"If you’re trying to get through your work as quickly as you can, then maybe you should see if you can find a different line of work."

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand."

"Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow."

"Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts — be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential.

Absorb into yourself the world’s full richness and goodness and fun and genius, so that when someone tells you it’s not worth fighting for, you will stick up for it, protect it, run to its defence, because it is your world they’re talking about, then watch that world continue to pour itself into you in gratitude. A little smart vampire full of raging love, amazed by the world."

"The great hoax which we are perpetuating every day of our lives is that we are making life easier, more comfortable, more enjoyable, more profitable. We are doing just the contrary. We are making life stale, flat and unprofitable every day in every way.

One ugly word covers it all: waste. Our thoughts, our energies, our very lives are being used up to create what is unwise, unnecessary, unhealthy.

The stupendous activity which goes on in forest, field, mine and factory never adds up to happiness, contentment, peace of mind, or long life for those engaged in it. Very, very few Americans enjoy the work they are obliged to perform day in and day out. Most of them look upon their work as stultifying and degrading. Few ever find a way out.

The vast majority are condemned, just as much as any slave, any convict, any half-wit. The work of the world, as it is so nobly called, is performed by drudges. That so many of them are well-educated only makes the picture that much worse. How little it matters whether one be a lawyer, doctor, preacher, judge, chemist, engineer, teacher or architect. One might just as well have been hod-carrier, stevedore, bank clerk, ditch digger, gambler or garbage collector.

Who really loves what he is doing day in and day out? What holds one to job, trade, profession of pursuit? Inertia. We are all locked together, as in a vise, feeding on one another, preying on one another.

Talk of the insect world, by comparison we resemble their degenerate offspring! …

Surely every one realizes, at some point along the way, that he is capable of living a far better life than the one he has chosen. What stays him, usually, is the fear of the sacrifices involved (even to relinquish his chains seems like a sacrifice), yet everyone knows that nothing is accomplished without sacrifice."

"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as a civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

"By love [God] can be caught and held, but by thinking never."

"There is nothing that is not spiritual for those who have learned how to see."

"You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question."

"What we’re in love with usually is not God. We’re in love with our way of thinking, our way of explaining, our way of doing. One of the greatest ways to protect ourselves from God, and to protect ourselves from truth and grace, is simply to buy into some kind of cheap conventionalism and call it tradition."

"Part of the act of creating is in discovering our own kind. They are everywhere. But don't look for them in the wrong places."

"We are not very good at recognizing illusions, least of all the ones we cherish about ourselves."

"Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place."

"I will admit that there are other people who are primarily interested in doing something. I am not. I can very well live without doing anything. But I cannot live without at least trying to understand whatever happens."

"A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep."

"There’s a reason that the symbol of anger is fire—mastered, it has tremendous productive energy; left to burn out of control, it can destroy everything in its path."

"In the writings of the desert fathers there is much emphasis on renunciation and detachment. We have to renounce the world, detach ourselves from our possessions, family, friends, own will, and any form of self-content so that all our thoughts and feelings may become free for the Lord. I find this very hard to realize. I keep thinking about distracting things and wonder if I ever will be “empty for God.”

Yesterday and today the idea occurred to me that instead of excluding I could include all my thoughts, ideas, plans, projects, worries, and concerns and make them into prayer. Instead of directing my attention only to God, I might direct my attention to all my attachments and lead them into the all-embracing arms of God. When this idea grew in me, I experienced a new freedom and felt a great open space where I could invite all those I love and pray that God touch them with his love."

"No enemy is worse than bad advice."

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

(attribution note)