Treasure Chest 2023

Note: This post runs longer than normal. It’s about a ten-minute read.

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My father made a practice of committing meaningful quotes to memory. He referred to these as his mental treasure chest. The practice rubbed off on me. For years, I’ve saved meaningful quotes. In retrospect, the quotes I selected often follow a theme which signposted where I was in life’s journey.

This is my 4^th annual posting of quotes collected throughout the year. Many of them address how the quality of awareness influences our lives. I also detect and underlying search for resilience, which comes as no surprise.

I hope this year’s treasure chest gives you pause for reflection.

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Happiness

A healthy mind knows how to hope; it identifies and then hangs on tenaciously to a few reasons to keep going. Grounds for despair, anger, and sadness are, of course, all around. But the healthy mind knows how to bracket negativity in the name of endurance. -Alain de Botton

The attainment of happiness is then less a matter of pursuit than of surrender. -Maria Popova, The Marginalian

If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give. And to demand too much is the surest way of getting even less than is possible. -Bertrand Russell

At any stage of life, the refusal to succumb to cynicism is among our greatest triumphs of the spirit. -Maria Popova, The Marginalian

It is your habits, how you live and how you eat, and how you think, especially how you think, that determines your destiny in so many different ways….The mind can be your biggest enemy or biggest friend. -Will Steger, Polar Explorer

The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy. -Herman Hesse

Spirit

Every person of faith engages in an act of interpretation. The problem of the world is that we draw our circle too small. -Rabbi Sharon Brous

It was the middle of winter, I finally realized that, within me, summer was inextinguishable. —Albert Camus

A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love -Leonard Cohen

Creativity

The object of the creative life, of the full life, is to dig for the “submerged sunrise of wonder. -G.K. Chesterton

We are obligated to make our best attempts to become the thing we wish to be, otherwise we forever remain the sorry consorts of our own defeat. -Nick Cave

It’s easy to find ways to improve when you are genuinely curious about something. Rather than asking yourself, “How can I be better at this?” start by asking, “How can I be more curious about this? -James Clear

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. -Albert Einstein

I would write poems whether anyone looked at them or not, but I hope someone will. -Mary Sarton, The House By the Sea

The art of seeing has to be learned. -Marguerite Duras, French novelist, and playwright

Perspective

The listener completes the song. -Paul Simon

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance. Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours. -The Weighting, Jane Hirshfield

An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer. -D.H. Lawrence

Our greatest limitation is not that of imagination but that of perspective — our lens is too easily contracted by the fleeting urgencies of the present, too easily blurred by the hopes and fears of our human lives. -Maria Popova, The Marginalian

There is no world save the one we make with our minds, and the mind’s predisposition determines the type of world we see. -George Saunders, A Swim In a Pond In the Rain

The joy is just being there, whether it is being miserable in a storm or being in the most beautiful scene you can imagine in the spring bloom. It’s the presence of where you are at. -Will Steger, Polar Explorer

The voyage of discovery isn’t about new lands, but having new eyes -Abraham Verghese, The Covenant Of Water

We make our own weather. -Herman Diaz, Trust

If wonder springs from the quality of attention we pay to things and joy springs from our capacity for presence with wonder, then the quality of our attention shapes the quality of our lives. -Maria Popova, The Marginalian

Seeking

The beauty of belief is it doesn’t matter whether the thing you believe is true or not. It’s your belief in it that gives it its power. We believe our way into things, allowing them to come into being in the world. -Rick Rubin, Grammy award winning music producer.

Bring questions into this space and you will receive a reply, though not an answer. -Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder In An Anxious Age

Nothing, not one thing, hurts us more — or causes us to hurt others more — than our certainties. -Maria Popova, The Marginalian

What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? -Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World

I want what [the] ancients had: … to have a direct encounter with the flow of things, a communication without words. -Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

The stories we tell ourselves long enough become our truths. -Mitch Albom, The Stranger In the lifeboat

The very least you can do in your life is figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. -Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Self & Relationships

But we only ever rise — or fall — to love’s responsibility in proportion to our wholeness. -Maria Popova, The Marginalian

The heart and mind of another are unknowable, even unapproachable, except in fantasies and projections that are really elements of the knower’s own life, not the other’s. -Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge

—please
try to get that you become the being
that you came there
to be yes yes. -Hannah Emerson, non-speaking autistic poet, excert from Center of the Universe

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. -Iris Murdoch

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. -Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible. -The fourteenth Dalai Lama, Heart to Heart: A Conversation of Love and Hope For Our Precious Planet

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth. -Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness

In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed. -Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. -Simone de Beauvoir

You can’t know somebody, I thought, till you’ve followed him home -Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance. -Pablo Neruda, Nobel acceptance speech.

Wisdom

“Because of the interconnectedness of all minds, affirming a positive vision may be about the most sophisticated action any one of us can take.” -Willis Harmon, Past President, Institute of Noetic Sciences

If you don’t put something in the bucket, how are you going to get anything out of it? -John Mckissick, America’s winningest football coach

Love is the discovery of the unity of life. -Nobel laureate Octavio Paz

To be beautiful and to be calm without mental fear is the ideal of nature. -Richard Jeffries

Attention taken to the highest degree is the same thing as prayer -Simone Weil

Our life is the creation of our mind. -The Dhamapada

Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. -Herman Hesse

Responsibility

When I hear the doomsaying about our democracy, about civilization, about the planet something feels off to me: a sense of responsibility. -Amanda Knox, Former Prisoner wrongfully accused of murder

You cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no ‘you’ except your life lived. -Jane Ellen Harrison

Every life is organized around a small number of events that either propel us or bring us to a grinding halt. -Herman Diaz, Trust

We are spinning our own fates -William James

Life

The more we learn about how the mind constructs the world, the more we see that our experience of reality is a function of our emotionally directed attention. -Maria Popova, The Marginalian

We ourselves are events in history. Things do not merely happen to us, they happen through us. -John Macmurray, Scottish Philosopher

Love: a knot made of two intertwined freedoms. -Octavia Paz

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