Half the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important
They don't mean to do harm ­
But the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.

T. S. Eliot

Unless your heart, your soul, and your whole being are behind every decision you make, the words from your mouth will be empty, and each action will be meaningless. Truth and confidence are the roots of happiness.

Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.

Auden

As if whipped by invisible spirits, the sun steeds of time run away with the light chariot of our destiny, and nothing remains to us but to hold onto the reins with calm courage, steering the wheels, now right, now left, from the stone here and the abyss there. Where it goes---who knows? One hardly remembers from where one came.

   Goethe

There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Jung

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.
Lewis Smedes

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Everyone hears only what he understands.

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad.

Marcel Proust

So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.

Krishnamurti

Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That's why it's a comfort to go hand-in-hand.

For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?

Bell Hooks

Insist upon yourself. Be original.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perhaps what I do not manage to operate rapidly enough is the passage between the outside and the inside.
Helene Cixous

Grace isn't a little prayer you chant before receiving a meal. It's a way to live.

The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.

Thomas Carlyle

Better to illuminate than merely to shine, to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate.
Thomas Aquinas

Regardless of who you are or what you have been, you can be what you want to be.

W. Clement Stone

Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Snowflakes

Out of the bosom of the Air,

Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,

Over the woodlands brown and bare

Over the harvest-fields forsaken,

Silent and soft and slow

Descends the snow.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow