J.A. Gilmer

“To integrate contemplative practice into life requires more than becoming proficient in techniques of meditation. It entails the cultivation and refinement of a sensibility about the totality of your existence—from intimate moments of personal anguish to the endless suffering of the world. This sensibility encompasses a range of skills: mindfulness, curiosity, understanding, collectedness, compassion, equanimity, care.”
― Stephen Batchelor, The Art of Solitude

“The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to record numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“Seek for the depth of things: there irony never descends—and when you have thus brought it to the edge of greatness, test at the same time whether this mode of perception springs from a necessity of your being. For under the influence of serious things it will either fall away from you (if it is something non-essential), or else it will (if it belongs to you innately) with gathering strength become a serious tool and be ranked among the means by which you will have to form your art.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“So much depends not on how awkward destiny is, but rather on how openly it is embraced. This is what the “sheltering wall” of blessing can enable.”
― John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings