c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Kuan Yin Speaks on The Law of the Spiritualization (Transformation) of Matter: “The earth is trying to teach humans that everything is spirit…Being human is an opportunity to bring spirit into all that is material…The quality and intensity of resonance emanated from a given point is thus attracted back. When one brings spirit into the human realm, it can spiritualize matter. Matter can then become lighter, (indeed liberated), not as dense as before.”-Kuan Yin
— Hope Bradford, Oracle of Compassion: The Living Word of Kuan Yin
These young men, in other words, represented a variety of types, but one thing they had in common was that they'd all given up on committing positively to anything in life. This was not their fault, however. The blame lay with a certain ubiquitous spirit of the times, transmitted to them by their respective mothers. And perhaps it goes without saying that this "spirit of the times" was in fact an oppressive value system based primarily upon the absolute certainty that nothing in this world was ever going to change.
— Ryū Murakami, Popular Hits of the Showa Era
Within, you hold a tiny piece of eternity, a fraction of life, a mirror of the universe.
— Vironika Tugaleva, The Love Mindset: An Unconventional Guide to Healing and Happiness
it {romantic love} really isn't about two people who have fallen madly for each other
—  it's about two people seeing spirit in each other.
If we want to know our God-given gifts, we must know the giver.
— Eric Samuel Timm, Static Jedi: The Art of Hearing God Through the Noise
We feel good when we hear about how powerful we are because we are pure power.
— Vironika Tugaleva, The Love Mindset: An Unconventional Guide to Healing and Happiness
Our bodies are simply our shells, the package for the spirit and the soul.
— Eric Samuel Timm, Static Jedi: The Art of Hearing God Through the Noise
Watch through the clarity of your mind ,the clear essence of your soul and judge accordingly.Your Inner Voices state the Truth and only the Truth.Let not anything interfere between your heart and mind.Let not anything break the Silence that comes within and promote Spirit .BECAUSE what matters is to promote Spirit .Voices from within
— Katerina Kostaki, Cosmic Light
Your mind is your spirit
—  do not seek any other hidden soul inside you! All is in the brain! The depiction of a spirit rising to the sky is no more real than a medieval Scandinavian fairytales!
When you let Soul drive the bus, life flows more effortlessly. -- From the book, Doing a 360, page 8
— Nancy  Ash
The universe and all creation are there for you to connect your spirit to and you are special part of the whole. If you can sense the wonder of the vast infinite and eternal universe, your spirit will be lifted to great heights and you will tap the source of your life energy.
— Timothy Simpson, Boredom to Brilliance
He doesn't have a soul?" she shrieked, horrified."That explains why he's such a dick," Tree muttered.
— Rebekkah Ford, Beyond the Eyes
I think Ken should grow some balls and tell Barbie to piss off," Matt said after Ashley waved an accusing finger in Darren's (leg-puppy) face, then stomped off to a table beside a window.
— Rebekkah Ford, Beyond the Eyes
How can you see into my eyes like open doorsLeading you down into my coreWhere I've become so numb without a soulMy spirit sleeping somewhere coldUntil you find it there and lead it back home
— Evanescence, Bring Me to Life
Art is the conscious making of numinous phenomena. Many objects are just objects - inert, merely utilitarian. Many events are inconsequential, too banal to add anything to our experience of life. This is unfortunate, as one cannot grow except by having one’s spirit greatly stirred; and the spirit cannot be greatly stirred by spiritless things. Much of our very life is dead. For primitive man, this was not so. He made his own possessions, and shaped and decorated them with the aim of making them not merely useful, but powerful. He tried to infuse his weapons with the nature of the tiger, his cooking pots with the life of growing things; and he succeeded. Appearance, material, history, context, rarity - perhaps rarity most of all - combine to create, magically, the quality of soul. But we modern demiurges are prolific copyists; we give few things souls of their own. Locomotives, with their close resemblance to beasts, may be the great exception; but in nearly all else with which today’s poor humans are filling the world, I see a quelling of the numinous, an ashening of the fire of life. We are making an inert world; we are building a cemetery. And on the tombs, to remind us of life, we lay wreaths of poetry and bouquets of painting. You expressed this very condition, when you said that art beautifies life. No longer integral, the numinous has become optional, a luxury - one of which you, my dear friend, are fond, however unconsciously. You adorn yourself with the same instincts as the primitive who puts a frightening mask of clay and feathers on his head, and you comport yourself in an uncommonly calculated way - as do I. We thus make numinous phenomena of ourselves. No mean trick - to make oneself a rarity, in this overpopulated age.
— K.J. Bishop, The Etched City
Once upon a time, [the guru] said, when God had finished making the world, he wanted to leave behind Him for man a piece of His own divinity, a spark of His essence, a promise to man of what he could become, with effort. He looked for a place to hide this Godhead because, he explained, what man could find too easily would never be valued by him."Then you must hide the Godhead on the highest mountain peak on earth," said one of His councilors.God shook His head. "No, for man is an adventuresome creature and he will soon enough learn to climb the highest mountain peaks.""Hide it then, O Great One, in the depths of the earth!""I think not," said God, "for man will one day discover that he can dig into the deepest parts of the earth.""In the middle of the ocean then, Master?"God shook His head. "I've given man a brain, you see, and one day he'll learn to build ships and cross the mightiest oceans.""Where then, Master?" cried His councilors.God smiled. "I'll hide it in the most inaccessible place of all, and the one place that man will never think to look for it. I'll hide it deep inside of man himself.
— Dorothy Gilman, A Nun in the Closet
Awakening your spiritual self is like having a second childhood with faulty parents, broken bones and proverbial brussel sprouts.
— Christopher Hawke, Unnatural Truth
The thing you let Die within when you are Alive, will be carried with your Soul after Death.
— Usha Cosmico
Global transformation can occur only when each individual has the courage to awaken from this amnesia to our true self and then make conscious choices true to our spirit. The human race is the only species on earth evolved enough to be capable of this privilege.
— Patsie Smith
Nature is our spirit, breathing.
— Jaeda DeWalt
every end should be followed by great new beginning
— cG9sYXJhZGl0aWE=
Water will not flow from a faucet that is not connected to its source.
— Mary Morrissey
The monks' response was to climb into their curraghs and row off toward Greenland. They were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination.
— Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
A person fully in the Self is formless, birth less and deathless. He is inside, outside and above everything that is known. In purity he is absolute and in spirit he is eternal.
— Gian Kumar
The challenge of elucidating living processes -- including consciousness and all its baggage which we bundle together as 'the human spirit' -- is only one example of a challenge where hard work is paying off and science does not need to accept the false explanations peddled by religions.
— Peter   Atkins
I guess you've got a spice of temper," commented Mr. Harrison, surveying the flushed cheeks and indignant eyes opposite him. "It goes with hair like yours, I reckon
— L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
What you're looking for is already inside you. You've heard this before, but the holy thing inside you really is that which causes you to seek it. You can't buy it, lease it, rent it, date it, or apply for it. The best job in the world can't give it to you. Neither can succes, or fame, or financial security - besides which, there ain't no such thing.
— Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith
If souls existed, they resided in flesh.
— Zachary Jernigan, No Return
some of the happiest moments of my life have occurred just before I fall asleep or wake up, when I linger in that twilight world between consciousness and unconsciousness, in a state of somnolent repose but also savoring the vital goodness of remaining this close to the vegetative in myself
— Irving Singer, Meaning In Life, Volume 3: The Harmony Of Nature And Spirit
Make yourself familiar with the angels and behold them frequently in spirit; for without being seen, they are present with you.
— Francis de Sales
We could do ourselves a tremendous favor by letting go of the people who poison our spirit.
— Steve Maraboli
There is no ownership. There is only stewardship.
— LeeAnn Taylor
The complexity of your earthly array is not a guarantee for a truimphant eternity. The fact is that you need a simple life to go to heaven; not an excessively glittering body, shiny lips and charming face.
— Israelmore Ayivor
A cooperative spirit enjoys a better harvest.
— T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph Over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"
And a man said, speak to us of self-knowledge.and he answered, saying:Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights.But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge.You would know in words that which you have always known in thought.You would touch with your fingers the naked body of your dreams.And it is well that you should.The hidden well-spring of your soul must needs rise and run murmuring to the sea;and the treasure of your infinite depths would be revealed to your eyes.But let there be no scales to weigh your unknown treasure;And seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.For self is a sea boundless and measureless.
— Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
In living this way, we discover new opportunities for comfort and enjoyment. Where the younger person may have tossed and turned throughout a sleepless night, the older man or woman can possibly feel the pleasure that comes from lying on a good mattress, resting one's weary bones and overcharged intellect, whether or not one sleeps throughout the hours of darkness.
— Irving Singer, Meaning In Life, Volume 3: The Harmony Of Nature And Spirit
Be Clever, Think Clever and Do Clever
— Robin James
When a desperate, hungry spirit appears and makes the guinea pigs squeal it is because he knows where to put the live wire of sex, because he knows that beneath the hard carapace of indifference there is concealed the ugly gash, the wound that never heals.
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Beneath the cacophony of sound generated by our world lies the quiet whisper of universal intelligence. Allow it to be heard...
— Simon Boylan
No one's life made sense on paper. You cannot condense a person into facts.
— Rivera Sun, Steam Drills, Treadmills and Shooting Stars - a story of our times -
Of all the hardships and deprivations a people can suffer, I am not sure if the deprivations of art and culture are not the most devastating. As meat and rice are food for the body, art and culture are food for the soul. Starve the body and the person dies; starve the soul and the spirit dies.
— Gerard de Marigny
The soul-Self doesn't follow the crowd. It encourages you to speak up when you need to and live by your truth.
— Debra Moffitt, Garden of Bliss: Cultivating the Inner Landscape for Self-Discovery
Love in action puts a mind at ease. It creates wonders and good feelings. Such is the magic word that when you allow it to flow freely, it awakens every human heart, and uplifts every human spirit.
— Rita Barnes
There are those of poor spirit and there are those of great spirit. None are without it but the flame flickers pretty low in some cases. The majority of people seem to be nothing but a little flickering flame. You know that when you match them against an individual who is all fire, all radiance. Those in whom the flame of the spirit runs high are extraordinary examples of human beings.
— Henry Miller, My Life and Times
ABOUT: KAHLIL GIBRAN "His power came from some great reservoir of spiritual life else it could not have been so universal and so potent, but the majesty and beauty of the language with which he clothed it were all his own." -- Claude Bragdon
— Claude Bragdon
All great religions hold the power to enslave & the power to enlighten...
— Simon Boylan
Some journeys lead nowhere, but they set the spirit free
— Jocelyn  Murray
Let go of the people who dull your shine, poison your spirit, and bring you drama. Cancel your subscription to their issues.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
The only way to gain power in a world that is moving too fast is to learn to slow down. And the only way to spread one’s influence wide to learn how to go deep. The world we want for ourselves and our children will not emerge from electronic speed but rather from a spiritual stillness that takes root in our souls. Then, and only then, will we create a world that reflects the heart instead of shattering it.
— Marianne Williamson, The Gift of Change: Spiritual Guidance for a Radically New Life
To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.
— Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles
If your lot makes you cry and be wretched, get rid of it and take another; strike out for yourself; don't listen to the shriek of your relations...don't be afraid of public opinion in the shape of the neighbours in the next house, when all the world is before you new and shining, and everything is possible, if you will only be energetic and independent and seize opportunity by the scruff of the neck.
— Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden
It's hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash. I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows she the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it.
— Karen Marie Moning
It is not good for the spirits to dwell on that which cannot be altered.
— Amanda Quick, I Thee Wed
For the others, it was still just a tale, like all the tales we told, night by night, tales comical and strange, tales heroic and awe-inspiring, the tales that formed the fabric of our spirits.
— Juliet Marillier, Daughter of the Forest
Sometimes you have to look past a person’s mistakes to see God’s presence.
— Shannon L. Alder
So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.
— Aaron Copland
New levels bring new devils. Stay unapologetically committed to your goals and let go of anyone who poisons your spirit.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
The nineteenth century was the Age of Romanticism; for the first time in history, man stopped thinking of himself as an animal or a slave, and saw himself as a potential god. All of the cries of revolt against 'God' - De Sade, Byron's "Manfred", Schiller's "Robbers", Goethe's "Faust", Hoffmann's mad geniuses - are expressions of this new spirit. Is this why the 'spirits' decided to make a planned and consistent effort at 'communication'? It was the right moment. Man was beginning to understand himself.
— Colin Wilson, The Occult
What we strive to restore and re-animate will never come from the promises of the middle class politicians, but will come instead from the spirit of the last Delphic prophecy, which foresaw that, ‘One day Apollo will return and it will be forever’.
— Guillaume Faye, Why We Fight
The simple truth is that love is a part of who we are, not something that others "give" to us if we're worthy of it. We're taught that if we just find that right person, and that person "falls in love" with us, everything will be fine. We're not taught about recognizing the love that is a part of our spirits, the love that we radiate when we recognize the beauty and need in all the people that surround us. Love is ours to share, at all moments and in all situations, but for some reason we fear doing so.
— Tom Walsh
Country music is the poetry of the American spirit.
— Steve Maraboli, Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience
..Imam Ali [A]..'However knows himself (his soul or spirit) knows [or has known] his Lord
— Mohammad Ali Shomali
Our loved ones are always with us whether they are of the flesh or of the spirit.
— Lynn Hubbard, Chase the Moon: A Historical Romance
Before the sparrow arrived, you had almost stopped thinking about flight. Then, last winter, it soared through the sky and landed in front of you, or more precisely on the windowsill of the covered balcony adjoining your bedroom. You knew the grimy window panes were caked with dead ants and dust, and smelt as sour as the curtains. But the sparrow wasn’t put off. It jumped inside the covered balcony and ruffled its feathers, releasing a sweet smell of tree bark into the air. Then it flew into your bedroom, landed on your chest and stayed there like a cold egg.
— Ma Jian, Beijing Coma
Silence can bring us into alignment with our thoughts and feelings and help us to hear the quiet spiritual voice of our intuition.
— Michael Thomas Sunnarborg, 21 Days to Better Balance: Find More Balance in a Busy World
a voice called out after me, 'life takes us on many divergent paths, and yet we shall meet one more time! Not in the flesh, but in the sun, man's home
— Adriana Koulias, Temple of the Grail
...the monk beat me to break my spirit, incensed I knew Acquinas - angry, I knew his riddle - beauty is what is pleasing to the eye - he wasn't...
— John Geddes, A Familiar Rain
In Galapagos, as elsewhere, things of the mind, including intellectual ramifications from evolutionary theory, and things of the spirit, like the feeling one gets from a Queen Anne’s lace of stars in the moonless Galapagean sky, struggle toward accommodation with an elementary desire for material comfort…because so many regard this archipelago as preeminently a terrain of the mind and spirit, a locus of biological thought and psychological rejuvenation. The sheer strength of Darwin’s insight into the development of biological life gently urges a visitor to be more than usually observant here- to notice, say, that while the thirteen Galapagean finches are all roughly the same hue, it is possible to separate them according to marked differences in the shapes of their bills and feeding habits.
— Barry López, About This Life
Friendship is ageless. It is the spirit we should like and care for, not the shell that encases it.
— Robert W. Sweeting, Kekaju and the Hidden Swamp
... If the dead can come back to this earth and move unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the garish day and in the darkest night—amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours—always, always; and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or if the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.
— Paul Hoffman, The Left Hand of God
Only the ego resists egos. The spirit may notice egos, but sees beyond them and does not engage with them.
— Alan Cohen
Being content with what you have already is an art form that leads to a peace that can’t be replaced by anything else.
— Elizabeth Gilbert
Let me tell you something, honey. When your boobs fall south and that pretty skin of yours looks like you’ve been tanning in a nuclear war zone, you’ll see what I mean about independence. When the looks are gone, all you’ve got left is your spirit, and ya gotta use it until you lose it. That and the occasional sponge bath from Francisco, but soon his ass will be just as wrinkly as mine. Beauty fades, but a strong will keeps ya young and springy.-Miss Velma
— Rachael Wade, Love and Relativity
It is purity of spirit that will keep corruption from the flesh
— Mark  Lawrence
This much is true: When you are about to effect the lives of hundreds of people, Satan will do everything he can to prevent it from happening. Often pride and anger are his best assassins.
— Shannon L. Alder
Allah, Most High, has truly blessed us. He has created just for us the mysterious spirit that He has breathed into us and by so doing distinguished us from all other physical creation. He has adorned us with our incomparable intellect, which further distinguishes us from all else in this creation. What other creature on this planet -another gift He has blessed us with- can even begin to create the likes of this Internet? Will we not stop, give thanks to our Merciful and Generous Lord? Will we not stop and realize how precious our lives are and begin to show each other more love, mercy, kindness and empathy? Will we not stop, take time, and reflect?
— Imam Zaid Shakir
There is no doubt, that in this world, there are all sorts of people who look nice, but are empty inside; who do not feel either moral or spiritual aspirations in addition to the physical gifts with which nature blessed them ... But Corneliu Codreanu, his magnificient physique corresponds to an exceptional inner wholeness. Exclamations of admiration from men left him indifferent. Praise angered him. He had only a fighter's greatness and the ambition of great reformers... The characteristic of his soul was goodness. If you want to penetrate the initial motive which prompted Corneliu Codreanu to throw in a fight so hard and almost desperate, the best answer is that he did it out of compassion for suffering people. His heart bled with thousands of injuries to see the misery in which peasants and workers struggled. His love for the people - unlimited! He was sensitive to any suffering the working masses endured. He had a cult for the humble, and showed an infinite attention to their aspirations and their hopes. The smallest window, the most trivial complaint, were examined with the same seriousness with which he addressed grave political problems.
— Horia Sima
She was eight years old, with the body of a child, but her spirit was weighed down by an adult suffering.
— Somaly Mam, The Road of Lost Innocence: The True Story of a Cambodian Heroine
The link between the spirit and the mind is the deep heart".~R. Alan Woods [2012]
— R. Alan Woods, The Journey Is The Destination: A Photo Journal
Each day we live is a glass roomUntil we break it with the thrustingOf the spirit and pass throughThe splintered walls to the green pasturesWhere the birds and buds are breakingInto fabulous song and hueBy the still w
— Mervyn Peake, Collected Poems
Freedom - that word that the human spirit feeds: that no one can explain, and anyone who does not understand.
— Cecília Meireles, Romanceiro da Inconfidência
I think that being a soul in flesh is really challenging and we should all give ourselves more credit.
— S. Kelley Harrell
Suddenly, Tara's accomplishment was clear. She had lined up allies among the school's various groups and got them all to work together for probably the first time in the school's history. She was like a master builder who could bend materials like stone and steel and clay to her will... except her materials were flesh and spirit.
— Neal Shusterman, Dread Locks
He wondered why it was easier to believe in a malevolent spirit than in a benign one. Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared eternal life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender.
— Dean Koontz, What the Night Knows
If I imagine my soul, as I do when I pray, it's shaped like Stapafel. No change of place or religion can alter that. I lived beneath Stapafel from the hour I was born until I was sixteen. I've never seen it since, but that doesn't matter. My soul is in the likeness of a jagged peak with a rock like a man standing on its summit, and snags of rock shaped like trolls along its spine. Screes defend it, although it's not quite inaccessible if you know the way up.
— Margaret Elphinstone
Dead or alive, true leaders can inspire an entire army.
— Peter Mohrbacher
And as for Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly than this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
What are we artists for? We are for showing you what you've wandered for to find the home of your spirit...
— Hiroko Sakai
Dedication. DEDICATION. That is the only way to become a writer. Write every day. Write until your fingers bleed, your eyes bleed, your soul bleeds. From that blood, stories are born. It's worth it.
— Belle DiMonté
Look at the sky. Does its sapphire hue dim when you take a single breath? Are the stars drawn closer when you weep? The sky cannot be diminished so. Thus it is with the spirit: it is a thing without beginning or end.
— Elaine Cunningham, Realms of the Arcane
We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive - survive the condemnations, survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things - they look small enough sometimes too - by which some of us are totally and completely undone.
— Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
Spirit is a tangible substance.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
— Anaïs Nin
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
— Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West
Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. And when life is bitter, say thank you and grow.
— Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way
I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she'd tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you're ever going to. Look around. It's all downhill from here. The rest of us will go a bit further, a steady job, a trip to Hawaii, or a move to Phoenix, Arizona, but out of fifteen hundred how many will do anything truly worthwhile, write a play, paint a painting that will hang in a gallery, find a cure for herpes? Two of us, maybe three? And how many will find true love? About the same. And enlightenment? Maybe one. The rest of us will make compromises, find excuses, someone or something to blame, and hold that over our hearts like a pendant on a chain.
— Janet Fitch, White Oleander
What makes night within us may leave stars.
— Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three
I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.
— Hermann Hesse, Demian. Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
My two favourite things in life are libraries and bicycles. They both move people forward without wasting anything. The perfect day: riding a bike to the library.
— Peter Golkin
I’ve learned that everything happens for a reason,” the yogi Krishnan told him. “Every event has a why and all adversity teaches us a lesson... Never regret your past. Accept it as the teacher that it is.
— Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari
For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.
— Cynthia Occelli
But when you're in front of an audience and you make them laugh at a new idea, you're guiding the whole being for the moment. No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It's very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That's when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance to grow.
— George Carlin, Last Words
Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development
—  you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer.
Rocks in my path? I keep them all. With them I shall build my castle.
— Nemo Nox
A diamond doesn't start out polished and shining. It once was nothing special, but with enough pressure and time, becomes spectacular. I'm that diamond.
— Solange nicole
Personal growth has its price, and she was paying it without complaint.
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
The only time you truly become an adult is when you finally forgive your parents for being just as flawed as everyone else.
— Douglas Kennedy, The Pursuit of Happiness
Don't let your habits become handcuffs
— Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures
No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
— David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
The ugliest thing in America is greed, the lust for power and domination, the lunatic ideology of perpetual Growth - with a capital G. 'Progress' in our nation has for too long been confused with 'Growth'; I see the two as different, almost incompatible, since progress means, or should mean, change for the better - toward social justice, a livable and open world, equal opportunity and affirmative action for all forms of life. And I mean all forms, not merely the human. The grizzly, the wolf, the rattlesnake, the condor, the coyote, the crocodile, whatever, each and every species has as much right to be here as we do.
— Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.
— G.K. Chesterton, A Chesterton calendar
Wildflower; pick up your pretty little head, It will get easier, your dreams are not dead.
— Nikki Rowe
We become aware of the void as we fill it.
— Antonio Porchia
It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.
— Henry David Thoreau
There is no man...however wise, who has not at some period in his youth said things, or lived a life, the memory of which is so unpleasant to him that he would gladly expunge it. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man...
— Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I - Swann's Way & Within a Budding Grove
We long for things that harm us and run from the things that grow and heal us. We think good is bad and bad is good.
— Tessa Afshar, Pearl in the Sand
If you're capable of despising your own behavior, you might just love yourself.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
He was still immersed in the dim, wet wonder of the folded wings that might open if someone loved him; he still hoped, probably, in a butterfly's unthinking way, for spring and warmth. How the wings ache, folded so, waiting; that is, they ache until they atrophy.
— Harold Brodkey, First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories
Going back after a long time will make you mad, because the people you left behind do not like to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.
— Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire.
— Richard M. Nixon
Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth.
— Theodore Roosevelt, The Man In The Arena:  Speeches and Essays by Theodore Roosevelt
I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing through it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers- the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and he Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees-must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, always flowing but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along andante, sometimes surging over rapids furioso, sometimes meandering wit hardly any visible movement tranquilo, lento, ppp pianissimo, sometimes gurgling giacoso with pleasure, sometimes sparkling brillante in the sun, sometimes lacrimoso, sometimes appassionato, sometimes misterioso, sometimes pesante, sometimes legato, sometimes staccato, sometimes sospirando, sometimes vivace, and always, I hope, amoroso.Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me to wall so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for they own purposes? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?
— Aidan Chambers, This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn
An economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.
— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.
— Bernard Berenson
You get olderand you are a whole mess of things,new thoughts, sorry feelings,big plans, enormous doubts,goling along hoping and getting disappointed,over and over again,no wonder I don't recognizemy little crayon picture.It appears to be meand it isand it is not.
— Virginia Euwer Wolff, True Believer
If I can't stay where I am, and I can't, then I will put all that I can into the going.
— Jeanette Winterson
But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.
— James     Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
13NOTESShe hesitated. For two years she had kept as far away from Mikael Blomkvist as she could. And yet he kept sticking to her life like gum on the sole of her shoe, either on the Net or in real life. On the Net it was O.K. There he was no more than electrons and words. In real life, standing on her doorstep, he was still fucking attractive. And he knew her secrets just as she knew all of his. She looked at him for a moment and realized that she now had no feelings for him. At least not those kinds of feelings. He had in fact been a good friend to her over the past year. She trusted him. Maybe. It was troubling that one of the few people she trusted was a man she spent so much time avoiding. Then she made up her mind. It was absurd to pretend that he did not exist. It no longer hurt her to see him. She opened the door wide and let him into her life again.
— Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
But what is the way forward? I know what it isn't. It's not, as we once believed, plenty to eat and a home with all the modern conveniences. It's not a 2,000-mile-long wall to keep Mexicans out or more accurate weapons to kill them. It's not a better low-fat meal or a faster computer speed. It's not a deodorant, a car, a soft drink, a skin cream. The way forward is found on a path through the wilderness of the head and heart---reason and emotion. Thinking, knowing, understanding.
— Laurence Gonzales, Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things
When you’re growing up, it takes a long time for you to realize that there’s something different about you. On one level, you know there’s something strange, but on another, yourself is the only thing you ever knew.
— Brooke Stevens, The Circus of the Earth and the Air
Not everyone is allotted the chance to become a personality; most remain types, and never experience the rigor of becoming an individual. But those who do so inevitably discover that these struggles bring them into conflict with the normal life of average people and the traditional values and bourgeois conventions that they uphold. A personality is the product of a clash between two opposing forces: the urge to create a life of one's own and the insistence by the world around us that we conform. Nobody can develop a personality unless he undergoes revolutionary experiences. The extent of those experiences differs, of course, from person to person, as does the capacity to lead a life that is truly personal and unique.
— Hermann Hesse, Soul of the Age: Selected Letters, 1891-1962
Growth is betrayal.
— John Updike, Rabbit Redux
The cost of growth is always a small act of violence.
— Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care
Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.
— Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
One of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details of life which differentiate them from you.
— Edward T. Hall, The Silent Language
Every test successfully met is rewarded by some growth in intuitive knowledge, strengthening of character, or initiation into a higher consciousness.
— Paul Brunton, The Notebooks of Paul Brunton
I'm tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I'm hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am dead. I can feel the surface trembling—it seems ready to give but it never does. I am uninterested in current events. How can I justify this? How can I explain it? I don't want to have the same vocabulary I've always had. I want something richer, broader, more penetrating and powerful.
— James Salter, Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps
Maybe you have to live under cover for a while before you can find your true character.
— Hugo Hamilton, The Sailor in the Wardrobe
Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
But I was done trying to wake her up, to make her see. To save her. The only person I could save was myself.
— Emme Rollins, Dear Rockstar
The images of myth must be the daemonic guardians, omnipresent and unnoticed, which protect the growth of the young mind, and guide man's interpretation of his life and struggles.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished??
— Jalaluddin Rumi
If you wish to make anything grow, you must understand it, and understand it in a very real sense. 'Green fingers' are a fact, and a mystery only to the unpracticed. But green fingers are the extensions of a verdant heart.
— Russell Page, The Education of a Gardener
After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
The art of being wise is the art of knowing that solutions don’t come from individuals, but rather experiences.
— Shannon L. Alder
We all have to learn to live with our losses, and to use our regrets to spur us on in the future.
— John Christopher, The Pool of Fire
We grow the aspects of our lives that we feed – with energy and engagement – and choke off those we deprive of fuel. Your life is what you agree to attend to.
— Jim Loehr
Growing up in a culture that constantly reminds one that they are an outsider can be deeply destructive, especially since that standard voice is so very strong, and becomes ingrained in the consciousness so early. Survival requires finding a way to come to peace with that voice and all the others: to subdue it, or to make it work towards one's own ends. The tale would be different indeed if Pegasus talked back to Perseus.
— Laura Yes Yes, How to Seduce a White Boy in Ten Easy Steps
Out of the new arrivals in our lives--the odd word stumbled upon in a difficult text, the handsome black stranger who bursts in one night through the cat door, the telephone call out of a friend's silence of years, the sudden greeting from the girl-child---we constantly make of ourselves our selves.
— Nancy Mairs
He had also been demonstrative and intelligent from the very beginning, his questions startlingly insightful. She would watch him absorb a new idea and wonder what effect it would have on him, because, with Edgar, EVERYTHING came out, eventually, somehow. But the PROCESS – how he put together a story about the world’s workings – that was mysterious beyond all ken. In a way, she thought, it was the only disappointing thing about having a child. She’d imagined he would stay transparent to her, more PART of her, for so much longer. But despite the proximity of the daily work, Edgar had ceased long before to be an open book. A friend, yes. A son she loved, yes. But when it came to knowing his thoughts, Edgar could be opaque as a rock.
— David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Being yourself in a world which wants you to be someone else is the highest possible attainment.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity.
— Vernon Howard
I love the smell of rain and growing things.
— Serina Hernandez
The goal of climbing big, dangerous mountains should be to attain some sort of spiritual and personal growth, but this won’t happen if you compromise away the entire process.
— Yvon Chouinard, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
A person is not like a thing that you put down in one place and leave, a person moves, thinks, asks, questions, doubts, investigates, probes, and while it is true that, out of a long habit of resignation, he sooner or later ends up looking as if he has submitted to the objects, don't go thinking that this apparent submission is necessarily permanent.
— José Saramago, The Cave
I try to be like a forest: revitalizing and constantly growing.
— Forest Whitaker
What lived on-in me- was the discomfort of how completely I'd outgrown the novel I'd once been so happy to live in
— Jonathan Franzen, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History
Let the darkness find you if it must. Throw off the quick and tempting escapes, and seek help only from those who would teach you to grow, feed your soul, embrace your heart, but would not steal away your journey.
— Jennifer DeLucy
We are all broken and wounded in this world. Some choose to grow strong at the broken places.
— Harold J. Duarte-Bernhardt
Growth is limited by the necessity which is present in the least amount. And naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate
— Frank Herbert, Dune
As we run, we become.
— Amby Burfoot
When you give others a new chance, a new chance is really being given to you.
— Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life
Oh thrice fools are we who like new-born princes weeping in the cradle know not that there is a kingdom before them then let our Lord's sweet hand square us and hammer us and strike off the knots of pride self-love and world-worship and infidelity that He may make us stones and pillars in His Father's house.
— Samuel Rutherford
there is no growth except in the fulfillment of obligations
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
We all have limitations. They are worth befriending. They teach us a lot. They can show us what we most need to pay attention to and honor. They become our cutting edge for learning and growing and gentling ourselves into the present moment as it is.
— Jon Kabat-Zinn, Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
For within your flesh, deep within the center of your being, is the undaunted, waiting, longing, all-knowing. Is the ready, able, perfect. Within you, waiting its turn to emerge, piece by piece, with the dawn of every former test of trial and blackness, is the next unfolding, the great unfurling of wings, the re-forged backbone of a true Child of Light.
— Jennifer DeLucy
In the realm of the unknown, difficulties must be viewed as a hidden treasure! Usually, the more difficult, the better. It's not as valuable if your difficulties stem from your own inner struggle. But when difficulties arise out of increasing objective resistance, that's marvelous!
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle
Growth is an unavoidable part of life. Whether we mean for it to happen or not, our bodies continually nourish and regenerate themselves, our minds continually learn and expand, and our lives continually evolve. We have the power to craft our growth the way a landscaper crafts a majestic garden, or we can leave it to chance, allowing it to unfold wild as the weeds that spread across a vacant lot.
— Scott Edmund Miller
There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: - through infancy's unconscious spell, boyhood's thoughtless faith, adolescence' doubt (the common doom). and then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood's pondering repose of If.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
When had she stopped being a child? The first time a guy had whistled at her out of a car window when she was walking to school? The moment she started wondering how she looked when she ran, what jiggled or bounced, instead of the pace she was setting? The first time she’d kept from raising her hand because she didn’t want to seem too smart or too eager?
— Leigh Bardugo, Wonder Woman: Warbringer
Online & social media subscribers are hungry for content, but when newsfeeding them for growth, try not to get them juiced up for more email junk they’ll trash over trunk…quality over quantity is the preferred principle thing!
— Tracey Bond