Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.
We think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will.
No bird can fly without opening its wings, and no one can love without exposing their hearts.
The greedy one gathered all the cherries, while the simple one tasted all the cherries in one.
Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.
The real & lasting practice for each of us is to remove what obstructs us so we can be who we are.
To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.
All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.
This is the ongoing purpose of full attention: to find a thousand ways to be pierced into wholeness.
The resource of life is everywhere, even in the smallest of things and we're never very far from it.
When we keep choosing between right and wrong. We spend our energy sorting life rather than living it.
The practice of listening is one of the most mysterious, luminous, and challenging art forms on Earth.
We need to give up what no longer works and find new ways of being that keeps us close to what matters.
The simplest and bravest way to counter the plight of disheartenment is to move toward what is precious.
I looked a hundred times and all I saw was dust. The sun broke through and flecks of gold filled the air.
Tragedy stays alive by feeling what's been done to us, while peace comes alive by living with the results.
If we are to access the resources of life, we must listen with our common heart to the cries of the world.
The mystery is that whoever shows up when we dare to give has exactly what we need hidden in their trouble.
I started out wanting to write great poems, then wanting to discover true poems. Now, I want to be the poem.
The greatest thing we can do to be closer to our own lives and to the freshness of living is to open up again.
Intuitive listening requires us to still our minds until the beauty of things older than our minds can find us.
We are all continually asked to learn how to ask for what we need, only to practice accepting what we're given.
When wiggling through a hole the world looks different than when scrubbed clean by the wiggle and looking back.
Anything or anyone that asks you to be other than yourself is not holy, but is trying only to fill its own need.
In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame.
When we deny what comes through us, it defines us. When we honestly face what comes through us, then who we are grows.
Living is the original art. As a young man I wanted to be a poet and I learned along the way that I already was a poet.
…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.” (p.275)
Perhaps the hardest thing I've learned, and still struggle with, is that I don't have to be finished in order to be whole.
A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it
Keeping a commitment to listening has led me to my own growth, beyond any imagined dreams I may have had throughout the years.
The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break.
Wakefulness is not a destination but a song the human heart keeps singing, the way birds keep singing at the first sign of light.
We are love. But in an everyday setting we have to make choices. We have limits. We can love everyone and we can't love everyone.
The journey is made easier when we can accept that the process of living is designed for what matters to come through us tenderly.
Accepting what we're given is a practice in being present to everything beyond us that lets us become intimate with the nature of life.
Let's be in awe which doesn't mean anything but the courage to gape like fish at the surface breaking around our mouths as we meet the air.
There is no getting around the fundamental fact that we need to interact with everything in order to manifest the wholeness we are born with.
Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to ... open our hearts once they've closed, to open our souls once they've shied away.
The real challenge is to remember to see clearly when everything's flying around us and we're wrapped up in our [emotional] wounds and traumas.
Grief can be a slow ache that never seems to stop rising, yet as we grieve, those we love mysteriously become more and more a part of who we are.
Meditation, in all its forms and traditions, is an invitation to listen, to open, to quietly enlist the courage to be touched and formed by life.
Try as we do to resist what we're given, this is the only doorway to truth. We waste too much time and energy denying or fighting where we find ourselves.
To distance ourselves from our experience makes our feelings a liability, while staying in conversation with our experience makes our feelings a resource.
Each of us carries some wisdom waiting to be discovered at the center of our experience. Everything we meet, if faced and held, reveals a part of that wisdom.
We can never be prepared for everything. No one person can anticipate all of life. In fact, overpreparation is yet another way to wall ourselves in from life.
Love and grief enable us to feel how we're all at heart the same. In love and grief, which is always very personal, the distinctions that separate us melt away.
Mysteriously, as elusive as it is, this moment--where the eye is what it sees, where the heart is what it feels--this moment shows us that what is real is sacred
To listen also means to stay in relationship, the central challenge of our time, and this requires us to constantly minimize whatever stands between us and life.
By our very nature, we are a human paradox. We are a human being. The being is infinite and the human is very finite. We walk around like lightening in a bottle.