1001 Pearls of Life-Changing Wisdom by Elizabeth Venstra

Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.

—Abraham Joshua Heschel, Polish-born American theologian

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Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

—John Christian, quoted in Reader’s Digest

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All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

—Samuel Butler, Notebooks

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I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

—Agatha Christie

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Dwelling deep within our hearts and the hearts of all beings without exception, is an inexhaustible source of love and wisdom. And the ultimate purpose of all spiritual practices… is to make contact with this essentially pure nature.

—Lama Thubten Yeshe

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Wonder… is essentially an ‘opening’ attitude—an awareness that there is more to life than one has yet fathomed, an experience of new vistas in life to be explored as well as new profundities to be plumbed.

—Rollo May

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Seek not afar for beauty; lo, it glows

In dew-wet grasses all about your feet

In birds, in sunshine, childish faces sweet,

In stars and mountain summits topped with snows.

—Minot Judson Savage

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We use one of the two shortest words in the English language to refer to ourselves, but a self can be a pretty complex thing.

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Any man worth his salt will stick up for what he believes right, but it takes a slightly better man to acknowledge instantly and without reservation that he is in error.

—Andrew Jackson

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A man should never be ashamed to own he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

—Alexander Pope, Thoughts on Various Subjects

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True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.

—R. D. Laing, Scottish psychiatrist

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It is always safe to learn, even from our enemies—seldom safe to instruct, even our friends.

—Charles Caleb Colton, Lacon

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Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.

—Sören Kierkegaard

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Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

—Joseph Addison, Tatler

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The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.

—Barry López, Crow and Weasel

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The highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes.

—John Ruskin

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He is not only idle who does nothing, but he is idle who might be better employed.

—Socrates

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Where your talents and the needs of the world cross lies your calling.

—Aristotle

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A professional is someone who can do his best work when he doesn’t feel like it.

—Alistair Cooke

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Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.

—Will Rogers

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The worst thing we can do with a dilemma is to resolve it prematurely because we haven’t the courage to live with uncertainty.

—William Sloane Coffin

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The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.

—Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry

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That type of obedience, where you find refuge in the corporate, or where you find refuge in the political or religious majority, is such an absolutely despicable cowardice.… I think that every time you turn towards a truth that is not your own, that you confide the guidance of your soul to somebody else’s choices, you are making a huge mistake.

—Guillermo del Toro, director of Pan’s Labyrinth, in an interview with Terry Gross, Fresh Air, January 24, 2007

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Hate and fear can poison the body as surely as any toxic chemicals.

—Joseph Krimsky, M.D.

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When my mind is still and alone with the beating of my heart, I find a quiet assurance, an inner peace, in the core of my being. It can face the doubt, the loneliness, the anxiety, can accept these harsh realities and can even grow because of these challenges to my essential being.

—Paul Beattie

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What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.

—Colette

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Can you see the holiness in those things you take for granted—a paved road or a washing machine? If you concentrate on finding what is good in every situation, you will discover that your life will suddenly be filled with gratitude, a feeling that nurtures the soul.

—Rabbi Harold Kushner

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For, after all, put it as we may to ourselves, we are all of us from birth to death guests at a table which we did not spread. The sun, the earth, love, friends, our very breath are parts of the banquet.

—Rebecca Harding Davis

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The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us.

—Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within

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You walk in grace or you walk in fear. You can’t have it both ways.

—Carlos Santana, Carlos Santana website

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I have only one life, and it is short enough. Why waste it on things I don’t want most?

—Louis D. Brandeis, American jurist

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I know what I am fleeing from, but not what I am in search of.

—Michel de Montaigne

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All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.

—James Thurber

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Every step of the journey is the journey.

—Zen saying

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We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us—the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path.

—Joseph Campbell

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We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing… But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.

—Joseph Epstein

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[We] go lightheartedly on our way never thinking that by a careless word or two we may have altered the whole course of human lives, for some persons will take [our] advice and use it.

—Laura Ingalls Wilder

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You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.

—Booker T. Washington

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I believe most men will make good if they find the work they are happy in doing.

—Harvey Firestone

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The sheer rebelliousness in giving ourselves permission to fail frees a childlike awareness and clarity… When we give ourselves permission to fail, we at the same time give ourselves permission to excel.

—Eloise Ristad

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He who limps is still walking.

—Stanislaw J. Lec

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There is no wealth but life.

—John Ruskin

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Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

—Maya Angelou

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The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

—Marshall McLuhan

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If we want to solve a problem that we have never solved before, we must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

—Richard P. Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?

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Troubles are tools by which God fashions us for better things.

—Henry Ward Beecher

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If it weren’t for the rocks in its bed, the stream would have no song.

—Carl Perkins

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We shall draw from the heart of suffering itself the means of inspiration and survival.

—Winston Churchill

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I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.

—Anne Morrow Lindbergh

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Enlightenment is just another word for feeling comfortable with being a completely ordinary person.

—Veronique Vienne, The Art of Doing Nothing

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Recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt.

—Barbara Kingsolver

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There are two great beginnings in the life of every man who has left his mark upon history. There is the day when he is born into the world; and there is the day when he discovers why he was born into the world.

—William Barclay, Scottish theologian

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Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of.

—Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

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Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man’s power to live long.

—Seneca, Epistulae morales

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Wish not so much to live long as to live well.

—Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

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Youth is not a time of life—it is a state of mind. It is a temper of the will; a quality of the imagination; a vigor of the emotions; it is a freshness of the deep springs of life. Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over a life of ease… Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years; people grow old by deserting their ideals.

—Samuel Ullman, “Youth”

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When you say ‘I would die for you’ to those you love, the truth of those words may be not that you give your physical life but that you are willing to die to the past and be born again in the present where you can live fully and freely—where you can give us the love we need.

—bell hooks, in her dedication in Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood

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Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, be swift to love, make haste to be kind!

—Henri-Frédéric Amiel, The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel, translated by Mrs. Humphry Ward

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If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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It is now long ago that I… resolved that I would permit no man, no matter what his colour might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.

—Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography

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Those you do not forgive you fear. And no one reaches love with fear beside him.

—From A Course in Miracles, published by the Foundations for Inner Peace

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To care about people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean, you name it—to have compassion and to care for these people means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves.

—Pema Chodron

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Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them.

—Carl Sagan, Psychology Today

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In the final analysis it is not what you do for your children but what you taught them to do for themselves that will make them successful human beings.

—Ann Landers

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The thing that is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

--Anna Quindlen

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The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.

-- Margot Fonteyn

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Those who stand at the threshold of life always waiting for the right time to change are like the man who stands at the bank of a river waiting for the water to pass so he can cross on dry land.

-- Joseph B. Wirthlin

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Humility does not mean you think less of yourself. It means you think of yourself less.

-- Dr. Kenneth Blanchard, American business consultant

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Make peace with someone you think you can’t make peace with. Notice what resistance arises even at the thought, how you build your case against your enemy, how you marshal your allies and ready your weapons. Note what it takes to give them up, what you must sacrifice and what you gain.

—Starhawk