"Irreverence is the champion of liberty, and its only sure defense."

-- Mark Twain 

 "Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example."

-- Mark Twain 

"What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence."

-- Ludwig Wittgenstein  

 "Good and evil are the prejudices of God."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche 

 "Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability."

-- Arthur Schopenhauer 

 "He who leaves the game wins it."

-- Sebastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort

 "It is impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing someone's beard."

-- George Christoph Lichtenberg

 "Honor thy error as hidden intention."

-- Peter Schmidt & Brian Eno 

 "Man's accidents are God's purposes."

-- Friedrich von Schlegel 

 "As long as the heart preserves desire, the mind preserves illusion."

-- Francois-Auguste-Rene de Chateaubriand 

 "Everywhere I turn is luck."

-- Louise Gluck 

 "Joy is not the result of healing, it is the way of healing."

-- Cassie Seal

 "There is something in you that is not touched by the brush of time."

-- Thomas Moore 

 "Mother Teresa didn't walk around complaining about her thighs -- she had shit to do."

-- meme on Instagram 

 "We are eased when the life force weakens: a kind experience for those who value clarity."

-- Stephen Mitchell 

 "A moment can be both mundane and magical."

-- Rebecca Pacheco

"There is no need to sustain or confirm a sense of being: I simply am."

-- Sogyal Rinpoche 

 "To enjoy the world without judgment is what a realized life is like."

-- Joko Beck

 "In my joy I forget to worry, and I don't even notice the approach of old age."

-- Confucius

"To ride the current of what is -- this is the primal virtue."

-- Stephen Mitchell  

 "Acknowledge the wave but stay with the ocean."

-- Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

 "Our supper is plain, but we are very wonderful."

-- Kenneth Patchen 

"Awakening is that shift from an object-oriented existence  to a being-oriented existence."

-- Shiv Sengupta 

 "... I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of truth."

-- Francis Bacon 

 "If life does not seem to offer a game worth playing, then invent one."

-- Robert DeRopp

 "To be awake is everything."

-- Gustav Meyrinck 

 "Everyday you're alive and someone loves you is a miracle."

-- Rita Mae Brown 

"Grace is getting what you don't deserve, and mercy is not getting what you do deserve."

-- Mary Gauthier

 

 "Suspect the sanctioned; respect the unauthorized."

-- Melissa Holbrook Pierson 

"Good thing thoughts aren't facts."

-- anonymous psychotherapist 

"We are not trying to change, we are learning to see."

-- Cheri Huber  

 "The most important thing in the world is to understand the sacred fact that you are alive."

-- Jeff Warren 

"The only problem is thinking there's a problem."

-- Richard Sylvester 

 ""Live small so you can live large."

-- Stewart Brand

 "The way in is the only way out."

-- Roy Melvin

 "Your only asset is the presence of awareness."

-- Wu Hsin

 "Your vibe attracts your tribe."

-- Wisdom seen on a button

"Thinking too much blocks life's flow." 

-- Bert McCoy

 "We have to trust that as we were cared for in the past, we will be cared for in the future."

-- Donna Goddard

 "It's not denial," Calvin tells Hobbes. "I'm just selective about the reality I accept."

-- Bill Watterson

 "Cooperate with the movement of life."

-- Eckhart Tolle

 "Style is knowing who you are, and what you want to say, and not giving a damn."

-- Gore Vidal

 "Anger is when your heart says, 'I feel passionate but powerless.'"

-- The Minimalists

"Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries." 
-- Blaise Pascal

"The only thing standing between most people and their dreams is themselves."
-- Cara Stein

"Asceticism is not that you should not own anything, but that nothing should own you."
-- Ali ibn Abu Talib

"If you walk hard enough you probably don't need any other God."
-- Bruce Chatwin

"Our whole spiritual transformation brings us to the point where we realize that in our own being we are enough."
-- Ram Dass

"You can choose what youb do; you can't choose what you like to do."
-- Gretchen Rubin

" I have a theory that the only original things we ever do are mistakes."
-- Billy Joel

"The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously."
-- Samuel Butler

"The secret of happiness lies in the taking of genuine interest in all the details of daily life."
-- William Morris

"Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from."
-- Jodie Foster

"A happy person is not a person with a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes."
-- Hugh Downs

"If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn."
-- Charlie Parker

"Human concepts, no matter how clearly conceived they are, almost always work against the whole"
-- Christopher Alexander

"If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teachers."

-- Pema Chodron

"When you appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of things, you receive energy."

-- James Redfield

"Don't try and stand out from the crowd, avoid crowds altogether."

-- Hugh MacLeod

"For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else."

-- Emerson

"When we understand, we are at the center of the circle, and there we sit while yes and no chase each other around the circumference."

-- Chuang Tzu

"You pray by working; you pray that you can make work that has a certain amount of authenticity."

-- Robert Graham

"I think that every breath is a prayer."

-- Harry Dean Stanton

"Is is much easier to distinguish a first desire than to satisfy all of those that follow it."

-- La Rochefoucauld

"Every good deed helps to kindle this feeling of joy within us."

-- Tolstoy

"Everything is honored but nothing matters."

-- Eckhart Tolle

"The monks seek to reach their goal of enlightenment not through learning but through unlearning all preconceived notions of life and reality."

-- Andrew Juniper

"Without deviation from the norm progress is not possible."

-- Frank Zappa

It's as clear as the Devil to anyone who pays attention, the Mother of All Evil is speculation."

-- Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas's character in Wall Street)

"Now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."

-- Umberto Eco

"Observe the direct connection between practicing trust and the serendipitous events that follow."

-- Alan Cohen

"When you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly try and reconcile yourself with the world."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence."

-- Henry David Thoreau

"We talked a lot of small talk, but it was small talk with heart in it."

-- Stuart Brent

"Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful."

-- Nina Grigoreva

"Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves."

-- Bertrand Russell

"Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity."

-- Sigmund Freud

"You are the teacher you've been waiting for."

-- Byron Katie

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what nobody else has thought."

-- Albert Gyorgi

"He who wants to do good knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gate open."

-- Rabindranath Tagore

"To miss the joy is to miss all."

-- William James

"If you love everything you will perceive the divine mystery in things."

-- Dostoyevsky

"Nothing down here below is profane for those who know how to see."

-- Teilhard de Chardin

"The highest service we can perform for others is to help them help themselves."

-- Horace Mann

"Nothing has value except for the hunger one has for it."

-- Camille Corot

"Often one gets a reputation for mental stability simply because one doesn't have enough courage to make a fool of oneself."

-- Ernie J. Zelinski

" a clue ...

great truth can be found in small places,

and small places can be found anywhere."

-- W. Gregory Stewart

"Sooner or later, no matter how satisfying your personal life is, you long for something more, something deeper, something that fills your heart in a way that your current life does not."

-- David Deida

"It's better to be at the bottom of a ladder you want to climb than half way up one you don't."

-- "Dawn" (a character in the UK version of The Office)

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."

-- Oscar Wilde

"Wealth is like sea water; the more we drink the thirstier we become."

-- Schopenhauer

"A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams."

-- John Barrymore

"The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness."

-- Eric Hoffer

"I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished garden."

-- Montaigne

"To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than to be forty years old."

-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Truest greatness lies in being kind, the truest wisdom in a happy mind."

-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet."

-- Gustav Flaubert

"Unremarkable lives are marked by the fear of not looking capable when trying something new."

-- Epictetus

"Forgiveness does not change the past, but it doe enlarge the future."

-- Paul Boege

"Throw your worries to the wind, turn within and find peace."

-- Ramana Maharshi

"The great hope of society is individual character."

-- William Ellery Channing

"My compassion is not for the individual, but for that beingness which has trapped itself into identifying with individuals."

-- Nisargadatta

"I have no special talents, I m only passionately curious."

-- Einstein

"The simple truth is nothing external will make you happy."

-- Stephen M. Pollan

"I was wise enough to never grow up while fooling most people into believing I had."

-- Margaret Mead

"We haven't got a plan so nothing can go wrong."

-- Spike Milligan

"Nothing is virtuous if it is not spontaneous."

-- Marilyn Wilhelm

"Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."

-- Abe Lincoln

"The most wasted day of all is that on which we have not laughed."

-- Sebastien Chamfort

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life, we learn to late, is in the living, in the tissue of every day and hour."

-- Stephen Leacock

"The best way is to understand yourself, then you will understand everything."

-- Suzuki Roshi

"The greatest wealth is poverty of desires."

-- Seneca

"Not what we have but what we enjoy constitutes our abundance."

-- John Petit-Senn

"In a world full of noise, we need to quiet ourselves to hear God's voice."

-- Paul Borthwick

"If you are feeling helpless, help someone."

-- Aung San Suu Kyi

"The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are."

-- Joseph Campbell

"Wen I tend to the small things in a conscious way, the big things have a tendency to take care of themselves."

-- Alexandra Stoddard

"Playing it safe is the riskiest choice we can ever make."

-- Sara Ben Breathnach

"An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all."

-- Oscar Wilde

"Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it is worthless."

-- Thomas Edison

"God lurks in the gaps."

-- Jorge Luis Borges

"A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it well enough that no one could find fault."

-- John Henry Cardinal Newman

"I may not believe in what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

-- Voltaire

"Happiness is a how, not a what; a talent not an object."

-- Hermann Hesse

"I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least."

-- Walt Whitman

"Disciples can usually be counted upon to wreck the teachings of a master."

-- J.C. Cooper

"All creation emerges from darkness."

-- Michael Meade

"Give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticizing others."

-- Thomas Jefferson

"We must be one of those who do good unconsciously."

-- Marcus Aurelius

"I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do."

-- Naomi Shihab Nye

"We are encouraged to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that don't last on people we don't care about."

-- Tim Jackson

"Gaining control of our attention -- the ability to put it where we want it, and keep it there for a sustained period of time -- is a prerequisite to a satisfying life."

-- Tony Schwartz

"The knowledge of our errors is the beginning of our salvation."

-- Epicurus

"Seeing death as the end of life is like seeing the horizon as the end of the ocean."

-- David Sedaris

"All spiritual life begins with the shock of impermanence."

-- David Guy

"When you really pay attention everything is your teacher."

-- Ezra Bayda

"Education should be the process of helping everyone discover his uniqueness."

-- Leo Buscaglia

"We are indeed much more than what we eat, but what we eat can nevertheless help us to be much more than what we are."

-- Adelle Davis

"I just went ahead doing what I liked to do."

-- Linus Pauling

"Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great."

-- Mark Twain

"Be careful going to search for adventure -- it's ridiculously easy to find. "

-- William Least Heat Moon

"This is the very perfection of man, to find but his own imperfection."

-- St. Augustine

"All creation emerges from darkness."

-- Michael Meade

"Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win."

-- Jonathan Kozol

"Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

-- Mary Oliver

"We make our lives by what we love."

-- John Cage

"Creativity is seeing something that doesn't already exist."

-- Michael Shea

"To be a friend is to step into the stream of another's life."

-- Todd May

"Frankly, I get a little bored -- and annoyed and suspicious -- when someone is sharing too much awesome."

-- Colleen Wainwright

"Computers are like Old Testament gods -- lots of rules and no mercy."

-- Joseph Campbell

"You use up everything you've got trying to give everybody what they want."

-- Nina Simone

"Progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things."

-- Robert Heinlein

"We make a contribution to the world just by being ourselves in every moment."

-- Shakti Gawain

"All we need to make us really happy is something to be excited about."
-- Charles Kingsley

"When one says 'God' without truly practicing virtue, 'God' is nothing but a word."

-- Plotinus

"Religion is a defense against a religious experience."

-- Carl Jung

"Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness."

-- John Cage

"Very little is needed to make a happy life."

-- Marcus Aurelius

"I often say that if I had a prayer, it would be this: God spare me from the desire for love, approval, or appreciation. Amen."

-- Byron Katie

"Following God's way is not so difficult as it is different."

-- A Course in Miracles

"This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it."

-- John Adams

"The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn."

-- Gloria Steinem

"You can learn to hold your own happiness lightly by remembering that you are its source and that there is an infinite supply."

-- Martha Beck

"In truth, the best way to experience long-term happiness is to experience perpetual short-term happiness."

-- Ernie J. Zelinski

"Give up trying to be recognized and others will recognize it."

-- Michael LaFargue

"You have been taught that there is something wrong with you and that you are imperfect, but there isn't and you're not."

-- Cheri Huber

"One can be very happy without demanding that others should agree with him."

-- Goethe

"Those folks who suffer most are just those who try hardest to make themselves into what they are not."

-- David Reynolds

"Happiness is good health and a bad memory."

-- Ingrid Bergman

"Being unable to abolish love, the Church has decided , at least, to disinfect it and has invented marriage."

-- Charles Baudelaire

"I wish my house to be a college, open as the air to all whom I spiritually belong, and who belong to me."

-- Emerson

"It's the experience of God that matters, not just the belief in God."

-- Marianne Williamson

"All religions pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance."

-- V.V. Rozanov

"There is more to life than beer alone, but beer makes those other things even better."

-- Stephen Morris

"When nations grow Old,

The Arts grow Cold

And Commerce settles on every tree."

-- William Blake

"Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire."

-- William Butler Yeats

"Discipline is the art of feeling awe."

-- Michael Ventura

"If you want to be happy, be."

-- Thoreau

"Every product of man is spliced with error."

-- Paul Reps

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."

-- Carl Jung

"Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!"

-- Walt Whitman

"There is only one problem ever; your uninvestigated story in the moment."

-- Byron Katie

"The key to heaven is an open mind here on Earth."

-- Mark Twain

"Life is a succession of moments; to live each one is to succeed."

-- Corita Kent

True religion is real living; living with all one's soul; with all one's goodness and righteousness."

-- Albert Einstein

"Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for."

-- Bob Marley

"Because I know myself very well, it is difficult to say who I am."

-- Taiso Eka

"Hitting the mark is the result of 99 failures."

-- Dogen

"Stretched and stressed in the pursuit of our worldly interests, we have no idea of the immense relief we would feel if we set aside our burden, that is if we renounced our effort to affirm ourselves at all costs against the order of the world, and at the expense of others."

-- Hulin

"The man 'who has his being in Christ' is one who lives by grace rather than law."

-- Walter Starcke

"The sage's indifference corresponds to a complete transformation of his relation to the world."

-- Pierre Hadot

"We must see the Spirit as our own self."

-- Plotinus

"Do not try to make things happen the way you want, but want what happens to happen the way it happens, and you will be happy."

-- Epictetus

"If I tell you something, you will stick to it, and limit your own capacity to find out for yourself."

-- Suzuki Roshi

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction."

-- Richard Dawkins

"There is a genuine payoff in pulling ourselves closer to reality."

-- David Reynolds

"What is created through mental noise is a conceptual sense of self."

-- Eckhart Tolle

"Having overcome the obstacles to the comprehension of life as it really is, we manifest spontaneous, unmotivated action completely appropriate to the present moment."

-- Claude Whitmyer

"Wherever the great dilemma exists is where the growth is, too."

-- Anne Lamott

"... lately I realized that what I call 'understanding' is basically just fantasizing."

-- David Sedaris

"We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success."

-- Thoreau

"If you're not looking for social 'profit,' but for what is of genuine worth and brings real satisfaction, pay attention to those parts of your being that seem like 'nothing.'"

-- Michael LaFargue

"What help is it to me that the Father gives birth to his Son unless I too give birth to him."

-- Meister Eckhart

"It is not doing the things we like to do, but liking the things we have to do that makes life blessed."

-- Goethe

"Our business is to wake up."

-- Aldous Huxley

"Letting go does not mean not having."

-- Cheri Huber

"Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to happiness."

-- Bertrand Russell

"If our nature is permitted to guide our life, we grow healthy, fruitful and happy."

-- Abraham Maslow

"If your desires do not accord with your spirit, sacrifice them, and you'll come to the end of your journey."

-- Attar

"Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays."

-- Kierkegaard

"... wisdom alone can suffice when knowledge and faith aren't enough."

-- T.V. Smith

"Happiness is a present attitude not a future condition."

-- Hugh Prather

"Romance is not the secret of happiness, harmony is."

-- Garrison Keillor

"The average man does not want to be free, he simply wants to be safe."

-- H.L. Mencken

"There can be no greater task than to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination."

-- Noam Chomsky

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency."

-- Virginia Woolf

"I do not understand the mystery of grace -- only that it meets us where we are but does not lave us where it found us."

-- Anne Lamott

"Love is supreme and unconditional; like is nice but limited."

-- Duke Ellington

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time."

-- Bertrand Russell

"Give me a woman who truly loves beer, and I will conquer the world."

-- Kaiser Wilhelm

"When you offer no resistance to life, life begins to work for you."

-- Eckhart Tolle

"To sit and look

to sit and listen 

then to move

interests us."

-- Paul Reps

"If you're looking for real enjoyment of the world, the most important thing is to preserve a healthy state of mind, capable of subtle pleasures and a deeply satisfying relationship to things -- and this is what constant stimulation destroys."

-- Michael LaFargue

"Between God and me there is no 'between.'"

-- Meister Eckhart

"I desire that there be as many different persons in the world as possible; I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way."

-- Thoreau

"As long as you're concerned about improving yourself, you'll always have a self to improve."

-- Cheri Huber

"A few small, powerful actions are worth a hundred hours of diddling about."

-- Stuart Wilde

"Don't think: Look!"

-- Wittgenstein

"You don't dance to get to the other side of the floor."

-- Alan Watts

"The best way to know God is to love many things."

-- Vincent Van Gogh

"The returning student had recently come out of a difficult divorce, and because her pain was significant, she wrongly insisted that her writing was significant as well."

-- David Sedaris

"When I begin to sit with the dawn in solitude, I begin to really live."

-- Gloria Vanderbilt

"There is no need to struggle to be free; the absence of struggle is itself freedom."

-- Chogyam Trungpa

"I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on the earth is not a hardship but a pastime -- if we live simply and wisely."

-- Thoreau

"There's nothing wrong with the world; what's wrong is our way of looking at it."

-- Henry Miller

"One who has any faith in God should be ashamed to worry about anything whatsoever."

-- Gandhi

"If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes transformation."

-- Krishnamurti

"A man doesn't learn to understand anything unless he loves it."

-- Goethe

"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."

-- George Bernard Shaw

"Knowing who in fact one is, being conscious of the universal and the impersonal life that lives itself through each of us, that's the art of living, and that's what one can help the dying to go on practicing."

-- Aldous Huxley

"The simple ability to pay attention to the world as we find it may be at the heart of a soulful life worth living."

-- David Whyte

"It is what you choose not to observe in your life that controls your life."

-- Lynn Andrews

"Love is the every only God."

-- e.e. cummings

"Human beings are not on earth to manufacture consume goods for one another but to share being; to celebrate being; to reverence being; and to fall ever more deeply in love and thankfulness for being."

-- Matthew Fox & Brian Swimme

"The biggest things are often the easiest to do because there is so little competition."

-- William Van Horne

"Joy is independent of our circumstances."

-- Greg Anderson

"Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything."

-- D. H. Lawrence

"The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."

-- Aart van der Leeuw

"I don't want to be saved, I want to be spent."

-- Fritz Perls