Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you.
We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief.
Gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us.
Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation.
The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.
You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds Except the one in which you belong.
Start close in, don’t take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in, the step you don’t want to take.
If in your mind it was possible to take a year's sabbatical from work to reassess your life, what would you do and where would you go?
Without the compassionate understanding of the fear and trepidation that lie behind courageous speech, we are bound only to our arrogance.
We're moving toward the kind of work world which has less security. But we hope it has more creativity and possibility of real engagement.
There are millions of people living Thoreau's life of quiet desperation, and they do not have the language to escape from that desperation.
What we strive for in perfection is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need.
What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
Sometimes you have to make a complete disaster of your life in such an epic way that it will be absolutely clear to you what you've been doing.
A soul-based workplace asks things of me that I didn't even know I had. It's constantly telling me that I belong to something large in the world.
The frail, vulnerable sounds of which we are capable seem to be essential to a later ability to roar like a lion without scaring everyone to death.
The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality.
Shyness means you are in the hallway of a greater presence. You just don't know how to take the conversation another step. It's a lovely indication.
It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you know despair or can see it in others.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
A sure sign of a soul-based workplace is excitement, enthusiasm, real passion; not manufactured passion, but real involvement. And there's very little fear.
I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand.
In Germany, they have great difficulty with anything that smacks of cultism or messianic leadership. You can't talk about leadership in its charismatic forms.
A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want.
If you've given away a sense of your own destiny, you need enormous amounts of hierarchy and protection within the structure to make up for what you've given away.
Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising.
The outlaw is the radical, the one close to the roots of existence. The one who refuses to forget their humanity and, in remembering, helps everyone else remember, too.
Things have a way of being richer in the end, a product better made, for the circuitous route we take to include all the elements that are necessary for a job well done.
Our work is to make ourselves visible in the world. This is the soul's individual journey, and the soul would much rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else's.
Shedding the carapace we have been building so assiduously on the surface, we must by definition give up exactly what we thought was necessary to protect us from further harm.
Being a good parent will necessarily break our hearts as we watch a child grow and eventually choose their own way, even through many of the same heartbreaks we have traversed.
There is a lovely root to the word humiliation - from the latin word humus, meaning soil or ground. When we are humiliated, we are in effect returning to the ground of our being.
If I don't have time for the writing, it's because I'm not making that time. It's really just a question of whether you want to or not, whether you feel you deserve to write or not.
For the personality, bankruptcy or failure may be a disaster. For the soul, it may be grist for its strangely joyful mill, and a condition it has been secretly engineering for years.
It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life.
To have a firm persuasion in our work - to feel that what we do is right for ourselves and good for the world at exactly the same time - is one of the great triumphs of human existence.
When I recite poems onstage, I put myself into the very personal struggle and it grants tremendous perspective. At the same time you get another perspective on the poem you're reciting.
Enough. These few words are enough If not these few words, this breath If not this breath, this sitting here This opening to the life we have refused again and again Until now Until now.
Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness.
Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation.
By definition, poetry works with qualities and dynamics that mainstream society is reluctant to face head-on. It's an interesting phenomenon that by necessity, poetry is just below the radar.
To regret fully is to appreciate how high the stakes are in even the average human life; fully experienced, it turns our eyes, attentive and alert, to a future possibly lived better than our past.
It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living.
Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story; we do not know where we are in the story. We do not know who, ultimately, is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end.
We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming, as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.
I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.
To seek out beauty in our work is to make a pilgrimage of our labors, to understand that the consummation of work lies not only in what we have done, but who we have become while accomplishing the task.
One of the great difficulties as you rise up through an organisation is that your prior competencies are exploded and broken apart by the territory you've been promoted into: the field of human identity.
Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for awhile. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way.
Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.