Andrew > Andrew's Quotes

“I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and i have been circling for a thousand years. And I still dont know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rainer Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours: A New Translation with Commentary (Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture)

“If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again...

to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready; it goes on because it’s 11:30.”
― Lorne Michaels

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, BAUDELAIRE - the Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“In the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz

“The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.”
― Henry Green

“You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters."

“Beautiful and full of monsters?"

“All the best stories are.”
― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.”
― Albert Einstein

“These woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
― Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

“You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest? … The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.”
― David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity

“Stop trying to change reality by eliminating complexity.”
― David Whyte

“work and life are not separate things and therefore cannot be balanced against each other except to create further trouble.”
― David Whyte, The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

“Work among all its abstracts, is actually intimacy, the place where the self meets the world.”
― David Whyte, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
― Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“... to be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others...”
― David Whyte

“THE JOURNEY

Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again

Painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.

Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.

Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that

first, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.

Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out

someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving.
Even as the light fades quickly now,
you are arriving.”
― David Whyte

“All powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy. We must recognize them both, but invest our gifts on the side of creation.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Balance is not a passive resting place—it takes work, balancing the giving and the taking, the raking out and the putting in.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“That, I think, is the power of ceremony. It marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine; the coffee to a prayer.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“I remember the words of Bill Tall Bull, a Cheyenne elder. As a young person, I spoke to him with a heavy heart, lamenting that I had no native language with which to speak to the plants and the places that I love. “They love to hear the old language,” he said, “it’s true.” “But,” he said, with fingers on his lips, “You don’t have to speak it here.” “If you speak it here,” he said, patting his chest, “They will hear you.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Suppression of our natural responses to disaster is part of the disease of our time.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“leadership is rooted not in power and authority, but in service and wisdom”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“The marvel of a basket is in its transformation, its journey from wholeness as a living plant to fragmented strands and back to wholeness again as a basket. A basket knows the dual powers of destruction and creation that shape the world. Strands once separated are rewoven into a new whole. The journey of a basket is also the journey of a people.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Wewene, I say to myself: in a good time, in a good way. There are no shortcuts. It must unfold in the right way, when all the elements are present, mind and body harnessed in unison. When all the tools have been properly made and all the parts united in purpose, it is so easy. But if they’re not, it will be futile. Until there is balance and perfect reciprocity between the forces, you can try and fail and try and fail again. I know. And yet, despite the need, you must swallow your sense of urgency, calm your breathing so that the energy goes not to frustration, but to fire.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

“Only by sacrificing what we have can we know what we have. Real sacrifice is made with the same definiteness and lack of bargaining that is involved in throwing something away We can do this only if we are forced by a greater power in us - a power stronger than the ego - that gives us the necessary strength. We experience this power as an inner imperative that tells us that we "must." In Jungian psychology we understand that as a message from the Self, the regulating center of the pysche. The sacrificer and what is sacrificed are one and the same: it is always the Self.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, Animus and Anima in Fairy Tales

“It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.” --”
― Marie-Louise von Franz

“People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable clients. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth so much attention, and so on. There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.”
― Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales