Colleen > Colleen's Quotes

“And a woman spoke, saying, "Tell us of Pain."
And he said: Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.
Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the
Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

“Universe consists of frozen light.”
― David Bohm

“The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“My thoughts turn to something I read once, something the Zen Buddhists believe. They say that an oak tree is brought into creation by two forces at the same time. Obviously, there is the acorn from which it all begins, the seed which holds all the promise and potential, which grows into a tree. Everybody can see that. But only a few can recognize that there is anther force operating here as well-the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity. In this respect, say the Zens, it is the oak tree that creates the very acorn from which it was born.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2

“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.”
― Basho

“The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.”
― Eden Phillpotts, A Shadow Passes

“Whether you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right.”
― Henry Ford

“Here is an amazement—once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.”
― Mary Oliver, West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems

“All eternity is in the moment.”
― Mary Oliver

“Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.”
― Mary Oliver, West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems

“We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say, “I am suffering,” than to say, “This landscape is ugly.”
― Simone Weil

“In struggling against anguish one never produces serenity; the struggle against anguish only produces new forms of anguish.

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― Simone Weil

“The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”
― Simone Weil

“Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“Stars and blossoming fruit trees: Utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.”
― Simone Weil

“The joy of learning is as indispensable in study as breathing is to running.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“Men owe us what they imagine they will give us. We must forgive them this debt.”
― Simone Weil

“The beauty of this world is Christ's tender smile coming to us through matter.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“God rewards the soul that focuses on Him with attention and love, and God rewards that soul by exercising a rigorous compulsion on it, mathematically proportional to this attention and love. We must abandon ourselves to this pressure, and run to the precise point where it leads, and not a single step further, not even in the direction of what is good. At the same time, we must continue to focus on God, with ever more love and attention, and in this way obtain an even greater compulsion — to become an object of a compulsion that possesses for itself a perpetually growing portion of the soul. Once God’s compulsion possesses the whole soul, one has reached the state of perfection. But no matter what degree we reach, we must not accomplish anything beyond what we are irresistibly pressured (compelled) to do, not even in the way of good.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“It is because the will has no power to bring about salvation that the idea of secular morality is an absurdity. What is called morality only depends on the will in what is, so to speak, its most muscular aspect. Religion on the contrary corresponds to desire, and it is desire that saves...To long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“The supernatural greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.”
― Simone Weil

“Creative attention means really giving our attention to what does not exist.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“The sum of the particular intentions of God is the universe itself.”
― Simone Weil