This quiet dust was gentlemen and ladies
and lads and girls.
Was laughter and ability and sighing,
And frocks and curls. --Emily Dickinson, (in Becoming an Ancestor)

Sadly, there are more wild horses in holding pens than in the wild. --Willie Nelson (in For Love of Wild Horses)

Name of names, our small identity unravels in You. You give it back as a lesson. --Neil Douglas-Klotz (in Neil Douglas-Klotz on The Aramaic Jesus)

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Taka (the Great Spirit), and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. --Black Elk (in Pat McCabe is a Voice for Peace)

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 The Descent to Soul: An Overview of the Terrain)

In the end, it seems that mastery has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go. --Donella Meadows (in Leverage Points & the Power to Transcend Paradigms)

The more any of us writes, the more our words will "come to us." If we trust in the words and their own mysterious relationship with one another, they will help us find things out. --Naomi Shihab Nye (in The Two Driving Forces of Creativity)

A healthy social life is found only, when in the mirror of each soul the whole community finds its reflection, and when in the whole community the virtue of each one is living. --Rudolf Steiner (in Rise Up Again)

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me. --Carlos Fuentes (in Students on Immigration and Unjust Assumptions)

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover. --Wendell Berry (in A Counterculture of Commitment)

No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses. --Herman Melville (in Doffing Our Inner Masks: Lessons from Horses)

Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will become. --John O'Donohue (in A Common Humanity: A Conversation with Bob Sadler)

Of all the species that need rewilding, I think human beings come at the top of the list. I would love to see a more intense and emotional engagement of human beings with the living world. --George Monbiot (in Rewilding a Mountain)

The more you study delight, the more delight there is to study...I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. --Ross Gay (in The Book of Delights: Ross Gay's Year of Willful Gladness)

If you brew your own cauldron, magic will surely happen. --Dara McAnulty (in Diary of a Young Naturalist)

My work is loving the world. --Mary Oliver (in Practicing the Art of Wonder: Lessons from the Hummingbird)

Our longings are a unique manifestation of the universe's longings. In listening to the depths of life, within our lives and within every life, we will hear the longings of the One that are deeper than the fears that divide us. --John Philip Newell (in Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul)

The word En'owkin in the Okanagan language elicits the metaphorical image of liquid being absorbed drop by single drop through the head (mind). It refers to coming to understanding through a gentle process of integration. --Jeanette Armstrong (in Indigenous Knowledge and Gift Giving)

Though leaves are many, the root is one. --William Butler Yeats (in Seven Lessons Learned from Leaves)

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention... --Mary Oliver (in Mary Oliver: I Happened to Be Standing)

Faith is a withholding of conclusion so that you allow what is to arise. --Adyashanti (in Earning Humility: My Story of Meeting Rollie Grandbois)

For love is not about merging. It's a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another. --Rainer Maria Rilke (in Letters to a Young Poet: Communing with Rilke's Prophetic Musing)

Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well. --Voltaire (in 100 Thank Yous)

Each culture is just like a tree whose essence and whole potential are already contained in the seed. --Peter Kingsley (in A Story Waiting to Pierce You)

The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If it's saved, it will be saved by new minds with no programs at all --Daniel Quinn (in Returning to the Village)

It is only in an uncondemned state that any of us can change. --Leaf Seligman (in Leaf Seligman: On Redemption and Beautiful Scars)

To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots. --Richard Mabey (in The City Planting a Million Trees in Two Years)

Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure. --Paulo Coelho (in Discovering & Embodying One's Unique Life Purpose)

The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions. --Parker J. Palmer (in The Clearness Committee: A Communal Approach to Discernment)

If you walk into a forest -- you hear all kinds of subtle sounds -- but underneath there is an all pervasive silence. --Eckhart Tolle (in The Stillness of the Living Forest)

Feeling is never invisible; it takes shape and manifests as form everywhere in nature. --Andreas Weber (in The Biology of Wonder: Finding the Human in Nature)

In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels. --Daniel Goleman (in Daniel Goleman: Emotional Intelligence Now)

Stillness and silence allow us to see things that were previously invisible, regardless of your walk of life. --Steve Elkins (in Echoes of the Invisible)

Ubuntu speaks particularly about the fact that you can't exist as a human being in isolation. It speaks about our interconnectedness. --Desmond Tutu (in The Extra Mile)

Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore,
May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul.
--John O'Donohue (in A Blessing for A Baby Coming Into This World)

Can anyone teach me
how to make a homeland? -- Amineh Abou Kerech (in Lament for Syria: A Young Poet Looks Back)

You are loved. --Ra Avis (in The Frightfully Wondrous Experience of Being Here)

We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them! --Donella Meadows (in Donella Meadows: Dancing with Systems)

Let's answer the birds' invitation, stepping outside to give them the simple gift of our attention. Listen. Wonder. Belong. --David George Haskell (in Listening to the Language of the Birds)

It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds. --Black Elk (in The Nightingale's Song)

To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die. --Thomas Campbell (in The Wanting Memories Project)

Nothing is so healing as the human touch. --Bobby Fischer (in What Critically Ill Kids Can Teach Us)

Nonviolence is to be an artist with your humanity. --Ali Abu Awwad (in The Third Harmony)

You gotta put one foot in front of the other
And lead with love. --Melanie DeMore (in Melanie DeMore: Sending You Light)

To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together. --Barry Lopez (in On Barry Lopez: Now That It's Come to This)

Life in our universe is a flash in the pan, a few moments in the vast unfolding of time and space in the cosmos...A realization of the scarcity of life makes me feel some ineffable connection to other living things. --Alan Lightman (in Probable Impossibilities)

The medicine of writing--and the medicine of robins and fungal filaments and stars and acorns--is the understanding that we're all made of the same material. --Sarah Sentilles (in How to Write Love)

In the tapestry of life, we're all connected. Each one of us is a gift to those around us helping each other be who we are, weaving a perfect picture together. --Sandra Day O'Connor (in The Art of Weaving)

Reality is inherently grounding. The more in touch with it we are, the more grounded we feel. This is true on every level: physical, mental, emotional, energetic, and spiritual. --John J. Prendergast (in Four Stages of Groundedness)

Hope is holding a creative tension between what is and what could and should be, each day doing something to narrow the distance between the two. --Parker Palmer (in First Passage)