Quotes about letting go

The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it. --Carl Jung

Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go. --Hermann Hesse

Sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on. --Eckhart Tolle

Let go of certainty. The opposite isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity, and a willingness to embrace paradox, rather than choose up sides. The ultimate challenge is to accept ourselves exactly as we are, but never stop trying to learn and grow. --Tony Schwartz

Creativity can be described as letting go of certainties. --Gail Sheehy

Courage is the power to let go of the familiar. --Raymond Lindquist

The world belongs to those who let go.  --Tao Te Ching

Everything I read about hitting a midlife crisis was true. I had such a struggle letting go of youthful things and learning how to exist and have enthusiasm while settling into the comfort of an older age. --David Bowie

Forgiveness means letting go of the past. --Gerald Jampolsky

For me, every single thing I do seems to be about the process of letting go because that's what I so desperately need to do with so many things: with fear, with what people think of me, and all these things I've worried about my whole life. --John Grant

There's a victory in letting go of your expectations. --Mike White

I think that what I have been truly searching for as a person, as a writer, as a thinker, as a daughter, is freedom. That is my mission. A sense of liberty, the liberty that comes not only from self-awareness but also from letting go of many things. Many things that weigh us down. --Jhumpa Lahiri

When you feel stuck in a hard time, jump-start a pro-change attitude by letting go of possessions that no longer work for you - like old clothes and old shoes. --Karen Salmansohn

Being deeply contented with God in my everyday life is a focused attitude. It is always available. It means practicing letting go of my obsession with how I'm doing. It means training myself to learn to actually be present with people, and seeking to love them. --John Ortberg

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. --Henry David Thoreau

 

Embracing all of life, sadness and all

Dan Rather posted this quote from writer Louise Erdrich on his Facebook page today, and I wanted to share it with you.

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

I am adding a few more quotes today, written by Mary Oliver, one of my favorite writers.

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

She also wrote this:

to live in this world

"you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go”

And last but not least, she offers her take on the gift of darkness in a life:

The Uses Of Sorrow

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

"Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.”