“When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it”
– A. A. Milne
“Only by investing and speaking your vision with passion can the truth, one way or another, finally penetrate the reluctance of the world.”
– Søren Kierkegaard
“Family is not family. “Family” is bullshit. It’s an excuse for people to enable each other. Everyone has issues in their family that they cover up with flimsy transparent band-aids.”
– James Altucher
“Our doubts are our traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.”
– Shakespeare
“What I do is an expression and not a definition of me.”
– Sundeep Sidhu
“Friendship is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die…
In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves…
The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence…
But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
– David Whyte
“I’m good friends with 25 letters of the alphabet. I don’t know Y.”
– Unknown
“Not what we have but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.”
– Epicurus
‘And still, after all this time, the Sun has never said to the Earth, “You owe me.” Look what happens with love like that. It lights up the sky.’
– Rumi
“Actions speak louder than words. We can apologize over and over, but if our actions don’t change, the words become meaningless.”
– Unknown
”Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”
– Abraham Lincoln
“The worst walls are never the ones you find in your way. The worst walls are the ones you put there – you build yourself.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.”
– Marcus Aurelius
“Congratulations on your ability to create drama out of absolutely nothing.”
– Very Grumpy Cat
“It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.”
– Milan Kundera