When ambition ends, happiness begins.
~Thomas Merton
Being deeply loved gives you strength. Loving someone deeply gives you courage.
~Lao Tzu
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
~Rumi
What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.
~Abraham Maslow
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
~Shakespeare, Hamlet
Paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally.
~Jon Kabat-Zinn (on mindfulness)
I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them.
~Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, 1676
The Perfect Way is only difficult
for those who pick and choose;
Do not like, do not dislike;
all will then be clear.
Make a hairbreadth difference,
and Heaven and Earth are set apart;
If you want the truth to stand clear before you,
never be for or against.
The struggle between “for” and “against”
is the mind’s worst disease.
~Sen-ts’an, 8th century Chinese Zen master
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
~Winston Churchill
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.
~Viktor Frankl