Words make a difference. They influence our thoughts, which in turn become our actions.
I’ve collected quotes for many years. It’s interesting to look back over those years and re-read quotes that were meaningful to me. Sometimes, I wince; other times, I asterisk them.
I decided to extend that tradition to this blog. Each December, I dedicate a post to meaningful quotes I’ve encountered throughout the year. This is my fifth installment. Previous Treasure Chest postings can be found here.
Note: Many quotes were lifted from Maria Popova’s weekly inspirational literature review. If interested, you can subscribe here.
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On Perserverance-
Anyone can smile when life goes smoothly.
Anyone can train when they feel great.
Anyone can be kind when the relationship is easy.
The strong mind finds a way to stay steady … even when plans fall apart.
The strong body finds a way to train … even when the day doesn’t go your way.
The strong relationship finds a way to reconnect … even when things get rough.
What matters most is how you respond on the bad days, not the good ones.
-James Clear
Composing a life as the pages of time keep turning is the great creative act we are here for…not toward greater perfection but toward greater authenticity, which is at bottom the adaptation of the self to the soul and the soul to the world.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.
-Daniel Gilbert
We cannot count on anything other than a mind that is prepared to live calmly with all that it cannot control.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
We just try to ignore the elephants of now…., somehow.
-Jason Isabell
The mind is formed by struggle, not by tranquility.
-Gianni Rodari, Bulgarian Children’s Books Author
One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.
-James Baldwin, Nothing Personal
There is no final test
for how to be human —
only the open question
of how to be yourself
which you must answer daily
with all the strength and kindness
that you’ve got.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
So much depends on what we can make of what happens to us, and on what we make of what we do…on our capacity or willingness to transform our experience rather than be merely victimized by it.
-Adam Phillips, On Getting Better
I don’t want to change myself, but to be myself in a better way… It also seems to me that the only way for someone like me to survive here is to breathe his own meaning into the experience.
-Vaclav Havel, Letters To Olga
What we make of our suffering may be the measure and meaning of our freedom.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me.
-Oscar Wilde
Our art…is the gift we offer to rehabilitate the world and, in the process, rehabilitate ourselves.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
Learning to listen to the response of our inner selves to disappointment and loss is essential. Wisdom doesn’t come from age. It comes from loss.
-Lou Ureneck
It isn’t the great book I had hoped it would be. It’s just a run-of-the-mill book. And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do. Now to work on it.
-John Steinbeck’s diary entry just before finishing The Grapes of Wrath
On Being-
It is the body that trembles with aliveness, but it is the spirit that animates it with life.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
The secret of Being is “to do nothing but listen,” so that the song of life — which is the song of love — may be heard.
-Maria Popova/Walt Whitman, The Marginalian
Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.
-Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces.
Throw away all opinions, all likes and dislikes, and only keep the mind that doesn’t know… Your before-thinking mind, my before-thinking mind, all people’s before-thinking minds are the same. This is your substance. Your substance, my substance, and the substance of the whole universe become one.
-Seung Sahn Soen-sa, Zen teacher
We have rooms in ourselves. Most of them we haven’t visited yet.
-Haruki Murakami
I came to understand that God was a form of perception, a means of being alert to the poetic resonance of being.
Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files
Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
The end of a melody is not its goal.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
On Happiness-
To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think.
-Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Keep extremely low expectations – and let life exceed them.
-A learning A Day blog
You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you (because) if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you’re in trouble.
-James Baldwin
We all have a compass inside, and all we must do is find it and follow it.
-Ann Patchett, State of Wonder
On Presence–
The moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity.
-Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler Than Its Parts
Those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must, of necessity, be unhappy.
-Marcus Aurelius
Presence- Those moments of being that make you who you are.
-Virginia Woolf
By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me.
-Lia Pupura, On Looking
To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
-Georgia O’Keeffe
As a man is, so he sees.
-William Blake
Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river,”
-Jorge Luis Borges, A New Refutation of Time
Real silence puts any present understanding to shame.
David Whyte, Consolations
On Perspective-
We move through the real world in a self-generated dream, responding not to reality but to the stories we tell ourselves about what is true.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
It is because things matter to us that we suffer, and it is because we suffer that we are impelled to transmute our suffering into art.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
Reality is the truth that endures whether or not we believe in it, while meaning arises from what we believe to be true.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
The externally observed world does not exist; what exists are only internal perspectives on the world, which are partial and reflect one another. The world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives.
-Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution
Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.
-Bertrand Russell
To feel the present sliding over the depths of the past, peace is necessary.
-Virginia Woolf
We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.
-Anne Enright, The Wren
Stop and think for a time about kinship. Think for a long time about kinship. The world lies before you, a lavish garden. However hobbled by waste, however fouled by graft and tainted by deception, it will always take your breath away. We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed, we are only obliged to look.
-Margaret Renkl, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
How we relate to anything is how we relate to everything.
Maria Popova, The Marginalian
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity.
-James Clear
On Love-
Time and change, which is another way of saying love and loss.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
Loss is the price we pay for love.
-Hannah Arendt
Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being.
-Rumi
Perhaps we are here to learn that love is worth any price, any price at all.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they’re too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don’t recognize inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost. But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honor what emerges along the way.
-Heidi Priebe
No one you love is ever dead.
-Ernest Hemingway
Intimacy is the art and practice of living from the inside out.
-David Whyte, Constellations II
We are always either drawing closer or drifting apart — there is no stasis in relationships.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
Don’t be tough until you have to,
Let love knock you on your ass.
-Jason Isabell
Charles Duhigg, in his book Supercommunicators, has a neat question to understand the expectations of those we’re communicating with – does the other person want to be helped, hugged, or heard? People who want to be helped are open to problem-solving. People who want a hug just want the support. People who want to be heard just need a listener
-A Learning a Day Blog
On Truth and Wisdom-
Help is for the people who want it,
not the people who need it.
-Jarred Dillian, Rule 62
An argument is a barricade against understanding.
-Corrina Luyken, The Arguers
Yesterday I thought myself at the center of the world. Now the world seems to sit at the center of me.
-Pico Ayer, Aflame
We spend our lives trying to find ourselves, only to discover that the self is precisely what stands between us and being fully alive.
Maria Popova, The Marginalian
It is on the hubris that we know more than life does that we most regularly break our own hearts.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
So I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know.
– Joanna Field, A Life Of One’s Own
When in doubt about how to spend our time, energy or money, spend it on relationships.
-Gretchen Rubin, Secrets of Adulthood.
All that I had
was all that I needed
It was good while it lasted
-Jason Isabell
I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future. If
you want to find someoneʼs true age, listen to them. If they talk about
the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they
did, theyʼve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their
aspirations, what theyʼre still looking forward to – theyʼre young.
-Peter Attia, Outlive
Never bet on the end of the world, because it only happens once.
-Art Cashin
Wisdom- The art of minimums…To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.
-Wendell Berry
If we consider the meaning of life, perhaps life will become more meaningful.
-Foster Wallace, Commencement Address to the 2005 class at Kenyon College.
On Mystery-
It may be that the most deadening effect of growing up is our incremental preference for certainty over surprise, which ends up keeping us a safe distance from alive.
-Maria Popova, The Marginalian
A mystery is a question that can barely be intelligibly asked, never mind satisfactorily answered.
-Margaret Boden
The past is all we know of the future.
-Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.
-Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
There is no terror like that of being known.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Is it not possible—I often wonder— that things we have felt with a great intensity have an existence independent of our minds, and are in fact, still in existence?
-Virginia Woolf
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Former blog posts can be found here by subject category and here chronologically.
You can subscribe to my latest posts by filling out 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 that supports mindfulness training in high schools.
Stay tuned for my new book, The Secret Within, which I expect to make available early in 2026.
Towards A Life Well-Lived 
Tim
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