“Forget about likes and dislikes. They are of no consequence. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.”
George Bernard Shaw, via Sunbeams (Page 159)
“If you want to write the truth, you must write about yourself. I am the only real truth I know.”
Jean Rhys, via Sunbeams (Page 159)
“There is a palace that opens only to tears.”
Zohar, via Sunbeams (Page 159)
“There are two kinds of faithfulness in love: one is based on forever finding new things to love in the loved one; the other is based on our pride in being faithful.”
François La Rochefoucauld, via Sunbeams (Page 158)
“The majority of people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, terribly objective sometimes, but the real task is, in fact, to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.”
Sören Kierkegaard, via Sunbeams (Page 157)
“There is one spectacle grander than the sea,
That is the sky;
There is one spectacle grander than the sky,
That is the interior of the soul.”
Victor Hugo, via Sunbeams (Page 156)
“If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.”
Carl Jung, via Sunbeams (Page 156)
“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live; it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
Oscar Wilde, via Sunbeams (Page 156)
“It is not that you must be free from fear. The moment you try to free yourself from fear, you create a resistance against fear. Resistance, in any form, does not end fear. What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it, not how to resist it through courage and so on.”
J. Krishnamurti, via Sunbeams (Page 155)
“Your duty is to be; and not to be this or that.”
Ramana Maharshi, via Sunbeams (Page 155)
“We tend to think of the rational as a higher order, but it is the emotional that marks our lives. One often learns more from ten days of agony than from ten years of contentment.”
Merle Shain, via Sunbeams (Page 155)
“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. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god: where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”
Joseph Campbell, via Sunbeams (Page 154)
“In the evening of our lives we shall be examined in love.”
St. John of the Cross, via Sunbeams (Page 154)
“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”
Eudora Welty, via Sunbeams (Page 153)
“We’ve discovered that the earth isn’t flat; that we won’t fall off its edges, and our experience as a species has changed as a result. Maybe we’ll soon find out that the self isn’t ‘flat’ either, and that death is as real and yet as deceptive as the horizon; that we don’t fall out of life either.”
Seth, Jane Roberts’ Seth Speaks, via Sunbeams (Page 151)
“It’s a kind of test, Mary, and it’s the only kind that amounts to anything. When something rotten like this happens, then you have your choice. You start to really be alive, or you start to die. That’s all.”
James Agee, A Death In The Family, via Sunbeams (Page 150)
“There is only one thing pain is good for. It teaches you to love. God bless pain.”
Joey Goldfarb, via Sunbeams (Page 150)
“I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I came to sing remains unsung.”
Rabindranath Tagore, via Sunbeams (Page 148)
“People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, via Sunbeams (Page 148)
“The mind cannot long act the role of the heart”
François La Rochefoucauld, via Sunbeams (Page 148)