Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it. --Mary Oliver (in Mary Oliver: Instructions for Living A Life)

In the Light of interbeing, peace and happiness in your daily life means peace and happiness in the world.
--Thich Nhat Hanh (in The New and Ancient Story of Interbeing)

Life is embodied network. --David George Haskell (in First, the Work of Paying Attention to the World)

You change your life by changing your heart. ---Max Lucado- (in Welcome to Fearless Dialogues. Are You Ready for Change?)

There is no passion in playing small--in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living. --Nelson Mandela (in Thoughts in Passing)

The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all...Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life. --Wendell Berry (in Reconnecting to the Soil, to Heal Ourselves and the Planet)

You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life --Mary Oliver (in Mary Oliver: Poet of Awe)

The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely. --Louisa May Alcott (in Discovering the Sacred in Everyday Life)

A river doesn't just carry water, it carries life. --Amit Kalantri (in In Which the River Makes Off with Three Stationery Characters)

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one. --Kahlil Gibran (in A Good Death: An Interview with Stephen Jenkinson)

Democracy is not just an election, it is our daily life. --Tsai Ing-wen (in Can Borrowing from Neighbors Strengthen Democracy?)

I was really on death's door. It brought very vividly to mind how extremely precious this life is, and what tremendous potential we have in this lifetime for purifying our hearts and our minds our souls--and for knowing reality. --Alan Wallace (in Coming Back to Being: A Conversation with Alan Wallace)

Don't we all die someday and someday comes all too soon? What will you do with your own wild, glorious chance at this thing we call life? --Mary Oliver (in The Courageous Mary Oliver)

Attending to life is an act of love. --Katie Rubinstein (in Mother's Day: Belonging to Each Other)

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well --Ralph Waldo Emerson (in Solar Sister)

Deep trust in life is not a feeling but a stance that you deliberately take. It is the attitude we call courage. --Br. David Steindl-Rast (in Deepening Our Comfort with Uncertainty)

We do have enough time. Life is long, if we listen to ourselves often enough, and look up. --Erling Kagge (in Why We Walk)

Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows. --Henry David Thoreau (in Meredith's Joy Jars)

We're all--trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria--pluralities. Life is embodied network. --David George Haskell (in The True Life of the Forest)

I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees. --Jane Hirshfield (in On Calligraphic Perception: A Conversation with Jane Hirshfield)

To learn that the most practical thing in life is to be idealistic is an enormous gift. --Godfrey Reggio (in If Life Wins There Will Be No Losers)

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. --Pablo Picasso (in The Wanderer: Earth as Art)

Tell me, what is it you plan to do.
With your one wild and precious life? --Mary Oliver (in Finding a Way Back)

One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter. --James Earl Jones (in Coastal Communication: A Mother and Son's Moving Collaboration)

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. --David Whyte (in Gathering as a Form of Leadership)

Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity. --Gilda Radner (in Uncomfortable Place of Uncertainty)

The life of an animal lies outside of conjecture. It is far beyond the scientific papers and the campfire stories. It is as true as breath. It is important as the words of children. --Craig Childs (in Bearing Witness: The Animal Dialogues)

Every creature was designed to serve a purpose. Learn from animals for they are there to teach you the way of life. --Suzy Kassem (in The Animal Rescuer of Assam)

I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light. --Barbara Brown Taylor (in Why We Need Darkness)

Life can survive in the constant shadow of illness, and even rise to moments of rampant joy, but the shadow remains, and one has to make space for it. --Diane Ackerman (in Diane Ackerman: 100 Names for Love)

There is more to life than increasing its speed. --Mahatma Gandhi (in Why Busyness is Actually Modern Laziness)

Faith means living with uncertainty--feeling your way through life, letting your heart guide you like a lantern in the dark --Dan Millman (in The Religious Value of the Unknown)

Interaction with self, with other human beings, and with Nature, all should lead to harmony and peace. That is the purpose of life. --Anand Damani (in Wild Borders)

The true life of the bowl began the moment it was dropped. --Ancient Kintsugi quote (in Kintsugi: The Golden Joinery of Love)

Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life. --Nelson Mandela (in Humanizing Aid with Dignity)

We have now felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal proportions, and devise means for maintaining the permanence of its relations to the fields, the meadows and the pastures, to the rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with which it waters down the earth. --George Perkins Marsh (in 1864 (in 20-Year Reforestation Project Plants 2.7 Million Trees)

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. --Rachel Carson (in Falling in Love With the Earth)

The connections we make in the course of a life--maybe that's what heaven is. --Fred Rogers (in Why We Turn to Mr. Rogers)

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. --Stella Adler (in John Barton: A Certain Mathematics)

Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. --Carl Jung (in Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results)

I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion--and where it isn't, that's where my work lies. --Ram Dass (in Be Love Now)

Safety and security don't just happen, they are the result of collective consensus and public investment. We owe our children, the most vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear. --Nelson Mandela (in METAdrasi: Escorting Children to Freedom and Hope)

The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness,
And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream. --Kahlil Gibran (in Kahlil Gibran on Befriending Time)

Occasionally in life one develops a conviction so precious and meaningful that he will stand on it till the end. That is what I have found in nonviolence. --Martin Luther King, Jr. (in Understanding King's Nonviolence)

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife. --Kahlil Gibran (in Meaning and the Song of the Soul)

In our estrangement from nature we have severed our sense of the community of life and lost touch with the experience of other animals. ...understanding the human animal becomes easier in context, seeing our human thread woven into the living web among the strands of so many others. --Carl Safina (in Of Wild Wolves And Bottle-Fed Squirrels)

Life is eternal; and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight. --Rossiter W. Raymond (in Love Letters from La Pineta)

Everything we see and touch consists of matter rearranged by information and energy. Everything is in connections and bonds. Life, mind, and love, our human nature, have been created in partnership with the rules that run the world. --Paul R. Fleischman (in The Wonder of the Universe is Wondering in Us)

Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky. --Ursula K. Le Guin (in Jane Rosen: Stay Here. Tell My Story.)

Trees do not preach learning and precepts. They preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. --Herman Hesse (in 111 Trees)