John Steinbeck quotes

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I just choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to our world. 

If you're in trouble, or hurt or need - go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help - the only ones.

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

No one wants advice - only corroboration.

We spend our time searching for security and hate it when we get it.

Time is the only critic without ambition.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.

I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

More Joseph Campbell quotes

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.

Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.

Regrets are illuminations come too late.

We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.

Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.

Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn't that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it's off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you're not married....The Puritans called marriage "the little church within the Church." In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament – love and forgiveness.... Like the yin/yang symbol....Here I am, and here she is, and here we are. Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I'm not sacrificing to her, I'm sacrificing to the relationship. Resentment against the other one is wrongly placed. Life in in the relationship, that's where your life now is. That's what a marriage is – whereas, in a love affair, you have two lives in a more or less successful relationship to each other for a certain length of time, as long as it seems agreeable.

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

 

Some quotes about evil

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. --Edmund Burke

Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil. --Elie Wiesel

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. --Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways. --Buddha

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil. --Plato

The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance. --Herodotus

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table. --W. H. Auden

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good... Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place. --Pope Francis

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil. --Aristotle

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself. --Soren Kierkegaard

Evil is whatever distracts. --Franz Kafka

I define a 'good person' as somebody who is fully conscious of their own limitations. They know their strengths, but they also know their 'shadow' - they know their weaknesses. In other words, they understand that there is no good without bad. Good and evil are really one, but we have broken them up in our consciousness. We polarize them. --John Bradshaw

All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy. --Scott Alexander

It is not enough for us to restrain from doing evil, unless we shall also do good. --St. Jerome

The bad man desires arbitrary power. What moves the evil man is the love of injustice. --John Rawls

The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world. --Max Born

I believe the root of all evil is abuse of power. --Patricia Cornwell

'Finish every day and be done with it'

I love what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1854; it's his philosophy for how to approach each day and it makes good sense. Especially, 'finish every day and be done with it'. That way there's no time for self-reproach, anxiety and second guessing. As he said, 'You have done what you could'. So true. We are not perfect and never will be, no matter how hard we try to get it perfect. So it's just to let go and let God after having done the best we can, in any situation. If we can say that, then that's saying a lot. 

 

Quotes from C.S. Lewis' book Mere Christianity

• It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.
• When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall.
• The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first - wanting to be the centre - wanting to be God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the human race. Some people think the fall of man had something to do with sex, but that is a mistake...what Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they 'could be like Gods' - could set up on their own as if they had created themselves - be their own masters - invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that hopeless attempt has come...the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
• The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility...According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
• The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.
• For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
• It is better to forget about yourself altogether.
• The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call "ourselves," to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be "good.
• All that we call human history--money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery--[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
• The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so.
• What can you ever really know of other people's souls — of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole of creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him.
• Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed forever in a universe of pure hatred.
• When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.
• Ceasing to be 'in love' need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense - love as distinct from 'being in love' - is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be 'in love' with someone else. 'Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.
• If people do not believe in permanent marriage, it is perhaps better that they should live together unmarried than that they should make vows they do not mean to keep. It is true that by living together without marriage they will be guilty (in Christian eyes) of fornication. But one fault is not mended by adding another; unchastity is not improved by adding perjury. The idea that 'being in love' is the only reason for remaining married really leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise at all. If love is the whole thing, then the promise can add nothing; and if it adds nothing, then it should not be made.
• But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away "blindly" so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

A good reminder

 

Worth learning and re-learning

Dealing with weariness of soul

 It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit. --Robert Louis Stevenson

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral. --Robert Louis Stevenson

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. --Epicurus

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world! --William Shakespeare

Christian, learn from Christ how you ought to love Christ. Learn a love that is tender, wise, strong; love with tenderness, not passion, wisdom, not foolishness, and strength, lest you become weary and turn away from the love of the Lord. --Saint Bernard

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians. --Benjamin Disraeli

People have become so weary of all the government and media dishonesty, the all-too-commonplace lying, that most Americans have stopped listening. --Wayne LaPierre

I always have doubts. I am weary of people. --Bae Suzy

Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do. --Eric Hoffer

I've shot a lot of pilots that have never seen the light of day, jobs that have fallen apart or gotten canceled, so I'm really weary about what contracts I sign and where I swear my loyalty to. --D. J. Cotrona

I'm very conscious and weary of the hype economy and the way people build things up just to tear them down. --Hari Nef

Some of our life experience makes us weary of love and make it difficult to forgive others. Parvathy

Quotes for weary souls

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit. --Robert Louis Stevenson

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. –Epicurus

It is as necessary for man to live in beauty rather than ugliness as it is necessary for him to have food for an aching belly or rest for a weary body. --Abraham Maslow

Rest when you're weary. Refresh and renew yourself, your body, your mind, your spirit. Then get back to work. --Ralph Marston

Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do. --Eric Hoffer

Some of our life experience makes us weary of love and make it difficult to forgive others. –Parvathy

We all get weary sometimes, and we tend to think that life is what makes us weary. --Joyce Meyer

We can be tired, weary and emotionally distraught, but after spending time alone with God, we find that He injects into our bodies energy, power and strength. --Charles Stanley

Christian, learn from Christ how you ought to love Christ. Learn a love that is tender, wise, strong; love with tenderness, not passion, wisdom, not foolishness, and strength, lest you become weary and turn away from the love of the Lord. --Saint Bernard

If we grow weary and give up, the goal remains for someone else to achieve. --Zig Ziglar

Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. --Paul the Apostle

We shall not grow weary of waiting upon God if we remember how long and how graciously He once waited for us. --Charles Spurgeon

I would go to the deeps a hundred times to cheer a downcast spirit. It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary. --Charles Spurgeon

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral. --Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Purpose in Life

I'm not sure who wrote this, so I cannot credit the author of the quote. I googled the text and another photo of the same came back with a website: notetoselfphilosophy.com  

Regardless of its origins, it struck a chord in me and I wanted to share it with you. 

Quotes about stupidity

I'm posting some quotes about stupidity today, because the stupidity I see around me has really started to get to me. I don't understand how educated people can behave so stupidly in some instances, and I don't understand how some people won't use their God-given intelligence. They would rather follow a leader slavishly than use their brains and their conscience to figure out the right path for them to follow. They refuse to follow the words of Christ, yet will unthinkingly follow the words of men who are far from Christian. They don't see the hypocrisy of their situation. They don't acknowledge the lying, the self-deception, the polarization they see around them, created by the men (often quite stupid themselves) that they worship. The first and last quotes offer hope to those who want to deal with and get past the stupidity of others, and perhaps in oneself as well. 

·        The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty. --John Steinbeck

·        Stupidity really gets me going, when it's just plain stupid, obvious stupidity. --Lewis Black

·        Scientists will eventually stop flailing around with solar power and focus their efforts on harnessing the only truly unlimited source of energy on the planet: stupidity. I predict that in the future, scientists will learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel. --Scott Adams

·        We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet. --Stephen Hawking

·        There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. --Frank Zappa

·        Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe. --Frank Zappa

·        My heart is broken in the face of the stupidity of my species. --Joni Mitchell

·        The doctor sees all the weakness of mankind; the lawyer all the wickedness, the theologian all the stupidity. --Arthur Schopenhauer

·        The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. --Milan Kundera

·        The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois. --Gustave Flaubert

·        No sooner does man discover intelligence than he tries to involve it in his own stupidity. --Jacques Yves Cousteau

·        Alcohol gives you infinite patience for stupidity. --Sammy Davis, Jr.

·        That's how I was taught. That's how I was raised, to ignore the stupidity, continue on and do what I need to do. --Bubba Wallace

Inspiration for these trying times

Both quotes give me food for thought, but it is the last one that got under my skin. After a lifetime of worrying about 'productivity' and 'efficiency', I realize that the 'degree of presence' in your own life and in the lives of others are what matter most. Eckhart Tolle writes about this all the time. We are often so worried about the future, or about what happened in the past. We are powerless to change the events of the past, and we simply cannot map out our futures to the smallest detail since it is the great unknown. So we are left with the present. Accepting where we are, where we stand, in the present time, leads to peace. And it leads us away from the idea that our personal lives must be lived the way our work lives have been lived--by measuring all things in terms of productivity and efficiency. Perhaps this is something one figures out as one gets older. I don't know. I only know that I have begun to think differently about how I want to live my daily life. Perhaps the pandemic has given me the chance to reflect on this. When I stop worrying about how much I need to get done in one day, I am more relaxed and life flows better. I am better able to keep the negative influences at bay because I am 'aware' of where I am in the present. I am aware of whether I am content or not. I am better able to establish the necessary boundaries between me and the rest of the world. I am aware of the uninvited infringements on my peace of soul and the criticisms of others and how that affects me. Society and other (well-meaning) people are always trying to tell us what to do, how to live, what to buy, how to think, and how to react to different events. It's exhausting to have to consider what others think we should do all the time. I simply don't want to. I've done it long enough in the work world.

C.S. Lewis quotes

• You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
• We are what we believe we are.
• True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.
• Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don't implement promises, but keep them.
• You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.
• Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
• God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
• No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
• Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
• Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
• We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
• I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
• Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.
• If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

The wisdom of Thomas Merton

I'm sharing some quotes by Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk who spent a good portion of his life exploring world religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Jainism and Sufism. His wisdom is reflected in the quotes I have chosen to post today.

• A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
• When ambition ends, happiness begins.
• Every moment and every event of every man's life on earth plants something in his soul.
• Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.
• We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.
• Love is our true destiny. We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone - we find it with another.
• We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.
• Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.
• We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.
• The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another.
• We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.
• In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for 'finding himself.' If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.
• If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
• To consider persons and events and situations only in the light of their effect upon myself is to live on the doorstep of hell.
• The very contradictions in my life are in some ways signs of God's mercy to me.

Quotes about gratitude

• If the only prayer you said in your whole life was “thank you” that would suffice. --Meister Eckhart
• We must find time to stop and thank the people who make a difference in our lives. --John F. Kennedy
• Be grateful for what you already have while you pursue your goals. If you aren’t grateful for what you already have, what makes you think you would be happy with more. --Roy T. Bennett
• True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. --Seneca
• The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not. --Seneca
• This a wonderful day. I’ve never seen this one before. --Maya Angelou
• When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed. --Maya Angelou
• A sense of blessedness comes from a change of heart, not from more blessings. --Mason Cooley
• May the work of your hands be a sign of gratitude and reverence to the human condition. --Mahatma Gandhi
• As long as this exists, this sunshine and this cloudless sky, and as long as I can enjoy it, how can I be sad? --Anne Frank
• In ordinary life, we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich. --Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude. --G.K. Chesterton
• I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. --Gilbert K. Chesterton
• We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorns have roses. --Alphonse Karr
• I was complaining that I had no shoes till I met a man who had no feet. --Confucius 
• Ingratitude is the daughter of pride. --Miguel de Cervantes

Quotes about disappointment

A part of life--disappointment. How we handle it affects our relationships, successes, failures and future expectations. I have gotten better at handling disappointment. I have also learned to deal with people and situations that continually disappoint me. If I can never count on another person to be there for me, if I am continually disappointed by them, my heart and soul adjust and move on. It's not a question of forgiveness; forgiveness is always there. But I know that I cannot depend on certain people for stability, constancy, generosity of spirit, or help. Sometimes it is not their fault; other times it's simply that they do not know themselves well enough to know what the rest of us know--that they promise more than they can ever deliver. They have false views of themselves. I know that, and I lower my expectations with those people. Eventually however, those people end up consigned to the outer reaches of my heart. Perhaps that is not so surprising. But they remain in my heart because I hold onto the hope that one day they will 'see' the light. 

“Don’t let today’s disappointments cast a shadow on tomorrow’s dreams.”

― Unknown

“There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.”

― Martin Luther King, Jr.

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”

― Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Disappointment to a noble soul is what cold water is to burning metal; it strengthens, tempers, intensifies, but never destroys it.”

– Eliza Tabor

“The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.”

― Robert Kiyosaki

“If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment.”

– Henry David Thoreau

“Anytime you suffer a setback or disappointment, put your head down and plow ahead.”

― Les Brown

“Disenchantment, whether it is a minor disappointment or a major shock, is the signal that things are moving into transition in our lives.”

― William Throsby Bridges

“If I am to meet with a disappointment, the sooner I know it, the more of life I shall have to wear it off.”

― Thomas Jefferson

 “We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment.”

― Jim Rohn

 “The principles of living greatly include the capacity to face trouble with courage, disappointment with cheerfulness, and trial with humility.”

― Thomas S. Monson

“Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm.”

― Murray Gell-Mann

Quotes about silence

Silence is a source of great strength. --Lao Tzu

Silence is a true friend who never betrays. --Confucius

Silence is better than unmeaning words. --Pythagoras

We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls. --Mother Teresa

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words. --Elbert Hubbard

Silence is true wisdom's best reply. --Euripides

Silence is argument carried out by other means. --Che Guevara

Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from. --Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Keep silence for the most part, and speak only when you must, and then briefly. --Epictetus

One of the greatest attacks of the enemy is to make you busy, to make you hurried, to make you noisy, to make you distracted, to fill the people of God and the Church of God with so much noise and activity that there is no room for prayer. There is no room for being alone with God. There is no room for silence. There is no room for meditation. --Paul Washer

Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom. --Francis Bacon

Everything that's created comes out of silence. Your thoughts emerge from the nothingness of silence. Your words come out of this void. Your very essence emerged from emptiness. All creativity requires some stillness. --Wayne Dyer

Liars hate silence, so they often try to fill it up by talking more than they need to. They provide far more information than was needed or asked for. --Travis Bradberry

I am rather inclined to silence. --Abraham Lincoln

Some inspiring Easter quotes

Easter is meant to be a symbol of hope, renewal, and new life. --Janine di Giovanni

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song. --Pope John Paul II

A rebirth out of spiritual adversity causes us to become new creatures. --James E. Faust

Easter is very important to me, it's a second chance. --Reba McEntire

The symbolic language of the crucifixion is the death of the old paradigm; resurrection is a leap into a whole new way of thinking. --Deepak Chopra

I think we need to do some deep soul searching about what's important in our lives and renew our spirit and our spiritual thinking, whether it's through faith-based religion or just through loving nature or helping your fellow man. --Louie Schwartzberg

Let every man and woman count himself immortal. Let him catch the revelation of Jesus in his resurrection. Let him say not merely, 'Christ is risen,' but 'I shall rise.' --Phillips Brooks

God had brought me to my knees and made me acknowledge my own nothingness, and out of that knowledge I had been reborn. I was no longer the centre of my life and therefore I could see God in everything. --Bede Griffiths

Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God. --Frederick Buechner

If anyone or anything tries to curse or kill the Goodness at the Center of all things, it will just keep coming back to life. Forever Easter.” --David Housholder

It would behoove us to remember that the life we live involves the death of something so that it can become the birth of something. --Craig D Lounsbrough

Some good quotes from Phyllis Theroux

I think this is what hooks one to gardening: it is the closest one can come to being present at creation.

Mistakes are the usual bridge between inexperience and wisdom.

An enlightened person raises the level of the consciousness of the entire community.

Children are born with imaginations in mint condition, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Then life corrects for grandiosity.

Falling silent should be cultivated, the way the woods fall silent in the snow. Messages you can’t send any other way can be heard.

Every house has its own private cup of sorrow. 

Writing is a deeply spiritual act that can have a profound effect upon the practitioner.

Writing is not only a reflection of what one thinks and feels but a rope one weaves with words that can lower you below or hoist you above the surface of your life, enabling you to go deeper or higher than you would otherwise go. What excites me about his metaphor is that is makes writing much more than a lifesaving venture.

There were times, in the beginning, when I used my journal as a wailing wall, but I learned not to immortalize the darkness. Rereading it was counterproductive. What I needed was a place in which to collect the light.

Everything we are given or learn or possess in any real sense - - the ability to play Beethoven sonata, write books, understand the principles of physics – is intended for one thing: to draw us closer to our selves.

To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart.