(. . .in no particular order. . .)

“Our results in life will always tells us what we are committed to in our depths.”
-Gay Hendricks

“Don’t let the Perfect be the enemy of the Good.”

“The flower that blooms in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all.”
-The Emperor, Disney’s Mulan

“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.” – Albus Dumbledore, The Prisoner of Azkaban (movie)

“No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.  The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness.  If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”

 

“The way mythology is integrated into life is by way of ritual. What has to be ritualized is essential to the life of the day. If one is to try to bring a mythological perspective into action in the modern world one has to understand the relationship of what is being done to the essentials of life, not to the superficialities of life. The essentials of life remain the same; they’ve been the same since the Paleolithic caves. Eating, reproduction, being a child, being mature, growing old. To realize that these things one is doing are not personally initiated acts but are functions of a biologically present world within yourself is to live in a very different way from the way one lives if one feels that one is the volitional initiator of everything going on.”

“Where there is kindness, there is goodness, and where there is goodness, there is magic.”

-Cinderella (2015

“For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary. All warmth derives from this love, all kindness and all humor.”
– Joseph Campbell

“The warrior’s approach is to say ‘yes’ to life: say ‘yea’ to it all. Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.”
– Joseph Campbell in a Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
– J.R.R Tolkien (The Hobbit)

“Never be cruel.
Never be cowardly.
Remember, hate is always foolish.
And, love is always wise.
Always try to be nice,
but never fail to be kind.
Laugh hard.
Run fast.”
– The Doctor (#12)

“Nobody important? Blimey, that’s amazing! Do you know, in 900 years of time and space I have never met anyone who wasn’t important before!”
– The Doctor (#11)

“Words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic; capable of both inflicting injury or remedying it.”
– Albus Dumbledore

“Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”
-Morticia Addams

The world is full of beautiful, wonderful people
who can reason, yet don’t.
I choose to be reasonable anyway.
The world is full of people who hate.
I choose to love anyway.
The world is full of people who discriminate and marginalize people.
I choose to be inclusive anyway.
The world gives me very little reason to hope.
I do not hope. But, I choose to care anyway.
-me

“The Wart did not know what Merlyn was talking about, but he liked him to talk. He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him, but the ones who went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas.
‘Shall we go out?’ asked Merlyn. ‘I think it is about time we began lessons.’”
– TH White, The Once and Future King

“You don’t ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don’t ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don’t ask what you mean. You enjoy it.”
– Joseph Campbell, The Collected Lectures of Joseph Campbell Series I, Volume 2, Lecture 3: “Confrontation of East and West in Religion”

“Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame.”
– Uncle Iroh

“Most of us need to be reminded that we are good, that we are lovable, that we belong. If we knew just how powerfully our thoughts, words, and actions affected the hearts of those around us, we’d reach out and join hands again and again. Our relationships have the potential to be a sacred refuge, a place of healing, and awakening. With each person we meet, we can learn to look behind the mask and see the one who longs to love and be loved. We can remember to say our blessings out loud.”
―Tara Brach, BREATHING OUT: OFFERING OUR CARE: Transforming suffering, from Parabola Magazine the Spring issue 2013

“When I was about sixteen years old, in prep school, and knew I was losing my childhood faith, I resolved that I would not quit the Catholic church until I knew why I was quitting, that is to say, until I had dissolved the symbols and knew what they referred to and meant. The whole thing wasn’t over until I was twenty-five years old and in Germany. I spent nine years working everything out, and then it just dropped off like a worn-out shirt. That’s the knowing thing. If you don’t know what the hell that symbol is saying to you, then it’s just there as a command, and there is going to be more and more of this hanging on. If you can’t use your mind in this rather complex field, I don’t know how you are going to work it out.

“You become mature when you become the authority for your own life.”

– Joseph Campbell, “A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living”

Everybody has a secret world inside them. . .no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing, worlds – not just one but a hundred of them. Thousands, maybe.
– Neil Gaiman (The Sandman vol. 5: A Game of You)

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all”
– William Blake

“Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That’s why it’s good to be able to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower.”
-Joseph Campbell

Loki: “It is said amongst my people that one should not provoke his enemies when he dwells with a fortress of glass.”
Wiccan: “We’re totally a different thing.”
Loki: “We say, “Don’t throw stones in glass houses,” too. I was just trying to Norse it up a bit.”
– Young Avengers

Simple things are always the most difficult. In actual life it requires the greatest art to be simple, and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem and the acid test of one’s whole outlook on life. That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy… all these are undoubtedly great virtues… But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all, the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders, yea, the very fiend himself-that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness, that I myself am the enemy who must be loved—what then?
—Carl Gustav Jung, “Psychotherapists or the Clergy,” from “The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.” (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Vol 11, pp. 339-41, Princeton University Press.

The goal is not to lost ten or twenty pounds; the goal is to live more fully, love more deeply. To be who you know you can be when you are not diminishing yourself by the obsession with food: that’s the best part.
– Geneen Roth

The greatest victory a man can win is over himself. – Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi

I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies
This is the dawning of the rest of our lives – Green Day

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. – Joseph Campbell

You don’t have to say all that! I have a montage in my seeing stone! – French and Saunders making fun of LOTR Saruman and the Palintir

Live! Live! Live! Life is a feast and most poor bastards are starving to death! – Mame Dennis

Heaven is right where you are standing. – Morihei Ueshiba

When you come to know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will see that it is you who are the children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty. – Jesus, Gospel of Thomas.

Jesus said, If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. – Gospel of Thomas.

There is more to life than increasing its speed. – Mohandas Gandhi

If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live. – Lin Yutang

If there is a coworker or a customer that brightens your day, someone to look forward to being around, cherish the moments. People move, people leave, and life is fleeting. – Stephen Kittredge Cunningham

Desires shape the arc of life’s trajectories, leading us to unimagined destinations. – John Donohue

The truly wise know that what we really need are those things that permit our true natures to emerge. We’re born with that knowledge, and then quickly forget it and sped a lifetime trying to remember it again. – John Donohue

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about, and that’s what these clues help us to find within ourselves …

Experience of life. The mind has to do with meaning. What’s the meaning of a flower? … There’s no meaning. What’s the meaning of the universe? What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there. That’s it. And your own meaning is that you’re there. We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.”

from Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, Episode 1