“I hate a Roman named Status Quo!…Stuff your eyes with wonder…live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great Sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that…Shake the tree and knock the sloth down on his ass.”
–Ray Bradbury
“The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sunstruck hills every day. . . It began as mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.”
–Diane Ackerman
“When you argue with reality you lose – but only 100 percent of the time.”
–Byron Katie
“From that hour Siddhartha ceased to fight against his destiny. There shone in his face the serenity of knowledge, of one who is no longer in confronted with conflict of desires, who has found salvation, who is in harmony with the stream of events, with the stream of life, full of sympathy and compassion, surrendering himself to the stream, belonging to the unity of all things.”
–Herman Hesse
“Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure uninterpreted experience in which body, mind and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters from free-swimming life into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.” –Peter Matthiessen
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”
–George Bernard Shaw
“Have you not received faculties which give you the power to endure everything that happens? Have you not received greatness of soul? Have you not received courage? Have you not received endurance? What concern to me is anything that happens while I have greatness of soul?
–Epictetus
“See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always non-acceptance of what is. It invariably carries an unconscious negative charge. When you complain, you make yourself into a victim…Leave the situation or accept it. All else is madness.”
–Eckhart Tolle
“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open doors to you. I say follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
–Joseph Campbell