Rudolf Steiner

Love starts when we push aside our ego and make room for someone else.

If we do not believe within ourselves this deeply rooted feeling that there is something higher than ourselves, we shall never find the strength to evolve into something higher.

You will not be good teachers if you focus only on what you do and not upon who you are.

Our highest endeavor must be to develop free human beings who are able of themselves to impart purpose and direction to their lives. The need for imagination, a sense of truth, and a feeling of responsibility—these three forces are the very nerve of education.

Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him. For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears.

Rebecca Solnit

The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak and be perfectly understood.

The art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture.

To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.

The stars we are given. The constellations we make. That is to say, stars exist in the cosmos, but constellations are the imaginary lines we draw between them, the readings we give the sky, the stories we tell.

Daniel Defoe II

It is never too late to be wise.

The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.

Expect nothing and you'll always be surprised.

Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.

I saw the Cloud, though I did not foresee the Storm.

Those people cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them because they see and covet what He has not given them. All of our discontents for what we want appear to me to spring from want of thankfulness for what we have.

Thus we never see the true state of our condition till it is illustrated to us by its contraries, nor know how to value what we enjoy, but by the want of it.

I hear much of people's calling out to punish the guilty, but very few are concerned to clear the innocent.

Today we love what tomorrow we hate,
today we seek what tomorrow we shun,
today we desire what tomorrow we fear,
nay, even tremble at the apprehensions of.

He that hath truth on his side is a fool as well as a coward if he is afraid to own it because of other mens's opinions.

Jim Butcher

When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching -- they are your family.

Paranoid? Probably. But just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face

I don't care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching--they are your family.

Evil isn’t the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it’s a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference.

Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar.

Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.

I had to smile at the man. I mean, you have to smile at idiots and children.

There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares.

We have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville.

The human mind is not a terribly logical or consistent place.

Kelley Armstrong

You forget, darling.
I am the local psychopath

Derek caught my arm again as I started to move--at this rate, it was going to be as sore as my injured one.
"Dog," he said, jerking his chin toward the fenced yard. "It was inside earlier."
Expecting to see a Doberman slavering at the fence, I followed his gaze to a little puff of white fur, the kind of dog women stick in their purses. It wasn't even barking, just staring at us, dancing in place.
"Oh, my God! It's a killer Pomeranian." 

Kids who don't eavesdrop on adult conversations are doomed to a childhood of ignorance.

He pivoted, gaze following me as I crossed to the shower and turned on the cold water, so it would drown out our conversation without steaming up the room.
Great," he muttered."Now they're going to think we're showering together. Maybe we can just tell them we were washing off the crawl space dirt and trying to conserve water.

E. A. Bucchianeri

So it’s true, when all is said and done, grief is the price we pay for love.

Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot.

An acquaintance merely enjoys your company, a fair-weather companion flatters when all is well, a true friend has your best interests at heart and the pluck to tell you what you need to hear.

Love, like everything else in life, should be a discovery, an adventure, and like most adventures, you don’t know you’re having one until you’re right in the middle of it.

I am an artist you know ... it is my right to be odd.

It was only high school after all, definitely one of the most bizarre periods in a person’s life. How anyone can come through that time well adjusted on any level is an absolute miracle.

Weirdism is definitely the cornerstone of many an artist's career.

The most beautiful moments always seemed to accelerate and slip beyond one’s grasp just when you want to hold onto them for as long as possible

Make your lives a masterpiece, you only get one canvas.

Joseph Conrad II

Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade since it consists principally of dealings with men.

It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

We live as we dream--alone....

It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice.

Let them think what they liked, but I didn't mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank -- but that's not the same thing.

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence--that which makes its truth, its meaning--its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream--alone.

Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.

We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.

The horror! The horror!

John O'Donohue

One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silences. Often secrets are not revealed in words, they lie concealed in the silence between the words or in the depth of what is unsayable between two people.

Every friendship travels at sometime through the black valley of despair. This tests every aspect of your affection. You lose the attraction and the magic. Your sense of each other darkens and your presence is sore. If you can come through this time, it can purify with your love, and falsity and need will fall away. It will bring you onto new ground where affection can grow again.

There is the solitude of suffering, when you go through darkness that is lonely, intense, and terrible. Words become powerless to express your pain; what others hear from your words is so distant and different from what you are actually suffering.

Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey.

Libba Bray

And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.

People have a habit of inventing fictions they will believe wholeheartedly in order to ignore the truth they cannot accept.

You can never really know someone completely. That’s why it’s the most terrifying thing in the world, really—taking someone on faith, hoping they’ll take you on faith too. It’s such a precarious balance, It’s a wonder we do it at all. And yet.

We all do things we desperately wish we could undo. Those regrets just become part of who we are, along with everything else. To spend time trying to change that, well, it's like chasing clouds.

I should never be left alone with my mind for too long.

There are no safe choices. Only other choices.

Sometimes we seek that which we are not yet ready to find.

I am a jumble of passions, misgivings, and wants. It seems that I am always in a state of wishing and rarely in a state of contentment.

What if evil doesn't really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except out own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?

Gary L. Francione

Being vegan is easy. Are there social pressures that encourage you to continue to eat, wear, and use animal products? Of course there are. But in a patriarchal, racist, homophobic, and ableist society, there are social pressures to participate and engage in sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism. At some point, you have to decide who you are and what matters morally to you. And once you decide that you regard victimizing vulnerable nonhumans is not morally acceptable, it is easy to go and stay vegan.

Veganism is not about giving anything up or losing anything; it is about gaining the peace within yourself that comes from embracing nonviolence and refusing to participate in the exploitation of the vulnerable.

We do not need to eat animals, wear animals, or use animals for entertainment purposes, and our only defense of these uses is our pleasure, amusement, and convenience

In order to be a teacher you've got to be a student first.

People need to be educated so that they can make intelligent moral choices.

All sentient beings should have at least one right—the right not to be treated as property.