Quotes for Healing, Meaning & Renewal
A curated archive of words that steady the breath, widen the heart, and return you to yourself. Organized into seven themes so you can find exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.
01
Balance & Presence
Blue sky and fine weather can abruptly change to tremulous lightning and rolling thunder. Violent winds and angry rains can abruptly change to serene moonlight in a clear sky. Has the universe ever ceased its working? Has the universe ever been impeded? Human nature is also like this.
The world acquires value only through its extremes and endures only through moderation; extremists make the world great, the moderates give it stability.
Balance isn’t either/or; it’s and.
We must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.
You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.
If you want to change the world, you must begin with yourself by changing the way you see the world.
Every human thought and every human action is based in either love or fear. There is no other human motivation.
I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer, and that this is true for every human being.
The present moment is the only moment available to us, and it is the door to all other moments.
We can only open to the fullness of this moment when we soften our resistance to what is.
Wisdom is knowing I am nothing. Love is knowing I am everything. Between the two, my life moves.
We carry our homes within us, which enables us to fly.
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
We all carry within us supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy. It is never thwarted, and cannot be destroyed.
Sometimes the most spiritual thing you can do is slow your exhale.
You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.
02
Love, Connection & Courage
You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
You have been criticizing yourself for years, and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.
We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.
Loving yourself does not mean being self-absorbed. It means welcoming yourself as the most honored guest in your own heart.
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
Let the good in me connect with the good in others, until all the world is transformed through the compelling power of love.
A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror.
Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair, but manifestations of strength and resolution.
A dream is the bearer of a new possibility, the enlarged horizon, the great hope.
Dreams are an art form created by the soul for our own edification. We must read them poetically, as we would any kind of art.
Love what you do and do what you love. Imagination should be the center of your life.
Let yourself be silently drawn by the pull of what you really love.
Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.
Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it.
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
Leaving what feels secure and following the beckoning of our hearts doesn’t always end as we expect or hope. We may even fail. But here’s the payoff: it can also be amazing and wonderful and immensely satisfying.
It’s not enough to wish, dream, hope. Even children know this. We must set sail into the sea of uncertainty. We must meet fear face-to-face. We must take our dreams as maps for a greater journey. Dreams, to come true, need a good story. So go live one.
So many people will tell you “no”, and you need to find something you believe in so hard that you just smile and tell them “watch me”. Learn to take rejection as motivation to prove people wrong. Be unstoppable. Refuse to give up, no matter what. It’s the best skill you can ever learn.
Get mocked at for as much as you can, fail as much as you can, but don’t quit. Let every mockery, every failure, be a source of inspiration for you to reach greatness, and that greatness will silence your critics.
To anyone that ever told you you’re no good, they’re no better.
If you’re upset that I’m just being myself, I’m going to be myself more.
One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul.
Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.
Courage is the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, and injustice, while affirming inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good.
The character like clear sky and broad daylight is formed in dark rooms under leaky roofs and in treading on thin ice.
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain. I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it. I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human. I want to know if you can see beauty even when it’s not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.
03
Healing, Health & Becoming
When health is absent, wisdom cannot reveal itself, art cannot manifest, strength cannot fight, wealth is useless, and intelligence cannot be applied.
Reverence for life is more than solicitude or sensitivity for life. It is a sense of the whole, a capacity for inspired response, a respect for the intricate universe of individual life.
The capacity to care is what gives life its deepest significance.
Gratitude enables us to receive and to return the goodness we have been given. It helps us be fully human.
Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of overcoming it.
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
If the hurt comes, so will the healing.
No matter how dark the moment, love and hope are always possible.
In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that… In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
Often the real test of courage is not to die, but to live.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.
Then the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.
You cannot discover new lands without losing sight of the shore for a very long time.
Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.’
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.
If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
You must do the thing you think you cannot do.
When in doubt, do the courageous thing.
No chance, destiny, or fate can hinder the firm resolve of a determined soul.
Press on: Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of uneducated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
If we all did the things we are capable of, we would literally astound ourselves.
Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.
Always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.
We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.
Risk brings its own rewards: the exhilaration of breaking through, of getting to the other side, the relief of a conflict healed, the clarity when a paradox dissolves. Whoever teaches us this is our agent of liberation. Eventually we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom. Finally, we must take charge of the journey, urging ourselves past our own reluctance, misgiving, and confusion to freedom.
Even in the midst of devastation, something within us always points the way to freedom.
Healing begins by embracing not knowing, so that in the darkness a flicker of light can be seen.
The body remembers how to open, even after years of closing.
You are allowed to be both a masterpiece and a work in progress, simultaneously.
Where the wound is, that is where the gift is.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. 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.
Healing yourself is connected with healing others.
At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer.
The function of freedom is to free someone else.
Encouraging someone to be entirely themselves is the loudest way to love them.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination –
announcing your place
in the family of things.
04
Meaning, Purpose & Creativity
Beauty is not caused. It is.
Only when one is connected to one’s own core is one connected to others.
Curiosity is the key to creativity.
Creative choice is your birthright.
In order to create, there must be a dynamic force. What force is greater than love?
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
The richest source of creation is feeling, followed by a vision of its meaning.
Creating is a skill that can be learned and developed. Like any skill, you learned by practice and hands-on experience. You can learn to create by creating.
Life is raw material. We are artisans. We can sculpt our existence into something beautiful or debase it into ugliness. It’s in our hands.
The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
I like to see art as humanity’s capacity to increase awe in the universe.
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy translated through you into action; because there is only one you, this expression is unique.
Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.
We either live with intention or exist by default.
The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly for newer and richer experience.
What is the world, if not the accumulation of all our small tendernesses?
The power is in you. The answer is in you. And you are the answer to all your searches. It’s never outside.
In times of crisis, people reach for meaning. Meaning is strength. Our survival may depend on our seeking and finding it.
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.
We are all connected; to each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe, atomically.
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
All that you are, you are right now. All that you can be begins in this moment. Now is a great place to be. For when you live it fully, with love, with gratitude, with purpose, anything is possible.
Tell me, what is it your plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
05
Kindness, Humanity & Goodness
Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; the third is to be kind.
What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?
The capacity to care is what gives life its deepest significance.
May you never doubt the gifts you bring to the circles of the world.
Every day I choose the small decencies that survived inside me.
Do your little bit of good where you are; those little bits of good put together overwhelm the world.
If we all do one random act of kindness daily, we just might set the world in the right direction.
Some days we simply rise by lifting someone else’s spirit.
If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, I shall not live in vain.
In the end, kindness is simply love made smaller, so it can fit into the cracks.
What is to give light must endure burning.
It is not only our hearts that are tested, but our capacity to remain kind while they break.
Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, not to fix, but to be present.
After all the noise, the soul still whispers: be kind.
Grace is never earned. And yet we carry it, even when the world tried to take it from us.
My softness was not the wound. It was the way I survived it.
Each of us is more than the worst thing we have survived.
To be gentle in a world that has been cruel is not weakness. It is a revolutionary choice.
Do not choose the world over yourself again.
Being compassionate does not mean giving yourself away.
The task is not to heal others by losing yourself, but to heal yourself in a way that makes the world safer for others, too.
Your task is to build a shelter strong enough to hold another person’s hope.
We cannot keep sacred the miracle of existence and hold sacrosanct the capacity to destroy it.
We’re all just walking each other home.
06
Light, Beauty & Awareness
The appearance of things changes according to the emotions; and thus we see magic and beauty in them, while the magic and beauty are really in ourselves.
Beauty is that in the presence of which we feel more alive.
Whenever you are sincerely pleased, you are nourished.
There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all
In difficult times, carry something beautiful in your heart.
Forever is composed of nows.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Put your heart, mind, intellect, and soul even into your smallest act.
The wound is the place where the light enters you.
When the heart breaks open, a new light is born.
As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
There is always light. If only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.
I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astounding light of your own being.
You are the universe in ecstatic motion.
This love is actually part of you; it is always flowing through you. It’s like the subatomic texture of the universe, the dark matter that connects everything. When you tune in to that flow, you will feel it in your own heart—not your physical heart or your emotional heart, but your spiritual heart, the place you point to in your chest when you say, “I am.”
In the vessel of your body, you yourself are the world tree, deep roots in the Earth and a crown of stars. Your essence bridges dimensions.
07
Communication & Expression
Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.
Your silence will not protect you.
The greatest gift we can offer another is our presence.
To listen is to let the other person change you.
Listening is an act of hospitality.
Every act of communication is a miracle of translation.
Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
I write as if to save somebody’s life. Probably my own.
We write to taste life twice: in the moment and in retrospect.
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different worlds from me.
Life is. I am. Anything might happen. And I believe I may invest my life with meaning. The uncertainty is a blessing in disguise. If I were absolutely certain about all things, I would spend my life in anxious misery, fearful of losing my way. But since everything and anything are always possible, the miraculous is always nearby and shall never, ever cease.
Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.
All real living is meeting.
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
