Grace works to soften the vicissitudes of your emotional states. As you grow older, the sharp edges of extremes are made softer by experience. All that remains is the light of understanding, which grows within and illuminates the eyes. Capturing your journey of a thousand miles in this way, no matter the trial, everything always works out.

The monuments you build to commemorate the past can become prisons. In proportion to your unwillingness to leave them, you will experience the power of grace. If you measure the vicissitudes of life, all things become equal over time.

Grace is a message of optimism without judgment or the silver lining you have yet to see. On the pathway, you will discover: it is all good.

- Kari Hohne, from her Cafe au Soul

Great egocentricity does not make a person great. The common ground of all creation is a greater source of life than any exalted isolation. These three qualities are invaluable: compassion for all creatures; material simplicity or frugality; and a sense of equality or modesty.

A compassionate person acts on behalf of everyone's right to life. Material simplicity gives one an abundance to share. A sense of equality is, paradoxically, one's true greatness.

It is a mistake to consider a person whose only interest is self interest as either caring or courageous. It is a mistake to rationalize that excessive consumption contributes to the well-being of others by giving them employment. It is a mistake to imagine that a person who acts immodestly or in a superior way is, in fact, a genuinely superior person.

These are all egocentric behaviors. They isolate a person from the common ground of existence. They produce rigidity and death.

Compassion, sharing, and equality, on the other hand, sustain life. This is because we are all one. When I care for you, I enhance the harmonious energy of the whole. And that is life.

- John Heider from "The Tao of Leadership"

When I say it's you I like, I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.

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Part of the problem with the word "disabilities" is that it immediately suggests an inability to see or hear or walk or do other things that many of us take for granted. But what of people who can't feel? Or talk about their feelings? Or manage their feelings in constructive ways? What of people who aren't able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.

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When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. you will always find people who are helping."

- Fred McFeely Rogers, American television personality, Presbyterian minister, and author.

Peace like a river ran through the city
Long past the midnight curfew
We sat starry-eyed
Oh, we were satisfied
 
And I remember
Misinformation followed us like a plague
Nobody knew from time to time
If the plans were changed
Oh, if the plans were changed
 
You can beat us with wires
You can beat us with chains
You can run out your rules
But you know you can’t outrun the history train
I’ve seen a glorious day
 
Four in the morning
I woke up from out of my dreams
Nowhere to go but back to sleep
But I’m reconciled
Oh, oh, oh, I’m gonna be up for a while

- Paul Simon, American songwriter, from his 1971 solo album

Let go of thought!
Don't take it into your heart!
You are naked,
and thought is like ice.

You use thought to seek
release from suffering and pain,
while thought is the cause of
your suffering and pain.
The realm of creation is outside the scope of thought.
O foolish one,
see the opus, and behold the beauty!

Look in the direction
from which the images flow.
See the brook that causes the wheel to turn.

- Rumi, Sufi mystic and poet

People, keep on learning
Soldiers, keep on warring
World, keep on turning
‘Cause it won’t be too long
 
Powers keep on lying
While your people keep on dying
World keep on turning
‘Cause it won’t be too long
 
I’m so darn glad he let me try it again
Cause my last time on Earth, I lived a whole world of sin
I’m so glad that I know more than I knew then
Going to keep on trying
‘Til I reach my highest ground
 
Teachers, keep on teaching
Preachers, keep on preaching
World, keep on turning
‘Cause it won’t be too long
 
Lovers, keep on loving
Believers, keep on believing
Sleepers, just stop sleeping
‘Cause it won’t be too long
 
I’m so darn glad he let me try it again
Cause my last time on Earth, I lived a whole world of sin
I’m so glad that I know more than I knew then
Going to keep on trying
‘Til I reach my highest ground
‘Til I reach my highest ground
Don’t you let nobody bring you down (They’ll sure enough try)…

- Stevie Wonder, an American singer-songwriter, musician, and record producer who is widely regarded as on of the most influenctial musicians of the 20th Century, from his song "Higher Ground"

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.

- Edward O. Wilson, American biologist, researcher, theorist, and author
 
When the crowded Vietnamese refugee boats met with storms or pirates, if everyone panicked all would be lost. But if even one person on the boat remained calm and centered, it was enough. It showed the way for everyone to survive.

- Thich Nhat Hanh, the founder of The Plum Village Tradition of Engaged Buddhism

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
 
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
 
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

- Neil Postman, an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, from his "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business"

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.
 
So the America I love still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
 
- Kurt Vonnegut, an American author known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels, from his "A Man Without a Country"

The great philosopher Immanuel Kant said, in what he called his categorical imperative, that "every man should so live that he treats every other man as an end and never as a means." Kant had something there because the minute you use a person as a means, you depersonalize that person, and that person becomes merely an object. This is what we do for things. We use things, and whenever you use somebody you, in your own mind, thingify that person. A great Jewish philosopher by the name of Martin Buber wrote a book entitled I and Thou, and he says in that book that life at its best is always on the level of "I and Thou," and whenever it degenerates to the level of "I and It," it becomes dangerous and terrible. Whenever we treat people not as thous, whenever we treat a man not as a him, a woman not as a her, we make them a thing, and this is the tragedy...

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from a sermon on "Levels of Love" given September 16, 1962 at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga.,