

The more you study delight, the more delight there is to study...I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. --Ross Gay (in The Book of Delights: Ross Gay's Year of Willful Gladness)

A healthy social life is found only, when in the mirror of each soul the whole community finds its reflection, and when in the whole community the virtue of each one is living. --Rudolf Steiner (in Rise Up Again)

This rare and precious gift of human life has been bestowed upon us so that we may return to our true Home. --Dada Vaswani (in Live a Life Worth Living)

Man instinctively regards himself as a wanderer and wayfarer, and it is second nature for him to go on pilgrimage in search of a privileged and holy place, a center and source of indefectible life. --Thomas Merton (in On the Road with Thomas Merton)

Life is a farce if a person does not serve truth. --Hilma af Klint (in Hilma af Klint: Enigmatic Mystic & Mother of Abstract Art)

Don't waste life in doubts and fears. --Ralph Waldo Emerson (in Doubts)

May you live every day of your life. --Jonathan Swift (in My 94-Year-Old Dad Talks About COVID-19)

The question is not 'Can you make a difference?' You already do make a difference. It's just a matter of what kind of difference you want to make during your life on this planet. --Julia Butterfly Hill (in Inside the Fight to Save an Ancient Forest)

There isn't time -- so brief is life -- for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving -- and but an instant, so to speak, for that. --Mark Twain (in What Makes A Good Life?)

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. --Leo Buscaglia (in Touch as Nutrition)

Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music. --George Eliot (in There Are Songs )

The key is to be in a state of permanent connectedness with your inner body -- to feel it at all times. This will rapidly deepen and transform your life. --Eckhart Tolle (in A Portal to Presence)