Celeste > Celeste's Quotes

“Why not think that sometimes—just sometimes—you can overcome evil with silence? And let people hear their hatefulness in their own ears, without distraction. Maybe goodness is enough to expose evil for what it really is, sometimes.”
― Sylvain Reynard, Gabriel's Inferno

“Kindness is never wasted.”
― Sylvain Reynard, Gabriel's Inferno

“Sometimes goodness doesn't tell everything it knows. Sometimes goodness waits for the appropriate time and does the best it can with what it has.”
― Sylvain Reynard, Gabriel's Inferno

“Love is doing a kindness for someone else, not expecting to receive anything in return.”
― Sylvain Reynard, Gabriel's Rapture

“All believers are hypocrites because none of us live up to our beliefs.”
― Sylvain Reynard, Gabriel's Inferno

“Truth sets one free, but love casts out fear.”
― Sylvain Reynard, Gabriel's Rapture

“We need to see with our hearts and not our eyes.”
― Sylvain Reynard, Gabriel's Inferno

“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.”
― Mary Oliver

“Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”
― Mary Oliver

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.”
― Mary Oliver

“When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it is over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
― Mary Oliver

“You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.”
― Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

“The Poet With His Face In His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need anymore of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
― Mary Oliver

“Love yourself. Then forget it.
Then, love the world.”
― Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

“And that is just the point... how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That's the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. "Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”
― Mary Oliver

“A dog comes to you and lives with you in your own house, but you do not therefore own her, as you do not own the rain, or the trees, or the laws which pertain to them”
― Mary Oliver

“Compassion is the radicalism of our time.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“True change is within; leave the outside as it is.”
― Dalai Lama XIV, How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life

“Give the ones you love wings to fly, roots to come back and reasons to stay.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“An open heart is an open mind.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“Anger is the ultimate destroyer of your own peace of mind”
― The Dalai Lama

“Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“Human use, population, and technology have reached that certain stage where mother Earth no longer accepts our presence with silence.”
― The Dalai Lama

“The goal is not to be better than the other man, but your previous self.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“An eye for an eye....we are all blind”
― Dalai Lama XIV, How to See Yourself As You Really Are

“We must recognize that the suffering of one person or one nation is the suffering of humanity.”
― Dalai Lama

“Learn and obey the rules very well so you will know how to break them properly.”
― Dalai Lama