Simple Abundance Quotes

“recognize that one of the reasons Christmases past probably didn’t live up to your expectations is that you’ve tried to do too much, too perfectly. Look at that list. Choose to let only what you love best about the holidays remain. Cross out two more “musts.” Now there’s time for gazing out the window at gently falling snow, delighting in the sounds of bells and joyful music, savoring the sweet aromas of hot cider, roast turkey, and gingerbread, sipping hot chocolate and homemade eggnog, reading a holiday story each night at dusk, basking in a fire crackling on the hearth, and re-creating cherished customs that care for your soul as well as the souls of those you love.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“The English writer Jeanette Winterson describes our dilemma beautifully: “I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“It’s never too late to be what you might have been. —George Eliot (1819–1880)
Pen name of celebrated Victorian writer Mary Ann Evans”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“A writer’s voice is a mirror of her soul and as indelible as fingerprints, and it must be guarded like the treasure it is.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Autumn to winter, winter to spring, Spring into summer, summer into fall— So rolls the changing year, and so we change; Motion so swift, we know not that we move. —Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1826–1887)
Victorian English novelist and poet”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Cooking is one of the best ways for your Authentic Self to remind your conscious self that you are an artist. Like the union of canvas and pigment, cooking is alchemy, a work of Wholeness-in-progress.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Today, take the negative of your Cosmic Plan and let Love develop it so that you can begin living the life for which you were created. It’s time to move forward.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Repotting means accepting that the way is forward, not back. It means realizing that we won’t again fit into our old shells. But that’s not failure. That’s living. —Heather Cochran
American novelist and television producer”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Gardening is an instrument of grace. —May Sarton (1912–1995)
American poet, novelist, and memoirist”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“For, as Frances Hodgson Burnett discovered, and we can, too, “When you have a Garden, you have a Future and when you have a Future, you are Alive.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“The kitchen is about the re-creation of childhood the way you wanted it to be, keeping all that was wonderful in your own early years, while weeding out those things that caused pain. We remember the hubbub of women, the warm sweets and hovering smells, the unction of food and love, the wrapping hug of the wainscoting of counters and ovens around the walls, the inkling that one might always find a mother there,”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Outside, winter’s darkness closes in. Inside, you have found your own Light.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings. Now, think.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“First, we have to believe, and then we believe. —G. C. Lichtenberg (1742–1799)
German physicist and Anglophile”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Blessed Mother Courage”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“So be of good cheer. Be not frazzled”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“The Holy Grail is our authenticity. It’s glimpsed hidden among what is familiar to us—home”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Today”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Which would you choose? The blessing we’ll meditate on today is health. We can’t buy good health”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Money is going to have to buy a lot in the next few weeks”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“You might be approaching this Thanksgiving with dread for the future and sorrow for what is happening now. When deep discouragement comes”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Above all, let your friends know how much you love them. Tell them frequently how much you treasure the gift of their friendship. Sadly, significant others come and go. Children grow up. Parents die. Siblings are separated by distance. But our friends are the continuous threads that help hold our lives together. Cherish your friends, not only in thought but in action. “Friends are people who help you be more yourself,” Merle Shain reminds us, “more the person you are intended to be.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. —Anaïs Nin (1903–1977)
French-American novelist, poet, and diarist”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Becoming aware of our emotional weather patterns is essential if we want to remain sane, functioning, and well-loved members of the human race.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Dreams pass into the reality of action,” Anaïs Nin reassures us.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. —Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
German Nobel Prize–winning theoretical physicist”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“These are the days to be grateful for the harvest of the heart, however humble it might be, and to prepare for the coming of the year’s closure.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Today I wish for you, as I wish for myself, that when our authentic adventure comes to a close, we can also be remembered as being by Love possessed.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“Just as words can hurt, words can heal.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life

“But wrong choices should never be confused with bad choices. Bad choices—and we all have made them—often happen when we embark on sinuous stretches of self-destruction, usually with a smile.”
― Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: 365 Days to a Balanced and Joyful Life