Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turn before we have learned to walk.

Connolly

Now, in the exacting twilight, to choose, not what we shall do or how we shall live but to choose the life whose dreams will hurt least in the nights to come.

Yehuda Amichai

Whoever tries to act like an angel makes a beast of himself.

Pascal

Three kinds of souls, three prayers:

1. I am a bow in your hands, Lord. Draw me, lest I rot.
2. Do not overdraw me, Lord. I shall break.
3. Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.

Nietzsche

He led a double life. Did that make him a liar? He did not feel a liar. He was a man of two truths.

Iris Murdoch

May my silences become more accurate.

Theodore Roethke

Only to have a grief
equal to all these tears!

Adrienne Rich

I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.

Albert Schweitzer

No trace: When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

Shunryu Suzuki

Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.

Simone Weil

To stand on one leg and prove God’s existence is a very different thing from going down on one’s knees and thanking him.

Kierkegaard

He who believes in nothing still needs a girl to believe in him.

Rosenstock-Huessy

Just remember, we’re all in this alone.

Lily Tomlin

The one who praises you is a thief. The one who criticizes you is your true friend.

Seung Sahn

I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.

Diane Arbus

The problem with introducing Oriental spirituality into America today is that the cultural barrier which the light from the East must pass through functions as a thick prism. The prism consists of American consumer culture and psychological individualism. Robbed by the prism of its color and sharpness, the now-refracted Oriental light serves as one more support for the structure its original teachers had most hoped it would undermine: the isolated, Western competitive ego.

Harvey Cox

No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.

Zen saying

The silver question is the one you are always afraid to ask (and the answer is yes).

Debora Greger