M. Scott Peck

Until you value yourself, you won't value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.

Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

We must be willing to fail and to appreciate the truth that often "Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived."

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult-once we truly understand and accept it-then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

Human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a PROFOUND tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there.

Share our similarities, celebrate our differences.

There is no worse bitterness than to reach the end of your life and realized you have not lived.

Problems call forth our courage and our wisdom; indeed, they create our courage and wisdom.

Hiromu Arakawa

It's a cruel and random world, but the chaos is all so beautiful.

Nothing's perfect, the world's not perfect. But it's there for us, trying the best it can; that's what makes it so damn beautiful.

Humankind cannot gain something without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. This is Alchemy's First Law of Equivalent Exchange. In those days, we really believed that to be the world's one, and only, truth.

Even when our eyes are closed, there's a whole world that exists outside ourselves and our dreams.

A lesson without pain is meaningless. For you cannot gain anything without sacrificing something else in return, but once you have overcome it and made it your own...you will gain an irreplaceable fullmetal heart.

Enduring and forgiving are two different things. You must not forgive the cruelty of this world. It's our duty as human beings to be angry at injustice. But we must also endure it. Because someone must sever this chain of hatred.

Stand up and walk. Move on. After all, you have perfect legs to stand on.

Damn it, there are so many idiots whose asses I have to kick! I'll have to start carrying a list just to keep track of 'em all!

Believe in yourself. Pick a path that you, deep down in your soul, won't be ashamed of.

If there's no door, then I'll make one!

Well, it's like that myth about the hero. He made wings out of wax so he could fly, but when he got too close to the Sun, to God, the wax melted and he crashed to the ground.

There are many questions in this world that have no answers.

Joshua Foer

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear. That's why it's so important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget.

Memory is like a spiderweb that catches new information. The more it catches, the bigger it grows. And the bigger it grows, the more it catches

Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older.

To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

Our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by … not paying attention?

Aberjhani

Dare to love yourself
as if you were a rainbow
with gold at both ends.

What a lover’s heart knows let no man’s brain dispute.

A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmare to the jeweled vision of a life started anew.

This fire that we call Loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls.

Each star is a mirror reflecting the truth inside you.

You were born a child of light’s wonderful secret— you return to the beauty you have always been.

Most people are slow to champion love because they fear the transformation it brings into their lives. And make no mistake about it: love does take over and transform the schemes and operations of our egos in a very mighty way.

If I say your voice is an amber waterfall in which I yearn to burn each day, if you eat my mouth like a mystical rose with powers of healing and damnation, If I confess that your body is the only civilization I long to experience… would it mean that we are close to knowing something about love?

This is what our love is––a sacred pattern of unbroken unity sewn flawlessly invisible inside all other images, thoughts, smells, and sounds.

Stephen R. Covey

But until a person can say deeply and honestly, "I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday," that person cannot say, "I choose otherwise."

Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.

Trust is the glue of life. It's the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It's the foundational principle that holds all relationships.

Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.

Seek first to understand, then to be understood.

To change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.

I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions

Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

We are free to choose our actions, . . . but we are not free to choose the consequences of these actions.

Two people can see the same thing, disagree, and yet both be right. It's not logical; it's psychological.

You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside. The enemy of the “best” is often the “good.” 

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are──or, as we are conditioned to see it.

The way we see the problem is the problem.

It's not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us.

Viktor E. Frankl

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.

Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.

The one thing you can’t take away from me is the way I choose to respond to what you do to me. The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.

What is to give light must endure burning.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible

Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.

Brandon Sanderson

Mocking a woman is like drinking too much wine. It may be fun for a short time, but the hangover is hell.

People can do great things. However, there are some things they just CAN'T do. I, for instance, have not been able to transform myself into a Popsicle, despite years of effort.

It's easy to believe in something when you win all the time...The losses are what define a man's faith.

The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.

Life before Death.
Strength before Weakness.
Journey before Destination.

I try to avoid having thoughts. They lead to other thoughts, and—if you’re not careful—those lead to actions. Actions make you tired. I have this on rather good authority from someone who once read it in a book.

Belief isn't simply a thing for fair times and bright days...What is belief - what is faith - if you don't continue in it after failure?...Anyone can believe in someone, or something that always succeeds...But failure...ah, now, that is hard to believe in, certainly and truly. Difficult enough to have value. Sometimes we just have to wait long enough...then we find out why exactly it was that we kept believing...There's always another secret.

Unknowing ignorance is preferable to informed stupidity.

And so, does the destination matter? Or is it the path we take? I declare that no accomplishment has substance nearly as great as the road used to achieve it. We are not creatures of destinations. It is the journey that shapes us. Our callused feet, our backs strong from carrying the weight of our travels, our eyes open with the fresh delight of experiences lived.

Abraham Maslow

To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.

We need not take refuge in supernatural gods to explain our saints and sages and heroes and statesmen, as if to explain our disbelief that mere unaided human beings could be that good or wise.

It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.

What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.

One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.

Be independent of the good opinion of other people

I can feel guilty about the past. Apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.

Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defense) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.

IIt seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually

 If the essential core of the person is denied or suppressed, he gets sick sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in subtle ways, sometimes immediately, sometimes later.

. . . the great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's backyard.

Lewis Carroll II (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson)

Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.

But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can’t help that," said the Cat: "we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad."
"How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, or you wouldn’t have come here.

Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."
"I don't much care where –"
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go.

One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.

Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle

I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again

I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.

Curiouser and curiouser

Contrariwise,' continued Tweedledee, 'if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.

Margaret Atwood II

War is what happens when language fails.

Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.

Another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.

What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, hairs, the weave of the bedsheet, the molecules of the face. Your own skin like a map, a diagram of futility, criscrossed with tiny roads that lead nowhere. Otherwise you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be.

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

Nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.

What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.