"If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work but rather, teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
  --Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another without any loss of enthusiasm."
  --Winston Churchill

"The novelists William Styron and George Orwell, and the social philosopher Hannah Arendt, in writing of totalitarian evil and the Nazi systematic murders in particular, have each come to the conclusion that evil is not what one expects: cruelty, moral perversion, power abuse, terror.  These are its instruments or its results.  But the deepest evil ( Read more... )

"The telling of stories, like singing and praying, would seem to be an almost ceremonial act, an ancient and necessary mode of speech that tends the earthly rootedness of human language. For narrated events always happen somewhere. And for an oral culture, that location is never merely incidental to those occurrences. The events belong, as it were ( Read more... )

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is ( Read more... )

". . . To be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others . . . ."
  --David Whyte

"The gift you carry for others is not an attempt to save the world but to fully belong to it.  It's not possible to save the world by trying to save it.  You need to find what is genuinely yours to offer the world before you can make it a ( Read more... )

"In the days of moon worship, religion was concerned with the unseen powers of the spirit world, and even when the state religion was transferred to the sun, a god of war, of personal aggrandisement, and of the things of this world, the spiritual qualities remained with the moon deities. For the worship of the moon is the worship of the creative ( Read more... )

"The utterances of the heart--unlike those of the discriminating intellect--always relate to the whole.  The heartstrings sing like an Aeolian harp only to the gentle breath of a premonitory mood, which does not drown the song but listens.  What the heart hears are the great things that span our whole lives, the experiences which we do nothing to ( Read more... )

"Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations; being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind.  Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still."
  --C.S. Lewis

"Matter is psyche moving slowly enough to be seen."
  --Pierre Teilhard de Chardin