Quotes to inspire and reflect

We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place.

There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know.

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination.

We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.

To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Just as true humor is laughter at oneself, true humanity is Knowledge of oneself..

But my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

A man does not make his destiny: he accepts it or denies it.

You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.

I am what happens between the maternity ward and the Crematorium.

...[W]ords can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences.

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.

Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled wandering, for there is no other way of discovering surprises and marvels, which, as I see it, is the only good reason for not staying at home.

What is an anarchist? One who, choosing, accepts the responsibility of choice.

What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me

If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you'll come to understand that you're connected with everything.

A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt.

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

The world is filled with love-play, from animal lust to sublime compassion.

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.

You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.

“Truth is a matter of the imagination.

The stories are also used as testing devices, to gauge mental state by reaction, as well as blueprints for further development.

One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt.

Life is like music for its own sake. We are living in an eternal now, and when we listen to music we are not listening to the past, we are not listening to the future, we are listening to an expanded present.

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

Those who travel outward seek completeness in things; those who gaze inward find sufficiency in themselves.

I do not care what comes after; I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning

Problems that remain persistently insoluble should always be suspected as questions asked in the wrong way.

When you know that illusion and transformation are no different from birth and death, then you may learn magic

Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.

I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

Complete people gaze into the blue sky above, plunge into the center of the earth below, and run freely in the eight directions without even a change of mood.

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

The ancient saying that force outdoes inferiors while gentility outdoes superiors.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.