That which you create in beauty and goodness and truth lives on for all time to come. Don't spend your life accumulating material objects that will only turn to dust and ashes. --Denis Waitley (in Beauty & the Dumpster)

I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift --Robin Wall Kimmerer (in Soil & Spirit: Cultivation and Kinship in the Web of Life)

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question. --Eugene Ionesco (in Question Everything: Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo)

I always ask, 'Can you be the fertile ground for others to thrive?' Because I stand on the shoulders of many women who looked right into my face and saw something that I wasn't seeing. --Tererai Trent (in Staying Loyal to Who You Are and Your Dreams)

We cannot choose the day or time when we will fully bloom. It happens in its own time. --Denis Waitley (in The Secret of Blooming)

We are the ones we have been waiting for. --June Jordan (in Diana Carr: Shepherds of the Dawn)

We have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And we have to do it all the time. --Angela Davis (in The Alphabet Rockers)

What we don't need in the midst of struggle is shame for being human. --Brene Brown (in Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic)

Some trees are compasses, and some are flags. If a flag tells you where you are, a compass can potentially tell you how to get there or how to find someplace else. --Carl Phillips (in Among the Trees)

You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. This is how prayer works. --Pope Francis (in Transforming Food)

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others. --Cicero (in Mother)

To free ourselves, we must feed ourselves. --Leah Penniman (in Leah Penniman: Farming While Black)

I've never known anyone who was what he or she seemed; or at least, was only what he or she seemed. People carry worlds within them. --Neil Gaiman (in Make Good Art)

We are one huge universe speaking and listening to itself. -- (in The Most Tender Gaze I Have Ever Beheld)

The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences. --Iain McGilchrist (in Attention as an Instrument of Love)

In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence. --Robert Lynd (in Bokkapuram's Birdman)

In traditional agriculture, the soil is the mother. She's the mother who gives, to whom you must give back. --Vandana Shiva (in Radiant Thinking)

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.
--Stephane Mallarme (in Early Music: Three Poems)

Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly? --Frida Kahlo (in Frida Kahlo: The Woman Behind the Legend)

What you think you are is a belief to be undone.

--Helen Schucman (in The Thread of My Life: Following the Heart's Wisdom)

May your children
hear and breathe
the words of
our Indigenous ancestors.
May we all be so lucky to
know an Indigenous future. --Matika Wilbur (in Visions of Indigenous Futures)

If it's only about the safe and beautiful thing, then that song is trivial. Our job is to figure out how to sing, how to find shape and artfulness and formal rigor, about things that are sometimes really not artful, like a dead whale, like chemicals, like disease. --David Baker (in Our Job Is To Sing: An Interview with David Baker)

True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice. --Martin Luther King Jr. (in Son of a Sweeper)

Close your eyes and follow your breath to the still place that leads to the invisible path that leads you home. --Mirabai Starr (in Thirsty for Wonder)

It's not like you have to empty your mind and then you can listen to the flowers. If you try to listen to the voice of flowers, you naturally start emptying your mind. For me, ikebana is a practice of the mind. --Mayuka Yamazaki (in Letting Flowers Lead: The Way of Ikebana)

Sacred time is devoted to the heart, to the self, to others, to eternity. Sacred time is not measured in minutes, hours or days. --Gary Eberle (in Sacred Time)

No amount of quantity adds up to quality. --Charles Eisenstein (in The Future of Intelligence)

Small change, small wonders - these are the currency of my endurance and ultimately of my life. --Barbara Kingsolver (in A Whetstone to the Spirit: An Interview with Barbara Kingsolver)

And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. --Kahlil Gibran (in Rustling Roots: Engaging Ecological Education)

The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. --Willa Cather (in Barbara McAfee: Voice as Vocation)

To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves. --Mahatma Gandhi (in The Men of Rice: A Conversation with Eduardo del Conde)

Sanitizing your thoughts and your preoccupations not only squanders vital energy that would be better spent in your creative endeavors, but your not-so-presentable life can be enormously enriching and provide the compost for the development of compassion. --Darlene Cohen (in The Skills Necessary to Deal with Anguish)

To the one who knows how to look and feel, every moment of this free wandering life is an enchantment.
--Alexandra David-Neel (in How to Grow Re-Enchanted with the World )

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear. --Italo Calvino (in The Mongerji Letters)

Here it is: the new way of living with the world inside of us so we cannot lose it, and we cannot be lost. You and me are us and them, and it and sky. --Ada Limon (in To Be Made Whole)

Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance? --Lewis Carroll (in Deborah Cohan: The Dancing Doctor)

Praying. It doesn't have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don't try to make them elaborate, this isn't a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak. --Mary Oliver (in Irises: Shape-shifters and Magical Reinventors)

Lying fallow is a transitional state of experience, a mode of being that is alerted quietude and receptive wakeful lambent consciousness. --Masud Khan (in The Art of Lying Fallow)

Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come. --Greta Thunberg (in Granddaughter's Eyes: 21-Day Climate Action Challenge)

Even if, from the sky, poison befalls all,
I'm still sweetness
wrapped in sweetness
wrapped in sweetness... --Rumi (translation by Ari Honarvar) (in When Relishing Joy is A Radical Act)

You are your own strength. --Saniya MQ (in Mumbai's Improbably Famous Hijab-Wearing Teen Rapper )

Tonight I choose to howl:
a song, a prayer
in the language of the lost. --Michael Small (in How Long Has It Been Since You Smelled a Flower?)

Love is what carries you, for it is always there, even in the dark, or most in the dark, but shining out at times like gold stitches in a piece of embroidery.

--Wendell Berry (in The Red Dress)

What is humanity, really, but a family of families? --Vivek Murthy (in Vivek Murthy: To Be a Healer)

Power without love is brutality, but love without consideration of power is sentimentality. How to make power express love, and love humanize power, is the distinctive task for the next hundred years, --Reinhold Neibuhr (in Mighty in Contradiction: Love Powerfully)

All stories are, in some form, prayers. --Brian Doyle (in How Did You Become A Writer?)

If I were to hold just one wish for humanity, it is that we remember our innate capacity to experience each other without condition. --Nic Askew (in It's Not A Thing You Do. It's A Thing You Are)

Next time you see a yardful of sprouting dandelions, note that they look remarkably like things we call "flowers." And later, when the flowers turn into fluff balls, look closely at one of those fluff balls and ask yourself whether it's really so unattractive. --Robert Wright (in Dandelions)

Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited. --Ada Limon (in Instructions on Not Giving Up)

If we really look at what the Enneagram can show us, it challenges what we believe about ourselves. We start to experience ourselves in a new way--and not just ourselves. We start to see human beings in a new way. --Russ Hudson (in The Enneagram: Nine Pathways to Presence)