We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men. Our identity is a dream. We are process, not reality, for reality is an illusion of the daylight — the light of our particular day.
~ Loren Eiseley
How, in our modern world, can we find our way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relations with the world sacred again?
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer
I must have flowers. Always and always.
~ Claude Monet
When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
~Rumi
I learned…that inspiration does not come like a bolt, nor is it kinetic, energetic, striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly and all the time, though we must regularly and every day give it a little chance to start flowing, prime it with a little solitude and idleness.
~Brenda Ueland
What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity. These are but trifles, to be sure; but scattered along life’s pathway, the good they do is inconceivable.
~ Joseph Addison
There are as many ways of loving as there are people, and that wildflower variety is the great beauty of this dimension of existence.
~ Jalaluddin Mevlana Rumi
Be positive and enjoy more, laugh more, dance more, sing more. Become more and more cheerful, enthusiastic about small things, even very small things. Life consists of small things, but if you can bring the quality of cheerfulness to small things, the total will be tremendous.
So don’t wait for anything great to happen. Great things do happen — it is not that they don’t — but don’t wait for the something great to happen. It happens only when you start living small, ordinary, day-to-day things with a new mind, with new freshness, with new vitality, with new enthusiasm. Then by and by you accumulate, and that accumulation one day explodes into sheer joy.
But one never knows when it will happen. One has to just go on collecting pebbles on the shore. The totality becomes the great happening. When you collect one pebble, it is a pebble. When all the pebbles are together, suddenly they are diamonds. That’s the miracle of life.
There are many people in the world who miss because they are always waiting for something great. It can’t happen. It happens only through small things: eating your breakfast, walking, taking a bath, talking to a friend, just sitting alone looking at the sky or lying on your bed doing nothing. These small things are what life is made of. They are the very stuff of life.
~ Osho, Day 120, Everyday Osho
Do you really believe … that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident.
~ Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men, circa 1600
