Quotes
Normal day. Let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn you, love you, bless you before you depart. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow.
Mary Jean Iron
We create our self through our choices, our actions, and the risks we are willing to take.
Nathaniel Branden
Self-care is never a selfish act — it is simply good stewardship of the only gift I have, the gift I was put forth on earth to offer others. Anytime we can listen to true self and give the care it requires, we do it not only for ourselves, but for the many others whose lives we touch.
Parker Palmer
…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
Viktor Frankl
On choosing
Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.
Howard Thurman
There is something in every one of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. And if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.
Howard Thurman
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments and life itself is grace.
Frederick Buechner
On one’s inner compass
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain ....Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying, 'You are accepted.'
Paul Tillich
Fear is boring, because fear only ever has one thing to say to us, and that thing is: ‘STOP!’… My fear wants me to stop, because my fear wants me to be safe, and my fear perceives all motion, all inspiration, all work, all activity, all passion whatsoever as potentially life-threatening. My fear wants me to live a smaller life. The smallest imaginable life, ideally. My fear would prefer that I never got out of bed. Your fear is the same. Exactly the same as mine. I guarantee it.
Elizabeth Gilbert
To assume responsibility for choosing our own values, principles, and goals, relying solely upon our own reason and understanding – to honor our internal signals to that extent – is to practice the ultimate form of intellectual independence, the one most difficult for the overwhelming majority of human beings and for which their upbringing least prepared them.
Nathaniel Branden
On overcoming
A creative life is an amplified life. It’s a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life. Living in this manner – continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you – is a fine art, in and of itself.
Elizabeth Gilbert
The path to wholeness of the self commonly leads through a labyrinth of possibilities, a maze of gifts. The fact is that coming to fullness of life is seldom a straight line. It is a matter of learning to listen to the call – to the magnet of the heart within us – to assess our own gifts, to follow our own passions, and to find, through them, the happiness that flows between passion and purpose.
Joan Chittister
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
Émile Zola
On purpose
The question is, of course, what do you feel to be your task? Where the fear, there is your task!
Carl Jung
For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.
Viktor Frankl