I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite - only a sense of existence.
Thoreau 12/6/56 letter
It's difficult to remember to be amazed every day, but it is amazing.
Andy Rooney
To pay attention,
this is our endless and proper work.
Mary Oliver from White Pine
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
William Blake from Augeries of Innocence
The lone ping into being of the first hydrogen atom ex nihilo was so
unthinkably, violently radical, that surely it ought to have been enough,
more than enough.
Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
...who makes much of
a miracle? ... I know of nothing else but
miracles ...
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle ...
Walt Whitman
I am a performing artist; I perform admiration. 'Come with me,' I want my poems to say.' And do the same.'
Mary Oliver, Winter Hours
This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.
Thomas Carlyle
We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive, and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. D.H. Lawrence
The world will never starve for want of wonders.
G. K. Chesterson
We ourselves cannot put any magic spell on this world. The world is its own magic.
Suzuki Roshi
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
Henry Miller
The real miracle is not to walk on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth.
Thich Nhat Hanh
More than anything else there is this: the amazement that I exist and that things exist.
Ionesco, The Hermit
Talk of mysteries! ---- Think of our life in nature,---daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we!
Thoreau, Maine Woods
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Aldous Huxley
My daily activities are not unusual, I'm just naturally in harmony with them. Grasping nothing, discarding nothing.. Supernatural power and marvelous activity - Drawing water and carrying firewood.
Layman Pang-yun (740-808)
One cannot but be in awe when one contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
Albert Einstein
I find nothing in fables more astonishing than my experience in every hour. One moment of a man's life is a fact so stupendous as to take the luster out of fiction.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
Hans Hofmann, Bootstrap, 1993
The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials.
Lin Yu Tang
The little things? The little moments? They aren't little.
John Zabat-Zinn
Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back
and realize they were the big things.
Robert Brault
Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment - a little makes the way of the best happiness.
Frederich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
To find the universal elements enough; to find the air and the water exhilarating; to be refreshed by a morning walk or an evening saunter. . .to be thrilled by the stars at night; to be elated over a bird's nest or a wildflower in spring - these are some of the rewards of the simple life.
John Burroughs
To know you have enough is to be rich.
Lao-Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena.
They are themselves their own lesson.
Goethe
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute,
day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.
Stephen Vincent Benet
Everywhere is here and everywhen is now.
Dante
Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis
on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without
rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment.
Only this moment is life.
Thich Nat Hahn
He is richest who is content with the least.
Socrates
A man is rich in proportion of the number of things he can afford to let alone.
Thoreau
Most are engaged in business the greater part of their lives, because the soul abhors a vacuum and they have not discovered any continuous employment for man's nobler faculties.
Thoreau
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
Thoreau
If a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound? If a wildflower in the depths of that forest is not noticed does it still have beauty? What a waste is an unappreciated universe!
When my senses are alive, and when I am truly awake, and mindful, I am aware of the
common, everyday wonders of the small part of the universe that I can observe. I become a part of the universe that is aware of itself. This is my function as a conscious being. What could be more important!
B. Kraver
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
Albert Einstein
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet.
James Oppenheim
Page started 7/21/02
Updated 10/24/02
More to come when they are found.
