For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. --Nelson Mandela (in This Rising Up)

You are a mountain full of gold.
Open the mine. Let the mountain speak.
Hear what happens. --Rumi (translation by Haleh Liza Gafori) (in Gold is the Deepest Love)

The Earth is alive and contains the knowledge you seek. It is your consciousness that determines what it reveals. --Barbara Marciniak (in Cooking in the Ainu Way)

What greater motivation can there be than doing whatever one possibly can to reduce pain and suffering? --Peter Singer (in Peter Singer: The Life You Can Save)

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? --Mary Oliver (in The Lost Art of Breathing)

By letting go of what is known, you are free to encounter the living present, in all its perplexity and revelation. Just as silence is the possibility of sound, self-confessed ignorance is the possibility of encounter. --Philip Shepherd (in The World's Hidden Harmony)

Learn to see what you are looking at. --Christopher Paolini (in WoodSwimmer)

Tread softly! All the earth is holy ground --Christina Rosetti (in How to Be a Citizen of Earth)

Each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home. --Matsuo Basho (in East Hill Farm: A Leap of Faith)

Time is the measurer of all things, but is itself immeasurable, and the grand discloser of all things, but is itself undisclosed. --Charles Caleb Colton (in Taking Time to Make Time)

O, ah! The awareness of emptiness brings forth a heart of compassion! --Gary Snyder (in The Art of Emptiness)

Inclusion is not a matter of political correctness. It is the key to growth. --Jesse Jackson (in At the Gate)

When you feel the body from inside, there is a door.
--Eugene Gendlin (in Jonathan Foust: Body-Centered Inquiry)

I've found that the best learners are the ones who cope best with failure and use it as a learning tool. --Barbara Oakley (in Learning to Learn: You, Too, Can Rewire Your Brain)

All life is fermentation. --Richard P. Feynman (in Fermentation as Metaphor)

Nobody sees a flower -- really -- it is so small it takes time -- we haven't time -- and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. --Georgia O'Keefe (in Botanical Animation: A Story of Flowers)

Memories, imagination, old sentiments, and associations are more readily reached through the sense of smell than through any other channel.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes (in 14 Smells that Remind You to Breathe)

Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. --George Lakoff (in George Lakoff on Language and Climate Action)

Memorialization is not a passive practice but an active conversation. --Aanchal Malhotra (in Aanchal Malhotra: Remnants of a Separation)

Don't wait for an inspired ending to come to mind. Work your way to the ending and see what comes up. --Andy Weir (in The Egg: A Short Story By Andy Weir)

Humility is nothing else but a right judgment of ourselves. --William Law (in How Do You Know If You Are Actually Humble?)

Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things --Lao Tzu (in Transforming Apocalypse Fatigue into Action)

To perceive the world through other senses is to find splendor in familiarity, wilderness in one's backyard, the sacred in the mundane. --Ed Yong (in An Immense World)

You want to unveil something. You want to know the Truth. That's what's behind it. --Wendy Sussman (in Wendy Sussman: Painting as a Search)

Fathoming deep time is arguably geology's single greatest contribution to humanity. --Marcia Bjornerud (in Timefulness: A Geologist's Story)

The hunter-gatherer did [their] shopping in the natural world...Success depended upon the ability to accurately read the innumerable variables which each season, day and hour presented. --Rupert Ross (in Perceptual Intelligence: Gathering Deep Knowledge)

There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars. --Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer (in Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn't Breaking)

We see cleaning not just as a job but as art, as a learning opportunity, a chance to experience the world differently, a chance to clean up our minds and be inspired while cleaning up physical spaces, a chance to move our bodies, a chance to learn humility and be better servant leaders. --Tolu Ilesanmi (in Tolu Ilesanmi: Cleaner and Life Artist)

Beauty is the harvest of presence. --David Whyte (in David Whyte: Blessings)

You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read. --James Baldwin (in Ada Limon: Trust Poetry)

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. --Plato (in Bringing Back the Delight of Poetry)

As we work to create light for others, we naturally light our own way. --Mary Anne Radmacher (in Woodworker Anoo Kulkarni: Answering the Heart's Call)

To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to. --Khalil Gibran (in Agnes Callard: A Philosophy of Change)

In improvisation, the generation of material is spontaneous, but it's never random. --Natalie Hodges (in Improvisation and the Quantum of Consciousness)

Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use.
--Carlos Castaneda (in How We Wrestle is Who We Are)

Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. --Melody Beattie (in Grateful Voices)

When you're happy, relaxed, and free of stress, the body can accomplish amazing, even miraculous, feats of self-repair. --Lissa Rankin (in The Paradoxes of Healing)

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), it's always our self we find in the sea. --e.e. cummings (in Anatomy of a Wave: A Triptych)

We lie in the lap of an immense intelligence. --Ralph Waldo Emerson (in Mozart's Starling)

What if we all could reach our potential and make our contribution to the world? That would create more abundance, solve humanity's problems faster, and make the world better for everyone. --Guy Bieber (in Zainika Jagasia: Mumbai's Inspiring 19-Year-Old Model & Baker )

The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find. --Iain McGilchrist (in The Divided Brain)

But the beauty is in the walking - we are betrayed by destinations. --Gwyn Thomas (in Three Hours of Free Time in Berkeley)

We must become accountable to our time, our earth, our species, our people, and our loved ones, from the inside out. --Adrienne Maree Brown (in Returning to the Whole)

See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. --Ray Bradbury (in Monkey Stories, the Best Kind of Stories)

When we hold space for someone with delight in our eyes, guess what? We call forward the lovely in one another. --Traci Ruble (in Scaling We: A Journey of Heart-Centered Deliberation)

I cannot significantly improve on the assertion that it simply is proper for us, as intelligent members of the universe, to try to look after our fellow creatures, and evil for us to do otherwise. --Colin Tudge (in Returning to the Art of the Unknowable)

There must be limits, somewhere, to the human footprint on this earth. --Barbara Kingsolver (in Barbara Kingsolver: The Urbicene)

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary. --Martin Luther (in The Night Is Just Beginning)

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with It as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts. --George Eliot (in Grieving Beneath the Stars: Mourners as Spiritual Teachers)

(...)I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. --F. Scott Fitzgerald (in Stonehenge: A Summer Solstice Experience)