When is the best time to do things?
Who is the most important one?
What is the right thing to do?
Remember then that there is only one important time, and that time is now. The most important one is always the one you are with. And the most important thing is to do good for the one who is standing at your side. For these, my dear boy, are the answers to what is the most important in this world.
This is why we are here.
JON MUTH, THE THREE QUESTIONS, BASED ON A STORY BY LEO TOLSTOY
... But if we listen to the child who lives in our soul, our eyes will grow bright. If we do not lose contact with that child we will not lose contact with life.
PAULO COEHLHO, BY THE RIVER PIEDRA I SAT DOWN AND WEPT
Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus.*
VIRGIL, GEORGICS, II
*But time flies meanwhile, flies never to return.
I learned what every dreaming child needs to know - that no horizon is so far you cannot get above it or beyond it.
BERYL MARKHAM, WEST WITH THE NIGHT
What is life: It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time; it is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.
CROWFOOT
A good relationship has a pattern like a dance and is built on some of the same rules. The partners do not need to hold on tightly, because they move confidently in the same pattern, intricate but gay and swift and free ... To touch heavily would be to arrest the pattern and freeze the movement, to check the endlessly changing beauty of its unfolding... they know they are partners moving to the same rhythm, creating a pattern together, and being invisibly nourished by it.
ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH, GIFT FROM THE SEA
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts, For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness; For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
KAHLIL GIBRAN, THE PROPHET
Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself....
Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul...
MAX EHRMANN, DESIDERATA, 1927
We pray for a calm and peaceful mind.
May our speech be of service to others.
May our hearts be open, loving and filled with compassion.
YOGA SUTRA OF PATANJALI (this was introduced to me by kookhee andersson and is now what we say at bedtime)
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be.
ANNE FRANK
it was a world of "pure magic, of beaver ceremonies and eagle dances, of spirits that inhabited springs, trees, rocks, turtles, and crows; a place where people danced all night and sang bear medicine songs, where wolf medicine made a person invulnerable to bullets, dream visions dictated tribal policy, and ghosts were alive in the wind." it was a place where one could "drift in the mystical cycles of the seasons, living in that random, terrifying, bloody and intensely alive place where nature and divinity become one."S. C. GWYNNE, THE EMPIRE OF THE SUMMER MOON (ABOUT THE RISE AND FALL OF THE COMANCHE INDIANS)
If you have butterflies in your stomach
ask them into your heart.
COOPER EDENS
I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather my sparks should burn out in a blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than asleep and permanent as a planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
JACK LONDON
All men dream; but not equally.
Those who dream by night in the dusty
recesses of their minds
Awake to find that it was vanity;
But the dreamers of day are dangerous men,
That they may act their dreams with open
eyes to make is possible.
T. E. LAWRENCE
If I had my life to live over again, I'd dare to make more mistakes next time. I'd relax. I would limber up. I would be sillier than I have been this trip. I would take fewer things seriously. I would take more chances. I would take more trips. I would climb more mountains and swim more rivers. I would eat more ice cream and less beans. I would perhaps have more troubles, but i'd have fewer imaginary ones.
You see, I'm one of those people who live sensibly and sanely hour after hour, day after day. Oh, I've had my moments, and if I had it to do over again, I'd have more of them. In fact, I'd try to have nothing else. Just moments, one after another instead of living so many years ahead of each day. I've been one of those persons who never goes anywhere without a thermometer, a hotwater bottle, a raincoat and a parachute. If I had it to do again, I would travel lighter than I have.
If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.
NADINE STAIR
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
E. B. WHITE
The world needs more men who do not have a price at which they can be bought; who do not borrow from integrity to pay for expediency; whose handshake is an ironclad contract; who are not afraid of risk; who are honest in small matters as they are in large ones; whose ambitions are big enough to include others; who know how to win with grace and lose with dignity; who do not believe that shrewdness and cunning and ruthlessness are the three keys to success; who still have friends they made twenty years ago; who are not afraid to go against the grain of popular opinion and do not believe in 'consensus'; who are occasionally wrong and always willing to admit it. In short, the world needs leaders.
ANONYMOUS
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirit of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
e.e.cummings
Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not knows no release from little things; knows not the livid loneliness of fear nor mountain heights where bitter joys can hear the sound of wings.AMELIA EARHART
There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the silence of emptiness, the silence of fear, the silence of doubt. There is a certain silence that can emanate from a lifeless object as from a chair lately used, or from a piano with old dust upon its keys, or from anything that has answered to the need of a man, for pleasure or for work. This kind of silence can speak. Its voice may be melancholy, but it is not always so; for the chair may have been left by a laughing child or the last notes of the piano may have been raucous and gay. Whatever the mood or the circumstance, the essence of its quality may linger in the silence that follows. It is a soundless echo.
BERYL MARKHAM, WEST WITH THE NIGHT
Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. An then - the glory - so that a cricket song sweetens the ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and the number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates to us in the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
JOHN STEINBECK, EAST OF EDEN, 1952
... If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours. ... If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
