Birgit > Birgit's Quotes

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  • #1
    Alan W. Watts
    “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”
    Alan Watts

  • #2
    Alan W. Watts
    “We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
    Alan Watts

  • #3
    Alan W. Watts
    “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
    Alan Watts

  • #4
    Douglas Carlton Abrams
    “When you are grateful,' Brother Steindl-Rast explained, 'you are not fearful, and when you are not fearful, you are not violent. When you are grateful, you act out of a sense of enough and not out of a sense of scarcity, and you are willing to share. If you are grateful, you are enjoying the differences between people and respectful to all people. The grateful world is a world of joyful people. Grateful people are joyful people. A grateful world is a happy world.”
    Douglas Carlton Abrams, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

  • #5
    Virginia Woolf
    “I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
    Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being: A Collection of Autobiographical Writing

  • #6
    Victor Hugo
    “He loved books; books are cold but safe friends.”
    Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

  • #7
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “Let your beauty manifest itself
    without talking and calculation.​
    You are silent. It says for you: I am.
    And comes in meaning thousandfold​,
    comes at long last over everyone.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke

  • #8
    Wendell Berry
    “How to be a Poet

    (to remind myself)

    i

    Make a place to sit down.
    Sit down. Be quiet.
    You must depend upon
    affection, reading, knowledge,
    skill—more of each
    than you have—inspiration
    work, growing older, patience,
    for patience joins time
    to eternity…

    ii

    Breathe with unconditional breath
    the unconditioned air.
    Shun electric wire.
    Communicate slowly. Live
    a three-dimensional life;
    stay away from screens.
    Stay away from anything
    that obscures the place it is in.
    There are no unsacred places;
    there are only sacred places
    and desecrated places.

    iii

    Accept what comes from silence.
    Make the best you can of it.
    Of the little words that come
    out of the silence, like prayers
    prayed back to the one who prays,
    make a poem that does not disturb
    the silence from which it came.”
    Wendell Berry, Given

  • #9
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
    Rainer Maria Rilke

  • #10
    Charles M. Schulz
    “What's the good of living if you don't try a few things?”
    Charles M. Schulz

  • #11
    “A sincere attitude of gratitude is a beatitude for secured altitudes. Appreciate what you have been given and you will be promoted higher.”
    Israelmore Ayivor

  • #12
    Groucho Marx
    “Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.”
    Groucho Marx, The Essential Groucho: Writings For By And About Groucho Marx

  • #13
    Søren Kierkegaard
    “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
    Søren Kierkegaard

  • #14
    Mary Oliver
    “How I go to the wood

    Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single
    friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore
    unsuitable.

    I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds
    or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of
    praying, as you no doubt have yours.

    Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit
    on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,
    until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost
    unhearable sound of the roses singing.

    If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love
    you very much.”
    Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems



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