In order to carry a positive action, we must develop here a positive vision.
– Dalai Lama
Category: Archived Quotes
Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.
– Winston Churchill
Stop looking outside for scraps of pleasure for fulfillment, for validation, security, or love – you have a treasure within that is infinitely greater than anything the world can offer.
– Eckhart Tolle
It is a mystery why we fall in love; It is a mystery how it happens
It is a mystery when it comes; It is a mystery why some love grows
And it is a mystery why some love fails.
You can analyze this mystery and look for reasons and causes,
But you will never do anymore than take the life out of the experience.
Just as life itself is more than the sum of the bones
And muscles and electrical impulses in the body,
Love is more than the sum of the interests
And attractions and commonalties that two people share.
And just as life itself is a gift that comes and goes in its own time,
So too, the coming and going of love must be taken as an unfathomable gift
That cannot be questioned in its ways.
Sometimes, hopefully at least once in your life –
The gift of love will come to you in full flower,
And you will take hold of it and celebrate it in all inexpressible beauty.
This is a dream we all share.
More often, it will come and take hold of you,
Celebrate you for a brief moment, then move on.
When this happens to young people,
They too often try to grasp the love and hold it to them,
Refusing to see that it is a gift that is freely given
And a gift that just as freely, moves away.
When they fall out of love,
They try desperately to reclaim the love that is lost
Rather than accepting the gift for what it was, then moving on.
They want answers where there are no answers.
They want to know what is wrong in them
That makes the other person no longer love them;
Or they try to get their lover to change,
Thinking that if some small things were different,
Love would bloom again. They blame their circumstances
And say that if they go far away and start a new life together,
Their love will grow.
They try anything to give meaning to what has happened.
But there is no meaning beyond the love itself,
And until they accept its own mysterious ways,
They live in a sea of misery.
You need to know this about love, and to accept it.
You need to treat what it brings you with kindness.
If you find yourself in love with someone who does not love you,
Be gentle with yourself. There is nothing wrong with you.
Love just didn’t choose to rest in the other person’s heart.
If you find someone else in love with you and you don’t love him,
Feel honored that love came and called at your door,
But gently refuse the gift you cannot return.
Do not take advantage; do not cause pain.
If you fall in love with another, and he falls in love with you,
And then love chooses to leave,
Do not try to reclaim it or to assess blame. Let it go.
There is a reason and there is a meaning. You will know in time.
Remember that you don’t choose love. Love chooses you.
Love has its own time, its own seasons,
And its own reason for coming and going.
You cannot bribe it or coerce it, or reason it into staying.
If it chooses to leave from your heart or from the heart of your lover,
There is nothing you can do and there is nothing you should do.
Love always had been and always will be a mystery.
Be glad that it came to live for a moment in your life.
If you keep your heart open, it will come again.
– Kent Nerburn, extract from Letters to my Son
Absence is to love what wind is to fire;
It extinguishes the small,
It enkindles the great.
– Comte Debussy-Rabutin
We must live, I’m afraid, with the shadows of imperfection.
– Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
When I have ceased to break my wings
Against the faultiness of things,
And learned that compromises wait
Behind each hardly opened gate,
When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange — my youth.
– Sara Teasdale, “Wisdom”
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 and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
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.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.
– Max Ehrmann, “Desiderata”
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 they 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.
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet, “On Children”
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
― Khalil Gibran, The Broken Wings
Ethics is nothing other than Reverence for Life. Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.
– Albert Schweitzer
Hearts united in pain and sorrow
will not be separated by joy and happiness.
Bonds that are woven in sadness
are stronger than the ties of joy and pleasure.
Love that is washed by tears
will remain eternally pure and faithful.
― Khalil Gibran, The Love Poems of Khalil Gibran, “Love Letters in the Sand”
Who What am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come.
– Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
– T.S.Eliot, an excerpt from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
It takes a minute to have a crush on someone, an hour to like someone, and a day to love someone… but it takes a lifetime to forget someone.
― Khalil Gibran
You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet, “On Marriage”
For everyone is pained by the thought disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.
– Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
There never yet was honest man
That ever drove the trade of love;
It is impossible, nor can
Integrity our ends promove:
For Kings and Lovers are alike in this
That their chief art in reigne dissembling is.
Here we are lov’d, and there we love,
Good nature now and passion strive
Which of the two should be above,
And laws unto the other give.
So we false fire with art sometimes discover,
And the true fire with the same art do cover.
What Rack can Fancy find so high?
Here we must Court, and here ingage,
Though in the other place we die.
Oh! ‘tis torture all, and cozenage;
And which the harder is I cannot tell,
To hide true love, or make false love look well.
Since it is thus, God of desire,
Give me my honesty again,
And take thy brands back, and thy fire;
I’me weary of the State I’me in:
Since (if the very best should now befall)
Loves Triumph, must be Honours Funeral.
– Sir John Suckling, “Loving and Beloved”
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
– T.S.Eliot, an excerpt from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
The tradegy of life is what dies inside a man while he lives.
– Albert Schweitzer
Rainbow of Madness 