Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes.  Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality.  Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

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We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.

Terrence McKenna

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

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No love is Love that subjugates the Lover.
No love is Love that feeds on flesh and blood.
No love is Love that draws a woman to a man only to breed
more women and men and thus perpetuate their bondage to the flesh.

Mikha’il Na’ima

…Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

…And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

…But often faltering feet
Come surest to the goal;
And they who walk in darkness meet
The sunrise of the soul…

Henry Van Dyke

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:

Nature has not so mingled the intelligence with the composition of the body, as not to have allowed you the power of circumscribing yourself and of bringing under subjection to yourself all that is your own; for it is very possible to be a divine man and to be recognized as such by no one.

Marcus Aurelius

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Kurt Vonnegut

The perturbation of brain chemistry is easily done.  What is not so easily done is the assimilation of the consequences of this act.

Terrence McKenna

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal and then leap in the dark to our success.

Henry David Thoreau

…light the candle in the cave of your heart, which is your ultimate refuge.

Nina Rao

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.

Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.

Khalil Gibran

…the more I tune out the noise around me and listen to the silence within, I’m able to access an inner widsom I’ve been unaware of most of my life.  I now realize there’s a natural and intuitive knowing within me, an inner guidance arising like a whisper from my Soul.

Bhava Ram  

 

The chief lesson I have learned in a long life is that the only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.

Henry L. Stimson

 

No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.

Carl Jung

 It is here that we encounter the central theme of existentialism: to live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is. Each man must find out for himself, and must accept the responsibility that his answer prescribes. If he succeeds he will continue to grow in spite of all indignities.

Gordon W. Allport

 

In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away…

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Khalil Gibran

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.

Sarah “Sadie” Williams

Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.

Brené Brown

Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you might jump out of a third story window.  Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing.  They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

Terrence McKenna

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart, the best brain. Superiority is born of honesty, of virtue, of charity, and above all, of the love of liberty. The superior man is the providence of the inferior. He is eyes for the blind, strength for the weak, and a shield for the defenceless. He stands erect by bending above the fallen. He rises by lifting others.

Robert Green Ingersoll

The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image.  Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Thomas Merton

 

…the universe is…an art-making machine. An engine for the production of ever-more novel forms of connectedness…

Terrence McKenna

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Adversity is like a strong wind.  It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.  

Yann Martel

 

Here, then, picked out at random from the ferment of ten thousand pages and a million words–put down just as they were written, in fragments, jots, or splintered flashes, without order or coherence–here, with all its vanity, faith, despair, joy, and anguish, with all its falseness, error and pretension, and with all its desperate sincerity, its incredible hope, its insane desire, is a picture of a man’s soul and heart–the image of his infuriate desire–caught hot and instant, drawn flaming from the forge of his soul’s agony.

Thomas Wolfe

 

We’re each of us alone, to be sure.  What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

Ursula K. Le Guin

 

…these men who seemed on the outside to have nothing to give…had been giving…the most precious gift of all: compassion.

Ron Hall

 

Diagnosing and labeling people whose struggles are more environmental or learned than genetic or organic is often far more detrimental to healing and change than it is helpful…Labeling the problem in a way that makes it about who people are rather than the choices they’re making lets all of us off the hook:  TOO BAD.  THAT’S WHO I AM.

Brené Brown

We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely. We write as the birds sing, as the primitives dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it. When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.

Anaïs Nin

 

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Will Durant