This troubled planet is a place of the most violent contrasts. Those who receive the rewards are totally separate from those who shoulder the burdens. It is not a wise leadership.

Spock, Star Trek

“Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.”

Samuel Butler

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

Carl Jung

It is blasphemy to separate oneself from the earth and look down on it like a god. It is more than blasphemy; it is dangerous. We can never be gods, after all — but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.

N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

Disappointment is a good sign of basic intelligence. It cannot be compared to anything else: it is so sharp, precise, obvious and direct. If we can open, then we suddenly begin to see that our expectations are irrelevant compared with the reality of the situations we are facing.

Chogyam Trungpa

Once we open ourselves, then we land on what is.

Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche

We have to be utterly broken before we can realize that it is impossible to better the truth. It is the truth that we deny which so tenderly and forgivingly picks up the fragments and puts them together again.

Laurens Van der Post

Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

World Health Organization

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

Emily Dickinson

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley