One of the many things I enjoy in life is the reading of quotations and collecting books of

quotations. I can get lost for hours in the thoughts that others have collected in their

study. I have found this a valuable way to access the wisdom of the ages.

Recently, I thought it would be fun and interesting to create my own collection and so I

did. Here you will find this work in progress of a collection of quotations which I have found

somehow meaningful. Some of them are just something I read and thought... "well, that was

mildly interesting or amusing." Others are words which are so important to me that I

rely on them to direct and organize my life. I hope, dear reader, that you will find here

for yourself something here that is new and edifying. If you have a favorite quote which

you'd like to share, I will pass it on. Send it to me by e-mail at Roger@spiritwalk.org; or by

regular mail at:

To thine own self be true.

And then it follows as night the day

that thou can't be false to any man.

~ William Shakespeare

The highest compact we can make with our fellow is-

Let there be truth between us two forevermore."

It is one thing to wish to have truth on our side;

and quite another to wish sincerely to be on the side of truth.

~ Whately

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.

What is essential is invisible to the eye.

~ Antoine de Saint-Expury

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.

Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism,

and nothing comes out but what was put in.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

As soon as a true thought has entered our mind

it gives a light which makes us see a crowd of other objects

which we have never perceived before.

~ Francois Chateaubriand

Ye shall know the truth,

and the truth shall make you free.

The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.

There are two ways to slide easily through life:

to believe everything or to doubt everything;

both ways save us from thinking.

~ Alfred Korzybski

Faced with having to change our views or

prove that there is no need to do so

most of us get busy on the proof.

In all affairs, it's a healthy idea, now and then,

to hang a question mark on things you have long taken for granted.

Every man has a right to his opinion,

but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.

It isn't what people don't know that gives us trouble.

It's that they know so many things that just ain't so.

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now ~ always.

~ Albert Schweitzer

To know is nothing at all;

to imagine is everything.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,

adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

My commitment is to truth, not consistency.

There are no whole truths; all truths are half truths.

It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

I have abandoned my search for truth

and now I am in search of a good fantasy

...that which is right is not always popular

and that which is popular is not necessarily right

A great many people think that they are thinking

when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

A "no" uttered from the deepest conviction

is better and greater than

a yes merely uttered to please-

or what is worse-

to avoid trouble.

~ Mahatma Gandhi

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

For my own part, I live every day as if this were the first day

I had ever seen and the last day I were going to see.

A mind too active is no mind at all.

~ Theodore Roethke

Politeness of the mind is to have delicate thoughts.

There's no point in speaking unless you can improve on silence.

You are young, and as the years go by, time will change,

and even reverse many of your present opinions.

Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up

as a judge of the highest matters.

He that gives good advice, builds with one hand;

he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both;

but he that gives good admonition and bad examples,

builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.

The growth of the human mind is still high adventure,

in many ways the highest adventure on earth.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing.

Education a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

~ Oscar Wilde

A strong conviction that something must be done

is the parent of many bad measures.

~ Daniel Webster

The man who does not read good books

has little advantage over one who can't.

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Never try to teach a pig to sing.

It wastes your time and annoys the pig.

Many receive advice, few profit from it.

~ Publilius Syrus

Wisdom is oftimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.

The price of wisdom is more than rubies

In much wisdom is much grief:

and he that increseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.

The true mystery of the world is the visible,

not the invisible.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.

A perception, sudden as blinking,

that subject and object are one,

will lead to a deeply mysterious understanding;

and by this understanding you will awaken to the truth....

Beauty is its own excuse for being.

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve

that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul,

and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Music stands halfway between thought and phenomenon, between spirit and matter,

a sort of nebulous mediator, like and unlike the things it mediates.

Spirit that requires manifestation in time and matter that can do without space.

...We do not know what music is.

~ Heinrich Heine

Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast,

to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty.

I only think of how to solve the problem.

But, when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful,

I know it is wrong.

~ Buckminster Fuller

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Every flower about a house certifies to the refinement of somebody.

Every vine climbing and blossoming tells of love and joy.

Beauty is Truth, truth Beauty

that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Music is the universal language of mankind-

poetry their universal pastime and delight.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The day will come when after harnessing 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,

man will have discovered fire.

~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.

There is no fear in love;

but perfect love casteth out fear;

because fear hath torment.

He that feareth is not made perfect in love.

I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know:

The only ones among you who will be truly happy

are those who have sought and found how to serve.

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other

but in looking outward together in the same direction.

Love seeketh not Itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives it ease,

And builds a heaven in Hell's despair.

Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

Everything is, everything exists, only because I love.

Everything is united by it alone.

Love is God,

and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

~ Sophocles

Love conquers all things;

let us surrender to love.

Love, Love, Love,

all you need is Love

all you need is Love

LOVE is all you need.

The spiritualization of sensuality is called love;

it is a great triumph over Christianity.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Love is the child of illusion and the parent of disillusion.

When love begins to sicken and decay

It useth an enforced ceremony

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.

Love posseses not nor would it be possessed;

For love is sufficient unto love.

A Man in love is incomplete until he has married- then he is finished.

To say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

I find we are growing serious,

and then we are in great danger of being dull.

If you don't have a sense of humor it isn't funny!

The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have,

and to be able to lose all desire for things beyond your reach.

Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven and all else will be added unto you.

The Kingdom of Heaven is within.

~ Jesus of Nazareth

 You need an ego to get on the bus!

True happiness is of a retired nature, an enemy to pomp and noise.

~ Joseph Addison

A man's life is what his thoughts make of it.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere, one directionally,

without regret or reservation.

~ William H. Sheldon

A merry heart doeth good like medicine.

~ Proverbs 17:22

Happiness depends, as nature shows,

Less on exterior things than most suppose.

Nothing is more fatal to happiness than the remembrance of happiness.

~ Andre Gide

Happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length.

Happiness is the only sanction of life;

where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it

than to consume wealth without producing it.

If thou canst believe all things are possible to him that believeth.

~ Mark 9:23

The mind contains all possibilities.

~ Buddha

We are all faced with magnificent opportunities

brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.

~ Charles R. Swindell

In the depth of winter, I finally learned

that within me there lay an invincible summer.

~ Albert Camus

One thing is sure.

You can't have darkness and light in the same place at the same time.

The cure for a gloomy outlook is a lighted mind.

There is, in addition to a courage with which men die,

a courage by which men must live.

~ John F. Kennedy

It is curious - that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

One doesn't discover new lands without consenting

to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

~ Andre Gide

True progress quietly and persistently moves along without notice.

~ St. Francis de Sales

Uncertainty and mystery are energies of life.

Don't let them scare you unduly

for they keep boredom at bay and spark creativity.

The Great Way is available to him who holds no preference.

The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion

to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment.

And this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated

on achieving reform from within.

The greatest discovery of any generation is that

human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes.

First keep the peace within yourself,

then you can also bring peace to others.

Be tolerant among the intolerant,

gentle among the violent,

and free from greed among the greedy.

~ Buddha

when they refuse to get in line.

All of us could take a lesson from the weather.

it pays no attention to criticism.

He who is of a calm and happy nature, will hardly feel the pressure of age.

The way to do...is to be.

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy,

and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs,

that is your success.

There is no meaning to life

except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.

If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder,

he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it,

rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and majesty of the world we live in.

Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others

cannot keep it from themselves.

Nothing here below is profane

for those who know how to see.

On the contrary,

everything is sacred.

There are only two ways to live your life.

One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is a miracle.

Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit.

And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age

and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.

There are glimpses of heaven to us in every act, or thought, or word,

that raises us above ourselves.

In the faces of men and women I see God,

and in my own face in the glass,

I find letters from God dropt in the street,

and everyone is sign'd by God's name.

And I leave them where they are,

for I know that wheresoe'er I go,

Others will punctually come for ever and ever.

~ Walt Whitman

The power of spiritual forces in the universe-

active it is everywhere!

Invsible to the eyes,

and impalpable to the senses,

it is inherent in all things,

and nothing escapes it.

the pattern of God exists in every man and that

this pattern in the individual has at its disposal

the greatest transforming energies of which life is capable.

Find this pattern in your own individual self and life is transformed.

God is Love

To transform the world, we must begin with ourselves.

However small may be the world we live in,

if we can transform ourselves,

bring about a radically different point of view in our daily existence,

then perhaps we shall affect the world at large, the extended relationship with others.

~ Krishnamurti

If you study life deeply, its profundity will seize you suddenly with dizziness.

A man is what he thinks about all day long.

Life is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.

~ Matthew Arnold

Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans.

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

The purpose of life is to matter, to be productive, to be useful,

to have it make a difference that you lived at all.

~ Leo Rosten

He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount.

In three words I can sum up everything I have learned about life:

It goes on.

The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.

Just because everything is different doesn't mean anything has changed.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change,

and to preserve change amid order.

Security is mostly a superstition.

It does not exist in nature,

nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

The fates lead him who will-

Him who won't they drag.

What we are really looking for is not the meaning of life but an experience of being alive.

And only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live in every experience,

painful or joyous; to live in gratitude for every moment, to live abundantly.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

~ Plato

The overexamined life is a drag

~ grafitti

There is only one time when it is essential to awaken.

That time is now.

~ Buddha

The most repressed and denied aspects of our soul...

[are] often the treasure that lies buried in he darkness.

Those things that Nature denied to human sight,

she revealed to the eyes of the soul.

~ Ovid, Metamorphosis

To live content with small means;

to seek elegance rather than luxury,

and refinement rather than fashion;

to be worthy, not respectable,

and wealthy, not rich;

to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages

with open heart;

to study hard;

to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently,

await occasions, hurry never;

in a word, to let the spiritual,

unbidden and unconscious,

grow up through the common-

My great mistake, the fault for which I can't forgive myself,

is that one day I ceased my obstinate pursuit of my individuality.

to be nobody but yourself,

in a world which is doing its best

to make you everybody else,

means to fight the hardest battle

which any human being can fight....

Who we are looking for is who is looking.

No matter where you go, there you are.

No man takes my measure but my tailor.

You need to claim the events of your life and make yourself yours.

Individualism is rather like innocence;

a new road or a secret gate.

The man who goes alone can start today;

but he who travels with another must wait 'till that other is ready.

Everyone must row with the oars he has.

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

A man wrapped up in himself makes a small package.

Only the shallow know themselves.

~ Oscar Wilde

Beware of any job which requires new clothes.

There is but one cause of human failure

and that is man's lack of faith in his true Self.

~ William James

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday,

and our present thoughts build our life of tommorrow:

Our life is the creation of our mind."

~ The Buddha

Things do not change,

He who knows others is wise;

he who knows himself is enlightened.

It is no use to wait for your ship to come in

unless you have sent one out.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams,

and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined,

he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

It's a funny thing about life;

if you refuse to accept anything but the best,

you very often get it.

You can't cross the sea by standing and staring at the water.

Don't let yourself indulge in vain wishes.

Things may come to those who wait,

but only the things left by those who hustle.

Success is not having whatever you want; rather,

Success is wanting what you have.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Start by doing what's necessary; then what's possible

and suddenly you are doing the impossible.

Enthusiasm is the greatest asset in the world.

A special Man

Dares to have dreams and to pursue them.

Uses his head for himself and his heart for others.

Lives his life with the purpose of

leaving the world a better place than he found it.

The one thing more difficult than following a regimen

is not imposing it on others.

~ Marcel Proust

A habit cannot be tossed out the window;

it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.

No one gets anywhere while straddling a fence.

You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.

Life affords no higher pleasure than that of surmounting difficulties,

passing from one step of success to another,

forming new wishes and seeing them gratified.

~ Samuel Johnson

My life seems like one long obstacle course

with me as the chief obstacle.

Those who make the worse use of their time

are the first to complain of its shortness.

~ Jean De La Bruyere

All anyone ever has is today

because yesterday is gone and tomorrow never comes.

The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive.

The great opportunity is where you are.

The only thing to do with temptation is to give in to it.

Genius, that power which dazzles mortal eyes,

is often perseverence in disguise.

Use what talents you possess.

The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there

We are what we think.

All that we are arises with our thoughts.

With our thoughts we make the world.

~ Buddha

What do you think?

Your thoughts are how you choose your life.

Make a good choice!

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us,

You have your views and your feelings and I have mine,

and I don't mind in the least if they don't match.

~ Ruth Sargent

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.

It is the first law of friendship that it be cultivated;

the second law is to be indulgent when the first law has been neglected.

You cannot be friends upon any other terms than upon the terms of equality.

Friendship redoubleth joys, and cutteth grief in half.

~ Francis Bacon

Home is the place you grow up wanting to leave,

and grow up wanting to get back to.

There is as much greatness of mind in acknowledging a good turn as in doing it.

~Seneca

Kind words can be short and easy to speak,

but their echoes are truly endless.

There is as much greatness of mind in acknowledging a good turn as in doing it.

Feelings are everywhere - be gentle.

Honest differences are often a healthy sign of progress.

The greatest problem of communication is the illusion

that it has been accomplished.

The heart is like a garden.

It can grow compassion or fear,

resentment or love.

What seeds will you plant there?

~ Jack Kornfield

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Pride goeth before destruction,

and an haughty spirit before a fall.

To be restored

our sickness must grow worse.

~ T. S. Eliot

That which we resist, persists.

Worry is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind.

If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all the other thoughts are drained.

Confusion is the doorway to a new understanding.

The deepest principle in human nature

is the craving to be appreciated.

Being in love is a transient state of psychosis.

Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean

if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean is not dirty.

Be awful nice to 'em goin' up,

Real learning comes about when the competitive spirit has ceased.

~ Krishnamurti

Believe nothing against another but on good authority;

The time is always right to do what is right.

That government is best which governs the least,

because its people discipline themselves.

The probability that we may fail in the struggle ought not

to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Some men look at the world as it is and ask why.

I look at the world as it might be and ask why not.

If you are not part of the solution - You are part of the problem.

I like a little rebellion now and then.

It's like a storm in the atmosphere.

~ Thomas Jefferson

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

~ Mark Twain

We are all fellow-passengers on the same planet and we are all equally

responsible for the happiness and well-being of the world in which we happen to live.

Minds are like parachutes - they work best when open.

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Things do not change,

we do.

You need to have Chaos in order to give birth to a dancing star.

If all you have is a hammer,

everything begins to appear as a nail.

-

~ Baruch

We are what we think.

All that we are arises with our thoughts.

With our thoughts we make our world.

In one sense there is no death~

the life of a soul on earth

lasts beyond his departure.

You will always feel that life

touching yours,

that voice speaking to you

that spirit looking out of other eyes,

talking to you in the familiar

things he touched, worked with, loved or familiar friends.

He lives on in your life

and in the lives of all others that knew him.

~ unknown (Greeting Card)

Death is not a period, but a comma, in the story of life.

ask not for whom the bell tolls,

it tolls for thee.

All composite things are by nature impermanent.