The imagination retains a passion for freedom. There are no rules for the imagination. It never wants to stay trapped in the expected territories. The old maps never satisfy it. It wants to press ahead beyond the accepted frontiers and bring back reports of regions no mapmaker has yet visited.
John O’Donohue
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
….myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
Gerald Manley Hopkins, When Kingfishers Catch Fire
“You can’t go back and make a new start, but you can start right now and make a brand new ending.”
James R. Sherman, Rejection (1982).
“I say, ‘follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.’”
Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth
“You (and every other created thing) begin with a divine DNA, an inner destiny as it were, a blueprint tucked away in the cellar of your being,that begs to be allowed, to be fulfilled, and to show itself.”
Richard Rohr, Daily Meditation, December 31, 2017
“And one of the loneliest things you can find is somebody who is in the wrong kind of work, who shouldn’t be doing what they are doing, but should be doing something else and haven’t the courage to get up and leave it and make a new possibility for themselves.”
John O’Donohue, Interview with Krista Tippet, OnBeing, 8-31-17
“You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it’s better to listen to what it has to say.”
Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.”
Charles Du Box
“Does the rose have to do something? No, the purpose of a rose is to be a rose. Your purpose is to be yourself. You don’t have to run anywhere to become someone else.”
Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching
“The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.”
David Viscott, Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times: A Book of Meditations.
“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.”