Quotes

Only if one knows the truth of love, which is the real nature of Self, will the strong entangled knot of life be untied. Only if one attains the height of love will liberation be attained. Such is the heart of all religions. The experience of Self is only love, which is seeing only love, hearing only love, feeling only love, tasting only love and smelling only love, which is bliss.
Sri Ramana Maharshi

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.
ee cummings

O Love
O Love, O pure deep Love, be here, be now,
Be all - worlds dissolve into your
stainless endless radiance,
Frail living leaves burn with you brighter
than cold stares -
Make me your servant, your breath, your core.
Rumi

For as long as space exists
and the world abides,
may I too remain
to dispel the suffering of this world
Shantideva

You, who are the source of all power
Whose rays illuminate the whole world
Illuminate also my heart
So that it too can do your work.
Gayatri

Death is the mother of beauty.
Rainer Maria Rilke



Love is life.  All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.  Everything is, everything exists, only because I love.  Everything is united by it alone.  Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

Leo Tolstoy



Interviewer: What do you see as your greatest strengths?

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar:  I love people.  I love this planet.


...the Lord of the Universe carries the entire burden of this world. You imagine you do. You can hand all your burdens over to His care. Whatever you have to do, you will be made an instrument for doing it at the right time. Do not think you cannot do it unless you have the desire to do it. Desire does not give you the strength for doing. The entire strength is the Lord's.
Sri Ramana Maharshi



My children, mark me.  I pray you.  Know!  God loves my soul so much that his very life and being depend upon his loving me, whether he would or no.  To stop God loving me would be to rob him of his Godhood; for God is love no less than he is truth; as he is good, so is he love as well.  It is the absolute truth, as God lives...  If anyone would ask me what God is, I should answer: God is love, and so altogether lovely that creatures all with one accord essay to love his loveliness, whether they do so knowingly or unbeknownst, in joy or sorrow.

Meister Eckhart

You know quite well, deep within you, that there is only a single magic, a single power, a single salvation...and that is called loving. Well then, love your suffering. Do not resist it, do not flee from it. It is only your aversion to it that hurts, nothing else.
Hermann Hesse

Love is a flame that burns everything other than itself. It is the destruction of all that is false and the fulfillment of all that is true.
Adyashanti

The Silence Afterwards
Try to be done now
with deliberately provocative actions and sales statistics,
brunches and gas ovens,
be done with fashion shows and horoscopes,
military parades, architectural contests, and the rows of triple traffic lights.
Come through all that and be through
with getting ready for parties and eight possibilities
of winning on the numbers,
cost of living indexes and stock market analyses,
because it is too late,
it is way too late,
get through with and come home
to the silence afterwards
that meets you like warm blood hitting your forehead
and like thunder on the way
and the sound of great clocks striking
that make the eardrums quiver,
because words don't exist any longer,
there are no more words,
from now on all talk will take place
with the voices stones and trees have.

The silence that lives in the grass
on the underside of every blade
and in the blue spaces between the stones.
The silence
that follows shots and birdsong.
The silence
that pulls a blanket over the dead body
and waits in the stairs until everyone is gone.
The silence
that lies like a small bird between your hands,
the only friend you have.
Rolf Jacobsen

When I see the misery of those in this world their sadness becomes mine. Oh that my monk’s robe were wide enough to gather up all the suffering people in this floating world! Nothing makes me happier than the vow to save everyone.
Ryokan

If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.
Isadora Duncan

When all the false self-identifications are thrown away, what remains is all-embracing love.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj



Love everyone, feed everyone, remember God, tell the truth.

Neem Karoli Baba

It is He who is revealed in every face, sought in every sign, gazed upon by every eye, worshipped in every object of worship, and pursued in the unseen and the visible. Not a single one of His creatures can fail to find Him in its primordial and original nature. The movement which is the movement of the universe is the movement of love.
Muhyiddin ibn al'Arabi

The great sea
Has sent me adrift
It moves me
As the weed in a great river
Earth and the great weather
Move me
Have carried me away
And move my inward parts with joy.
Song of Uvavnuk

If you do not see God in the next person you see, you need look no further.
Mahatma Gandhi

Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you will do with your evenings, how you will spend your weekends, what you read, who you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in love, stay in love and it will decide everything.
Joseph Campbell

If you think you understand, it isn't God.
Søren Kierkegaard



carrying a poppy 
he passes through 
the quarrel 
Issa

There's nothing better than Love.
Life Carter Hughes

There is in the body a current of energy, affection and intelligence, which guides, maintains and energizes the body. Discover that current and stay with it.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Humility exists only in those who are poor enough to see that they possess nothing of their own.
Angela of Foligno

To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life. I have caught life. I have come down with life. I was a wisp of undifferentiated nothingness, and then a little peephole opened quite suddenly. Light and sound poured in. Voices began to describe me and my surroundings. Nothing they said could be appealed. They said I was a boy named Rudolph Waltz, and that was that. They said the year was 1932, and that was that. They said I was in Midland City, Ohio, and that was that. They never shut up. Year after year they piled detail upon detail. They do it still. You know what they say now? They say the year is 1982, and that I am fifty years old. Blah blah blah...
Kurt Vonnegut from Deadeye Dick

It is not through the way in which someone speaks about God that I can see
whether that person has passed through the crucible of Divine Love, but
through the way the person speaks to me about things here on earth. 
Simone Weil

You shall love your crooked neighbor

With your crooked heart.

W. H. Auden



Was I lost?  No question.
Did I know where I was?  Not at all.
Had I ever been happier in my life?  Never.

Mary Oliver


The truth is so amazing. Anyone who is not letting themselves be remade is playing spiritual games.
Michael Regan

The Breaking Wave of Love
Ah, once more he put a fire in me,
And once more this crazy heart
is craving the open plains.
This ocean of love breaks into another wave
And blood pours from my heart
in all directions.

Ah, one spark flew
and burned the house of my heart.
Smoke filled the sky.
The flames grew fierce in the wind.

The fire of the heart is not easily lit.
So don't cry out: "O Lord, rescue me
from the burning flames!
Spare me from the army of thoughts
that is marching through my mind!"

O Heart of Pure Consciousness,
You are the ruler of all hearts.
After countless ages
you brought my soul
all it ever wished for.

The eyes of all people happy and sad,
are closed to the truth.
May their eyes be opened!
May they look upon God
and get drunk on His beauty.

May their hands reach toward the Truth.
May their ears hear the voice of the Beloved.
May the shadow of a Master
fall upon everyone who has devotion.

All the world praises you,
But where did this "you" come from?
All the universe is born of Love -
But where did this Love come from?

O Shams,
you are the owner of the land of life -
the light of every heart;
Even the King of Love
knows no love
that is not yours.
Rumi

By the dharma is meant the heart, for there is no dharma apart from the heart.
Huang Po



...in the acquisition of this blessing human nature can find no better helper than Love. I declare that it is the duty of every man to honour Love, and I honour and practice the mysteries of Love in an especial degree myself, and recommend the same to others, and I praise the power and valour of Love to the best of my ability both now and always.

Socrates

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
Rainer Maria Rilke

When the Day came -
The Day I had lived and died for -
The Day that is not in any calendar -
Clouds heavy with love
Showered me with wild abundance.
Inside me, my soul was drenched.
Around me, even the desert grew green.
Kabir

It is not power that corrupts but fear.
Aung Sung Suu Kyi

Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I've heard people say that they cling to their painful thoughts because they're afraid that without them they wouldn't be activists for peace. "If I feel peaceful," they say, "why would I bother taking action at all?"


My answer is "Because that's what love does." To think that we need sadness or outrage to motivate us to do what's right is insane. As if the clearer and happier you get, the less kind you become. As if when someone finds freedom, she just sits around all day with drool running down her chin. My experience is the opposite.

Love is action.

It's clear, it's kind, it's effortless, and it's irresistible.
Byron Katie

What is to give light must endure burning.
Victor Frankl

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

How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing -
each stone, blossom, child -
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Love conquers all things; let us too surrender to Love.
Virgil

The eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one and the same-one in seeing, one in knowing, and one in loving.
Kahlil Gibran

Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.
Meister Eckhart

Sometimes the most urgent and vital thing you can do is take a complete rest.
St. Francis of Assisi

Nothing can match or even come near the miracle of who you truly are. Let this be the mantra of your life. A Being of Indescribable wonder has, again, become a bearer of the Light on Earth. Let nothing dissuade you from this truth.
Emmanuel

Why, then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so...
Shakespeare, Hamlet

Mindfulness of the body leads to nirvana.
Buddha

Religious people are trying to stay out of hell. Spiritual people have already been there.
Unknown

I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love
letter to the world.
Mother Theresa

There's a whisper on the night-wind, there's a star agleam to guide us,
And the Wild is calling, calling . . . let us go.
Unknown

All good things are wild, and free.
Henry David Thoreau

I see a lilly on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew;
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads
Full beautiful, a faery's child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
John Keats

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

Gently, but with undeniable strength
divesting myself of the holds that would hold me
I inhale great drafts of space

The North and the South are mine
And the East and the West are mine
I am larger, better than I thought
I did not know I held so much goodness
All seems beautiful to me

Henceforth I ask not for good fortune.
I am my own good fortune.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything,
that's how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen

Someday, after mastering the winds,
the waves, the tides and gravity,
we shall harness for God the energies of Love,
and then, for the second time in the history of the world,
humans will discover fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

You are Joy!
Oh my God, our intoxicated eyes
Have blurred our vision
Our burdens have been made heavy,
Forgive us.

You are hidden and yet
From east to west you have filled the world with Your radiance
Your Light is more magnificent
Than sunrise or sunset
And you are the inmost ground of consciousness
Revealing the secrets we hold.

You are an explosive force
causing our dammed up rivers to burst forth.

You whose essence is hidden
While Your gifts are manifest
You are like water
and we are like millstones
You are like wind and we are like dust;
The wind is hidden while the dust is plainly seen.
You are the invisible spring
and we are your lush garden
You are the spirit of life,
And we are like hand and foot;
Spirit causes the hand to close and open.

You are intelligence,
And we are your voice
Your intelligence causes this tongue to speak.
You are joy and we are laughter,
For we are the result
of the blessing of Your joy
All our movement is really
A continual profession of faith
Bearing witness to Your eternal power
Just as the powerful turning of the millstone
professes faith in the rivers existence.

Dust settles upon my head and upon my metaphors
For You are beyond anything we could ever think or say
And yet this servant cannot stop trying
to express Your beauty in every moment,
let my soul be Your carpet.
Rumi

I haven't got any Buddhism. I live by letting things happen.
Dogen

Let us master this science and read this book of love. God instructs; Love is His school.
Yunus Emre

The rainbow comes and goes
With a charming body.
The outer sun comes and goes
With a vast body.
The inner sun stays and stays
With its boundless
And deathless
Love-light.
Sri Chinmoy

When one remains without thinking one understands another by means of the universal language of Silence.
Sri Ramana Maharshi

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me: my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
Meister Eckhart

In Silence
Be still.
Listen to the stones of the wall.
Be silent, they try
to speak your

name. Listen
to the living walls.

Who are you? Who
are you? Whose
silence are you?

Who (be quiet)
are you (as these stones
are quiet). Do not
think of what you are
still less of
what you may one day be.

Rather
be what you are (but who?)
be the unthinkable one
you do not know.

O be still, while
you are still alive,
and all things live around you

speaking (I do not hear)
to your own being,
speaking by the unknown
that is in you and in themselves.

“I will try, like them
to be my own silence:
and this is difficult. The whole
world is secretly on fire. The stones
burn, even the stones they burn me.
How can a man be still or
listen to all things burning?
How can he dare to sit with them
when all their silence is on fire?"
Thomas Merton

The experience of not forgetting consciousness alone is the state of devotion which is the relationship of unfading real love, because the real knowledge of Self, which shines as the undivided supreme bliss itself, surges up as the nature of love. Love itself is the actual form of God. That is pure bliss. Call it pure bliss, God, Self, or what you will. That is devotion, that is realization and that is everything.
Sri Ramana Maharshi

When my Beloved appears,
With what eye do I see Him?

With His eye, not with mine,
For none sees Him except Himself.

Muhyiddin ibn al'Arabi

A person is not a thing or a process but an opening through which the absolute manifests.
Martin Heidegger

What you are looking for is what is looking.
St. Francis of Assisi



on the high priest's
head...
flies making love

Issa

I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time.
Helen Keller

The sense of duality, which is a barrier to true love, must prevail so long as the apperception of Truth has not occurred. Once individuality is surrendered, there is only total Love.
Ramesh Balsekar

Sovereign spirit beneficent and merciful Allah my infinite one at thy command only will i carry out the pilgrimage of life for the love of all created by thee and for thy glory.
Unknown

lift the veil
that obscures
the heart

and there
you will find
what you are
looking for 
Kabir

Even if at times I can still experience outwardly some little sadness and joy, nonetheless there is in my soul a chamber in which no joy, sadness, or enjoyment from any virtue, or delight over anything that can be named, enters. This is where the All Good, which is not any particular good, resides, and it is so much the All Good that there is no other good. Although I blaspheme by speaking about it -- and I speak about it so badly because I cannot find words to express it -- I nonetheless affirm that in this manifestation of God I discover the complete truth. In it, I understand and possess the complete truth that is in heaven and in hell, in the entire world, in every place, in all things, in every enjoyment in heaven and in every creature. And I see all this is so truly and certainly that no one could convince me otherwise. Even if the whole world were to tell me otherwise, I would laugh it to scorn. Furthermore, I saw the One who is and how he is the being of all creatures. I also saw how he made me capable of understanding those realities I have just spoken about better than when I saw them in that darkness which used to delight me so. Moreover, in that state I see myself as alone with God, totally cleansed, totally sanctified, totally true, totally upright, totally certain, totally celestial in him. And when I am in that state, I do not remember anything else…
Angela of Foligno

Live in joy,
In love,
Even among those who hate.

Live in joy,
In health
Even among the afflicted.

Live
In peace
Even among the troubled.

Look within
Be still.
Free from fear and attachment
Know the sweet joy of the way.
Buddha

Riding the Elevator into the Sky
As the fireman said:
Don’t book a room over the fifth floor
in any hotel in New York.
They have ladders that will reach further
but no one will climb them.

As the New York Times said:
The elevator always seeks out
the floor of the fire
and automatically opens
and won’t shut.
These are the warnings
that you must forget
if you’re climbing out of yourself.
If you ’re going to smash into the sky.

Many times I’ve gone past
the fifth floor,
cranking upward,
but only once
have I gone all the way up.
Sixtieth floor:
small plants and swans bending
into their grave;
Floor two hundred:
mountains with the patience of a cat,
silence wearing its sneakers.
Floor five hundred:
messages and letters centuries old,
birds to drink,
a kitchen of clouds.
Floor six thousand;
the stars,
skeletons on fire,
their arms singing.
And a key,
a very large key,
that opens something–
some useful door–
somewhere–
up there.
Anne Sexton

He that sees the Lord in the temple, the living body, by seeking Him within, can alone see Him, the Infinite, in the temple of the universe, having become the Endless Eye.
Sri Ramana Maharshi

May I become at all times, both now and forever: a protector for those without protection; a guide for those who have lost their way; a ship for those with oceans to cross; a bridge for those with rivers to cross; a sanctuary for those in danger; a lamp for those without light; a place of refuge for those who lack shelter; and a servant to all in need.
Shantideva

O Lord, give me eyes
Which see nothing but your glory.
Give me a mind
That finds delight in your service.
Give me a soul
Drunk in the wine of your wisdom.
O Lord, to find you is my desire,
But to comprehend you is beyond my strength.
Remembering you is solace to my sorrowing heart;
Thoughts of you are my constant companions.
I call upon you night and day.
The flame of your love glows
In the darkness of my night...
Abdullah Ansari of Herat

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.
Carl Jung

It is always the false that makes you suffer, the false desires and fears, the false values and ideas, the false relationships between people. Abandon the false and you are free of pain; truth makes happy, truth liberates.
Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

My religion is kindness.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama

The sun can only be seen by the light
of the sun. The more a man or woman knows,
the greater the bewilderment, the closer
to the sun the more dazzled, until a point
is reached where one no longer is.

A mystic knows without knowledge, without
intuition or information, without contemplation
or description or revelation. Mystics
are not themselves. They do not exist
in selves. They move as they are moved,
talk as words come, see with sight
that enters their eyes. I met a woman
once and asked her where love had led her.
"Fool, there's no destination to arrive at.
Loved one and lover and love are infinite."
Farid ud-Din Attar

It is beyond the beyond,
yet it is here,
shining through every
particle of this world.
Rumi

Is My Soul Asleep?
Is my soul asleep?
Have those beehives that work
in the night stopped? And the water-
wheel of thought, is it
going around now, cups
empty, carrying only shadows?

No, my soul is not asleep.
It is awake, wide awake.
It neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches,
its eyes wide open
far-off things, and listens
at the shores of the great silence.
Antonio Machado

The State of liberated Being can be reached only by "dying"; but (this) dying does not consist in destruction of the body; one should understand that true death is the extinction of the ideas "I" and "mine."
Sri Ramana Maharshi

I would rather feel compassion than know the meaning of it.
Thomas Aquinas

When an old culture is dying, the new culture is born by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.
Rudolf Bahro

Even offering three hundred bowls of food three times a day does not match the spiritual merit gained in one moment of love.
Nagarjuna

Fishing in the Keep of Silence
There is a hush now while the hills rise up
and God is going to sleep. He trusts the ship
of Heaven to take over and proceed beautifully
as he lies dreaming in the lap of the world.
He knows the owls will guard the sweetness
of the soul in their massive keep of silence,
looking out with eyes open or closed over
the length of Tomales Bay that the herons
conform to, whitely broad in flight, white
and slim in standing. God, who thinks about
poetry all the time, breathes happily as He
repeats to Himself: There are fish in the net,
lots of fish this time in the net of the heart. 
Linda Gregg

Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality.
Abraham Lincoln

in the musket's
line of fire...
a maiden flower
Issa

Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right always.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Her Kind
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain house, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
Anne Sexton

Let sorrowful longing dwell in your heart. Never give up, never lose hope. Allah says, "The broken ones are my beloved."  Crush your heart.  Be broken.
Shaikh Abu Saeed Abil Kheir, aka Nobody, Son of Nobody

Nothing in life is trivial. Life is whole wherever and whenever we touch it, and one moment or event is not less sacred than another.
Vimala Thakar

O Sweet Irrational Worship
Wind and a bobwhite
And the afternoon sun.

By ceasing to question the sun
I have become light,

Bird and wind.

My leaves sing.

I am earth, earth

All these lighted things
Grow from my heart.

A tall, spare pine
Stands like the initial of my first
Name when I had one.

When I had aspirit,
When I was on fire
When this valley was
Made out of freshair
You spoke my name
In naming Your silence:
O sweet, irrational worship!

I am earth, earth

My heart's love
Bursts with hay and flowers.
I am a lake of blue air
In which my own appointed place
Fieldand valley
Stand reflected.

I am earth, earth

Out of my grass heart
Rises the bobwhite.

Out of my nameless weeds
His foolish worship.
Thomas Merton

With love, even the rocks will open.
Hazrat Inayat Khan

Helping, fixing and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help you see life as weak. When you fix you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego; service the work of the soul.
Rachel Naomi Remen, MD

I know that I have life
only insofar as I have love.
I have no love
except it come from Thee.
Help me, please, to carry
this candle against the wind.
Wendell Berry

A Prayer That Will Be Answered
Lord let me suffer much
and then die

Let me walk through silence
and leave nothing behind not even fear

Make the world continue
let the ocean kiss the sand just as before

Let the grass stay green
so that the frogs can hide in it

so that someone can bury his face in it
and sob out his love

Make the day rise brightly
as if there were no more pain

And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane
bumped by a bumblebee's head.
Anna Kamienska

When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
Audre Lorde

When They Sleep
All people are children when they sleep.
There's no war in them then.
They open their hands and breathe
in that quiet rhythm heaven has given them.

They pucker their lips like small children
and open their hands halfway,
soldiers and statesmen, servants and masters.
The stars stand guard
and a haze veils the sky,
a few hours when no one will do anybody harm.

If only we could speak to one another then
when our hearts are half-open flowers.
Words like golden bees
would drift in.
- God, teach me the language of sleep.
Rolf Jacobsen

Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.
Dogen

It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone.
Alice Walker

Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door.
Emily Dickinson

The Place Where We Are Right 
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.
Yehuda Amichai

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
Rainer Maria Rilke

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we could find in each man’s life a sorrow and a suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.
Mark Twain

Prayer Before Birth
I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak to me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me. 

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.
Louis MacNeice

The gulf between knowledge and truth is infinite.
Henry Miller

How canst thou say, “God is enough for me,” when thou restest not in the ignorance of the unknown, even as thou restest in the knowledge of the known?

Muhammad Ibn’Abdi’l-Jabbar Al-Niffari

In wildness is the preservation of the world.
Henry David Thoreau

A monk asked Chao-chou, "I have just entered the monastery: please give me some guidance." Chao-chou said, "Have you eaten your rice gruel?" The monk said,"Yes, I've eaten." Chao-chou said, "Then go wash your bowl."
Unknown

When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire that leaves no trace.
Suzuki Roshi

I alone have the mind of a fool, and am all muddled and vague. The people are so smart and bright. While I am just dull and confused.
Lao Tzu

Make an island of yourself, make yourself your refuge; there is no other refuge. Make truth your island, make truth your refuge; there is no other refuge.
Buddha

War is out of date, obsolete.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
Vincent Van Gogh

God's grace consists in the fact that He shines in the heart of every one as the Self; that power of grace does not exclude any one, whether good or otherwise.
Sri Ramana Maharshi

This is the true joy in life - being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; 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

"I don't know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath. "I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world! ...I don’t know anything. I never did know anything. But now I know I don’t know anything!”
Alastair Sims, A Christmas Carol

"I AM" itself is God. The seeking itself is God. In seeking you discover that you are neither body nor mind, but the love of the self in you for the self in all. The two are one. The consciousness in you and the consciousness in me, apparently two, really one, seek unity, and that is love.
Nisargadatta Maharaj

Whether you love God or you love a human being, if you love enough you will come into the presence of Love itself.
Rumi

The eyes are our most sensitive organ, and when you look and look and look into another person's eyes you are looking at the most beautiful jewels in the universe. And if you look down beyond that surface beauty, it's the most beautiful jewel in the universe, because that's the universe looking at you. We are the eyes of the cosmos. So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody's eyes, you are looking deeply into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self, which many-eyed, as the mask of Vishnu is many-faced, is looking out everywhere, one energy playing myriads of different parts.
Alan Watts

Sir, I am a lover of life, and as a lover of life, I cannot keep out of any activity of life. If people are hungry for food, my response is to help feed them. If people are hungry for truth, my response is to help them discover it. I make no distinction between serving people who are starving and have no dignity in their physical lives and serving people who are fearful and closed and have no dignity in their mental lives. I love all life.
Vimala Thakar

As for me, all I know is I know nothing.
Socrates

On Prayer
You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.
That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal
Where everything is just the opposite and the word 'is'
Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.
Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately,
Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh
And knows that if there is no other shore
We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.
Czeslaw Milosz

I found myself desiring and knowing less and less, until I could say in utter astonishment: "I know nothing, I want nothing." Earlier I was sure of so many things, now I am sure of nothing. But I feel I have lost nothing by not knowing, because all my knowledge was false. My not knowing was in itself knowledge of the fact that all my knowledge is ignorance, that "I do not now" is the only true statement the mind can make....I do not claim to know what you do not. In fact, I know much less than you do....
Sri Nisargaddata Maharaj

We have misunderstood our confusion when we think there is an answer to it. The confusion is not a result of questions that are too hard, but rather a questioner who is disintegrating. Confusion is the introduction to true intelligence.
Steven Harrison

Grant me some wild expressions, Heavens, or I shall burst.
George Farquhar

Unconditional, of course - conditional love is so boring.
Julie Sutter

So often I put up my hands
To shield my eyes from You
Wild hilarious miracle!
Your Light shines through my bones.
Rumi

Do not turn away from the Word "Christ" ...
It only means
I Am in the Grace of THAT I AM,
the ALL THAT IS,
the HOLY OF HOLIES
who sent Who I Am
to be H offering.

The Christlight came
to be the only Self born of the HOLY.
It is the holy I AM which never leaves.
It is Who we are as LOVE.
It is only found in our Essence.
Christ is the wholesome NAME
that GOD in all H NAMES Spoke.
The Christ in each is GOD's way
for devotional awareness
to All H IS that also each IS.

Be Christed.
Put the halo of Love upon your minds ...
giving Birth to the Sacred,
breath by breath by breath.

In H NAME ...

I AM LOVE
Elle Collier Re

Where every something, being blent together, turns to a wild of nothing.
William Shakespeare

We shall not cease from exploring and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot

If you desire to gaze out over wide vistas, you do well to climb up to a high spot. But if you wish to gaze into the human heart, you must climb down and look from a low place.
Roshi Soko Morinaga

Wring Out My Clothes
Such love does
the sky now pour,
that whenever I stand in a field,

I have to wring out the light
when I get
home.
St. Francis of Assissi

By what boundless mercy, my Savior,
have you allowed me to become a member of your body?
Me, the unclean, the defiled, the prodigal.
How is it that you have clothed me
in the brilliant garment,
radiant with the splendor of immortality,
that turns all my members into light?
Your body, immaculate and divine,
is all radiant with the fire of your divinity,
with which it is ineffably joined and combined.
This is the gift you have given me, my God:
that this mortal and shabby frame
has become one with your immaculate body
and that my blood has mingled
with your blood.
I know, too,
that I have been made one with your divinity
and have become your own most pure body,
a brilliant member, transparently lucid,
luminous and holy.
I see the beauty of it all, I can gaze on the radiance.
I have become a reflection of the light of your grace.
Symeon the New Theologian

Come all ye weary and broken-hearted and I will give ye rest.
Holy Bible

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.
Seamus Heaney

In the ages marked by scarcity and want, may I myself appear as drink and sustenance.
Shantideva

Someday, emerging at last
from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and
praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one
of the clearly struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack,
a doubtful, or a broken string.
Let my joyfully streaming face
make me more radiant;
let my hidden weeping
arise and blossom.
How dear you will be to me then,
you nights of anguish.
Why didn't I kneel more
deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters,
and, surrendering, lose myself
in your loosened hair.
How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end.
Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage,
our dark evergreen,
one season in our inner year -
not only a season in time -
but are place and settlement,
foundation and soil and home.
Rainer Maria Rilke

I told them that the words that I was speaking did not come from my memory or from any experience that had to do in the past. On occasions like these I don't retrieve words from my memory or store them there after I have finished speaking. So, if people ask me what I have just said, I often can't tell them because the words are not stored in my memory. When I speak to people, the words that I use are a response to the environment that I am in,and a response to the state of mind of the person who is sitting in front of me. These words come up automatically from the SELF They don't come from the mind or the memory, and they are not stored there afterwards. As I told these gentlemen, it is the birthright of everyone to speak like this, but no one ever does. Everyone lives in the past, and whenever they speak they bring up images and ideas from their past experiences that they are keeping in their memory for future use. If you have to think about what you have to say, the words will always come from the past because whatever is stored in your mind and your memory belongs to the past and not to the present.
Papaji

Every (hu)man must decide whether (s)he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

if you desire grace
lose your selfish self
till you can taste
the sweet essence

in the blackest
of your moments
wait with no fear

since the water of life
was found by the prophet
in the darkest caverns
Rumi

There is profound responsibility in being Love... more than the mind could imagine or hold up under. If most human beings truly realized the impact that they have on the whole, they'd be crushed by the realization of it.
Adyashanti

There is nothing but water in the holy pools.
I know, I have been swimming in them.
All the gods sculpted of wood or ivory can’t say a word
I know, I have been crying out to them.
The sacred Books of the east are nothing but words.
I looked through their covers one day sideways.
What Kabir talks of is only what he has lived through.
If you have not lived through something it is not true.
Kabir

What You Need
Suppose you want to leave your life,
that old ring in the tub,
behind?

It closes cozily
as a clerk’s hand,
a coin with fingers.

You hate it
the same way the drunken son
loves Mother.

You will need pain
heaving under you
like frost ruining the new road.
William Matthews

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I am the Great Sun
(From a Normandy crucifix of 1632)
I am the great sun, but you do not see me,
I am your husband, but you turn away.
I am the captive, but you do not free me,
I am the captain but you will not obey.
I am the truth, but you will not believe me,
I am the city where you will not stay.
I am your wife, your child, but you will leave me,
I am that God to whom you will not pray.
I am your counsel, but you will not hear me,
I am your lover whom you will betray.
I am the victor, but you do not cheer me,
I am the holy dove whom you will slay.
I am your life, but if you will not name me,
Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.
Charles Causley

Don't tell God how big your storm is.  Tell the storm how big your God is.
Author Unknown

Love is the only game that is not called on account of darkness.
Thomas Carlyle

Paradise is always where love dwells.
Jean Paul F. Richter

Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.
John Milton

Fear is the cheapest room in the house -- I would like to see you living in better conditions.
Hafiz

O you who have departed from your own self,
and who have not yet reached the Friend:
do not be sad, for
He is accompanying you in each of your breaths.
Abdullah Ansari of Herat

What pleases our mind is not dangerous enough.
Kazuaki Tanahashi

I have come to drag you out of yourself and take you in my heart. I have come to bring out the beauty you never knew you had, and lift you like a prayer to the sky.
Rumi