When you come right down to it all you have is yourself. The sun is a thousand rays in your belly. All the rest is nothing.

Pablo Picasso

Like all young men I set out to be a genius, but mercifully laughter intervened.

Laurence Durrell

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother.

Kahlil Gibran

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.

Bette Reese

There is a story that as God and Satan were walking down the street one day, the Lord bent down and picked something up. He gazed at it glowing radiantly in His hand. Satan, curious, asked, “What’s that?’’ “This,” answered the Lord, “is Truth.” “Here,” replied Satan as he reached for it, “let me have that — I’ll organize it for you.”

Ram Dass, Journey of Awakening

When I marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.

Rabbi Abraham Heschel

Analysis does not take into account the creative products of neurotic desires.

Anaïs Nin

Slowly the Earth will grow in the window. Blue she will gleam and brown and gray and silver and rose and red. Her clouds will cover her like curls of white hair, her clouds will turn dark as smoky pearls and the lavender of orchid, her clouds will be brown and green like marsh grass wet by the sea, and the sea will appear beneath like pools of water in the marsh grass. The Earth will look like a precious stone, blue as sapphire, blue as a diamond, the Earth will be an eye to look at them in curious welcome as they return.

Norman Mailer

The attainment of enlightenment from ego’s point of view is extreme death, the death of self, the death of me and mine, the death of the watcher. It is the ultimate and final disappointment.

Chögyam Trungpa, The Myth of Freedom

If the goal is not the goal, what is not the goal?

David Belsky

I was not looking for my dreams to interpret my life, but rather for my life to interpret my dreams.

Susan Sontag, The Benefactor

A certain Bektashi dervish was respected for his piety and appearance of virtue. Whenever anyone asked him how he had become so holy, he always answered, “I know what is in the Koran.”

One day he had just given this reply to an enquirer in a coffee-house, when an imbecile asked, “Well, what is in the Koran?”

“In the Koran,” said the Bektashi, “there are two pressed flowers and a letter from my friend Abdullah.”

Idries Shah