There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.
--Maya Angelou (in Why to Get Published)

In the end, reconciliation is a spiritual process, which requires more than just a legal framework. It has to happen in the hearts and minds of people. --Nelson Mandela (in Reconciliation as a Way of Life: White Women & Settler Coloniali)

Rituals are the formulas by which harmony is restored. --Terry Tempest Williams (in How Rituals Support Us)

From my most unnoticed actions,
my most veiled writing --
from these alone will I be understood. --C.P. Cavafy (in Personal Integrity in C.P. Cavafy's Poetry )

Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world. --Lucy Maud Montgomery (in A Family Reunion at the End of the World)

I think kinship is the opposite of alienation. I think kinship is the opposite of objectification of people, of the greater-than-human world. If we can see the moon as kin, what can't we see as kin? --John Hausdoerffer (in Kinship is a Verb)

In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich. --Dietrich Bonhoeffer (in Grateful: A Love Song to the World)

"Now shall I walk, or should I ride?

"Ride," Pleasure said.

"Walk," Joy replied. --W.H. Davies (in Metaphors of Movement)

So, you are still alive and when you are alive, give love, unconditional love! That's enough.
--Shin Terayama (in Shin Terayama: A Radical Healing, A Remarkable Life)

Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror up to where you're bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead, here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see. --Rumi (translation Coleman Barks) (in Jennifer Bichanich: Rising from the Ashes)

I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine. It resensitizes. It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow. Because new places require new learning. --Jedidiah Jenkins (in The Great Discontent)

Can we make a new world with new words? --Robin Wall Kimmerer (in Invisible Landscapes)

Without peace, there is nothing truly human. Peace is harmony. And harmony is the highest ideal of life. --Klas Pontus Arnoldson (in Koolulam: Harnessing the Power of Harmony)

As global citizens, it is incumbent upon us to express global citizenship. We must also recognize the fundamental human responsibility we share, which is to practice making conscious the dark energies of human suffering so that those energies can be digested, integrated, and returned to the life flow of future potential. --Thomas Hubl (in Attuned: Global Social Witnessing)

Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity. --Hippocrates (in Could Creativity Transform Medicine?)

Blunt the sharpness, resolve the tangles, settle the dust. --Tao Te Ching (in Cultivating Inner Stillness for Compassionate Service)

Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. --Ursula Le Guin (in Telling is Listening)

The ability to flexibly move between states is a sign of well-being and resilience. --Deb Dana (in Becoming an Active Operator of Your Nervous System)

My true self is free. I cannot be contained.
--Marcus Aurelius (in Overcomer)

Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together, and the lack of awareness of the sacred is what is tearing it apart. --Joan D. Chittister (in The Edge of the Sacred)

All will concede that in order to have good neighbors, we must also be good neighbors. That applies in every field of human endeavor. --Harry Truman (in Cooking Up Connection)

Are we asking the right questions? Will our children be able to read the map we leave behind? --Anna Badkhen (in Portholes)

There is always a practice before the practice; a sitting before the incomprehensible long enough to feel and sometimes understand the mystery each instrument and craft is designed to invoke. --Mark Nepo (in The Practice Before the Practice)

Grief is the language that love speaks after loss --John Mark Green (in Griefhouse)

I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at
closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that carried me
through the wildest storm of all. --Rainer Maria Rilke (in Passing Through the Storm)

Loneliness is proof that your innate search for connection is intact. --Martha Beck (in The End is an Illusion)

For me, sacredness is an experience of the inner radiance of life, the unseen force that transforms and nourishes the physical world but is never limited by it. There is something more to it, a mystery that is never totally grasped. --Anthony Lawlor (in Beware the Fairy Host)

One must grow a culture and community of fellow seekers, each aiming to break the mechanical patterns of their thought. This is what I mean by indirect work. --Carol Sanford (in Carol Sanford: Indirect Work)

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

Real self-care involves making difficult decisions that will pay off in the long run as we build a life around the relationships and activities that matter most to us. When done well, real-self care is empowering. --Pooja Lakshmin (in Pooja Lakshmin: Self Care the Right Way)

Love is the force behind every level of existence. --Kabir Helminksi (in Kabir Helminksi: Rumi & the Mysterion)

To listen is to lean in, softly, with a willingness to be changed by what we hear. --Mark Nepo (in The Endless Vows)

Compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got --Cheryl Strayed (in The Yellow Umbrella)

I aim to reclaim a space for home for the black, the brown, the nameless, my patients, myself. I try to find my home through them. --Sriram Shamasunder (in The Marvelous Connections Between Poetry & Medicine)

All real living is meeting. --Martin Buber (in All Real Living is Meeting)

Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for. --Maria Popova (in 17 Life Learnings from 17 Years of the Marginalian)

Aesthetics enliven our senses, makes us feel alive, and actually keep us alive. --Ivy Ross (in Your Brain on Art)

If sequestered pain made a sound, the atmosphere would be humming all the time. --Stephen Levine (in Grief as Deep Activism)

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. --Henry David Thoreau (in The Art of Paying Attention)

It's time for greatness -- not for greed. It's a time for idealism -- not ideology. It is a time not just for compassionate words, but compassionate action. --Marian Wright Edelman (in How Greed Could Save the World)

I would say love is focused attention with benevolent intent. -- J. Drew Lanham (in Look Closely or You'll Miss It)

The conductor of an orchestra doesn't make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful. --Benjamin Zander (in The Art of Conducting)

Disability is not the characteristic that defines you; it's the characteristic that others project onto you, and it's up to us to change those perceptions. --Haben Girma (in Haben Girma: Transforming Constraints to Creative Opportunity)

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
--Margaret Mead (in Greater Good Resources for Peace & Conflict)

It isn't more light we need, it's putting into practice what light we already have. When we do that, wonderful things will happen within our lives and within our world. --Peace Pilgrim (in Peace Pilgrim's Last Interview)

The years teach much which the days never know. --Ralph Waldo Emerson (in The Blessing of Aging)

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift. --Mary Oliver (in 6 Compensations for Sleeplessness)

I try to think of a folklore monster [Gojira] as a rebel that can deliver information that's not all just negative or scary. Sometimes the fear part snaps us into taking a look at what we have to look at. They were scaring us to wake us up. --Craig Nagasawa (in Meeting Gojira: A Conversation with Craig Nagasawa)

Sensory perception is like a silken thread that binds our separate nervous systems into the wider ecosystem. --David Abram (in Coming to Our (Animal) Senses)

Perhaps the most radical act of resistance in the face of adversity is to live joyfully. --Ari Honorvar (in The Radical Act of Savoring Pleasant Moments)