(Updated 4-3-08)
These wonderful quotes sent by a friend kind of sum it all up. If you have some more wonderful quotes to share, please send them to me at paul@OnenessBlessing-DFW.com. Many Thanks!
“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” – Henry Miller
“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” – Nietzsche
"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience…" – Eleanor Roosevelt
“We do not remember days… We remember moments." – Cesare Pavese
“Some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity…” – Gilda Radner
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” – Lao Tzu
"Be the change you wish to see in the world…" – Ghandi
“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
“I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of stars makes me dream.” – Vincent Van Gogh
“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…” – Walt Whitman
“Live to the point of tears." – Camus
"May you live all the days of your life.” – Jonathan Swift
"Tell me what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" – Mary Oliver
"Ecstasy is what everyone craves — not love or sex, but a hot-blooded, soaring intensity, in which being alive is a joy and a thrill. That enravishment doesn’t give meaning to life, and yet without it life seems meaningless." – Diane Ackerman
"It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any self-deception of illusion, that a light will develop out of events, by which the path to success may be recognized." – I Ching, Hexagram 5, Hsu, Waiting (nourishment)
"And then the day came when the pain it took to remain tight in a bud was more than the pain it took to blossom." – Anais Nin
“Argue for your limitations and they are yours.” – Richard Bach from his book, “Illusions”
"I could only believe in a God who could dance… And now a God dances through me." – Friedrich Nietszche
"Tent tethered among jack pine and blue-bells. Lacewings rise from rock incubators. Wild geese flying north. And I can’t remember who I’m supposed to be.
I want to learn how to purr. Abandon myself, have mistresses in maidenhair fern, own no tomorrow nor yesterday: a blank shimmering space forward and back. I want to think with my belly. I want to name all the stars animals flowers birds rocks in order to forget them, start over again. I want to wear the seasons, harlequin, become ancient and etched by weather. I want to be snow pulse, ruminating ungulate, pebble at the bottom of the abyss, candle burning darkness rather than flame. I want to peer at things shameless, observe the unfastening, that stripping of shape by dusk. I want to sit in the meadow a rotten stump pungent with slimemold, home for pupae and grubs, concentric rings collapsing into the passacaglia of time. I want to crawl inside someone and hibernate one entire night with no clocks to wake me, thighs fragrant loam. I want to melt. I want to swim naked with an otter. I want to turn inside out, exchange nuclei with the Sun. Toward the mythic kingdom of summer I want to make blind motion, using my ribs as a raft, following the spiders as they set sail on their tasseled shining silk. Sometimes even a single feather’s enough to fly." -Robert Maclean
“Namaste: I honor the Divine Light within you.” – Jai Bhagwan
"The breath of the flute player: does it belong to the flute?" – Rumi
“Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth." – Katherine Mansfield
“If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much." – Jacqueline Kennedy
"The harder we look at our aches and ailments, the more we will be startled by the painful truths they are trying to convey about our dangerously disembodied way of life." – Marion Woodman
"The length of our life is less important than its depth." – Mary David Fisher
"Danger past, God is forgotten." – Thomas Fuller
"Red meat and gin."
– Julia Child when asked, at eighty-four, to what she credited her longevity
"The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being." – Madeleine L’Engle
"In a sky full of people, only some want to fly: isn’t that crazy?" – Seal
"Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother." – Khalil Gibran
"My religion is simple, my religion is love." – Dalai Lama
"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a butterfly." – Richard Bach from his book, "Illusions"
"For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. This perspective has helped me to see there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way. So treasure every moment you have and remember that time waits for no one. Happiness is a journey, not a destination." – Souza
“When you come close to the edge of all the light you have, and must take a step in the darkness of the unknown, either there will be something solid for you to stand on, or, you will fly?” – Patrick Overton
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." – Mark Twain
“Just because someone doesn’t love you the way you want them to, doesn’t mean they don’t love you with all they have.
The truth you think you’re after might just break your heart.
We are taught you must blame your father, your sisters, your brothers, the school, the teachers - you can blame anyone but never blame yourself. It’s never your fault. But it’s always your fault, because if you wanted to change, you’re the one who has got to change. It’s as simple as that, isn’t it?” – Katherine Hepburn