Insightful Literature Quotes

Today is a wonderful day, an avalanche of light and I would like to stand with you in this rain of sunshine, to flow together, to melt into it… in mornings like this, life roars within me.
~ Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, Correspondance, January 13, 1950 [#128]

The Cosmic Eye of Buddha: At any given moment life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, tending in a certain direction.
~ Aldous Huxley

The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.
~ Aldous Huxley March 1962

As Above So Below Dreams are imperfections of sleep; even so is consciousness the imperfection of waking. Dreams are impurities in the circulation of the blood; even so it's consciousness a disorder of life. Dreams are without proportion, without good sense, without truth; so also is consciousness. Awake from dream, the truth is known: awake from waking. The truth is: The Unknown.
~ Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
~ Anais Nin

I love your silences, they are like mine. You are the only being before whom I am not distressed by my own silences. You have a vehement silence, one feels it is charged with essences, it is a strangely alive silence, like a trap open over a well, from which one can hear the secret murmur of the earth itself.
~ Anaïs Nin

I'm awaiting a lover. I have to be rent and pulled apart and live according to the demons and the imagination in me. I'm restless. Things are calling me away. My hair is being pulled by the stars again.
~ Anaïs Nin

Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage.
~ Anais Nin

Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.
~ Anaïs Nin, Delta of Venus

You cannot save people. You can only love them.
~ Anais Nin

It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one’s life for love.
~ Andrew Sean Greer, The Confessions of Max Tivoli

And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Men have forgotten this truth, said the fox. But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.
~ Antoine De Saint-Exupery

I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

In the whole world there is no study ... so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads ... (they) are products of the highest wisdom ... It is destined sooner or later to become the faith of the people ... The study of the Upanishads has been the solace of my life, it will be the solace of my death.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer

To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. That's what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul - would you understand why that's much harder?
~ Ayn Rand

Love the life you live and live the life you love.
— Bob Marley

Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men´s eyes, because they know -or think they know- some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.
~ Bram Stoker, Dracula

And when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. What do you call it, freedom or loneliness?
~ Charles Bukowski

Having many cats is good. If you feel bad, you look at the cats and you feel better, because they know that everything is just the way it is. You don't have to be nervous about anything. And they know it. They are saviors. The more cats you have, the longer you will live. If you have a hundred cats, you will live ten times longer than if you have ten. One day, this will be known and people will have thousands of cats.
~ Charles Bukowski

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sun rise.
~ Charles Bukowski

I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas.
~ Charles Bukowski

If you have the ability to love, love yourself first.
~ Charles Bukowski

Love is a form of prejudice. You love what you need, you love what makes you feel good, you love what is convenient. How can you say you love one person when there are ten thousand people in the world that you would love more if you ever met them? But you'll never meet them. All right, so we do the best we can. Granted. But we must still realize that love is just the result of a chance encounter. Most people make too much of it.
~ Charles Bukowski

Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. I have my madness, I live in another dimension and I do not have time for things that have no soul.
~ Charles Bukowski

When a man plays it short, he doesn’t look so good, act so good, he doesn’t even walk right. Most people are dead long before they are buried, that’s why funerals are so sad. Most people quit too easy, they accept the short end, they compete for small prizes and become small. I don’t expect everybody to be a genius but I never guessed that so many would rush to idiocy with such aplomb.
~ Charles Bukowski

I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. There is not any part of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surfaces of the water.
~ D. H. Lawrence

Ah listen, for Silence is not lonely:Imitate the magnificent trees That speak no word of their rapture, but only Breathe largely the luminous breeze.
~ D. H. Lawrence

We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.
~ D. H. Lawrence

He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream, and he sometimes wondered whose it was, and whether they were enjoying it.
~ Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Beyond the wall of the unreal city … there is another world waiting for you. It is the old true world of the deserts, the mountains, the forests, the islands, the shores, the open plains. Go there. Be there. Walk gently and quietly deep within it. And then — May your trails be dim, lonesome, stony, narrow, winding and only slightly uphill. May the wind bring rain for the slickrock potholes fourteen miles on the other side of yonder blue ridge. May God's dog serenade your campfire, may the rattlesnake and the screech owl amuse your reverie, may the Great Sun dazzle your eyes by day and the Great Bear watch over you by night.
~ Edward Abbey

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

Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.
~ Ernest Hemingway

Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares; if you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars.
~ Ernest Hemingway

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world.
~ Eugène Ionesco

In order for the light to shine so brightly, the darkness must also be present.
~ Francis Bacon

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
~ Franz Kafka

If you kill a cockroach you are a hero, if you kill a butterfly you are bad. Morality has aesthetic standards.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The ‘kingdom of heaven’ is not something lying ‘above the earth’ or coming ‘after death’. it does not have a yesterday or a day after tomorrow, and it will not arrive in a ‘thousand years’. It is an experience of the heart. It is everywhere and it is nowhere.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

There will always be rocks in the road ahead of us. They will be stumbling blocks or stepping stones; it all depends on how you use them.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we love.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Demons”

Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand of it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky

Nature doesn’t ask your permission; it doesn’t care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You’re obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Observe your behavior every hour and every minute of the day until you radiate purity.
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.
~ Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Some will say they do not wish to dream their lives away. As if life itself were not a dream, a very real dream from which there is no awakening! We pass from one state of dream to another: from the dream of sleep to the dream of waking, from the dream of life to the dream of death. Whoever has enjoyed a good dream never complains of having wasted his time.
~ Excerpt From: Henry Miller, “Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch.”

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.
~ Henry David Thoreau

Glorious indeed is the world of God around us, but more glorious the world of God within us.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
~ Hermann Hesse

I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.
~ Hermann Hesse

Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?“ That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future
... If time is not real, then the dividing line between this world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion..
~ Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

He looked around, as if he was seeing the world for the first time. Beautiful was the world, colourful was the world, strange and mysterious was the world! Here was blue, here was yellow, here was green, the sky and the river flowed, the forest and the mountains were rigid, all of it was beautiful, all of it was mysterious and magical, and in its midst was he, Siddhartha, the awakening one, on the path to himself. All of this, all this yellow and blue, river and forest, entered Siddhartha for the first time through the eyes, was no longer a spell of Mara, was no longer the veil of Maya, was no longer a pointless and coincidental diversity of mere appearances, despicable to the deeply thinking Brahman, who scorns diversity, who seeks unity. Blue was blue, river was river, and if also in the blue and the river, in Siddhartha, the singular and divine lived hidden, so it was still that very divinity's way and purpose, to be here yellow, here blue, there sky, there forest, and here Siddhartha. The purpose and the essential properties were not somewhere behind the things, they were in them, in everything.
~ Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Many verses of the holy books, above all the Upanishads of Sama-Veda spoke of this innermost thing. It is written: "Your soul is the whole world." It says that when a man is asleep, he penetrates his innermost and dwells in Atman. There was wonderful wisdom in these verses; all the knowledge of the sages was told here in enchanting language, pure as honey collected by the bees.
~ Hermann Hesse

Now, he had to experience his self. It is true that he had already known for a long time that his self was Atman, in its essence bearing the same eternal characteristics as Brahman. But never, he had really found this self, because he had wanted to capture it in the net of thought. With the body definitely not being the self, and not the spectacle of the senses, so it also was not the thought, not the rational mind, not the learned wisdom, not the learned ability to draw conclusions and to develop previous thoughts in to new ones. No, this world of thought was also still on this side, and nothing could be achieved by killing the random self of the senses.
~ Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

So she thoroughly taught him that one cannot take pleasure without giving pleasure, and that every gesture, every caress, every touch, every glance, every last bit of the body has its secret, which brings happiness to the person who knows how to wake it.
~ Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

The world, my friend Govinda, is not imperfect, or on a slow path towards perfection: no, it is perfect in every moment, all sin already carries the divine forgiveness in itself, all small children already have the old person in themselves, all infants already have death, all dying people the eternal life.
~ Hermann Hesse

This is why I am continuing my travels- not to seek other, better teachings, for I know there are none, but to depart from all teachings and all teachers and to reach my goal by myself or to die.
~ Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Thus Gotama [Buddha] walked toward the town to gather alms, and the two samanas recognized him solely by the perfection of his repose, by the calmness of his figure, in which there was no trace of seeking, desiring, imitating, or striving, only light and peace.
~ Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

We kill at every step, not only in wars, riots and executions. We kill when we close our eyes to poverty, suffering and shame.In the same way all disrespect for life, all hard-heartedness,all indifference, all contempt is nothing else than killing.
~ Hermann Hesse

We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the Spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for in our innermost soul we know ourselves to be One with all being..
~ Hermann Hesse

When someone is seeking, said Siddartha, It happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. You, O worthy one, are perhaps indeed a seeker, for in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose.
~ Hermann Hesse

We must not allow the clock and the calendar to blind us to the fact that each moment of life is a miracle and mystery.
~ H.G. Wells

Mid-summer… when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.
~ H. P. Lovecraft

And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, or in this endless universe of stars and mountains, it’s all in my mind.
~ Jack Kerouac

We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes through everything, is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.
~ Jack Kerouac

Be in love with your life. Every minute of it.
~ Jack Kerouac

Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect.We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes through everything, is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.
~ Jack Kerouac

I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind it is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky ways of cloudy innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere, or one universal self. Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes through everything, is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the one vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.
~ Jack Kerouac

Listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot.
~ Jack Kerouac in his letter to Eddie Kerouac Parker, The Portable Jack Kerouac

I was smelling flowers in the yard, and when I stood up I took a deep breath and the blood all rushed to my brain and I woke up dead on my back in the grass. I had apparently fainted, or died, for about sixty seconds. My neighbor saw me but he thought I had just suddenly thrown myself on the grass to enjoy the sun. During that timeless moment of unconsciousness I saw the golden eternity. I saw heaven. In it nothing had ever happened, the events of a million years ago were just as phantom and ungraspable as the events of now, or the events of the next ten minutes. It was perfect, the golden solitude, the golden emptiness, Something-Or- Other, something surely humble. There was a rapturous ring of silence abiding perfectly. There was no question of being alive or not being alive, of likes and dislikes, of near or far, no question of giving or gratitude, no question of mercy or judgment, or of suffering or its opposite or anything. It was the womb itself, aloneness, alaya vijnana the universal store, the Great Free Treasure, the Great Victory, infinite completion, the joyful mysterious essence of Arrangement. It seemed like one smiling smile, one adorable adoration, one gracious and adorable charity, everlasting safety, refreshing afternoon, roses, infinite brilliant immaterial gold ash, the Golden Age. The ‘golden’ came from the sun in my eyelids, and the 'eternity’ from my sudden instant realization as I woke up that I had just been where it all came from and where it was all returning, the everlasting So, and so never coming or going; therefore I call it the golden eternity but you can call it anything you want. As I regained consciousness I felt so sorry I had a body and a mind suddenly realizing I didn’t even have a body and a mind and nothing had ever happened and everything is alright forever and forever and forever, O thank you thank you thank you.
~ Jack Kerouac, Scripture of the Golden Eternity - 64

Within the heart is found a freedom and love even greater than the suffering.
~ Jack Kornfield, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry

Live dangerously and you live right.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness?
~ John Steinbeck

May you live every day of your life.
~ Jonathan Swift

We must reach the understanding that the world is an apparition, a dream; that life is a dream. But we must feel this deeply. In the Buddhist monasteries, the neophyte must live every moment of his life experiencing it fully. He must think: "Now it is noon; now I am crossing the patio; now I will meet the superior." And at the same time he must think that the noon, the patio, and the superior are unreal, that they are as unreal as he and his thoughts.

One of the great delusions is the I. There is no subject; what exists is a series of mental states. If I say "I think," I am committing an error, because I am assuming a fixed subject and then an act of that subject, which is thought. It is not so. One should say, not "I think," but rather "it is thought," as one says "it is raining." When we say "it is raining," we do not think that the rain is performing an act but rather that something is happening. In the same way that we say "it's hot," "it's cold," we should also say "it's thinking," "it's suffering," and avoid the subject".
~ Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights

All things in this creation exist within you, and all things in you exist in creation; there is no border between you and the closest things, and there is no distance between you and the farthest things, and all things, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the smallest to the greatest, are within you as equal things. In one atom are found all the elements of the earth; in one motion of the mind are found the motions of all the laws of existence; in one drop of water are found the secrets of all the endless oceans; in one aspect of you are found all the aspects of existence.
~ Kahlil Gibran

And ever has it been known that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
~ Kahlil Gibran

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
~ Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931)

Faith is an oasis in the heart which will never be reached by the caravan of thinking.
~ Kahlil Gibran

Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower, But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee. For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life, And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love, And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.
~ Khalil Gibran, “Pleasure XXIV

I existed from all eternity and, behold, I am here; and I shall exist till the end of time, for my being has no end. ~ Khalil Gibran

It was but yesterday I thought myself a fragment quivering without rhythm in the sphere of life. Now I know that I am the sphere, and all life in rhythmic fragments moves within me.
~ Kahlil Gibran

You are not enclosed within your bodies, nor confined to houses or fields. That which is you dwells above the mountain and roves with the wind. It is not a thing that crawls into the sun for warmth or digs holes into darkness for safety, But a thing free, a spirit that envelops the earth and moves in the ether. If these be vague words, then seek not to clear them. Vague and nebulous is the beginning of all things, but not their end.
~ Kahlil Gibran

Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.
~ Kurt Vonnegut

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow... The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don’t show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward.
~ Kurt Vonnegut

Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
~ Kurt Vonnegut

There is love enough in this world for everybody, if people will just look.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

In order for the truth to be heard, it must be spoken with love. No matter how wise and true a spoken word is it will not be conveyed to someone if it's spoken in anger.
~ Leo Tolstoy

The kinder and more intelligent a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people. Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy and dull things become cheerful.

You know what the issue is with this world? Everyone wants some magical solution to their problem and everyone refuses to believe in magic.
~ Lewis Carroll - The Mad Hatter, Alice in Wonderland

If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything — as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.
~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Never forget that the universe is a single living organism possessed of one substance and one soul, holding all things suspended in a single consciousness and creating all things with a single purpose.
~ Marcus Aurelius

Everything from the gods is full of Divinity – all the things that we have been given on earth. Even difficult events have a place in the whole. The Divine gifts are right here in our midst, joined together with invisible threads.

All things flow from the gods – all things in the universe, of which we are a part. If we were to learn just this, we would never again need books.

Remember how many moments you have been given, and how many are gone. Time is valuable – it should be used for the highest purpose. Every moment is an chance to clear the mind, and seek a state of calm.

Strive to do your work with feelings of peace – and give yourself freedom from all other thoughts. You deserve the freedom that a peaceful mind brings. If you seek only peace, you will see how easy it is to live a happy live – one that is like the life of the gods.
~ Marcus Aurelius

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web.
~ Marcus Aurelius

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
~ Mark Twain

If you tell the truth, you won’t have to remember anything.
~ Mark Twain

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
~ Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

Desire is the kind of thing that eats you and leaves you starving.
~ Nayyirah Waheed

The sheer beauty of our planet surprised me. It was a huge pearl, set in spangled ebony. It was nacreous, it was an opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel. Its patterned colouring was more subtle, more ethereal. It displayed the delicacy and brilliance, the intricacy and harmony of a live thing. Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely yearning to wake.
~ Olaf Stapledon

We should not for a moment consider even our best-established knowledge of existence as true. It is awareness only of the colors that our own vision paints on the film of one bubble in one strand of foam on the ocean of being.
~ Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)

A passion for pleasure is the secret of remaining young.
~ Oscar Wilde

Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand, creeds follow one another, but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons, a possession for all eternity.
~ Oscar Wilde

The final mystery is oneself. When one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself. Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
~ Oscar Wilde

The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
~ Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
– Oscar Wilde

Everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
~ Pablo Neruda

Blessed are those who do not fear solitude, who are not afraid of their own company, who are not always desperately looking for something to do, something to amuse themselves with, something to judge.
~ Paulo Coelho

Ester asked why people are sad. “That’s simple,” says the old man. “They are the prisoners of their personal history… Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan… They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people’s ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with… And that is why they forget their dreams...
~ Paulo Coelho, The Zahir

I have inside me the winds, the deserts, the oceans, the stars, and everything created in the universe. We were all made by the same hand, and we have the same soul.
~ Paulo Coelho

Listen to your heart. It knows everything.
~ Paulo Coelho

Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.
~ Paulo Coelho

Our life is a constant journey, from birth to death. The landscape changes, the people change, our needs change, but the train keeps moving. Life is the train, not the station.
~ Paulo Coelho

That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. People need to understand that no one is playing with marked cards; sometimes we win and sometimes we lose. Don’t expect to get anything back, don’t expect recognition for your efforts, don’t expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are.
~ Paulo Coelho

We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.
~ Paulo Coelho

Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
~ Rabindranath Tagore

God is neither manifest nor hidden; He is neither revealed nor unrevealed; there are no words to tell that which He is. He is without form, without quality, without decay.
~ Rabindranath Tagore

The Grasp of your Hand
Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it. Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved, but hope for the patience to win my freedom. Grant me that I may not be a coward, feeling your mercy in my success alone; but let me find the grasp of Your hand in my failure.
~ Rabindranath Tagore

Let us unite, not in spite of our differences, but through them. For differences can never be wiped away, and life would be so much the poorer without them. Let all human races keep their own personalities, and yet come together, not in a uniformity that is dead, but in a unity that is living.
~ Rabindranath Tagore

A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be when the stars are dead.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours - that is what you must be able to attain.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world, for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone and then no one outside learns of you. But the darkness pulls in everything: shapes and fires, animals and myself. How easily it gathers them! — powers and people — and it is possible a great energy is moving near me. I have faith in nights.
~ Rainier Maria Rilke

Life is about choices and hovering in the middle can be extremely frightening. Remember, once you make a decision the universe will conspire to make it happen…. but you must choose.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us. And when we bring what is within us out into the world, miracles happen.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I've always assumed that every time a child is born, the Divine reenters the world. Okay? That's the meaning of the Christmas story. And every time that child's purity is corrupted by society, that's the meaning of the Crucifixion story. Your man Jesus stands for that child, that pure spirit, and as its surrogate, he's being born and put to death again and again, over and over, every time we inhale and exhale, not just at the vernal equinox and on the twenty-fifth of December.
~ Tom Robbins

Do you see how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls, the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth an light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale’s sounding to the fall of a dry leaf an the gnat’s flight, all they do is done within the balance of the whole.

But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.
~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If you look in the eyes of the young, you see flame. If you look in the eyes of the old, you see light.
~ Victor Hugo

Nothing in this world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.
~ W. Somerset Maugham The Razor’s Edge

I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.
I exist as I am, that is enough.
I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don't believe I deserved my friends.
Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul.
Simplicity is the glory of expression.
The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
The beauty of independence, departure, actions that rely on themselves.
The future is no more uncertain than the present.
To me, every hour of the day and night is an unspeakably perfect miracle.
We convince by our presence.
~ Walt Whitman

Arise and drink your bliss, for all that lives is holy.
~ William Blake

Agartha is already HERE and NOW.It always WAS and always WILL be. You don't have to struggle anymore. It is your very own Divine Nature, the ATMAN,the silent observer. Arise and drink your bliss, for all that lives is holy.
~ William Blake

Arise and drink your bliss, for all that lives is holy.
~ William Blake

Everything that lives lives not alone nor for itself.
~ William Blake

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.
~ William Blake

Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour
~ William Blake

Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape..
~ William S. Burroughs

We are all alone, born alone, die alone and - in spite of true romance magazines - we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely - at least, not all the time - but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.
~ William S. Burroughs

Insightful Quotes from Literature