“The person who looks up to God rarely looks down on people.”
~Unknown
“Do Not Put Others Down In Order To Build Up Your Own Image.”
~Unknown
“Be not proud of race, face, place, or grace.”
-Charles Haddon Spurgeon
How do we know if we have a servant’s heart? By how we act when we are treated like one!
-Unknown
“Everybody can be great… because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
“That’s a spiritual lifestyle, being willing to admit that you don’t know everything and that you were wrong about some things. It’s about making a list of all the people you’ve harmed, either emotionally or physically or financially, and going back and making amends. That’s a spiritual lifestyle. It’s not a fluffy ethereal concept.”
― Anthony Kiedis
“You are exactly who you need to be in this moment. Don’t begrudge that or justify it.”
― Jennifer Mclean
“We work very hard to have what Buddha gave up to become enlightened. Does that mean we are benighted?”
― Rohan Perera
As soon as you stop making everyone else responsible for your happiness, the happier you’ll be.
― Nina Guilbeau
“O’ GREAT SPIRIT help me always to speak the truth quietly, to listen with an open mind when others speak, and to remember the peace that may be found in silence.”
Cherokee Prayer
“When you are in doubt, be still, and wait; when doubt no longer exists for you, then go forward with courage. So long as mists envelop you, be still; be still until the sunlight pours through and dispels the mists — as it surely will. Then act with courage.”
– Ponca Chief White Eagle
“You cannot change what is happening now so that you become yourself. You are already yourself; you just need to relax into it.”
– A. H. Almaas
Admit It and Change Everything – Rumi
“Define and narrow me, you starve yourself of yourself. Nail me down in a box of cold words, that box is your coffin. I do not know who I am. I am in astounded lucid confusion.
I am not a Christian, I am not a Jew, I am not a Zoroastrian, And I am not even a Muslim. I do not belong to the land, or to any known or unknown sea. Nature cannot own or claim me, nor can heaven,
Nor can India, China, Bulgaria, My birthplace is placelessness, My sign to have and give no sign. You say you see my mouth, ears, eyes, nose – they are not mine.
I am the life of life. I am that cat, this stone, no one. I have thrown duality away like an old dishrag, I see and know all times and worlds,
As one, one, always one. So what do I have to do to get you to admit who is speaking? Admit it and change everything! This is your own voice echoing off the walls of God.”
“There is a magnet in your heart that will attract true friends. That magnet is unselfishness, thinking of others first; when you learn to live for others, they will live for you.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda
“Those in the West who have adopted Christ as their own should remember that he was an Oriental. Love and sympathy for Jesus should be expanded into love and sympathy for all Orientals, and for all the world.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda
“The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda
“Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself…”
― Paramahansa Yogananda
“We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“Life is an experiment in which you may fail or succeed. Explore more, expect less.”
― Santosh Kalwar
“Explore, examine and express.”
― Brandon A. Trean
“You should seek harmony in everything that you do. I am harmony. Thank you for your love.”
-Babaji
“I want, and many times I have told you, that it is the best thing to live your life with courage and bravery. You must be always active and hardworking. I have told you this before also. I will give you liberation only through Karma, so you should not lag behind in your work. Be active and advance! You must always encourage Karma Yoga. You have to progress through Karma Yoga. Through Karma only, can all needs be fulfilled. We cannot make the world happy and peaceful without Karma Yoga (work). For the peace and happiness of the world, we have to practice Karma Yoga. Through Karma Yoga – working hard – you can bring peace, happiness, joy and contentment to the world. Idleness makes men slip backwards, lag behind. Karma is the highest and greatest thing.”
-Babaji
“To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow – this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert
“It is difficult to make a man miserable while he feels worthy of himself and claims kindred to the great God who made him.”
― Abraham Lincoln
“One man practicing kindness in the wilderness is worth all the temples this world pulls.”
― Jack Kerouac
“There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The mind is key. If anything should be considered a god, so to speak, it is the mind, not money. A healthy positive mind is the utmost priority. But if we were to reverse the order of these priorities, what would happen? I find it hard to imagine how a person with great wealth, bad health, no friends, and no peace of mind could feel even slightly happy.”
Dalai Lama
“There is a wonderful, mystical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life, happiness, freedom and peace of mind, are always attained by giving them to someone else.”
Unknown
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
Martin Luther King
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Water and words… Easy to pour impossible to recover.”
Chinese Proverb
“If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.”
Zen Proverb
“We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.”
~Thomas Merton
“The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.”
~Thomas Merton
“The least of the work of learning is done in the classroom.”
– Thomas Merton
“A spiritual person finds happiness in being loving and compassionate towards everyone, even towards those who are against him. He is like a tree that gives shade even to those who are in the act of cutting it down.”
– Ammachi
“To be able to put oneself in another’s position, to be able to see and to feel as another person does, this is the rare gift of an earnest spiritual seeker.”
– Ammachi
“Compassion does not see the faults of others. It does not see the weaknesses of people. It makes no distinction between good and bad people. Compassion cannot draw a line between two countries, two faiths or two religions. Compassion has no ego; thus there is no fear, lust or passion. Compassion simply forgives and forgets. Compassion is like a passage. Everything passes through it. Nothing can stay there. Compassion is love expressed in all its fullness.”
– Ammachi
“The common expression is ‘I love you.’ But instead of ‘I love you,’ it would be better to say, ‘I am love — I am the embodiment of pure love.’ Remove the I and you, and you will find that there is only love. It is as if love is imprisoned between the I and you. Remove the I and you, for they are unreal; they are self-imposed walls that don’t exist. The gulf between I and you is the ego. When the ego is removed the distance disappears and the I and you also disappear. They merge to become one — and that is love. You lend the I and you their reality. Withdraw your support and they will disappear. Then you will realize, not that ‘I love you,’ but that ‘I am that all-embracing love.”
– Ammachi
“Every moment is unique, unknown, completely fresh.”
– Pema Chodron
“Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.”
-Pema Chodron
“…feelings like disappointment, embarrassment, irritation, resentment, anger, jealousy, and fear, instead of being bad news, are actually very clear moments that teach us where it is that we’re holding back. They teach us to perk up and lean in when we feel we’d rather collapse and back away. They’re like messengers that show us, with terrifying clarity, exactly where we’re stuck. This very moment is the perfect teacher, and, lucky for us, it’s with us wherever we are”
― Pema Chödrön
“The greatest obstacle to connecting with our joy is resentment.”
― Pema Chödrön
“In deep self-acceptance grows a compassionate understanding. As one Zen master said when I asked if he ever gets angry, ‘Of course I get angry, but then a few minutes later I say to myself, ‘What’s the use of this,’ and I let it go.’”
– Jack Kornfield
“Make your whole life unceasing gratitude. What is Zen? Simple, simple, so simple. Infinite gratitude toward all things past; infinite service to all things present; infinite responsibility to all things future.”
– Goto Roshi
“Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu, Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or the next, did not descend from Adam or Eve or any origin story. My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being.”
– Mevlana Rumi
“Inherent within the dilemma is a solution.”
~Reginald Pawle
“We live thinking I am right, I am wise. Herein lies the cause of human delusion.”
― Ko Kamei
“It is the rub that polishes the jewel,” Enso Roshi says. “Nobody ever gets to nirvana without going through samsara. Nobody ever gets to heaven, without going through hell. The center of all things, the truth, is surrounded by demons.”
― T. Scott McLeod
“What is your face before your mother and father were born?”
– Zen Koan
A student asked Soen Nakagawa during a meditation retreat, “I am very discouraged. What should I do?” Soen replied, “Encourage others.”
– Essential Zen
“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”
― Brené Brown
“I realize there’s something incredibly honest about trees in winter, how they’re experts at letting things go.”
― Jeffrey McDaniel
“All people live in their own dream, in their own mind. They are in a completely different world from the the one we live in.”
~Don Miguel Ruiz
“All that we are is the result of what we have thought.”
~Buddha
“Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.”
~Buddha