Words make a difference. They influence our thoughts, which in turn become our actions.
I’ve saved meaningful quotes as a personal practice for many years. It’s interesting to look back over those years and re-read quotes that were meaningful to me at the time. Sometimes, I wince; other times, I asterisk them.
I decided to extend my tradition to this blog. Each December, I dedicate a post to meaningful quotes I’ve encountered throughout the year. This is my fourth installment.
I hope you find kernels of meaning for your life in this year’s quotes.
—————————————————————
When small men cast big shadows, it means the sun is about to set.
-Lin Yutang
For all your ills, I give you laughter.
-Francois Rabelais
You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw.
Humility is the road to love.
-Brian Doyle, One Long River of Song
The True Self should not be thought of as anything different than life itself—not my little life, but the Big Life.
-Thomas Merton
We undervalue health if we have not recently experienced illness.
We undervalue wealth if we have not recently experienced poverty.
We undervalue kindness if we have not recently experienced cruelty.
What might you be undervaluing right now?
-James Clear
I have a full life. A privileged life. An unendangered life. But sometimes the simple joys escape me. Joy is not always a feeling that is freely bestowed upon us, often it is something we must actively seek. In a way, joy is a decision, an action, even a practiced method of being. It is an earned thing brought into focus by what we have lost.
-Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files.
Grief is life….forgiveness is too.
-Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
-Edith Wharton
We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The same things happen again and again.
Men learn little from others’ experience.
But in the life of one man, never
The same time returns.
Sever the cord, shed the scale.
Only the fool, fixed in his folly, may think
He can turn the wheel on which he turns.
-T.S. Elliot, Murder in the Cathedral
Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
-C. K. Chesterton
People pay to see others believe in themselves.
-Kim Gordon
Beauty is almost always a form of communication.
-Zoe Schlanger
“Don’t cry, it’s only music,”
someone’s voice is saying.
“No one you love is dying.”
It’s only music. And it was only spring,
the world’s unreasoning body
run amok, like a saint’s, with glory,
that overwhelmed a young girl
into unreasoning sadness.
“Crazy,” she told herself,
“I should be dancing with happiness.”
But it happened again. It happens
when we make bottomless love —
there follows a bottomless sadness
which is not despair
but its nameless opposite.
It has nothing to do with the passing of time.
It’s not about loss. It’s about
two seemingly parallel lines
suddenly coming together
inside us, in some place
that is still wilderness.
Joy, joy, the sopranos sing,
reaching for the shimmering notes
while our eyes fill with tears.
– Lisel Mueller, Joy
Nature, in the intimate and in the vast, is not designed. It is designing. Our own nature confirms it…The merging qualities of hope, courage, love, intellectual quest and the sense of beauty, as represented to some degree in every human being, are emergent qualities of all that the universe is made of….If mind and spirit grow out of matter they are nonetheless what they have been thought to be. It is our conception of matter that needs revision. All that is included in thought, perception and spiritual harmony belong as naturally in the universe as visible energy and tangible matter, and it is our peculiarly human task at the moment to see them all as facets of a whole.
-N.J. Berrill
How you wait is who you are.
-Adam Phillips
Between what is said and not meant
And meant but not said
Most love is lost.
-Khalil Gibran
Use each other’s differences in our common battles for a livable future.
-Audrey Lorde
I can prove anything by statistics except the truth.
-George Canning, 19th Century British Prime Minister
Learn to look when the sun of destiny plays with your shadows.
-Hermann Hesse
To have peace and prosperity, a society must have productivity that benefits most people. Do you think we have this today?
-Ray Dalio.
We make our lives by what we love.
-John Cage
Happiness is achieved only when the beloved becomes a permanently inherent element of one’s own being.
-Hannah Arendt
Nothing is more corrosive to a vibrant democracy and healthy communities than when leaders with formal authority behave without moral authority.
-Dov Seidman
The potentialities you develop to the full come as the result of an interplay between you and life’s challenges.
-John Gardner, Self Renewal
Renewal is not just innovation and change. It is also the process of bringing the results of change into line with our purposes.
-John Gardner, Self Renewal
An expert is a man who has stopped thinking because he knows.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
To see takes time.
-Georgia O’Keeffe
In quietness, the soul expands.
-Rockwell Kent
We are all trained to tell things apart. In the experience of beauty, we learn to tell things alike.
-Richard J. Nevle
The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.
-Mark Twain
By default, we tend to over-optimize the way we’re playing the current game we’re in and under-optimize the decision involving which game to play.
-A Learning A Day
When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, what is being asked of me in this situation? Each of us is an actor on a stage, and God is the audience.
-Marylynne Robinson-Gilead
Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents. . . . Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.
-Eric Hoffer
This is a wonderful day! I’ve never seen this one before.
-Maya Angelou
Above all, mind what you say. Behold how much wood is kindled by a small fire, and the tongue is a fire.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Humans are born with different capacities.
If they are free, they are not equal, and if they are equal, they are not free.
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
There is nothing to be learned from a second kick of a mule.
-Mark Twain
It is necessary… to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light, (and that) everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light.
-James Baldwin
But the earth process itself suggests we rediscover nature as spirit as well as understand it as matter — nature as presence, intelligence, and root source of inspiration and imagination.
-Glen Slater, Jung vs Borg
Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
You are holding a cup of coffee when someone comes along and bumps into you or shakes your arm, making you spill your coffee everywhere.
Why did you spill the coffee?
“Because someone bumped into me!!!”
Wrong answer.
You spilled the coffee because there was coffee in your cup.
Had there been tea in the cup, you would have spilled tea.
Whatever is inside the cup is what will spill out.
Therefore, when life comes along and shakes you (which WILL happen), whatever is inside you will come out. It’s easy to fake it, until you get rattled.
So we have to ask ourselves… “What’s in my cup?”
When life gets tough, what spills over?
Joy, gratefulness, peace and humility?
Anger, bitterness, harsh words and reactions?
Life provides the cup, YOU choose how to fill it.
Today let’s work towards filling our cups with gratitude, forgiveness, joy, words of affirmation; and kindness, gentleness and love for others.
-Thich Nhat Hahn
When it all comes down to it, there is little else we need to do in this world but care.
-Nick Cave
Love is a present activity only.
-Leo Tolstoy
Love is the quality of attention we pay to things,”
-J.D. McClatchy
Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined. One cannot dance well unless one is completely in time with the music, not leaning back to the last step or pressing forward to the next one, but poised directly on the present step as it comes.
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh-Gift From the Sea
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on,
and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
-Shakespeare
Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love.
-Thich Nhat Hahn
We began to realize, dimly at first, that we were no longer living our lives. We began to see that our lives were living us. And we began to suspect that our relationship to time had become so toxic precisely because we had forgotten how to bring to our day-to-day lives the essential question of who and what a human being is and is meant to be.
-Jacob Needleman, Time and Soul
The ego lives only in the future and the past; it has no present moment; it is always hurrying or dreaming.
-Jacob Needleman, Time and Soul
One starts to get young at the age of sixty, and then it’s too late.
-Pablo Picasso
The most difficult thing to admit, and to realize with one’s whole being, is that you alone control nothing…I have accepted the fact, hard as it may be, that human beings are inclined to behave in ways that would make animals blush.
-Henry Miller
One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless.
-Henry Miller
I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars. This vascular malformation could bleed and burst. Or I can simply go on living, appreciating my condition as a vulnerable human being in a vulnerable world, guided by the songs of birds. What is time, sacred time, but the acceleration of consciousness? There are so many ways to change the sentences we have been given.
-Terry Tempest Williams
We should be careful of each other,
we should be kind
While there is still time.
-Philip Larkin
The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.
-Alan Turing
One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light.
-James Baldwin
To experience grace is one thing,
To integrate it into your life is quite another.
-Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.”
-Simone Weil
Love is my religion
-Keats
The purpose of listening is not to reply, but to hear what is not being said.
– Kevin Kelly
To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time
-Georgia O’Keefe
All life builds on relations and unfolds through mutual transformations.
-Andreas Weber, The Biology of Wonder
The primal feature of nature is that it always rises again, bringing forth new life. Even the most devastating catastrophe gives way over time to green shoots of rebirth and productivity and therefore to hope for ourselves
-Andreas Weber, The Biology of Wonder
Nobody stumbles into a well-lived life. It has to be cultivated. Reflection and review are critical.
-James Clear
May you learn to use this illness as a lantern to illuminate the new qualities that will emerge in you.
-John O’Donohue
Steady yourself and see that it is your own thinking that darkens your world.
-John O’Donohue
I give thanks for arriving
Safely in a new dawn
For the gift of eyes
To see the world
-John O’Donohue
——————————————————
I’ll finish with commentary lifted from Maria Popova’s weekly blog, The Marginalian, the best compendium of wonder-provoking literature on the internet:
Chance deals the hand and we must play it, and in how we choose to play it lies the measure of who we are.
-Maria Popova
Every artist’s art is an instrument of self-understanding and a coping mechanism for whatever haunts their interior world.
-Maria Popova
It is impossible to escape
being greatly mistaken
about the nature
and intentions
of persons you
meet in the world
for in the glare of
how they appear and
how you imagine them to be
you cannot see their shadow
-Maria Popova
But because the engine of all creative energy is connection, suffering can serve as a mighty instrument of unselfing, of contacting that place where the spirit meets the bone of being, that common core of human experience.
-Maria Popova
Reality lives somewhere between matter and meaning. One makes us, the other we make to bear our mortality and the confusions of being alive. Meaning arises from what we believe to be true, reality is the truth that endures whether or not we believe in it.
-Maria Popova
Suffer gladly
the lonely truth of time
that great destroyer
of blind fancy
in the dust of which
blossoms
the peace and power
of clear sight
-Maria Popova
Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for.
Maria Popova
Perhaps the greatest perplexity of aging is how to fill with gentleness the void between who we feel we are on the inside and who our culture tells us is staring back from that mirror.
-Maria Popova
It is the boundaries, chosen or imposed, that give shape to our lives
-Maria Popova
What we can feel will always be infinitely vaster and more complex than what we can name, because words will always break under the weight of the immensities we task them with carrying, (and) never fully answer the soul’s cry for connection, for consolation, for mercy.
-Maria Popova
I know from the most etymologically passionate person in my life that the Latin root of the word person means “to sound through,” in turn implying a listener: We sound through to something other than ourselves.
Maria Popova
The fear of change dissolves when we come to see love not as a vector of constancy but as a rosary of nows.
-Maria Popova
Who we become depends on how we tend to our inner garden.
-Maria Popova
We live as patterns unaware of perpetuating themselves.
-Maria Popova
Every once in a while, the curtain of consciousness we mistake for reality parts and we glimpse what glows beyond it.
-Maria Popova
A feather is a present
On loan from the wings of time
That only attention makes beautiful
And only kindness valuable.
-Maria Popova
Have a beautiful Holiday Season!
—————————————————————
Former blog posts can be found here by subject category and here chronologically.
You can subscribe to my latest posts by filling in your email address at the bottom of this page.
My first book, Towards A Life Well-Lived, can be purchased by clicking this link. Proceeds from sales are donated to Peace In Schools, a Portland, Oregon-based organization supporting mindfulness training in high schools.
Towards A Life Well-Lived 