Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
                                          -Thomas Merton

Quote from poet Antonio Machado–

Last night as I was sleeping

I dreamt—marvelous error!—

that I had a beehive

here inside my heart.

And the golden bees

were making white combs

and sweet honey

from my old failures.

The beauty of imperfection is the possibility for improvement

-Tom Bennett

Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.

 -Bob Marley

You must be the change you wish to see in the world

-Mahatma Gandhi

Our best friends are those who know their faults well enough to forgive ours

-Moulton H. Farnham

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

-David Carradine

“Never, never, never give up, because one ‘never’ may not be enough”

-Winston Churchill, paraphrased by Mel Smith

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

-Mark Twain

“You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”

-Oscar Wilde

Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.  –Eckhart Tolle

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but in is the journey that matters, in the end.” –Ernest Hemingway

“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.” –Ezra Pound

“Patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one you have in mind.” – David G. Allen

poem (below) written by Gallway Kinnel to a student contemplating suicide:

WAIT

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

Why draw instead of photograph? from The Book of Life

‘No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than men could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.’

–John Ruskin 1875

“The closer you look the more you see.”

–Mel Smith (a cameraman at heart)

quote from Northern Farm–Henry Beston

“When this twentieth century of ours became obsessed with a passion for mere size, what was lost sight of was the ancient wisdom that the emotions have their own standards of judgment and their own sense of scale. In the emotional world a small thing can touch the heart and the imagination every bit as much as something impressively gigantic; a fine phrase is as good as an epic, and a small brook in the quiet of a wood can have its say with a voice more profound than the thunder of any cataract. Who would live happily in the country must be wisely prepared to take great pleasure in little things.”

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”                                                   -Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is that which has always been there,

Which has never left your side,

Which has always been present,

Whatever the feeling, the circumstance.

When you turn your attention to trusting that,

You surrender to yourself. –annonymous

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

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone” — Blaise Pascal

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
                                                                                     –J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring