Sunbeams

There are never enough “I-love-yous.”

Lenny Bruce

People are like stained glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.

Elisabeth Ross

A thankful person is thankful under all circumstances. A complaining soul complains even if he lives in paradise.

Baha’u’llah

To you I’m an atheist. To God I’m the loyal opposition.

Woody Allen

Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or conviction.

Dag Hammarskjold

Power always thinks it has great Soul and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service, when it is violating all his laws.

John Adams

So it was that I had discovered, for instance, that selfishness is not usually a failure of will, it is not that one deliberately sees a selfish and unselfish attitude and chooses the selfish. It is that one is selfish because one unwittingly indulges in a kind of thinking which cannot, by its very nature, recognize the realness of other people’s needs.

Joanna Field, A Life of One’s Own

When a memory is too much, turn to the eye.

William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways

You can plan events, but if they go according to your plan they are not events.

Jack Yeats
from John Berger, Permanent Red

If I could only remember that the days were not bricks to be laid row on row, to be built into a solid house, where one might dwell in safety and peace, but only food for the fires of the heart.

Edmund Wilson

Burn all the maps to your body.

Richard Brautigan

The next message you need is always right where you are.

Ram Dass

I really think I write about everyday life. I don’t think I’m quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that’s what makes it so boring.

Edward Gorey

There wouldn’t be such a thing as counterfeit gold if there were no real gold somewhere.

Sufi proverb

One day when the children were playing, they reported to Yasoda, “Krishna has eaten dirt.”

Yasoda scolded him and said, “You naughty boy, why have you eaten dirt?”

“I haven’t,” said Krishna. “All the boys are lying. If you believe them instead of me, look at my mouth yourelf.”

“Then open up,” she said to the god, and he opened his mouth. Yasoda saw in his mouth the whole universe and she saw her own village and herself. She became frightened and confused, thinking: “Is this a dream of an illusion fabricated by God? Or is it a delusion in my own mind?”

And then she thought: “God’s power of delusion inspires in me such false beliefs as, ‘I exist,’ ‘This is my husband,’ ‘This is my son.’ ”

Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

Lao Tzu

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

A Course in Miracles