Wonder. Go on and wonder.
~ William Faulkner
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.
~ Mary Oliver
God allows disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavor. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssety buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiraction to laborious doing.
~ C. S. Lewis
Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow; it empties today of its strength.
~Corrie Ten Boom
Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
~Wendell Berry
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
~Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue
Some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up and touch everything. If you never let that happen, then you just acculumate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow.
~E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
I can't give you a surefire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.
~Herbert Bayard Swope
The most exciting movement in nature is not progress, advance, but expansion and contraction, the opening and shutting of an eye, the heart, the mind. We throw our arms wide with a gesture of religion to the universe; we close them around a person. We explore and adventure for a while and then draw in to consolidate our gains...the breathless swing is between subject matter and form."
~Robert Frost
You must have a room, or certain hour of the day or so, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don't know who your friends are, you don't know what you owe anybody, you don't know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.
~Joseph Campbell
Love shared anywhere transforms situations everywhere. Your life is your corner of the garden; tend to that and you tend to the world.
~Marianne Williamson
You are educated when you have the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
~Robert Frost
But I always think that the best way
To know God is to love many things.
~Vincent Van Gogh
Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
~Kurt Vonnegut
Martha, Martha, thou are careful and troubled about many things; But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.
~Luke 10:41-42
It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light.
~G.K. Chesterton
To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children...to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition...to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived: this is to have succeeded.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
...Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
~Seamus Heaney, "Postscript"
A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled. You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance, with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith's forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade...
~ Ian McEwan, Atonement
Make something, do something--with your hands, with your imagination, with your mind, with your soul, with your fellowman. Do something in their interest, something consistent with integrity and love and good reason, good sense. But, granted these other values, cut loose. Be yourself, be an individual, express yourself. Don't be a rubber stamp. God isn't that way. God is free, creator, full of love. We can be those, too, I think, to satisfy our inner nature.
- Lowell Bennion
Nothing wonderful has ever been accomplished by anyone who was worried sick about it not being wonderful.
- Neale Donald Walsch
