Empathy is not relating to an experience, it's connecting to what someone is feeling about an experience. --Brene Brown (in The Practice of Story Stewardship)

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around. --Terry Pratchett (in The Unchosen One)

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable...Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. --Martin Luther King Jr. (in Putting the Power of Law in People's Hands)

Analysis means taking something apart in order to understand it; systems thinking means putting it into the context of a larger whole. --Fritjof Capra (in Creativity & Leadership in Learning Communities)

All real living is meeting. --Martin Buber (in Meeting Our World Views)

Our talent for division, for seeing the parts, is of staggering importance -- second only to our capacity to transcend it, in order to see the whole. --Iain McGilchrist (in The Matter with Things)

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere --Blaise Pascal (in Patterns of Extraction)

Life is often more complex than the stories we like to tell about it. --Daniel Kahneman (in Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement)

Be curious, not judgmental. --Walt Whitman (in My Wish For Humanity)

People often go to great lengths to avoid reckoning with their internal contradictions. --Katy Milkman (in Katy Milkman: How to Change)

Animal protection is education to humanity. --Albert Schweitzer (in What Does Justice for Animals Look Like)

Emptiness means empty of limitation.
Emptiness means spaciousness
Emptiness means openness.
Emptiness--the home of possibility.
The great mystery. --Caverly Morgan (in Caverly Morgan: The Heart of Who We Are)

Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world --Dacher Keltner (in Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder )

The heart of man is very much like the sea, it has its storms, it has its tides and in its depths it has its pearls too
--Vincent Van Gogh (in Two Types of Heartbreak)

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever. --Anthony Doerr (in Window of Possibility)

To hear each other...to listen to one another, is an exercise in recognition. --bell hooks (in The Just Listen Project)

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. --Eugene Ionesco (in How to Question Your Own Decisions)

Play is the mediator of the invisible and visible. --Dora M. Kalff (in Into the Middle of Nowhere)

The art of ikebana is to listen to the spirits of flowers and plants. --Kasen Yoshimura (in Ikebana and the Jedi Model)

With you, I meet my own infiniteness. --Sonali Ojha (in Growing Through the Cracks: A Conversation with Sachi Maniar)

When you are quiet, the silence blows against your mind and etches away everything that is soft and unimportant. What is left is what is real: pure awareness and the very hardest questions --Kathleen Dean Moore (in Five Thoughts About Sacrifice)

Whenever we look at life, we look at networks. --Fritjof Capra (in The Systems View of Life)

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all. --Emily Dickinson (in Letter to Tomorrow)

Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow our mind's hearing to your ears' natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning. --Peter Senge (in Otto Scharmer on The Four Levels of Listening)

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less. --Marie Curie (in The Most Beautiful Science of the Year)

The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
--Ben Okri (in The Best Greater Good Articles of 2022)

Only the children know what they are looking for. --Antoine de Saint-Exupery (in Doorways to Our Childhood Selves)

Let our New Year's resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word. --Goran Persson (in New Year Transformation: Resources for the Journey)

So pain pushes until vision pulls and I have a muscle that I've developed to help people see the vision, to pull them through the pain, and it's a privilege to do it and it's a joy. --Lynne Twist (in Finding Fulfillment in a Purpose Larger than You)

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. --Naguib Mahfouz (in The Fearless Organization)

Our problem is that sound is not important in our culture. We know the world from the visual, not from the other senses. I had to be taught other ways of understanding. --Bernie Krause (in Earwitness to Place)

In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still. --Pico Iyer (in Pico Iyer: The Craft and Life of a Restless Writer)

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. --C.S. Lewis (in A Special Kind of Grace: The Remarkable Story of the Devadosses)

The only really interesting questions are the unanswerable ones. --Jacob Needleman (in On Hope: A Conversation with Jacob Needleman)

My idea of Christmas, whether old-fashioned or modern, is very simple: loving others. --Bob Hope (in George's Best Friend: A Christmas Story)

Slow Food unites the pleasure of food with responsibility, sustainability and harmony with nature. --Carlo Petrini (in Grace Before Dinner)

I'm always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light. --Miles Davis (in That's My Jazz)

What if collective healing will be made possible precisely by facing--together--the end of the world as we know it?

--Vanessa Machado de Oliveira (in Vanessa Machado de Oliveira : Hospicing Modernity)

Too many of us lack intimacy with the natural world and with our souls, and consequently we are doing untold damage to both. --Bill Plotkin (in Bill Plotkin: The Butterfly and the Cocoon)

The practice of doing others' thinking for them weakens them by undermining their development of the abilities to be self-observing and self-directed. --Carol Sanford (in Carol Sanford: No More Feedback)

If a tree falls in the forest there are other trees listening. --Peter Wohllenben (in The Heartbeat of Trees)

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever. --Jacques Cousteau (in Fishpeople: Lives Transformed By The Sea)

It's absolutely necessary to have human exemplars. And I think it's necessary in terms of exemplary experiences. If you've never experienced what it is to have a really, really good and intimate friend and have been able to share that friendship, your life not only is emptier, but you're really at sea. --Lee Hoinacki (in Davis Dimock: The Gift)

Like treasure hidden in the ground, like flavor in the fruit, like gold in the rock, and oil in the seed, the Absolute is hidden in the heart. --Akka Mahadevi (in Balakrishnan Raghavan: Belonging to the World)

There's a difference between 'belonging' and 'fitting in.' When our sense of belonging is anchored in ourselves, it doesn't really matter how or where or if we fit. --Suleika Jaouad (in Suleika Jaouad: Transforming Isolation into Creative Resilience)

We humans are not alone in having a sense of community, a sense of fun, a sense of wonder and awe at the beauty of nature. --James Bridle (in James Bridle: An Ecological Technology)

A better world for wildlife means a better world for human life. --Carl Safina (in Carl Safina: Mother Culture)

Change is the end result of all true learning. --Leo Buscaglia (in You Can Grow New Brain Cells)

It's a calming thing, to learn there's a word for something you've felt all your life but didn't know was shared by anyone else. --John Koenig (in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows)

Tenderness personalizes everything to which it relates, making it possible to give it a voice, to give it the space and the time to come into existence, and to be expressed. It is thanks to tenderness that the teapot starts to talk. --Olga Tokarczuk (in Storytelling & the Art of Tenderness)