Accepting does not necessarily mean 'liking,' 'enjoying,' or 'condoning.' I can accept what is - and be determined to evolve from there. It is not acceptance but denial that leaves me stuck - Nathaniel Branden
All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again - Jeff Buckley
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident - Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher (1788-1860)
As I grow to understand life less and less I grow to love it more and more - Jules Renard
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now - Rainer Maria Rilke
Comedy is tragedy plus time - Anon
Do you remember the things you were worrying about a year ago? How did they work out? Didn't you waste a lot of fruitless energy on account of most of them? Didn't most of them turn out all right after all? - Dale Carnegie, 1888-1955
Every day you rearrange atoms and electrons into hope, love, fear and desire, without even trying. Stop looking outside yourself for magic - Jon Gomm
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - only recognise them - Edward Murrow
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense - Ralph Waldo Emerson
God grant me the serenity, to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference - Reinhold Niebuhr
He felt tempted to get angry when a radiation machine broke and patients had to wait in long lines. But he didn’t have enough time to waste it in anger, so instead he began to learn acceptance - from Chasing Daylight, Eugene O'Kelly
Human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind - William James
I have accepted fear as a part of life--specifically the fear of change ... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back - Erica Jong
I wish they would only take me as I am - Vincent Van Gogh
If you run after things, nothing will come to you. Let things run after you. The sea never sends an invitation to the rivers. That's why they run to the sea. The sea is content. It doesn't want anything. That's the secret in life - Swami Satchidananda
It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbours, or even our relations - Bertrand Russell
Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult - once we truly understand and accept it - then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters - M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled
Life is too short to be wasted in finding answers. Enjoy the questions - Paulo Coelho
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is - Albert Camus
My dog is usually pleased with what I do, because she is not infected with the concept of what I "should" be doing - Lonzo Idolswine
No amount of effort can save you from oblivion - Kurt Cobain's letters and journals http://j.mp/13pFMS8
No problem is so big that it can't be ignored - Homer Simpson
Nothing vast enters the lives of mortals without a curse - Sopochles
Our emotional life maps our incompleteness… do not despise your inner world - Martha Nussbaum http://j.mp/PrF1nA
Post coitum omne animal triste - Anonymous
Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself - Basho
Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself - Basho
Sometimes, it is an appropriate response to reality to go insane - Philip K. Dick
Striving to be better, oft we mar what's well - William Shakespeare
Suffering comes down to our steadfastly, and often unconsciously, holding to a core point of view that somehow just who we are, and just how life is, is fundamentally not okay and should be different. That is the lens through which we view existence, and we are usually blind to it, and thus, rather than changing the lens, we devote ourselves to perpetually rearranging the picture, via the various and exotic forms of our seeking - Eliezer Sobel, http://www.realitysandwich.com/suffering_seeking_and_sanity
The idea of progress is detrimental to the life of the spirit, because it encourages us to view our lives, not under the aspect of eternity, but as moments in a universal process of betterment. We do not, therefore, accept our lives for what they are, but instead consider them always for what they might someday become - John Gray
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition - Carl Sagan
There comes a time in each life like a point of fulcrum. At that time you must accept yourself. It is not anymore what you will become. It is what you are and always will be - John Fowles
There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yoursel - Henry David Thoreau
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self - Aldous Huxley
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness - Bertrand Russell
To succeed, it is necessary to accept the world as it is - and rise above it - Michael Korda, American author (1933- )
Understanding is not a piercing of the mystery, but an acceptance of it, a living blissfully with it - Henry Miller http://j.mp/Sj4OfI
We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate - C.G. Jung
We wax, we wane. It’s the dance of life - Robert Krulwich http://j.mp/10w75Wq
When one considers our world from a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent - Anonymous
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained - Mark Twain
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding - Kahlil Gibran http://bit.ly/dIhyH
The problem is not to find the answer, it is to face the answer - Terence McKenna
Everybody wants to save the Earth. Nobody wants to help mom do the dishes - P.J. O'Rourke
Anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really - Douglas Adams
Most people over the age of 50 need a therapist because the things you don’t work out when you’re younger come back to haunt you. You have to acknowledge them, realise them, forgive them and move on - Tom Ford
What I do is wrong, in spite of its acceptance by nearly 95 percent of the American population. I know it in my bones -- even if I cannot yet act on it. Someday it must stop. Somehow we need to become the sort of beings who can see what we are doing when we look head on, the sort of beings who don't weave dark, damning shrouds to sustain, with acceptance and celebration, the grossly unethical. Deeper, much deeper, we have an obligation to eat otherwise - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-comis/the-importance-of-our-evolution-beyond-killing-for-food_b_4518133.html
Worrying doesn't rob tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its strength - AJ Cronin
If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present - Lao Tzu
To reduce your worry, you must assume that what you fear may happen is certainly going to happen - Seneca
At 80, Leonard Cohen stands above his generation as a seer of lasting things, of values received and passed on - http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-september-14-moral-strength-leonard-cohen-norman-lebrecht-jewish-roots?page=0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C0%2C3
While emotionally intelligent people may have an uncommonly hard time not being lonely with a person, they have an unusually easy time finding company with people who are not in the room, the fancy term for which we call art. We have perhaps over-privileged certain standard notions of friendship. We may just have to accept that our best friends could have died 250 years ago – and be chatting to us via dabs of paint or within rhyming pentameters - The School of Life
How much vanity must be concealed—not too effectively at that—in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? - Christopher Hitchens, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself - Rumi
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not - Joan Didion http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/19/joan-didion-on-keeping-a-notebook/?utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twit
My death does not belong to me, it’s the others who would live my death - Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins
Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism - Jean-Paul Sartre
The realisation that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning - Albert Camus
My project has been completely different than my contemporaries. The minimum environment that would enable you to do your work with the least distraction and the most aesthetic deliverance came from a modest surrounding. A palace, a yacht would be an enormous distraction from the project. My fantasies went the other way. The way I lived on Mt. Baldy was perfect for me. I liked the communal life, I liked living in a little shack - Leonard Cohen
Humanity has already achieved, technically, the total success all Utopians ever dreamed of; our problems now are entirely due to wrong thinking. We are in the tragic-comic predicament of two crazed men dying of thirst, fighting over a teaspoon of water in the middle of a rainstorm. We cannot see the rainstorm because we are hypnotized by emergency-reflexes fixated on the teaspoon - Robert Anton Wilson
One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, "What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?” - Rachel Carson
When we observe how some people know how to manage their experiences – their insignificant, everyday experiences – so that they become an arable soil that bears fruit three times a year, while others – and how many there are! – are driven through surging waves of destiny, the most multifarious currents of the times and the nations, and yet always remain on top, bobbing like a cork, then we are in the end tempted to divide mankind into a minority (a minimality) of those who know how to make much of little, and a majority of those who know how to make little of much - Friedrich Nietzsche
I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you’d have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it’s a kind of blessing. It’s certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you’re going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. … It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, à la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears - Terence McKenna
There is not a man in the world, either here or elsewhere, who is so happy that he does not wish - again and again - to be dead rather than alive - from The Histories by Herodotus
Ever since I was a child, I have been acutely sensitive to the idea - in the way that other people seem to feel only after bereavement or some shocking unexpected event - that the human intellect is unable, finally, to make sense of the world: everything is contradiction and paradox, and no one really knows much for sure, however loudly they profess to the contrary - Tim Lott http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/tim-lott-zen-buddhism-alan-watts/
At a certain point, if you still have your marbles and are not faced with serious financial challenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. It’s a cliché, but it’s underestimated as an analgesic on all levels. Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most comforting activities, and the benefits of it are incalculable - Leonard Cohen
Man, who is the noblest part of the earth, melts so away as if he were a statue, not of earth, but of snow - John Donne
In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash - Marcus Aurelius
The confrontation with death lays bare the spiritual core of the human condition… Death acts like a hot wind to really strip away any pretense a person has, any sense of self, and really exposes our personal essence, our elemental core. What I call spiritual is our innate response to the at once awe-inspiring and terrifying fact of human life, our experience of life in this universe - Ira Bryock http://explore.noodle.com/post/107161596193/the-confrontation-with-death-lays-bare-the?utm_content=bufferf35ca&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Right now, someone is praying for what you have - Anonymous
If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing - Malcolm X
Dawn is the world’s reminder to let yesterday go...It’s strange: all available time is in truth limited. You can’t make there be twenty five hours in the day. Yet now it does feel like you are in possession of an extra slice of existence; it’s always been there, but you’ve only just found it. Time could be re-arranged: there are plenty of things that can contribute to leading a life more like the one we want. We could get new chances. Every day, it happens. And every day you have the chance to be again the person you are just now in the very early morning - The School of Life
I may become a poor man; I shall then be one among many. I may be exiled; I shall then regard myself as born in the place to which I shall be sent. They may put me in chains. What then? Am I free from bonds now? Behold this clogging burden of a body, to which nature has fettered me - Seneca
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained - Mark Twain
To be lost is as legitimate a part of your process as being found - Alex Ebert
Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves - Henry David Thoreau
In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you - Buddha
Practice obliviousness. Like mindfulness, except instead of acknowledging and accepting all your thoughts and emotions, you just ignore them and go about your day until something actually goes wrong - Emer O'Toole
Essentially, the view I have taken of other 'theories of personality', such as those of Marx, Christianity, Freud, Pavlov, Nietzsche and many others, is not that all, or all but one, are wrong, but on the contrary that all are correct. I was, and am still, unable to escape the implications of the fact that each of the theorists in question was, after all, concerned with one and the same human being. Instead of rejecting all such views, I found myself essentially rejecting none. This shift of emphasis is, I believe, crucial. The task is changed from one of selection to one of assembly - Stan Gooch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stan_Gooch
A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving - Lao Tzu
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional - Buddhist proverb
Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday - Dale Carnegie
Rejoice in the things that are present; all else is beyond thee - Michel de Montaigne
My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it . . . but love it - Friedrich Nietzsche
We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us – Joseph Campbell
I’d rather regret the things I’ve done than regret the things I haven’t done - Lucille Ball
Very little is needed to make a happy life - Marcus Aurelius
My heart is in a good place. Deep inside of me, I long for something that’ll never happen, but it no longer matters that it won’t - Roy Harper