Albert Einstein

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

Gail Sheehy

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!

Robert Frost

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.

from "Two Tramps in Mudtime"

Ecclesiastes

Enjoy life with the one whom you love all the days of your life. Whatever your hands find to do, do with all your might. And eat your bread with gladness and drink your wine with a merry heart, because your God has already approved what you do.

9:7-10 adapted

Arthur Graham

Each of us is an artist

whose task it is to shape life

Into some semblance of the pattern

of our dreams.

The making is not of the self alone

but of shared tomorrows

And times we shall never see.

So let us be about our task.

The materials are very precious

and perishable.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea.

from Gift from the Sea

Robert Ingersoll

No day can be so sacred but that the laugh of a little child will make it holier still.

Jacob Trapp

May we find the world to be so beautiful, we will want it to be more so, more often, for more persons.

(adapted)

Abraham Lincoln

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

(attributed)

Abraham Lincoln

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.

Max Coots

It’s the little deaths before the final time we fear.
The blasé shrug
That quietly replaces excited curiosity,
The cynic-sneer
That takes the place of innocence,
The soft-sweet odor of success
That overcomes the sense of sympathy,
The self-betrayals
That rob us of our will to trust,
The ridicule of vision, the barren blindness
To what was once our sense of beauty –
These are the deaths that come so quietly
We do not know when it was we died.

from Seasons of the Self

Henry David Thoreau

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

from Walden

Joseph Addison

Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week.

Bob Herbert

Everyone has a song inside of him or her, and ... you lose sight of that song at your peril. If you get out of touch with your song, forget how to sing it, you’re bound to end up frustrated and dissatisfied.

paraphrasing August Wilson in "Tweet Less, Kiss More" op ed, July 17, 2010

Eleanor Roosevlet

Friendship with oneself is all-important because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.

ee cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

from "i thank You God for most this amazing"

Woody Guthrie (on his birthday)

Nobody living can ever stop me
As I go walking
That freedom highway
Nobody living can make me turn back
This land was made for you and me

from "This Land is My Land, " 1940

Joseph Wood Krutch

If we do not permit the earth to produce beauty and joy, it will in the end not produce food, either.

Margaret Fuller

Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

Alan W. Watts

To arrive at reality--"suchness"--is to go beyond karma, beyond consequential action and to enter a life which is completely aimless. Yet to Zen and Taoism alike this is the very life of the universe, which is complete at every moment and does not need to justify itself by aiming at something beyond. In the words of a Zenrin poem:

If you don't believe, jut look at September, look at October!

The yellow leaves falling, falling, fill both the mountain and river.

from The Way of Zen

Mark Twain

None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.

1905 letter to Dan Beard regarding the rejection of "The War Prayer."

Theodore Parker

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eyes reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

1853

Thich Nhat Hahn

Mindfulness is the miracle by which we master and restore ourselves....Mindfulness is like that--it is the miracle which can call back in a flash our dispersed mind and restore it to wholeness so that we can live each minute of life.

from The Miracle of Mindfulness

Ikkyu Doka

Whatever runs counter

To the mind and will of ordinary people

Hinders the Law of Men

and the law of Buddha.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. There is no comradeship except through union in the same high effort.

from Wind, Sand, and Stars

Henry David Thoreau

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Do not be timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

from Journal, November 11, 1842

Yogi Berra

If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.

Kenneth Patton

Brief our days,

But long for singing,

When to sing

Is made our call.

from "Brief Our Days"

W. S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me

Like thread through a needle.

Everything I do is stitched with its color.