Julie Johnson > Julie's Quotes

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“BAD PEOPLE
A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks—what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams—that’s the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, “You.”
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn’t move on its own. Sometimes it takes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless god—who refuses to let people
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge—can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.”
― Robert Bly, Morning Poems: A Sensational Daily Poetry Collection on Waking, Mourning, and the Mystery of Creation

“Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“It is not the length of life, but the depth.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals Of Ralph Waldo Emerson, With Annotations - 1841-1844

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Make the most of yourself....for that is all there is of you.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.”
― Frank Lloyd Wright

“We can’t change the past. But we will keep repeating it if we continue to live by the beliefs and agreements set in response to past events.”
― Julie Tallard Johnson, Wheel of Initiation: Practices for Releasing Your Inner Light

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
― James Baldwin

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“It’s all right if you grow your wings on the way down.”
― Robert Bly, My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy: Poems – Intimate Ghazals of Startling Beauty, Wildness, and Astounding Energy

“We must be our own before we can be another's.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Each of us is always blessed with third options, with choices. If there is one thing the scientific approach to living our life points to is – there is no end to our abilities to discover and make meaning. There are no “absolutes,” or end point in our explorations and possibilities. The blessing comes in participating in our surroundings and consciously making meaning through our perceptions and choices. Everything is taken in as filled with blessing because no experience is exempt. We are always making meaning through our choices, but now, we do so consciously, deliberately and creatively while tapping into the universes power to manifest. We are like gardeners (always) in the garden of Eden – with the most basic choices sometimes awakening us to our true nature – do I eat the apple? Every decision as Joseph Campbell says, “is a destiny decision.”
― Julie Tallard Johnson, The Zero Point Agreement: How to Be Who You Already Are

“Sometimes our blessings are limited. There is a tangible poverty that surrounds us. We are not offered an obvious tapestry of choices. Still, even when the choices seem bleak between a tiger’s teeth or deadly fall -- every moment offers up some third options (the true potentiality within the situation), and it is in our choices (conscious or not) that a future harvest depends.”
― Julie Tallard Johnson, The Zero Point Agreement: How to Be Who You Already Are

“The question is how our own meanings are related to those of the universe as a whole. We could say that our action toward the whole universe is a result of what it means to be us.”
― David Bohm, The Essential David Bohm

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
― Buddha Siddhartha Guatama Shakyamuni

“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.”
― Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

“Our deepest calling is to grow into our own authentic self-hood, whether or not it conforms to some image of who we ought to be. As we do so, we will not only find the joy that every human being seeks--we will also find our path of authentic service in the world.”
― Parker Palmer

“People are "punished" or "rewarded" not for what they have done but for what they have become, and what we intentionally do is what makes us what we are.”
― David R. Loy, Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes for a Buddhist Revolution

“There’s nothing complicated or expensive about living purposefully and meaningfully. And we don’t have to travel to some exotic place to “find ourselves,” or to make a difference. The most effective practices that afford us the most happiness and meaning are done within the context of our daily lives. This is the premise of all my work – bringing our ideas and practices into our daily life. The place we make a real difference is within our own personal lives.”
― Julie Tallard Johnson, The Zero Point Agreement: How to Be Who You Already Are

“This spiritual and creative journey is about this dance of self, a self that must find its unique voice and then bring this voice back to the world. Spiritually it is about living our principles with those who share this type of path and with those who don’t.

It’s living life from within, using the six perfections or our principles as guiding posts, as pointers but never absolutes. In our creative and spiritual life there are no absolutes because we are discovering ourselves, and our surroundings in a constantly changing world.”
― Julie Tallard Johnson, The Zero Point Agreement: How to Be Who You Already Are

“What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.”
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

“Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.”
― Noam Chomsky