Wisdom

Copied from my old blog: a collection of quotes and poems I come to when I need inspiration, a reality check or some positive affirmation. I welcome suggestions!

• “To laugh often and much; To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; To leave the world a bit better…To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”
  -Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and the rain with verbs, and for worms to pass through question marks, and the stars to shine down on budding nouns, and the dew to form on paragraphs.
  -Richard Brautigan, Please Plant This Book
• To be of the Earth is to know
  the restlessness of being a seed
  the darkness of being planted
  the struggle toward the light
  the pain of growth into the light
  the joy of bursting and bearing fruit
  the love of being food for someone
  the scattering of your seeds
  the decay of the seasons
  the mystery of death
  and the miracle of birth.
  -John Soos
• “The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”
  -Gandhi
• “But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light, and of that proportion of life and time they had been born to enjoy.”
  -Plutarch, Moralia
• “When the earth is ravaged and the animals are dying, a new tribe of people shall come unto the earth from many colors, classes, creeds, and who by their actions and deeds shall make the earth green again. They will be known as the warriors of the Rainbow”
  -Old Native American Prophecy
• “Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
  Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”
  -Goethe
• “What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”
  -Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator
• “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”
  -Native American Proverb
• “The difference between loneliness and solitude is your perception of who you are alone with and who made the choice.”
  -anonymous
• "You are the only person who can forgive yourself. Once that forgiving has taken place, you can then console yourself with the knowledge that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure ... The pressure can make you something quite precious, quite wonderful, quite beautiful and extremely hard."
  -Maya Angelou
• "I found God in myself and I loved her fiercely."
  -Ntozake Shange
• There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
  There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
  There is society, where none intrudes,
  By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
  I love not man the less, but Nature more,
  From these our interviews, in which I steal
  From all I may be, or have been before,
  To mingle with the Universe, and feel
  What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
  -Lord Byron
• "I will age ungracefully until I become an old woman in a small garden, doing whatever the hell I want."
  -Robin Chotzinoff