Other People's Thoughts

Quotes help point me in directions. sometimes directions i need to go in, sometimes they open doors for me. sometimes they simply reassure me that i am not alone. they put words to my thoughts, feelings and ponderings. here's a whole conglomeration.

We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek. To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.
—Terry Tempest Williams

… through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.
—Frederick Buechner

When [our secrets] are sad and hurtful secrets, like my father’s death, we can in a way honor the hurt by letting ourselves feel it as we never let ourselves feel it before, and then, having felt it, by laying it aside; we can start to take care of ourselves the way we take care of people we love.
—Frederick Buechner

It's like, at the end, there's this surprise quiz: Am I proud of me? I gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth what I paid?—Richard Bach

It is important to tell our secrets too because … it makes it easier for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own, and exchanges like that have a lot to do with what being a family is all about and what being human is all about.
—Frederick Buechner

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven? —Kahlil Gibran

Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.
—Charles Augustin Sainte–Beuve

We never know the wine we are becoming while we are being crushed like grapes.
—Henri Nouwen

The least livable life is the one without coherence—nothing connects, nothing means anything. Stories make connections. They allow us to see our past, our present, and our future as interrelated and purposeful…. The stories we value most reassure us that life is worth the pain, that meaning is not an illusion, and that others share our experience with us.
—Daniel Taylor, The Healing Power of Stories

Let your tears come. Let them water your soul. —Eileen Mayhew

We are healed of a suffering only by expressing it to the full. —Marcel Proust

Where there is ruin, there is hope for treasure. —Rumi

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.’ We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we subconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we’re liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. —Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles

I beg you... to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet