Quotations
Below are some quotations I have collected from a variety of sources. Most are short, and a few are longer. I include them on this site because you may find one among them that stirs something true within you or that is of support in some way.
May you know the beauty of your own true nature. – Jack Kornfield
Your heart will give you greater counsel than all the world's scholars. – The Talmud
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. – Wendell Berry
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen. – Elizabeth Kubler Ross
The world can only change from within. – Eckhart Tolle
Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. – Eckhart Tolle
The obstacle is the path. – Zen saying
There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hand. – A Course in Miracles
No philosophy of human personality is worth very much unless it takes full account of the data of mystical experience. – H. H. Price
We sanctify the moment with the quality of our attention. – Zen saying
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. – John Muir
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says "This is the real me," and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
– William James
Do not feel lonely. The entire universe is inside you. – Rumi
There is a reason you can learn from everything: you have basic wisdom, basic intelligence, and basic goodness.
– Pema Chodron
Emotion is the chief source of all becoming conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion. – Carl Jung
Wisdom is the intelligence of the system as a whole. – Gregory Bateson
The totality of the psyche can never be grasped by the intellect alone. – Carl Jung
… On the other hand, however, everyone who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men, and in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. – Albert Einstein
That which lies at the root of us lies at the root of the cosmos too. – F.W.H. Meyers
Our true nature is beyond all categories. Whatever you can conceive or imagine (about yourself) is but a fragment of your Self. Hence the real you cannot be found through logical deduction or intellectual analysis or endless imaginings. – Zen master Yasutani Roshi
I am inviting you to discover that deeper than any pattern, deeper than personality, deeper than success or failure, deeper than worth or worthlessness, there is a radiance that is undeniable, always present – the truth of who you are. – Gangaji
Pathology is not a problem to be solved, but the soul's way of working on itself. – James Hillman
When you look back at your own life, you see … the sufferings you went through, each time you would have avoided it if you possibly could. And yet, when you look at the depth of your character now, isn't a part of that a product of those experiences? Weren't those experiences part of what created the depth of your inner being?
– Ram Dass
If a way to the better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst. – Thomas Hardy
The world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming. – Helen Keller
Great pain, when it is honored from the heart, opens into great understanding. – Jack Kornfield
Nothing human is alien to me. – Voltaire
The quieter we become, the more we can hear. – Ram Dass
My actions are my only true belongings. – Thich Nhat Hann
Help us to be the always-hopeful gardeners of the spirit who know that without darkness nothing comes to birth, as without light nothing flowers. – May Sarton
If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning to suffering. – Victor Frankl
The only way out is through. – Goethe
If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. – Longfellow
Little is really known of the actual potentials of human functioning. – M.H. Erickson
Safety lies in tending towards our highest and not in resting content with an inferior potentiality….. To rest in or follow after an inferior potentiality may seem safe, rational, comfortable, easy, but it ends badly, in some futility or in a mere circling down the abyss or in a stagnant morass. Our right and natural road is towards the summits. – Sri Aurobindo
Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging. -Joseph Campbell
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life…therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus,everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it. – Victor Frankl
Of the many billions of human beings who have ever lived there has never existed one exactly like you, with your particular characteristics, and your unique way of experiencing life. Whoever you are, this is true. It is a very beautiful and awesome fact. There also has never existed one with your particular life story, your predicaments experienced in your individual way. These predicaments, like it or not, are part of your purpose here. Whatever you are facing right now in your life – the situations, the people, decisions, emotions, events, joyous or painful, including illness and death itself – they are the way life is working on you to bring about the maturation of your soul and, ultimately, your personal experience of universal truths. This is what life does. In a deep and hidden way, it promotes and guides our inner growth and maturation in ways we would never have expected or chosen beforehand. Looking back, you may get a glimmer of how life has been teaching you, but ultimately the way this all works is mysterious. Adding to this mystery is that, whoever you are, you are being used by life in the service of this same development in others in ways you can never know. However, this much is certain: you have emerged from life, you are inseparable from the web of life, and you belong here. – Anonymous
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust
For the personality, bankruptcy or failure may be a disaster. For the soul, it may be grist for its strangely joyful mill, and a condition it has been secretly engineering for years. – David Whyte
The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion. -Joseph Campbell
If you're going through Hell, keep going. – Winston Churchill
Perhaps everything terrible really, in its deepest being, is something helpless that wants help from us.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
The fastest way to freedom is to feel your feelings. – Gita Bellin
We only can be here now when we accept instantly our moment-by-moment emotional experience. – Gita Bellin
You see, in the image of Aquarius, it's a man who pours water into the fish. Now the fish is the unconscious. It is not enough just to have it. We have to actively turn towards it and support it so that it then helps us.
– Marie Louise von Franz
It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery
True knowledge is not attained by thinking. It is what you are; it is what you become. – Sri Aurobindo
It takes two to tell the truth: one to say it and another to hear it. – Henry David Thoreau
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed. – Carl Jung
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose.
– Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
You can outdistance that which is running after you, but cannot outdistance that which is running inside you.- African proverb
Fear creates provisional realities. – Unknown
The elements in a relationship which seem impossible to share, the secretly disturbing, dissatisfying elements, are the most rewarding to share. This is a hard, risky, frightening thing to learn, and it needs to be re-learned over and over. – Carl Rogers
I have learned that in any significant or continuing relationship, feelings which are persistent had best be expressed. If they are expressed as feelings owned by me, the result may be temporarily upsetting but ultimately far more rewarding than any attempt to deny or conceal them. – Carl Rogers
The teacher you need is the person you're living with. Are you listening? – Byron Katie
Beneath every conflict is a desire to connect. – Unknown
Love is the exchange of vulnerabilities. – Masters
Your distance from your partner is the distance from your heart. The things that make relationships difficult are some of the most precious aspects to us. – Stephen Levine
If you want the other person more than anything else in the world, you're in major trouble and the relationship is a wobbly pivot. It's different if the thing you want most in the world is truth, and your partner is the person you want most in the world. – Stephen Levine
Do you know what astonished me the most in the world? The inability of force to create anything. In the long run, the sword is always beaten by the spirit. – Napoleon Bonaparte at the end of his life
Without a listener, the healing process is aborted. Human beings, like plants that bend toward the sunlight, bend toward others in an innate healing tropism. There are times when being truly listened to is more critical than being fed. Listening well to another's pain is a primary form of nurturance, capable of healing even the scars of violence, even the horrors of war and large-scale social trauma. Children speak their own pain automatically when there is a listener, but learn to hide it when there is no ear to hear….I've seen again and again that the essence of healing emotional pain lies in listening to what hurts – in both knowing how to listen to oneself and being listened to by another. – Miriam Greenspan
Our worst fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. – Marianne Williamson
It is a bewildering thing in human life that the thing that causes the greatest fear is the source of the greatest wisdom. One's greatest foolishness is one's biggest stepping stone. No one can become a wise man without being a terrible fool. Through Eros one learns the truth, through sins we learn virtue. Meister Eckhart says one shouldn't repent too much, that the value of sin is very great. Anatole France says that only a great sinner can become a great saint, the one can not be without the other. How can man deal with this terrible paradox? He cannot say "I will commit a sin and then I will be a saint," or, "I will be a fool in order to become a wise man." The question is, what to do when put into a complete impasse. Then the dream says, in the cauldron things are cooked together, and out of things strange to each other, irreconcilable, something new comes forth. This is obviously the answer to the paradox, the impossible impasse. – C.G. Jung Dream Analysis v.3 p.26 in Practical Jung
Most of us have lost that sense of unity of biosphere and humanity which would bind and reassure us all with an affirmation of beauty. Most of us do not today believe that whatever the ups and downs of detail within our limited experience, the larger whole is primarily beautiful. – Gregory Bateson
The answer to human life is not to be found within the limits of human life. – Carl Jung
All things are connected like the blood which unifies one family. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the children of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. – Chief Seattle
Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate, sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth….. home. My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity. – Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut and founder, Institute of Noetic Sciences;