You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Faith takes us to deep places, to the ruptures in our self-confidence and our lives. Do not settle for spiritual comfort all the time…Darkness is divine also. Faith is not about positive thinking so much as about what kicks in when we are weak, sick, and short of self-confidence. The via positiva never stands alone. The via negativa is always with us on our faith journey as well. ~ Matthew Fox
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
~ David Whyte, Sweet Darkness
There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. ~ Carl Gustav Jung
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars. ~ Charles Austin Beard
Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action? ~ Arthur Miller
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. ~ Theodor Adorno
From each as they choose, to each as they are chosen. ~ Robert Nozick
I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide. ~ Emily Bronte
We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them. ~ Khalil Gibran
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. ~ Viktor E. Frankl
Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. ~ Viktor E. Frankl
Guess, if you can, and choose, if you dare. ~ Pierre Corneille
Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself. ~ Walter Anderson
I've never thought of my characters as being sad. On the contrary, they are full of life. They didn't choose tragedy. Tragedy chose them. ~ Juliette Binoche
No matter how sad we might be, the universe is still planning our happiness. We can choose happiness in any moment we wish. ~ Marianne Williamson
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go. ~ Dr. Seuss
We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours. ~ Dag Hammarskjold
Every human has four endowments - self awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change. ~ Stephen Covey
I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman. ~ Anais Nin
Anaïs Nin beams me
on.
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
“Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions.”
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
"I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman."
"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."
"Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to
replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It
dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of
tarnishings."
"Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together."
The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic.
I walk ahead of myself in perpetual expectancy of miracles.
“I have heard the beast pound
in the breath of a bird...
and felt in its feathers the fire.
I have hated with passion
the gathering herd
and the weight of its common desire.
Ah, but no rest for weary terrestrial wings
in beating oppressive air;
they long for the strength
of celestial things
like the essence of myrrh in her hair.”
