Words to Live By

Since my middle school years I’ve been a collector of quotes. My “taste” in words has no doubt changed over the years, but bits & pieces of others’ words still help me make sense of my own at times. Here are a few of my favorites…

  • Crushed dreams, broken promises, lost loves, and unhappy endings needn’t leave us hard. They leave us human. -Linda Ellerbee
  • The great object of life is sensation – to feel that we exist, even in pain. – Lord Byron
  • The antidote to exhaustion isn’t rest. It’s wholeheartedness. —David Whyte
  • Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it empowers us to develop courage; to trust that courage and build bridges with it; to trust those bridges and cross over them so we can attempt to reach each other. ― Maya Angelou
  • Let the things that would ordinarily bore you suddenly thrill you. – Andy Warhol
  • An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. – G.K. Chesteron
  • I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over again . – F Scott Fitzgerald
  • How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone. – Coco Chanel
  • A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.  -George Moore
  • Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear. – Ambrose Redmoon
  • In every man’s heart, there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty. – Christopher Morley
  • When I say be creative, I don’t mean you should all go and become great painters and great poets. I simply mean let your life be a painting, let your life be a poem. —Osho
  • Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one. – Jane Howard
  • It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship. –Henry Ward Beecher
  • Don’t ask what the world needs. Rather ask – what makes you come alive? Then go and do it! Because what the world needs is people who have come alive – Howard Thurman
  • Something deep in the human heart breaks at the thought of a life of mediocrity. Our hearts cry out for life. – C.S. Lewis
  • The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. ― Maya Angelou
  • It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.  ~Henry David Thoreau
  • If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader. – John Quincy Adams
  • All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.  – Havelock Ellis
  • The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.  ~Marcus Aurelius
  • Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these. – Susan B Anthony
  • I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment, and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity. – Gilda Radner
  • Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
  • I used to think it was about balancing all the opposites within me, but slowly I have learned that it is actually “holding” things unreconciled that teaches us – leaving them partly unresolved and without perfect closure or explanation. – Richard Rohr
  • Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. –  Frederick Buechner
  • Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art. ― Maya Angelou
  • Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold.  – Zelda Fitzgerald
  • When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, “I used everything you gave me.”  – Erma Bombeck
  • Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love.  – Martin Luther King Jr.
  • Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. – Victor Hugo
  • There is a necessary light that is only available through darkness, the darkness that comes in those liminal spaces of birth, death and suffering. … There are certain truths that can be known only if we are sufficiently emptied, sufficiently ready, sufficiently confused or sufficiently destabilized. – Richard Rohr
  • Beauty is an all-pervading presence…it waves in the branches of the trees and in the green blades of grass…the mountains, the clouds, the heavens, the stars, the rising and the setting sun, all overflow with beauty…the greatest truths are wronged if not linked with beauty, and they win their way most surely and deeply into the soul when arrayed in this their natural and fit attire. -William Ellery Channing
  • Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it, in it, through and by it. – Henry Miller
  • The mathematician goes mad, not the poet, because the mathematician try’s to build a bridge across the infinite and the poet just swims in the sea. – G. K. Chesterton
  • I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun. – Katharine Hepburn
  • Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving. – Madeleine L’Engle
  • Time is a relentless river. It rages on, a respecter of no one. And this, this is the only way to slow time: When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here. I can slow the torrent by being all here.  I only live the full live when I live fully in the moment. And when I’m always looking for the next glimpse of glory, I slow and enter. And time slow. Weigh down this moment in time with attention full, and the whole of time’s river slows, slows, slows. – Ann Voskamp
  • Beauty often resides in the peripherals of our lives. … What makes us truly human may not be how fast we are able to accomplish a task but what we experience fully, carefully, and quietly in the process. – Mako Fujimura
  • Over-explanation separates us from astonishment. – Eugene Ionesco
  • Stop trying. Stop forcing reality. Learn the mystery of surrender and trust, and then it will be done unto you, through you, with you, in you and very often in spite of you. – Richard Rohr

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *