The gleaming stars all about the shining moon
Hide their bright faces, when full-orbed and splendid
In the sky she floats, flooding the shadowed earth
With clear silver light

- Sappho, Greek lyric poet

Every limit that the mind suggests turns out to be some kind of an object. The mind claims that our self is a body and, having made this initial presumption, subsequently claims that it has an age, a history, a future, a nationality, a gender, a colour, a weight, a shape and a size. However, all these characteristics are qualities of the body, not of our self. They are known by our self but do not belong to our self. They do not limit our self any more than an image limits the screen on which it appears.

-  Rupert Spira, English philosopher, author and potter and proponent of the Direct Path of nonduality.

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

- Leo Tolstoy, prolific Russian author who was concerned with what it means to be a human being

Mountains have long been a geography for pilgrimage, place where people have been humbled and strengthened, they are symbols of the sacred center. Many have traveled to them in order to find the concentrated energy of Earth and to realize the strength of unimpeded space. Viewing a mountain at a distance or walking around its body we can see its shape, know its profile, survey its surrounds. The closer you come to the mountain the more it disappears, the mountain begins to lose its shape as you near it, its body begins to spread out over the landscape losing itself to itself. On climbing the mountain the mountain continues to vanish. It vanishes in the detail of each step, its crown is buried in space, its body is buried in the breath. On reaching the mountain summit we can ask, “What has been attained?” - The top of the mountain? Big view? But the mountain has already disappeared. Going down the mountain we can ask, “What has been attained?” Going down the mountain the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain disappears, the closer we are to the mountain the more the mountain is realized. Mountain’s realization comes through the details of the breath, mountain appears in each step. Mountain then lives inside our bones, inside our heart-drum. It stands like a huge mother in the atmosphere of our minds. Mountain draws ancestors together in the form of clouds. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the raining of the past. Heaven, Earth and human meet in the winds of the future. Mountain mother is a birth gate that joins the above and below, she is a prayer house, she is a mountain. Mountain is a mountain.

- Joan Halifax, Zen Buddhist teacher, anthropologist, ecologist, civil rights activist, hospice caregiver, and author from her book "The Fruitful Darkness"

Looking at the media today, I’m quite ashamed of myself, of things I’ve participated in. Everything is marketed to sex and gossip and it’s just a shame that those are the things at the forefront, on people’s minds, those are the things that make you popular, what you have on or how little you have on and it has nothing to do with music, nothing to do with sports it has nothing to do with the things so many communities put their faith in. It’s just a sad place to be.

- Meshell Ndegeocello, Grammy Award winning American musician, singer, songwriter, and poet

A sangha is a community of resistance, resisting the speed, violence, and unwholesome ways of living that are prevalent in our society. Mindfulness is to protect ourselves and others. A good sangha can lead us in the direction of harmony and awareness.

- Thich Nhat Hanh, founder of The Plum Village Tradition of engaged buddhism

What, then, is the answer? The answer lies in our willing acceptance of unwanted and unfortunate circumstances even as we still cling to a radiant hope, our acceptance of finite disappointment even as we adhere to infinite hope. This is not the grim, bitter acceptance of the fatalist, but the achievement found in Jeremiah's words, "This is a grief, and I must bear it."

- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from his second book called, "Strength to Love" published in 1963

…that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high celling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.

- Jack Kerouac, American beat novelist and poet

Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round…The sky is round and I have heard the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind in its greatest power whirls, birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were. Our teepees were round like the nests of birds. And they were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop.

- Black Elk, a spiritual man of the Oglala Lakota People

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

- Rachel Carson, an American marine biologist and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.