We are most asleep when awake.

Paul Reps

Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.

José Ortega y Gasset

Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.

Samuel Butler

Be alert, be wakeful. You do not know when the moment comes. It is like a man away from home: he has left his house and put his servants in charge, each with his own work to do, and he has ordered the doorkeeper to stay awake. Keep awake, then, for you do not know when the master of the house is coming.

Mark 13:33-36

I have come one step away from everything. And here I stay, far from everything, one step away.

Antonio Porchia

Her theme was happiness: what it was; what it was not; where we might find it, where not; and how, if found, it must be guarded. Never must we confound it with pleasure. Nor think sorrow its exact opposite.

Mary Lavin

“I don’t sing about myself,” Campo said. “I sing about life. I am happy, but life is sad. The songs don’t belong to me.”

Larry McMurtry
Lonesome Dove

As you look at many people’s lives, you see that their suffering is in a way gratifying, for they are comfortable in it. They make their lives a living hell, but a familiar one.

Ram Dass
Journey of Awakening

The ego, as a collection of our past experiences, is continually offering miserable lines of thought. It’s as if there were a stream with little fish swimming by, and when we hook one of them there is a judgement. The ego is constantly judging everybody and everything. It has its constant little chit chat about things that can happen in the future, things about the past, too, and these are the little fish that swim by. And what we learn to do — this is why it takes work — is not to reach out and grab a fish, you see.

Hugh Prather

For the good man to realize
that it is better to be whole
than to be good
is to enter on a straight and
narrow path compared to which
his previous rectitude was
flowery license.

John Middleton Murray

Most people really believe that the Christian commandments (e.g., to love one’s neighbor as oneself) are intentionally a little too severe — like putting the clock ahead half an hour to make sure of not being late in the morning.

Søren Kierkegaard

Recently my fingers have developed a prejudice against comparatives. They all follow this pattern: a squirrel is smaller than a tree; a bird is more musical than a tree. Each of us is the strongest one in his own skin. Characteristics should take off their hats to one another, instead of spitting in each other’s faces.

Bertolt Brecht

All that we do
Is touched with ocean, yet we remain
On the shore of what we know.

Richard Wilbur

There once was a man who cried every time it snowed. He went to a psychotherapist. Now when the snow falls, he weeps for his mother, who died in the winter.

Joe Riener