Every so often I run across a beautiful phrase or poem or saying that catches my ear, and I write it down, sometimes finding it useful to meditate on.
“Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
– Shel Silverstein
“And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
– Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.”
– Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter
“She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.”
– Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.”
– Jim Morrison
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
– Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
“Your heart knows the way. Run in that direction.”
– Rumi
“Whenever you are lonely, remind yourself that God has sent everyone else away so that there are only you and Him.”
– Rumi
“Prayer is not asking; it is a longing of the soul … It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without heart.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood, would be intolerable.
– Virginia Woolf