This is a partial selection of the many quotes I have collected over the years.
I have attached attributes/authors for those I remember but the main point of this page is to share the wisdom and I have not spent time tracking down all sources.
For the most part the are in reverse chronological order, with the most recent quotes I found appearing first.
"The most important good we distribute to each other in society is membership. The right to belong is prior to all other distributive decisions since it is members who make those decisions. Belongingness entails an unwavering commitment to not simply tolerating and respecting difference but to ensuring that all people are welcome and feel that they belong in the society. We call this idea the “circle of human concern." -Bell Hooks quoting M. Scott Peck
"Discomfort is not [the same as] harm"
“It’s not just that we have difficult conversations in our most important relationships, those conversations are the relationship.” -Sheila Heen
“Eternity is not a long time; eternity has nothing to do with time.” -Joseph Campbell
“...and they lived for a long time afterward. Happy and with pleasure.” – Alternative fairytale ending.
“May this suffering serve to awaken compassion” - The bodhisattvas’s aspiration
"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day." -E. B. White
“Assume people have zero knowledge and infinite intelligence.”
“Preferencing expansion over contraction, is contracting around expansion.”
"The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love - whether we call it friendship or family or romance - is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light." - James Baldwin
"The Mathom-house it was called; for anything that Hobbits had no immediate use for, but were unwilling to throw away, they called a mathom." - The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” — Dr. César A. Cruz
“All of Western medicine is built on getting rid of pain, which is not the same as healing. Healing is actually the capacity to hold pain.” -Gabor Mate
“Prayer is not a bargain.” - David Balfour
"Ask for what you want. You usually won’t get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well." -Sam Altman
"As fast as I carefully can."
"There is a substantial gap between learning a technique and being able to see results from. For quite a while, you need to just keep working on that technique and kind of just wait for it to click and for the results to show up. Especially when trying a new technique. You may be doing things the 'right way' but your outcomes will be worse because you arent used to it. 'Build technique and disregard the outcome, for a substantial amount of time.'” - from Steven Dubner on No Stupid Questions
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." - Albert Einstein
"In imagination we feel sure that it would be lovely to live with a full and rich awareness of the world. But in practice sensitiveness hurts. It is not possible to develop the capacity to see beauty without developing also the capacity to see ugliness, for they are the same capacity. The capacity for joy is also the capacity for pain. We soon find that any increase in our sensitiveness to what is lovely in the world increases also our capacity for being hurt. That is the dilemma in which life has placed us. We must choose between a life that is thin and narrow, uncreative and mechanical, with the assurance that even if it is not very exciting it will not be intolerably painful; and a life in which the increase in its fullness and creativeness brings a vast increase in delight, but also in pain and hurt." -John Macmurray
“Not everyone who is nice has good intentions.”
“All divisions are arbitrary. We cut up the world to describe it.”
"Whoever has the most fun, wins."
"Water never complains, but always pushes back. Always. " - James Clear
“The brain thinks involuntarily just like the heat beats involuntarily.”
“[The mistaken idea that] belongings will fill our hunger, when it is belonging that we crave.” - Braiding Sweetgrass.
“Ceremony focuses attention so that attention becomes intention. If you stand together and profess a thing before your community it holds you accountable. Ceremonies transcend the boundaries of the individual and resonate beyond the human realm.” - Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
“Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention. Perhaps the second is to be patient. And perhaps a third is to be attentive to what the body knows.” -Barry Lopez
“There’s a part of your partner you can never know. Because they don’t even know it themselves. That’s why they actually need to be left alone. It’s to garner and deepen that (self) relationship.” David Whyte
“Never trust someone who’s laughter and tears aren’t close to the surface.”
“The difference between the healthy energy of anger and the hurtful energy of emotional and physical violence, is that anger respects boundaries. Standing forward on your own behalf does invade anyone else’s boundaries.”- When the Body Says No - Dr Gabor Maté
“For many people, guilt is a signal that they have chosen to do something for themselves. …they are still putting their own needs, emotions, interests last. …If you face the choice between feeling guilt and resentment, choose the guilt every time… Resentment is souls suicide.” - When the Body Says No - Dr Gabor Maté
“One of the best ways to observe wildlife is to remain perfectly still. Nature is a constantly changing mosaic and animals are always on the move. But the sighting of a potential predator will cause many animals to freeze until the intruder has been evaluated and judged nonthreaten-ing. Silence and stillness can convince hidden creatures that they are not in danger and they will then go about their business.” -Mark Plotkin, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice
“If you always do what you’ve always done. You’ll always get what you’ve always got.”
"No riesgo, no recompensa." (no risk, no reward)
“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.’” — Kurt Vonnegut
“Enough is as good as a feast.”
"The problem with humanity is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology" by EO Wilson.
“Honor those who seek the truth, beware of those who've found it”
“Love does not consist of gazing at each other. But in standing together and looking the same direction.”
"So, if I may start by insulting your intelligence with what is called the Most Elementary Lesson. ... Any experience that we have through our senses, whether sound or a light or a touch, is a vibration. And a vibration has two aspects. One called ‘on.’ And the other called ‘off.’ Vibrations seem to be propagated by waves. And every wave system has crests and it has troughs. And so life is a system of now-you-see-it-now-you-don't. And these two aspects always go together. For example, sound is not pure sound. It is a rapid alternation between sound and silence. And that's simply the way things are. Only you must remember that the crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable. Nobody ever saw crests without troughs or troughs without crests. Just as you don't encounter people with fronts but no backs. Just as you don't encounter a coin that has a heads but no tails. And although the heads and tails, the front and the backs, the positive and the negative, are different they are at the same time one. And one has to get used, fundamentally, to the notion that different things can be inseparable. That what is explicitly two can at the same time be implicitly one. If you forget that very funny things happen. If therefore we forget that black and white are inseparable, and if you forget that existence is constituted equivalently by non-being then you get scared." - Alan Watts, Coincidences of Opposites
“It's no measure of health to be adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. “ - African adage
“Put simply, in order to be someone, we need someone to be someone for. Our personalities develop as a role we perform for other people, fulfilling the expectations we think they have of us.”
"The past is not a reliable predictor of the future."
“The afternoon was intimate, infinite.” - Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, The Garden of Forking Paths
“We should not harm a human being because they have done wrong, but in order that they not do wrong. Punishment should be addressed to the future, not the past. For it acts out of concern, not anger.” -Seneca
“It’s so hard to imagine heaven but so easy to imagine hell.”