So many of our problems arise because we always feel cut off from something we need. We do not feel whole and therefore turn expectantly toward other people for the qualities we imagine missing in ourselves. All of the problems of the world, from one person’s anxiety to warfare between nations, can be traced to this feeling of not being whole.
~ Lama Thubten Yeshe

hari om tat sat
You are that which you seek.

We are not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not extending in the present.
~ Marianne Williamson

And then the day came
when the risk to remain tight in a bud
was more painful
than the risk it took to blossom.
~Anais Nin

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world...as in being able to remake ourselves. BE the change you want to see in the world.
~Gandhi

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.
~Einstein

I saw the angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free.
~Michelangelo

We are what we think. With our thoughts we make the world.
-The Buddha

Our whole business in this life is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.
~Saint Augustine

Doubts, like clouds, sail on the mental horizon occasionally. They can be dark and heavy or small and wispy. Sometimes they disappear, but often return unnoticed because of an influx of new experiences. . . Impatience and restlessness create doubt, but the aspirant is warned that both prevent certain spiritual powers from developing. Remember that arrogance of some sort which, if allowed to linger, will undermine faith, hope, and will and only strengthen the moods of depression. Arrogance is of the ego and is therefore destructive.
~Swami Sivananda Radha

Everyone is overridden by thoughts;
that's why they have so much heartache and sorrow.
At times I give myself up to thought purposefully;
but when I choose,
I spring up from those under its sway.
I am like a high-flying bird,
and thought is a gnat:
how should a gnat overpower me?
-Rumi

For one human being to love another
That is perhaps the most difficult of
All our tasks, the ultimate, the last
Test and proof, the work for which all
Other work is but preparation.
-Rilke, Letters From Young Poet

I have learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
~Henry David Thoreau, Walden

For a man, as for a flower and beast and bird, the triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
~John Muir

Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
to where you’re bravely working.

Expecting the worst, you look, and instead
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.

Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes
if it were always a fist or always stretched out you would be paralyzed.

Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings.
~Rumi

So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence. . . . Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of "I" and "mine," self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction. . . . The fact that we need to grasp at all and go on and on grasping shows that in the depths of our being we know that the self does not inherently exist. . . . {The ego's greatest triumph} is to inveigle us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that ego and its grasping are at the root of all our suffering. Yet ego is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us.
~Sogyal Rinpoche

The dreamer who dreams our dreams knows far more of us than we know of it.
~R.D. Laing

Thou must love God as not-God, not-Spirit, not-person, not-image, but as He is, a sheer, pure absolute One, sundered from all duality, and in whom we must eternally sink from nothingness to nothingness.
~Meister Eckhart

If my heart could do my thinking, and my head began to feel, I would look upon the world anew, and know what’s truly real.
~Van Morrison

Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.
And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy...
But anywhere is the center of the world.
~Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux

Realize that the journey to the center takes place within your own mind.
~Matthew Flickstien

"All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
~Pablo Picasso

I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element.  It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous.  I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.  In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse.  If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming.
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 

May the tree of our life
Be firmly rooted in the soil of love
Let good deeds be the leaves of that tree
May words of kindness form its flowers
And may peace be its fruit
~AMMA

I believe that the very purpose of life is to be happy. From the very core of our being, we desire contentment. In my own limited experience I have found that the more we care for the happiness of others, the greater is our own sense of well-being. Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others automatically puts the mind at ease. It helps remove whatever fears or insecurities we may have and gives us the strength to cope with any obstacles we encounter. It is the principal source of success in life. Since we are not solely material creatures, it is a mistake to place all our hopes for happiness on external development alone. The key is to develop inner peace.
~Dalai Lama

Traditional people of Indian nations have interpreted the two roads that face the light-skinned race as the road to technology and the road to spirituality. We feel that the road to technology.... has led modern society to a damaged and seared earth. Could it be that the road to technology represents a rush to destruction, and that the road to spirituality represents the slower path that the traditional native people have traveled and are now seeking again? The earth is not scorched on this trail. The grass is still growing there.
~William Commanda, Mamiwinini, Canada, 1991 ~ The Sacred Tree

Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to. . . . you have uncovered in yourself your own wise guide. Because he or she knows you through and through, since he or she is you, your guide can help you, with increasing clarity and humor, negotiate all the difficulties of your thoughts and emotions. . . . The more often you listen to this wise guide, the more easily you will be able to change your negative moods yourself, see through them, and even laugh at them for the absurd dramas and ridiculous illusions that they are. . . . The more you listen, the more guidance you will receive. If you follow the voice of your wise guide . . . and let the ego fall silent, you come to experience that presence of wisdom and joy and bliss that you really are.
~Sogyal Rinpoche

The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men.
~Einstein

come inside the fire
leave your trickery behind
go insane
go mad
burn like a candle-moth

first make yourself a stranger
to yourself and
tear down your house
then move with us
dwell in the abode of love

wash your chest
seven times over
cleansing from hatred
then mold yourself into the chalice
holding the pure wine of love

to understand the intoxicated
you must become intoxicated
to join the eternal soul
you mustbecome a soul

you heard my story and
your spirit grew wings
now you must be annihilated in love
to become a fable of your own

your imagination my friend flies away
then pulls you as a follower
surpass the imagination and
like fate
arrive ahead of yourself

passion and desire
has locked your heart
you must become the key
the teeth of the key
to open all locks

King Solomon gives you a message
listen to the birds
they are talking to you
calling you a trap
frightening them away

to capture us they say
you must make a nest
you must make a nest

your sweetheart's face
is appearing now
change yourself to a mirror
and fill yourself to the brim

so many gifts
you purchased for your love
quit buying gifts
give yourself over

you were a part of the
mineral kingdom in the beginning
then you change to animal life for awhile
then you found the soul of a human for awhile
now the time has arrived
to become
the soul of souls
~Rumi