“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.” 
― C.S. Lewis


“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.” 
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.” 
― C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” 
― C.S. Lewis

“Make your choice, adventurous Stranger,
Strike the bell and bide the danger,
Or wonder, till it drives you mad,
What would have followed if you had.” 
― C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

“If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.” 
― C.S. Lewis

“The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become - because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be. . .It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.” 
― C.S. Lewis

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.” 
― C.S. Lewis, The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis

“Don't you mind," said Puddleglum. "There are no accidents. Our guide is Aslan; and he was there when the giant king caused the letters to be cut, and he knew already all things that would come of them; including this.” 
― C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

“Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.” 
― C.S. Lewis, The Magician's Nephew

I connect best with others when I connect with the core of myself. When I am able to disengage myself from others and allow the Lord to liberate me from an unhealthy dependence on people, I can exist more for them, listen more attentively, love more unselfishly, speak more compassionately, play more playfully, take myself less seriously, and become more aware that my face is bright with laughter in the midst of a game I thoroughly enjoy.”

Brennan Manning,  Souvenirs of Solitude

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

We are always held in the love of God. We are never wholly at the mercy of other people–they are only “second causes,” and no matter how many second or third or fifieth causes seem to be in control of what happens to us, it is God who is in charge, He who holds the keys, He who casts the lot finally into the lap. Trusting Him, then, requires that I leave some things to be decided by others. I must learn to relinquish the control I might wield over somebody else if the decision properly belongs to him. I must resist my urge to manipulate him, needle and prod and pester unter he capitulates. I must trust God in him, trust God to do for both us better than I know.
— Elizabeth Eliot, Passion & Purity

She was not beautiful, at least not in the way society taught us to admire… Yet in her own eyes she had always felt blessed and radiant. Because she had made it up from a tough, mostly black neighborhood in San Francisco to become a doctor. Because she was loved. Because she was taught to give love.
— James Patterson, 1st To Die

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
— George Washington

When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
- John Ruskin

To live with the conscious knowledge of the shadow of uncertainty, with the knowledge that disaster or tragedy could strike at any time; to be afraid and to know and acknowledge your fear, and still to live creatively and with unstinting love: that is to live with grace.
— Peter Henry Abrahams

Often we allow ourselves to be upset by small things we should despise and forget. We lose many irreplaceable hours brooding over grievances that, in a year’s time, will be forgotten by us and by everybody. No, let us devote our life to worthwhile actions and feelings, to great thoughts, real affections and enduring undertakings.
— Andre Maurois

When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others—not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.
– C.S Lewis

Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.
— George MacDonald

"one reason we struggle with insecurity: we're comparing our behind the scenes to everyone else's highlight reel" - steven furtick


"The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead, I think of myself less.” -Tim Keller, The Reason for God


"Things which sound like platitudes become vital, living and powerful when you have to learn them in dark tunnels." — Elizabeth Elliot


"It is not hard for the Lord to turn night into day. He that sends the clouds can as easily clear the skies. Let us be of good cheer. It is better farther on. Let us sing hallelujah in anticipation." — C.H. Spurgeon


See that I am God. See that I am in everything. See that I do everything. See that I have never stopped ordering my works, nor ever shall, eternally. See that I lead everything on to the conclusion I ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it. How can anything be amiss?
— Julian of Norwich

One reason we struggle with insecurity: we’re comparing our behind the scenes to everyone else’s highlight reel.” -Steven Furtick

Expect to have hope rekindled. Expect your prayers to be answered in wondrous ways. The dry seasons in life do not last. The spring rains will come again.

— Sarah Ban Breathnach

“And if you go broke and somebody comes along with a crazy proposition my advice is to take it. You might learn something when you’re in a mood to learn something.” —Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

I was a mystery too, not to be explained. I was a story being told.

.....

Though at times relationship seems too rickety a shelter to enter, pummeled by change and teased by our weaknesses, the desire to know others remains If God lets that longing cling as it does, that desperate quiet for companionship, perhaps it's worth understanding, perhaps later we will turn to the buildings we once thought were so thin and see them as fortresses that held us, frail and failing though we were at the time.

.....

I remember a few sentances we spoke to each other, jingling around like remnants I have from the beginning of a journey - not necessarily treasures in themselves, but valuable because they are what I have kept.

- elisa stanford, "ordinary losses"

She had that spontaneous quality of aliveness which illuminates people who have already done a lot of their dying, and I think I am beginning to understand the truth of that.
- Madeline L'Engle (The Summer of the Great-grandmother, 180)

The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast. - Madeline L'Engle

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.
-Arthur Golden

Listen to the MUSTN'TS, child, Listen to the DON'TS. Listen to the SHOULDN'TS, the IMPOSSIBLES, the WON'TS. Listen to the NEVER HAVES, then listen close to me---
Anything can happen, child, ANYTHING can be.
-Shel Silverstein

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.
-Marie Curie

When I look at the galaxies on a clear night - when I look at the incredible brilliance of creation, and think that this is what God is like, then instead of feeling intimidated by and diminished by it, I am enlarged-I rejoice that I am part of it.
-Madeline L'Engle

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
- Sherlock Holmes (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930)


The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.
- Samuel Johnson


When you're not sure you trust a person any more you start wishing they'd do something really, really wrong, just so you can be right about them.
-Angela on "My So-Called Life"


To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.
-Sir Winston Churchill


To be nobody but yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
-E.E. Cummings


The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart it buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within, not for want of a teller, but for want of an understanding ear.
-Stephen King

May my silences become more accurate.
-Theodore Roethke

Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending. - Carl Bard

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
-Nelson Henderson

Let every man or woman here, if you never hear me again, remember this, that if you wish to be great at all, you must begin where you are and with what you are. He who would be great anywhere must first be great in his own Philadelphia.  
-Russel H. Conwell

What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.
-Aristotle


How often things occur by mere chance which we dare not even hope for.
-Terence


The beginnings of all things are weak and tender. We must therefore be clear-sighted in beginnings.
-Michel de Montaigne


It is only by risking from one hour to another that we live at all.
-William James


Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.
-Sigmund Freud


I am still learning.
-Michaelangelo


Let the world know you as you are, not as you think you should be, because sooner or later, if you are posing, you will forget the pose, and then where are you?
-Fanny Brice


No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.
-Maya Angelou


Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.
-Robert Bresson

It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength of live and our reasons for living.
-Simone de Beauvoir


At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities.
-Jean Houston


Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand.
-Baruch Spinoza


Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.
-M.C. Richards


It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth, however hard.
-May Sarton

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
-Annie Dillard

Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, 'Something is out of tune.'
-Carl Jung

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.
-Anais Nin

Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.
-C.S. Lewis

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
-C.S. Lewis

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery

half of learning how to play/ is learning what not to play/ and she's learning the spaces she leaves/ have their own things to say/ and she's trying to sing just enough/ so that the air around her moves/ and make music like mercy/ that gives what it is/ and has nothing to prove.
-Ani DiFranco


I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald


When in the morning I looked upon the light, I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world.
-Sir Rabindranath Tagore


She is vulnerable for the same reason she is strong. Anything she puts her love in--she will trust. She will wait you out--she will put up with you--forever--if she loves you.
-John Irving

Even the most solid of things, and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.
-Jeanette Winterson


I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
-William Stafford


If she got really quiet and listened, new parts of her wanted to speak.
-SARK


You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing, and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life.
-J. Krishnamurti


Intimacy happens in moments. The mistake we make is wanting it all the time.
-Jo Ann Magdoff


Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.
-Gretel Ehrlich


And the sea will always be there for your soul to meet the tide.
-Ann Reed

When one door closes, another opens. But we often look so long and regretfully upon the closed door that we fail to see the one that has opened for us.
-Alexander Graham Bell


The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.
-Albert Einstein


Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.
-Arthur Golden


It hurt me a little bit to stand there and lie. Sometimes truth was a bandy-legged soul who dashed from one side of the world to the other and I could never find him.
-James McBride


It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.
-Margaret Atwood


To be lost is only a failure of memory.
-Margaret Atwood


Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
-T.S. Eliot


For life is holy and every moment is precious.
-Jack Kerouac


I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind--and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.
-Michel de Montaigne


Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.
-Percy Bysshe Shelly

I will be the gladdest thing under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

A little madness in the spring is wholesome even for the King.
- Emily Dickinson

Her love was entire as a child's, and though warm as summer it was fresh as spring.
- Thomas Hardy

What I hope for you is that you live there not as prisoners, ashamed of being women, consenting captives of a psychopathic social system, but as natives. That you will be at home there, keep house there, be your own mistress, with a room of your own. That you will do your work there, whatever you're good at, art or science or tech or running a company or sweeping under the beds, and when they tell you that it's second-class work because a woman is doing it, I hope you tell them to go to hell and while they're going to give you equal pay for equal time. I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is.
- Ursula K LeGuin

Some things...arrive on their own mysterious hour, on their own terms and not yours, to be seized or relinquished forever.
- Gail Godwin

Six o'clock in the evening and Alicia is waiting for Jake. She has in fact spent the better part of the last few months waiting for him, something she hates to acknowledge even to herself. Certainly no one else would know it. Her waiting is a near-miracle of camouflage and self-containment. She doesn't sit by the phone, doesn't even stay home. It's something invisible: an inner ear cocked, an ache.
- Elissa Wald, "Holding Fire"

Sail on silver girl, sail on by./ Your time has come to shine. All your dreams are on their way./ See how they shine, Oh, if you need a friend I'm sailing right behind./ Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down. Like a bridge over troubled water, I will ease your mind.
- Paul Simon

It strikes Miranda as bizarre how you could sit for months plotting how to get inside, and then one day you knock, he says come in, and you wonder if it would have truly been that easy all along.
- Thisbe Nissen, The Good People of New York

Sometimes it takes years to really grasp what has happened to your life.
- Wilma Rudolph


You must learn to be still in the midst of activity, and to be vibrantly alive in repose.
- Indira Ghandi


One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are, when you don't come home at night.
- Margaret Mead


Not all who wander are lost.
- J.R.R. Tolkien


too much freedom, i'm learning, can be just as frustrating as not enough. and as with everything in life, i'm still trying to find the balance.
- Audrey Beth Stein


Just don't give up trying to do what you really want to do. Where there is love and inspiration, I don't think you can go wrong.
- Ella Fitzgerald


You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the things you think you cannot do.
- Eleanor Roosevelt


She began to cry. Just crying—the deep and ugly kind, the kind you lose yourself in, thanking God no one has to see how rubbed and blotched your face becomes, though some detached part of you also wishes there were someone to see you now, to see and understand how sad you are, at heart. They don't see it, of course; you'd never show them.
- Sylvia Brownrigg, The Metaphysical Touch

Never part without loving words to think of during your absence. It may be that you will not meet again in this life.
- Jean Paul Richter

You have to find it. No one else can find it for you.
- Bjorn Borg

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.
- Maya Angelou

When you come to the edge of all the light you know,
and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown,
faith is knowing one of two things will happen:
There will be something solid to stand on,
or you will be taught how to fly.
- Barbara J. Winter

At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.
It is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.
You can love completely without complete understanding.
- Norman Maclean (A River Runs Through It)

Do not consider painful what is good for you.
- Euripides


Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done whether you like it or not. It is the first lesson that ought to be learned and however early a person’s training begins, it is probably the last lesson a person learns thoroughly.
- Thomas Huxley, British biologist


In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.
- Bertrand Russell


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


The most precious possession that ever comes to a man in this world is a woman’s heart.
- Proverb


Love doesn't sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.
- Ursula K. Le Guin, writer


Never seem more learned than the people you are with. Wear your learning like a pocket watch and keep it hidden. Do not pull it out to count the hours, but give the time when you are asked.
- Lord Chesterfield

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
- Benjamin Franklin

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
- William Shakespeare

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.
- Alfred Korzybski

The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.
- Pierre Abelard

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning.
- Ivy Baker Priest

A man may fulfill the object of his existence by asking a question he cannot answer, and attempting a task he cannot achieve.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes


Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest...
- Robert Frost

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
- Delos B. McKown

The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
- Charles DuBois

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
- Anais Nin

From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.
- Pat Conroy

if you like my poems let them walk in the evening, a little behind you
- e. e. cummings

To me, the ending felt so correct and so appropriate that it seemed to bend over backward to kiss the beginning.
- Elizabeth Gilbert

Scientists are the easiest to fool. They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything has a logical explanation and things are what they appear to be. Children and conjurors — they terrify me. Scientists are no problem; against them I feel quite confident.
-James P. Hogan

The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within.
-Gandhi

It's surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you're not comfortable within yourself, you can't be comfortable with others.
-Sydney J. Harris

When I was young I was sure of everything; in a few years, having been mistaken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most things as I was before; at present, I am hardly sure of anything but what God has revealed to me.
-John Wesley


We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.
-Herman Melville

Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.
-George Soros

Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
-Winston Churchill

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Waste not fresh tears over old griefs. -Euripides, Alexander

Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee. -Montaigne

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.
-Victor Hugo

Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.
-Edna Ferber

All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance.
-V.V. Rozanov

You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip.
-Jonathan Carroll, Outside the Dog Museum

The moment when you first wake up in the morning is the most wonderful of the twenty-four hours. No matter how weary or dreary you may feel, you possess the certainty that, during the day that lies before you, absolutely anything may happen. And the fact that it practically always doesn't, matters not a jot. The possibility is always there.
-Monica Baldwin

It seemed to be a necessary ritual that he should prepare himself for sleep by meditating under the solemnity of the night sky... a mysterious transaction between the infinity of the soul and the infinity of the universe.
-Victor Hugo

Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is mingled with grief, love grows perhaps the greater. -from The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.
-Agatha Christie

"Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it.. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more." -Erica Jong

"Put away the book, the description, the tradition, the authority, and take the journey of self-discovery. Love, and don't be caught in opinions and ideas about what love is or should be. When you love, everything will come right. Love has its own action. Love, and you will know the blessings of it. Keep away from the authority who tells you what love and what it is not. No authority knows and he who knows cannot tell. Love, and there is understanding." - Krishnamurti

"At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done. We will be judged by 'I was hungry and you gave me to eat, I was naked and you clothed me, I was homeless and you took me in.' Hungry not only for bread -- but hungry for love. Naked not only for clothing -- but naked for human dignity and respect. Homeless not only for want of a room of bricks -- but homeless because of rejection." -Mother Teresa

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves 'who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; its in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." -Marianne Williamson

"Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure...than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat."
-Theodore Roosevelt

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours."
-Ayn Rand

“Come to the edge.”
“We can't. We're afraid.”
“Come to the edge.”
“We can't. We will fall!”
“Come to the edge.”
And they came.
And he pushed them.
And they flew.

Guillaume Apollinaire

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -Mark Twain

"Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn from you, love you, bless you before you depart. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may, for it may not always be so. One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky and want, more than all the world, your return." -Mary Jean Iron

"Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn from you, love you, bless you before you depart. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may, for it may not always be so. One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky and want, more than all the world, your return." -Mary Jean Iron

"People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass by themselves without wondering."
- St. Augustine

"Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it
and whispers, 'Grow, grow.'" -The Talmud

"I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which comes to me as seed goes to the next as blossom and that which comes to me as blossom, goes on as fruit." - Dawna Markova