Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living In better conditions.
Hafiz
You suppose you are the trouble But you are the cure You suppose that you are the lock on the door But you are the key that opens it It’s too bad that you want to be someone else You don’t see your own face, your own beauty Yet, no face is more beautiful than yours.
Rumi
The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Beauty XXV
And a poet said, “Speak to us of Beauty.”
Where shall you seek beauty, and how shall you find her unless she herself be your way and your guide?
And how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech?
The aggrieved and the injured say, “Beauty is kind and gentle. Like a young mother half-shy of her own glory she walks among us.”
And the passionate say, “Nay, beauty is a thing of might and dread. Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us.”
The tired and the weary say, “beauty is of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit. Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in fear of the shadow.”
But the restless say, “We have heard her shouting among the mountains, And with her cries came the sound of hoofs, and the beating of wings and the roaring of lions.”
At night the watchmen of the city say, “Beauty shall rise with the dawn from the east.” And at noontide the toilers and the wayfarers say, “we have seen her leaning over the earth from the windows of the sunset.”
In winter say the snow-bound, “She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills.” And in the summer heat the reapers say, “We have seen her dancing with the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair.”
All these things have you said of beauty. Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy. It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted. It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,
But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.
People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.
Khalil Gibran
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. Mark Twain
The Seed Market
Can you find another market like this?
Where, with your one rose you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?
Where, for one seed get a whole wilderness? For one weak breath, a divine wind?
You’ve been fearful of being absorbed in the ground, or drawn up by the air.
Now, your waterbead lets go and drops into the ocean, where it came from.
It no longer has the form it had, but it’s still water The essence is the same.
This giving up is not a repenting. It’s a deep honoring of yourself.
When the ocean comes to you as a lover, marry at once, quickly, for God’s sake! Don’t postpone it!
Existence has no better gift. No amount of searching will find this.
A perfect falcon, for no reason has landed on your shoulder, and become yours.
Rumi
“Come to the edge.” “We can’t. We’re afraid.” “Come to the edge.” “We can’t. We will fall!” “Come to the edge.” And they came. And he pushed them. And they flew.
Guillaume Apollinaire
And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin
Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure…than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt
When you come looking for sugar, your bag will be examined to see how much it can hold; it will be filled accordingly.
Rumi
And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
Kahlil Gibran
Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.
Buddha
From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life.
Arthur Ashe
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
from Dream Work by Mary Oliver published by Atlantic Monthly Press © Mary Oliver
You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand. Woodrow Wilson
Now That
All your worry
Has proved such an
Unlucrative Business,
Why Not
Find a better Job.
Hafiz
I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which comes to me as seed goes to the next as blossom and that which comes to me as blossom, goes on as fruit.
Dawna Markova
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves ‘who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; its in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. Marianne Williamson
That best portion of a good man’s life; his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love. William Wordsworth You give but little when you give of your possessions.It is when you give of yourself that you truly give. Kahlil Gibran
No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.
Aesop
The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but reveal to them their own.
Disraeli
One regret, dear world, That I am determined not to have When I am lying on my deathbed Is that I did not kiss you enough.
Hafiz
The Time Before Before Death
Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think . . . and think . . . while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.
If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive, do you think ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the should will rejoin the ecstatic just because the body is rotten— that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of the Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is, Believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.
by Kabir (version by Robert Bly)