Quote Archive

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Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
- Howard Thurman

Few needs are as pressing and as often go unmet in our world as the need for a place to converse.
We all require somewhere, some circle of companions, where and with whom we can enter into the demanding task
of trying to say what we experience and to understand what others say in response.
- Michael J Himes, Doing the Truth in Love: Conversations about God, Relationships, and Service

When a man begins to have a vision larger than his own truth...
he begins to become conscious of his moral nature.
- Rabindranath Tagore

The insanity of human destructiveness may be matched by an older grace and intelligence
that is fastening us together in ways we have never before seen or imagined.”
- Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest

Each one of us has that capacity to move from a limited and confining sense of identification
to an expanded sense of awareness.  That is what we mean by transformation.
- James O'Dea, President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences

Globally and culturally we are undergoing an initiation.
We are moving out of the journey of the hero and the heroine ... that process of individuation.
An archetypal shift or initiation is occurring where we are moving into the journey of partnership
or the journey of the tribe. The journey of partnership ... requires the spirit of cooperation and collaboration
... requires that we learn about collective leadership and collective wisdom.
- Angeles Arrien, “The Second Half of Life” transcript

The universe emerges out of an all-nourishing abyss
not only twelve billion years ago but in every moment.
...It is not possible to find any place in the universe that is outside of this activity
- Physicist Brian Swimme, Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: Humanity and the New Story

“Politics and spirituality are the two sides of the same coin.
 Politics is the driving force visible to the outside; spirituality is the internal force driving the consciousness
to open up to the world and conjoin it.  Politics bared of spiritual awareness always leads to violence and the abuse of power.
 Spirituality without political engagement resembles an escape from the world.”
- Gundula Schatz, co-founder of The Waldzell Institute

"If we listen to the women and children,
they will tell use what is required to heal this earth and all its people."
- Paul Hawkins

I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over.
Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (Piano Player)

Belonging is a circle that embraces everything; if we reject it, we damage our nature.
The word 'belonging' holds together the two fundamental aspects of life:
Being and Longing, the longing of our Being and the being of our Longing.
- John O'Donohue

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be.
Now put the foundation under them.
- Henry David Thoreau

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is easy to calculate the number of seeds in an apple but difficult to calculate the number of apples in a seed.
- Anonymous, contributed by David Smith

And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
- Marianne Williamson

He who confronts the paradoxical
exposes himself to reality.
- Friedrich Durrenmatt, The Physicists, 1962

Intelligence means being able to see the many levels of the whole in space and time
and taking them into account when making a decision...
It's all about context. The larger your context is, the more intelligent your decisions will be.
It's about being able to think at different levels of reality at the same time.
- Elisabet Sahtouris

If we want to make the imagination feel at home, generosity shows us the way.
How else can imagination thrive but in a place where welcoming comes first
and where judgment feels no need to speak and finally feels no need to be?
- Sarah Wider, Emerson scholar

Truth is not to be found inside the head of an individual person,
it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction
- Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer,
it sings because it has a song.
- Maya Angelou

Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub;
It is the centre hole that makes it useful.
Shape clay into a vessel;
It is the space within that makes it useful.
Cut doors and windows for a room;
It is the holes which make it useful.
Therefore profit comes from what is there;
Usefulness from what is not there. - Tao te Ching

I've come to believe that all wisdom, including wisdom that's beyond our perception,
is contained in nature in almost a holographic way.
- Eric Alan, photographer and author of Finding My Religion: Nature as a Spiritual Path -

An awakened group will become self-balancing and wise.
- Arnold Mindell, The Leader as Martial Artist -

Nature does not deceive or conceal, but reveals.
- Carl Jung -

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born,
webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.
Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new
but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood,
which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations.
The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events,
but some of us feel it always.
- William Faulkner -

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, the rational mind is a faithful servant.
We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
- Albert Einstein -

We are all linked by a fabric of unseen connections.
This fabric is constantly changing and evolving.
This field is directly structured and influenced by our behavior and by our understanding.
- David Bohm -

I don’t know what the fate of the human is, but I do know that if we make it,
it will be because we tell our stories.
- Pete Seeger -

I am reminded that the most important thing a map shows,
if we pause to look at it long enough, if we travel upon it widely enough,
if we think about it hard enough, is all the things we still do not know.
- Stephen S. Hall, You Are Here -

;A paradox is a form of cubism
in which you look at the same situation
simultaneously from different directions.
-Marshall McLuhan, Violence as a Quest for Identity -

Democracy is an infinitely including spirit.
We have an instinct for democracy because we have an instinct for wholeness;
we get wholeness only through reciprocal relations, through infinitely expanding reciprocal relations.
Democracy is really neither extending nor including merely, but creating wholes.
- Mary Parker Follett, The New State, 1918 -

...the heart of thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall,
not an intersection is there anywhere in nature,
but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men,
as the water of the globe is all one sea, and truly seen, its tide is one.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, from an essay, The Over-Soul, 1841 -

To work our way towards a shared and living language once again,
we must first learn how to discover patterns which are deep, and capable of generating life.
- Christopher Alexander, A Timeless Way of Building -

;What we know about individuals, no matter how rich the details, will never give us the ability to predict how they will behave as a system. Once individuals link together they become something different…Relationnships change us, reveal us, evoke more from us. Only when we join with others do our gifts become visible, even to ourselves.
- Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers -

The scattered parts become a Whole by yielding to their centre's pull,
by allowing it to gather them.
Their wholeness makes them beautiful and real.
- from ;Double Measure © 2002 Virtuelles Bert Hellinger Institut Impressum -

Human beings and all living things are a coalescence of energy in a field of energy connected to every other thing in the world. This pulsating energy field is the central engine of our being and our consciousness, the alpha and the omega of our existence. 'The field,' as Einstein once succinctly put it, 'is the only reality.'
-Lynne McTaggart, The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe -

Insight ... refers to that depth of understanding that comes by setting experiences, yours and mine, familiar and exotic, new and old, side by side, learning by letting them speak to one another.
- Mary Catherine Bateson, Peripheral Visions, page 14 -

;The myths that link you to your social group, the tribal myths, affirm that you are an organ of the larger organism. Society itself is an organ of a larger organism which is the landscape, the world in which the tribe moves. The main theme in ritual is the linking of the individual to a larger morphological structure than that of his own physical body.
- Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth -

If we can open the windows of our being to the underlying matrix of creation through our insights, intuitions and creative actions we will be sustained by the organizing, implicate order of the universe.
-David La Chapelle, Navigating the Tides of Change -

The mode which we call sacred is one where inner focus and outer focus are balanced and blended,
where there is a reciprocal mirroring of idea and sentiment from within and imagery and sensation from without.
It is a waking trance state, ripe with knowledge. This knowledge seems to come to us from a wise source which calls us home.
- Frederic Lehrman, The Sacred Landscape -

There is something greater and purer than what the mouth utters. Silence illuminates our souls, whispers to our hearts, and brings them together. Silence separates us from ourselves, makes us sail the firmament of spirit, and brings us closer to heaven.
- Kahlil Gibran -

My bewilderment began to give way to a tremulous sense of the miraculous. I was aware of a looming revelation that would rock my life forever, exposing dimensions and a world that I could not now imagine. But although I strained to grasp it, this understanding remained elusive and tantalizing, just beyond the limits of my reach.
- Dean Koontz, Fear Nothing -

The mode which we call sacred is one where inner focus and outer focus are balanced and blended, where there is a reciprocal mirroring of idea and sentiment from within and imagery and sensation from without. It is a waking trance state, ripe with knowledge. This knowledge seems to come to us from a wise source which calls us home.
- Frederic Lehrman, The Sacred Landscape -

A group of people coming together in a state of prescence generates a collective field of great intensity. It not only raises the degree of presence of each member of the group but also helps to free the collective human consciousness from its current state of mind dominance. This will make the state of prescence increasingly more accessible to individuals.
- Eckhart Tolle, 'The Power of Now' -

Don't ask yourself what the world needs - ask yourself what makes you come alive,
and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
- Harold Thurman Whitman -

...the visionary and the mystic and the artist do not conform. They touch the next realm and return to inform. Creative energy whispers 'edge' energy, the next collective movement and direction. ... We will honor the one who listened. We recognize and salivate before the truth. Our own lives jump out at us from the canvas ... the curve of a pot opens a door in our heart. ...
- Tama J. Kieves, This Time I Dance -

There is a wisdom in your physical bodily presence that is luminous and profound.
The inner voices of the body want to speak to us,
to inform us of the truths beneath the fixed surface of our external lives.
- John O'Donohue, Anam Cara, page 50 -

If I do not practice one day, I notice it.
If I do not practice a second day, the orchestra notices it.
If I do not practice a third day, the world notices it.
- Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Concert Pianist -

When flowing water meets with obstacles on its path, a blockage in its journey, it pauses.
It increases in volume and strength,
filling up in front of the obstacle and eventually spilling past it . . .
- I Ching -

Invisible threads are the strongest ties.
-Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900)

Let your view be as vast and expansive as the sky.
And let the mindfulness of your actions be as fine and precise
as a grain of sand.
- Tibetan Buddhist instruction to the Mahayana practitioner -

Somewhere, there are people to whom we can speak with passion
without having the words catch in our throats.
Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us,
Eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate us whenever we come into our own power
Community means strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done.
Arms to hold us when we falter. A circle of healing. A circle of friends.
Someplace where we can be free.
- Starhawk, Dreaming the Dove -

Some of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more fully
until we have the courage to do and see and taste and experience much less than usual …
There are times, then, when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all
we simply have to sit back for a while and do nothing.
And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity,
nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all.
The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform.
- Thomas Merton -

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor;
it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others;
and it is also a sign of genius,
since a good metaphor implies intuitive perception
of the similarity in the dissimilar.
- Aristotle -

He who wishes to teach us a truth should not tell it to us,
but simply suggest it with a brief gesture,
a gesture which starts an ideal trajectory in the air
along which we glide until we find ourselves
at the feet of the new truth.
- Ortega y Gasset -

The day will come when, after harnessing
space, 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
we shall have discovered fire.
- Tielhard de Chardin -

I am always doing that which I cannot do,
in order that I may learn how to do it.
- Pablo Picasso -

Once upon a time a band of knights riding through a forest saw hundreds of trees
with targets painted on them and an arrow in the very center of each target.
When the king heard of this, he sent the knights back to find the archer who hit the bullseye every time.
They found a wee, small boy.
They brought him back to the king, and the king asked how he ever managed such a remarkable feat.
The boy answered, it's easy, sir. First you shoot the arrow, then you paint the target.
- source unknown -

You do not belong to you.
You belong to the universe.
The significance of you will remain forever obscure to you,
but you may assume you are fulfilling your significance
if you apply yourself to converting all you experience to highest advantage to others.
- Buckminster Fuller - 

Carolyn Myss, the medical intuitive who writes and lectures about why people don't heal,
flew to Russia a few years ago to give some lectures.  Everything that could go wrong did
flights were canceled or overbooked, connections missed, her reserved room at the hotel given to someone else.
She kept trying to be a good sport, but finally, two mornings later, on the train to her conference on healing,
she began to whine at the man sitting beside her about how infuriating her journey had been thus far. 
It turned out that this man worked for the Dalai Lama.
And he said – gently - that they believe when a lot of things start going wrong all at once,
it is to protect something big and lovely that is trying to get itself born
- and that this something needs for you to be distracted so that it can be born as perfectly as possible.
- Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies -

 This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of non-conformists. The
saving of our world from pending doom will come not from the actions of
a conforming majority, but from the creative maladjustment of a
dedicated minority.
- Martin Luther King Jr. -

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
-Marcel Proust -

If it vibrates it can be tuned.
Everything is energy - violins, people, potato chips, thoughts, feelings, and events.
They all vibrate.
- Deena Zalkind Spear, Ears of the Angels -
Deena is violin maker and energy healer,
with a background in neurobiology, anayitical chemistry, and acoustical engineering.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper.
It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.
- Maya Angelou -

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