“The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”
— Henry Miller
Attention
Evidence of What You Are
“What you are living is the evidence of what you are thinking and feeling every single time.”
— Abraham Hicks
Consequences Of The Little Choices
“People should think about the consequences of the little choices they make each day. What do you buy? Where did it come from? Where was it made? Did it harm the environment? Did it lead to cruelty to animals? Was it cheap because of child slave labor?”
— Jane Godall
More in this article.
The Person Who is Doing It
“The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it.”
– Chinese Proverb
Be Afraid
“Be afraid of the calmest person in the room.”
— Bruce Lee
Teach Them All The Things
“Instead of buying your children all the things you never had, you should teach them all the things you were never taught. Material wears out but knowledge stays.”
— Bruce Lee
In the End
“In the end,
we will conserve only what we love,
we will love only what we understand,
and we will understand
only what we are taught.”
— baba dioum
(via)
How (Not) To Grow Old
“The best way to overcome it [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.”
— Bertrand Russell
A Space Suit For Living
“When I was born, I donned a space suit for living on this planet. It was this body, this nice spacesuit, and it had a steering mechanism, my prefrontal lobes and all the brain motors coordinating stuff. . . . You get so good at using your spacesuit that you can’t differentiate yourself from your spacesuit anymore. . . . It’s what I call somebody training.”
— Ram Dass
Trust
“The best way to find out if you can trust someone is to trust them.”
— Ernest Hemingway
Small Kindnesses
This is beautiful.
On Holding Space for Another Person?
“What does it mean to hold space for another person? It means that we are willing to walk alongside another person in whatever journey they’re on without judging them, making them feel inadequate, trying to fix them, or trying to impact the outcome. When we hold space for other people, we open our hearts, offer unconditional support, and let go of judgment and control.”
— Heather Plett
Creativity is Unpredictable
“I can’t give my students more time in their lives; but what I try to do is change the way they think about and value it in the first place. My class typically includes students who aren’t art majors, some of whom may never have made art before. I give them the same advice every quarter: Leave yourself twice as much time as you think you need for a project, knowing that half of that may not look like “making” anything at all. There is no Soylent version of thought and reflection — creativity is unpredictable, and it simply takes time.”
— Jenny Odell
Your Own Happiness
“The greatest gift you can ever give another person is your own happiness”
― Esther Hicks
Stop Focusing On The Negative
“You can get to where you want to be from wherever you are—but you must stop spending so much time noticing and talking about what you do not like about where you are.”
― Esther Hicks
You Have To Rise
“Everything you have ever dreamed of having is being held in trust for you until you are at the level in which you are ready to receive it. You have to rise. You have to become the kind of person who deserves the life you want.”
— Brianna Wiest
If you Love…
“The most important thing in life is your inner energy. If you’re always tired and never enthused, then life is no fun. But if you’re always inspired and filled with energy, then every minute of every day is an exciting experience. Learn to work with these things. Through meditation, through awareness and willful efforts, you can learn to keep your centers open. You do this by just relaxing and releasing. You do this by not buying into the concept that there is anything worth closing over. Remember, if you love life, nothing is worth closing over.”
― Michael A. Singer
Break The Rules
“By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately, and well.”
— Robert Bringhurst
Torn
“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
— E. B. White
The Technology of Kindness
“People’s ability to connect is the glue that holds our culture together. By thinning out our interactions and splintering our media landscape, the Internet has taken away the common ground we need to understand one another. Each of us is becoming more confident about our own world just as it drifts farther from the worlds of others. Empathy requires us to understand that even people who disagree with us have a lived experience as deep as our own. But in the fractured landscape of social media, we have little choice but to see the other side as obtuse, dishonest or both. Unless we reverse this trend and revive empathy, we have little chance of mending the tears in our social fabric.”
The Technology of Kindness, by Jamil Zaki
True Success
“What if we measured true success not by the amount of money you have but by the amount of human energy you unlock, the amount of potential you enable? If that were our metric, our world would be a different place.”
— Jacqueline Novogratz
You Gotta Show Up
“You certainly can’t lead from behind a desk, and you can’t lead with email. It’s a human enterprise. It’s the same reason you can’t parent through texting. You can’t coach a baseball team with email. You’ve got to show up.”
— Simon Sinek
Listen to this wonderful conversation between Debbie Millman and Simon Sinek.
Odd
“You have to be odd to be number one.”
― Dr. Seuss
Come To The Edge
“Come to the edge.
“We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came
And he pusehd
And they flew.”— Christopher Logue