"Everything you see has its roots in the unseen world.
The forms may change, yet the essence remains the same.
Every wonderful sight will vanish, every sweet word will fade,
But do not be disheartened,
The source they come from is eternal, growing,
Branching out, giving new life and new joy.
Why do you weep?
The source is within you
And this whole world is springing up from it."

Rumi

"The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious of the rose."

Khalil Gibran

"Do not insist that the universe comply with your understanding of it."
Gary Zukav

"The supreme experience is staggering, enrapturing, blissful, and inspiring, but at the same time inexplicable and ungraspable by the intellect. The experience is supremely illuminating because it reveals the grandeur, sublimity and the eternal nature of the soul, but beyond that -- what? All that is beyond lies out of the reach of the intellect, and hence cannot be translated into any language devised by the mind."
Gopi Krishna

"I have learnt silence from the talkative,
toleration from the intolerant,
and kindness from the unkind;
yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers."

Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

"For behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal, or a window opening on something more than itself."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“The machine does not isolate us from the great problems of nature but plunges us more deeply into them”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Angel, some beauties there! Reminds me of one of my fave Antoine quotes.....

“How could there be any question of acquiring or possessing, when the one thing needful for a man is to become -- to be at last, and to die in the fullness of his being.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Heaven is in everything:
follow the light,
hide in the cloudiness and begin in what is.
Do this and your understanding will be like not understanding and your wisdom will be like not being wise.
By not being wise you will become wise later."

Chuang Tzu

Thanks Chuang I LOVE it!!!

"When you find the way others will find you.
Passing by on the road they will be drawn to your door.
The way that cannot be heard will be echoed in your voice.
The way that cannot be seen will be reflected in your eyes."

Lao Tzu

"Looking ahead the way is long,
Looking back it is short.
If you don't go within, you go without.
The beauty of the Way is that there is no Way"

Lao Tzu

In his youth Kabir was approached by two disciples who wanted intellectual guidance along the mystic path. The master responded simply;

"Path presupposes distance;
If He be near, no path needest thou at all.
Verily it maketh me smile
To hear of a fish in water athirst!"

Kabir

Quoted in Autobiography of a Yogi
(Paramahansa Yogananda)

Albert Schweitzer
Truth has not special time of its own. Its hour is now—always and indeed then most truly when it seems unsuitable to actual circumstances.

Dogen
If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?

Martin Luther King
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

Winston Churchill
Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.

"Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein."
H. Jackson Brown

A deeply touching card was gifted to me today with this quote...

"This is love: to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.
First to let go of life.
Finally, to take a step without feet." - Rumi

Thank you for meeting me beyond the depths and reflecting the light of my soul for me to see!
Trin
x

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere it's setting, and cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come.
From God, who is our home."

William Wordsworth

Is it possible for the rose to say,
'I will give my fragrance to the good people who smell me, but I will withhold it from the bad?'
Or is it possible for the lamp to say,
'I will give my light to the good people in this room, but I will withhold it from the evil people'?
Or can a tree say, 'I'll give my shade to the good people who rest under me, but I will withhold it from the bad'?
These are images of what love is about.

Anthony De Mello, 1931-1987

"The Great Way is not difficult
For those who have no preferences.
When love and hate are both absent
everything becomes clearer and undisguised
Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart."

This is the first verse of Hsin hsin Ming, on the challenge to acquire the bodhi(awakened mind)...

"The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp."
John Berry, Flight of White Crows

"The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers."
Thich Nhat Hanh

"When will you learn to expect what you can't imagine to happen?"

"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."
Anais Nin

"We must not be attached to a view or a doctrine,
even a Buddhist one. . .
The Buddha said that if in a certain moment or place you adopt something as the absolute truth,
and you attach to that,
then you will no longer have any chance to reach the truth.
Even when the truth comes and knocks on your door,
and asks you to open the door, you won't recognize it.
So you must not be too attached to dogma - to what you believe, and to what you perceive."

Thich Nhat Hanh

"Light gives of itself freely, filling all available space.
It does not seek anything in return;
it asks not whether you are friend or foe.
It gives of itself and is not thereby diminished."

Michael Strassfeld

"Fame or integrity: which is more important?
Money or happiness: which is more valuable?
Success or failure: which is more destructive?...
If you look to others for fulfillment, you will never truly be fulfilled.
If your happiness depends on money, you will never be happy with yourself.
Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are.
When you realize there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you."

Lao Tzu (c.604 - 531 B.C.)
Tao Te Ching

"Let silence take you to the core of life.
All of your talk is worthless when
compared to one whisper from the Beloved."

Rumi

“Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”

Kahlil Gibran

"The sun, with all those plants revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."

Galileo

"It is by going down into the abyss
that we recover the treasures of life.
Where you stumble,
there lies your treasure."

"The goal of life
is to make your heartbeat
match the beat of the universe,
to match your nature with Nature."

"We must be willing to get rid of
the life we've planned,
so as to have the life that is waiting for us.
The old skin has to be shed
before the new one can come."

"If you can see your path laid out
in front of you step by step,
you know it's not your path.
Your own path you make with every step you take.
That's why it's your path."

"Find a place (inside) where there's joy,
and the joy will burn out the pain."

"I don't think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that still remains."
Anne Frank

"Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow."
Aesop

"Should you really open your eyes and see,
you would behold your image in all images.
And should you open your ears and listen,
you would hear your own voice in all voices."

Kahlil Gibran

Peace is to be found only within,
and unless one finds it there he will never find it at all.
Peace lies not in the external world.
It lies within one's own soul.

Ralph W. Trine

"My actions are my only true belongings.
I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.
My actions are the ground upon which I stand."
Thich Nhat Hanh

"The appearance of things change according to the emotions, and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.
Kahlil Gibran

"Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow.
Don't walk behind me, I may not lead.
Just walk beside me and be my friend".

"There are no accidents... there is only some purpose that we haven't yet understood."
Deepak Chopra

"In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.

In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped."

Lao Tzu

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”

“You can never step into the same river twice; for new waters are always flowing..........”

“There is nothing permanent except change.”

Heraclitus of Ephesus

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature"
--Einstein

"Each of us is put here in this time and this place to personally decide the future of humankind. Did you think you were put here for something less?"
--Chief Arvol Looking Horse

"One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star."
--Nietzsche

"This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed."
--D.H. Lawrence

Our chakras embody the spiritual & sensual universe, deny them neither.

yogamanity

“The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.”
Rumi

"All men and all women are connected by an energy which many people call love, but which is, in fact, the raw material from which the universe was built. This energy can't be manipulated, it leads us gently forwards, it contains all we have to learn in this life. It we try to make it go in the direction we want, we end up desperate, frustrated, disillusioned, because that energy is free and wild.

We could spend the rest of our life saying that we love such a person or thing, when the truth is that we are merely suffering because, instead of accepting love's strength, we are trying to diminish it so that it fits the world in which we imagine we live."
Paulo Coelho

"Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter."

John Muir - Letter to wife Louie, July 1888, Life and Letters of John Muir 1924.

"We all flow from one fountain Soul. All are expressions of one Love. God does not appear, and flow out, only from narrow chinks and round bored wells here and there in favored races and places, but He flows in grand undivided currents, shoreless and boundless over creeds and forms and all kinds of civilizations and peoples and beasts, saturating all and fountainizing all."

John Muir - June 9, 1872 letter to Miss Catharine Merrill, from New Sentinel Hotel, Yosemite Valley, in Badè's Life and Letters of John Muir.

"The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.

Thich Nhat Hanh

'Your mind must become one, do not try to understand with your ears but with your heart. Indeed, not with your heart but with your soul."

Chuang Tzu

"Fresh beauty opens one's eyes wherever it is really seen, but the very abundance and completeness of the common beauty that besets our steps prevents its being absorbed and appreciated. It is a good thing, therefore, to make short excursions now and then to the bottom of the sea among dulse and coral, or up among the clouds on mountain-tops, or in balloons, or even to creep like worms into dark holes and caverns underground, not only to learn something of what is going on in those out-of-the-way places, but to see better what the sun sees on our return to common everyday beauty."

John Muir

"Our doubts are traitors
and make us lose the good we often might win
by fearing to attempt."
William Shakespeare

Thank you for all the inspiring contributions here...

I've started a new spiritual quote thread here to continue this one:

http://www.openhandweb.org/profound_spiritual_quotes_4