Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.
Whenever you are creating beauty around you, you are restoring your own soul.
No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
A grown child is a dangerous thing.
There is no graceful way to carry hatred.
‘Thank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. Thank you expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.
I don’t need a certain number of friends, just a number of friends I can be certain of.
Every small positive change we make in ourselves repays us in confidence in the future.
A writer’s heart, a poet’s heart, an artist’s heart, a musician’s heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world.
Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet.
To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrow, is always a measure of what has gone before.
Healing begins where the wound was made.
In every life there comes a point when you have to make a decision about how you will live.
When the ax came into the forest the trees said the handle is one of us.
What the mind doesn’t understand, it worships or fears.
A burnt finger remember the fire.
Wherever I have knocked, a door has opened. Wherever I have wandered, a path has appeared.
we are the ones we have been waiting for
People who work hard often work too hard. … May we learn to honor the hammock, the siesta, the nap and the pause in all its forms.
it is this broken road with pitfalls and sharp turns and unexpected traverses that has brought me joy and adventure.
Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.
It has become a common feeling, I believe, as we have watched our heroes falling over the years, that our own small stone of activism, which might not seem to measure up to the rugged boulders of heroism we have so admired, is a paltry offering toward the building of an edifice of hope. Many who believe this choose to withhold their offerings out of shame. This is the tragedy of the world. For we can do nothing substantial toward changing our course on the planet, a destructive one, without rousing ourselves, individual by individual, and bringing our small, imperfect stones to the pile.
Human compassion is equal to human cruelty, and it is up to each of us to tip the balance.
As I get older, I realize that the thing I value the most is good-heartednes s.
