Andrew Solomon

“Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.”

Søren Kierkegaard

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Thay

"Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy."

"You carry Mother Earth within you.  She is not outside of you.  Mother Earth is not just your environment.  In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer."

"People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar."

~Thich Nhat Hanh~

cookie

"Know when to be in Silence"

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

"Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from."

Walt Whitman

“This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.”

Thomas Merton

"But there is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question.”

Mother Teresa

“In the silence of the heart God speaks. If you face God in prayer and silence, God will speak to you. Then you will know that you are nothing. It is only when you realize your nothingness, your emptiness, that God can fill you with Himself. Souls of prayer are souls of great silence.”

Jon Krakauer

“It's not always necessary to be strong, but to feel strong.”

Vincent van Gogh

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”

NF

"When I die, put my ashes in the trash bag
I don't care where they go
Don't waste your money on my gravestone
I'm more concerned about my soul
Everybody's gonna die
Don't everybody live though
Sometimes I look up to the sky
And wonder do You see us down here?
Oh Lord."

Osho

“If you love a flower, don’t pick it up.  Because if you pick it up it dies and it ceases to be what you love.  So if you love a flower, let it be.  Love is not about possession.  Love is about appreciation.”

Esther Hicks

“Tell everyone you know: “My happiness depends on me, so you’re off the hook.” And then demonstrate it. Be happy, no matter what they’re doing. Practice feeling good, no matter what. And before you know it, you will not give anyone else responsibility for the way you feel, and then, you’ll love them all. Because the only reason you don’t love them, is because you’re using them as your excuse to not feel good.”

Mahatma Gandhi

“Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”

Thich Nhat Hanh

 "Do not accumulate wealth whilst millions are hungry. Do not take as the aim of your life, fame, profit, wealth, or sensual pleasure. Live simply and share time, energy, and material resources with those who are in need."

victor frankl

"Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way."

"Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time."

"Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for."

Edgar Allan Poe

“I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.”

Lao Tzu

“Time is a created thing. To say 'I don't have time,' is like saying, 'I don't want to.”

George Harrison

“It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.”

Andy Warhol

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”

Soren Kierkegaard

"The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased.  If I were a doctor and were asked my advice I should reply: Create Silence."

T. Brown Jr

"Man living in the island of self is living but a small part of what life is all about.  Man must transcend the barriers, the prisons of ego and thought, and reach the Creator.  All islands, all circles, must be bridged.  Each world must be understood, then finally fused into an absolute and pure oneness.  Then there can be no inner or outer dimension, no separation of self, just a pure oneness where man is at once all things.  It is in this fusion of worlds that man will know all things and live the deeper meanings of life... Then and only then can man ever hope to touch God."

Dyer

"We all share the same oxygen, drink from the same water, walk and reside on the same soil.  And whether we like to admit it or not, we are all intimately sharing each other's continually changing atoms and molecules.  Everything that is manifested in a material form is changing at all moments.  The continuous shift of atoms means that there is no separateness in the quantum scientific sense or in  any other sense.  Your sacred self is waiting for you to make the choice to let your ego know the truth."

Gary McKay

"You have the capacity to choose what you think about.  If you choose to think about past hurts, you will continue to feel bad.  While it's true you cannot change the effect past influences had on you once,  you can change the effect they have on you now."

Job 12:8

"Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee."

Nathan Kollar

"Suffering breaks our world.  Like a tree struck by lightening -- splintered, shaken, denuded -- our world is broken by suffering, and we will never be the same again. What will become of us is a mystery."

J.K. Rowling

“Those we love never truly leave us… There are things that death cannot touch.”

george herbert

"was ever grief like mine?"

Martha Hickman

"It's probably unavoidable, after the first rush of grief and crisis, that from time to time we hold the world, the seasons, the days and nights, at arm's length -- a kind of general anesthesia against life, because it is so painful to allow ourselves to feel."

John Ruskin

"The deadliest of all things to me is the loss of faith in nature.  No spring-- no summer.  Fog always, and the snow faded from the alps."

Eckhart Tolle

“On a deeper level you are already complete. When you realize that, there is a joyous energy behind what you do.”

Abraham Lincoln

"The worst thing you can do for those you love is the things they could and should do themselves."

Isak Dinesen

"Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows that they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest."

Sizo

"If we could untangle the mysteries of life and unravel the energies which run through the world; if we could evaluate correctly the significance of passing events; if we could measure the struggles, dilemmas, and aspirations of mankind, we could find that nothing is born out of time. Everything comes at it's appointed moment."

Hickman

"That's how important we are to each other - as essential as food and water. And especially now, when we are suffering from loss."

Kahlil Gibran

"And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair."

75th Verse

"When taxes are too high,

people go hungry.

When the government is too intrusive,

people lose their spirit.

Act for the people's benefit;

trust them, by leaving them alone."

Tao Te Ching

Mary Oliver

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
     love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you about mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."

Success

"Take up one idea. Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. This is the way to success."
~Swami Vivekananda~

Neal Donald Walsch

"Which snowflake is the most magnificent? Is it possible that they are all magnificent - and that, celebrating their magnificence together they create an awesome display? Then they melt into each other, and into the Oneness.  Yet they never go away.  They never disappear.  They never cease to be. Simply, they change form.  And not just once, but several times: from solid to liquid, from liquid to vapor, from the seen to the unseen, to rise again, and then again to return in new displays of breathtaking beauty and wonder.  This is Life, nourishing Life."

anton chekhov

"should his heart break and the grief pour out, it would flow over the whole earth, it seems, and yet, no one sees it."

Amish

"We have no enemies; we are all God's children, and forgiveness is at the very core of our christian faith.  If we can't forgive those who are lost and would do harm to us, then our faith in meaningless."

Anne Frank

"in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart... I can feel the suffering of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that all will all come right."

Peace

"Everything in the world is good, is holy and beautiful. If you see something evil, think that you do not understand it in the right light. Throw the burden on yourselves!"
- Swami Vivekananda

they are coming...

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

MARTIN NIEMÖLLER

Mary Jane Moffat

"Feeling better... I also felt a sense of betrayal for my loved one, even though I rationally knew that sustained grief could be morbid.  Because grief may become a substitute for the dead one, giving up our grief can be the greatest challenge of mourning."

Hindu Proverb

"Help thy brother's boat across, and lo! thine own has reached the shore as well."

Simone de Beauvoir

"In the face of an obstacle which is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid."

MLK

“We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”

Wayne Dyer

"Let go of all the beliefs that convince you of your inadequacies and shortcomings.  Clean out that closet of worn-out loyalties to what you can and cannot do.  Just open yourself up right in this moment.  Be like a clear, blank slate.  Nothing is imprinted or projected on this slate."

Albert Schweitzer

"Every man has to seek in his own way to make his own self more noble and to realize his own true worth.  You must give some time to your fellow man.  Even if it's a little thing, do something for those who have need of help, something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it.  For remember, you don't live in a world all your own.  Your brothers are here too."

R.W.E.

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions.  All life is an experiment.  The more experiments you make the better.  What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn? What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice?  Up again; you shall never be so afraid of a tumble."

susan griffith

"The earth is my sister.  I love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am.  How we admire the strength of each other, all that we have lost, all that we have suffered, all that we know.  We are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget, what she is to me, what I am to her."

dhammapada

"all that we are is the result of what we have thought.  it is founded on our thoughts; it is made up of our thoughts."

Hafiz

"I am in love with every church

And mosque

And temple

And any kind of shrine

Because I know it is there

That people say the different names

Of the One God."

Schaef

"When we need these healing times, there is nothing better than a good long walk. It is amazing how the rhythmic movements of the feet and legs are so intimately attached to cobweb cleaners in the brain."

Rabindranath Tagore

“Reach high, for stars lie hidden in you. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.”

Roy T. Bennett

“Be grateful for what you already have while you pursue your goals.  If you aren’t grateful for what you already have, what makes you think you would be happy with more.”

Louisa May Alcott

“Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.”