A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.
A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward; to reset oneself by an inner compass.
A house that does not have one warm, comfy chair in it is soulless.
Absence becomes the greatest Presence.
At any moment solitude may put on the face of loneliness.
Death does frame a person and somehow it is the good that stays.
Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.
Do we always make our freedom out of someone else's bondage?
Don't forget that compared to a grownup person every baby is a genius. Think of the capacity to learn! The freshness, the temperament, the will of a baby a few months old!
Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
Excellence costs a great deal.
Fire is a good companion for the mind...
Flowers and plants are silent presences. They nourish every sense except the ear.
Gardening is an instrument of grace.
How slowly one comes to understand anything!
In the country of pain we are each alone.
In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival.
It feels a long way up and down from zero.
It is sometimes the most fragile things that have the power to endure and become sources of strength.
Joy, happiness... we do not question. They are beyond question, maybe. A matter of being. But pain forces us to think, and to make connections... to discover what has been happening to cause it. And, curiously enough, pain draws us to other human beings in a significant way, whereas joy or happiness to some extent, isolates.
Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
Lunches are just not good. They take the heart out of the day and the spaciousness from the morning's work.
Most people have to talk so they won't hear.
Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent. As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.
One does not 'find oneself' by pursuing one's self, but on the contrary by pursuing something else and learning through discipline or routine. . . who one is and wants to be.
One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
One of the good elements of old age is that we no longer have to prove anything, to ourselves or to anyone else. We are what we are.
Pain can make a whole winter bright, like fever, force us to live deep and hard.
People are always talking about the joys of youth- but, oh, how youth can suffer!
People who cannot feel punish those who do.
Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.
Read between the lines.Then meet me in the silence if you can.
Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation.
Routine is not a prison, but the way to freedom from time.
Self-respect is nothing to hide behind. When you need it most it isn't there.
Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.
Solitude is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience.
Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
The hardest thing we are asked to do in this world is to remain aware of suffering, suffering about which we can do nothing.
The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
The moral dilemma is to make peace with the unacceptable.
The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.
The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
The trouble is, old age is not interesting until one gets there. It's a foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged.
There is a proper balance between not asking enough of oneself and asking or expecting too much.
Time unbounded is hard to handle.
True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.
True power is given to the vulnerable.
Unless the gentle inherit the earth,
There will be no earth.
There will be no earth.
We cannot afford not to fight for growth and understanding, even when it is painful, as it is bound to be.
We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.
We only keep what we lose.
What frightens me about America today is that in the large majority there is no active sense of the value of the individual: few citizens feel that they are the Republic, responsible for what happens. And when the individual in a democracy ceases to feel his importance, then there is grave danger that he will give over his freedom, if not to a Fascist State, then to the advertising men or Publicity Agents or to the newspaper he happens to read.
What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
When it comes to the important things, one is always alone...
When we admit our vulnerability, we include others. If we deny it, we shut them out.
When you change the way you look at a thing, the thing itself changes...
Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness?
Without anxiety life would have very little savor.
Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, As without light, nothing flowers.
Women's work is always toward wholeness.
Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child's mind, they are not easily eradicated.
Found 62 occurence(s) in 52,450 quotation(s).
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