I want to create things that are really beautiful, profoundly beautiful, because the world needs as much beauty as it can get. --Jeffrey Bale (in Jeffrey Bale: The World Needs Beauty)

I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing --
that the light is everything -- that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do. --Mary Oliver (in Willing to Be Dazzled)

Without community, there is no liberation.
--Audre Lorde (in 3 Steps to Build Peace & Create Change )

Art does not try to communicate; it calls for communion. --Paul Reynard (in Beyond Beauty: A Conversation with Paul Reynard)

Miracles come in moments. Be ready and willing.
--Wayne Dyer (in Hummingbirds & the Ecstatic Moment)

The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet. --Alan Watts (in An Antidote to the Age of Anxiety)

The emphasis is more on the process of Becoming than on the content of Being. --John Weir (in Janet Adler: Into the Light)

Every moment is a moment. Every moment makes a certain request of us. The question is how we answer it. --Charlotte Selver (in Bone, Breath & Gesture: Practices of Embodiment)

All good conversation, manners, and action come from a spontaneity which forgets usages and makes the moment great.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson (in To Converse Well)

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place. --Zora Neale Hurston (in Lost Together)

Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food. --Hippocrates (in The Middle Way in Medicine & Healing)

Lots of people talk to animals...Not very many listen, though...That's the problem. --Benjamin Hoff (in Why We Can & Should Listen to Other Species)

Pride is concerned with who is right. Humility is concerned with what is right. --Ezra Taft Benson (in The 8 Kinds of Humility to Help You Stay Grounded)

Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much. --Helen Keller (in 5 Tips on How to Live Like a Lichen)

Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention. --Jane Hirshfield (in Zen & the Art of Poetry)

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.
--Abraham Joshua Heschel (in Shrine)

No individual can truly thrive without looking inward. The same is true for societies. --Thomas LeGrand (in Thomas LeGrand: The Politics of Being)

Emptiness which is conceptually liable to be mistaken for sheer nothingness is in fact the reservoir of infinite possibilities. --D. T. Suzuki (in A Zen Life: DT Suzuki)

The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness. --Dalai Lama (in Conspiracy of Goodness)

Rock blurs the categories of time and space by making time visible and place temporal. --Susan Tichy (in The Syntax of Sedimentation)

Integrity has no need of rules. --Albert Camus (in Albert Camus on Writing, Creativity and Stubborness)

Care is methodically practicing the beautiful maintenance of showing up and attending to our neglected pains wherever they may be. It is choosing its words carefully, pulling the stitch closed, reminding us what it's like to feel safe --MOsley WOtta (in Care is the Only Useful Revolution)

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. --Simone Weil (in Is Our Attention for Sale?)

This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed. --Terence McKenna (in The Life Cycle of a Feather)

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it. --Mark Twain (in Eight Steps Towards Forgiveness)

I like it much better than 'religious' or 'spiritual' -- to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real. --Barbara Brown Taylor (in This Hunger for Holiness)

Chess is everything: art, science, and sport. --Anatoly Karpov (in The Magic of Chess)

When you spend any time at all paying attention to the proclivities of the natural world, you realize that nature has no problem including in its sorority the dead, dying, and ailing as fully as the lovely, healthy, and whole. --Trebbe Johnson (in 11 Interventions in the 10 Days of Your Dying)

The fragile weave of natural sound is being torn apart by our seemingly boundless need to conquer the environment rather than to find a way to abide in consonance with it. --Bernie Krause (in The Great Animal Orchestra)

To attain inner peace you must actually give your life, not just your possessions. When you at last give your life - bringing into alignment your beliefs and the way you live then, and only then, can you begin to find inner peace. --Peace Pilgrim (in How to Become a 100 Percenter)

If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are. --Wendell Berry (in From the Ground Up: The Art of Place)

There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave. --W.B. Yeats (in Cloudy is the Stuff of Stones)

Not only are we 'cut off' from a knowledge of wild foods, but at a more fundamental level from a first-hand knowledge of what food is, and how it gets to us. --Richard Mabey (in Eating the Wild)

We are absolutely a part of the cycle of water. All of life is. --Valerie Segrest (in The Many Lives of Water)

I believe the best way to begin reconnecting humanity's heart, mind, and soul to nature is for us to share our individual stories --J. Drew Lanham (in Hope and Feathers)

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. --Hannah Arendt (in Cup of Karma)

Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.
--Amy Tan (in Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir)

I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. --Emily Dickinson (in Maggie Smith: Writing in a Way that is Brave, Real, and True)

The way our globalist, capitalist culture segregates art and land is a symptom of our Earth-desecrating disease. --Arwen Donohue (in Arwen Donohue: Care is a Creative Act)

You are not separate from the whole. You are one with the sun, the earth, the air. You don't have a life. You are life. --Eckhart Tolle (in Your Gift to Nature)

I came to see that the great matter of death is not great because it's scary but because it is profound in its immense capacity to arouse a loving nature within us. --Zenju Earthlyn Manuel (in The River of Silence)

All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch?) --Walt Whitman (in A Turtle's Silver Bead of Quietude)

In a strange way the spiritual life isn't "useful" or "successful." But it is meant to be fruitful. And fruitfulness comes out of brokenness.
--Henri Nouwen (in It Takes Brokenness to Find It)

True comfort in grief is in acknowledging the pain, not in trying to make it go away. Companionship, not correction, is the way forward --Megan Devine (in The Radical Act of Letting Things Hurt)

Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don't want it.
What appears bad manners,
an ill temper or cynicism
is always a sign of things no ears have heard, no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on down there
where the spirit meets the bone. --Miller Williams (in Creating a Healthier Sense of Attribution)

An emotion is your brain's creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world. --Lisa Feldman Barrett (in Cultivating Wisdom: The Power of Mood)

Nowadays my brain no longer races compulsively in either elation, grandiosity, or depression. I have been given a quiet place in bright sunshine. --Bill Wilson (in The Spiritual Awakening of a World-Class Drunk)

I want to inhabit my life like a porch. --Rebecca Wells (in A Case for the Porch)

Maybe each word
is a footprint filling up
with snow.

I was here, meaning
I am disappearing.
--Alison Benis White (in Alison Benis White: Light on the Page)

It is quite possible to leave your home for a walk in the early morning air and return a different person - beguiled, enchanted.
--Mary Ellen Chase (in When Elves Took Over an Abandoned Gas Station)