Favorite Quotes
Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass.
It’s about learning to dance in the rain.
- Vivian Greene
Traveler, there is no path. The path is made by walking.
- Antonio Machado
Longer version:
Traveler, the path is your tracks
And nothing more.
Traveler, there is no path
The path is made by walking.
By walking you make a path
And turning, you look back
At a way you will never tread again
Traveler, there is no road
Only wakes in the sea.
- Antonio Machado, Border of a Dream: Selected Poems
Sweet are the uses of adversity;
Which, like a toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
- William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene 1
Balance is —
the place where it takes the least amount of effort to stay there.
- Jim Riddell
Broken crayons still color.
- Source Unknown
Suffering is not inherently redemptive;
Yet, all suffering can be redeemed.
- Jim Riddell
When you're going through hell, keep going!
- Winston Churchill
The task of maturing is replacing unconscious myth with conscious autobiography.
- Sam Keen, Interview with Bill Moyers (edited in the memory of Jim Riddell)
DANCE as if the world dances with you;
SING as if you sing with the stars;
LOVE as if you'll never be hurt again;
LIVE as if heaven is on earth;
FOR maybe it is.
- Jim Riddell's take on widely repeated thought
It takes a lot of energy to achieve escape velocity.
-Rev. Jerry Overton
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting;
it has been found difficult, and left untried.
- G. K. Chesterton
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
- Isaac Newton
... When I looked into his face and saw how he felt about it, then for the first time I more than saw. I more than knew what went on in another person; I felt in myself what he was feeling and at the same time I had an unfamiliar disinterested respect for it; and strange, strange to me, this small pain of his was more poignant to my unaccustomed heart than anything I had ever suffered, or thought I suffered, in my own solitary experiences. The pang of it and the dissolving, the flooding into the blood of the realization of how another feels, has felt before, and will feel again, was both terrible and desirable to me: terrible to know that until that instant I had been so insulated from others; desirable, oh desirable to come alive to them at last. How new, how fresh, how vivid, life might be, no matter if it did hurt like this, if one were always aware of it all instead of isolated portions of it in oneself. As I stood there facing Tony when he spoke to me, perhaps it was only an instant in time, yet I was by grace born in that flash as I should have been years, years ago: inducted into the new world.
Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of Taos Desert
What a piece of work is man!
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Longer version:
What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2
To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age. 'Tis much better to do a little with certainty & leave the rest for others that come after you.
- Isaac Newton
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
- John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
- John Muir, Our National Parks
I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
- John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
A weed is simply a plant growing where you don’t want it; and determined to stay there.
- source unknown
I do not believe in a fate
that falls on all [people] however they act;
but I do believe in a fate
that falls on [people] unless they act;
- G. K. Chesterton
Nothing that happens to you was meant to be. The only thing about you that was meant to be is you. Blaze your own trail.
- George Alexiou
Threshing is the process that separates the grain that nourishes
from the chaff that becomes manure.
I keep getting threshed.
- Jim Riddell
Those who remove mountains
begin by carrying away small stones.
- Chinese proverb
If you have two loves of bread
sell one and buy a lily.
- Chinese proverb
Friends are God's way of making up for our relatives.
- source unknown
Laziness is nothing more than the habit of resting before you get tired.
- fortune cookie
They tried to bury us,
but they didn't know we were seeds.
- Cuban proverb
All these psychics and these doctors,
They're all right and they're all wrong.
It's like trying to make out every word,
When they should simply hum along.
- Dawes, A Little Bit of Everything