What Was She Thinking?!

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
~~ Charles Kinglsey

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
~~ Kahlil Gibran

Where fear is, happiness is not.
~~ Seneca

You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
~~ Albert Camus

We either make ourselves happy or miserable. The amount of work is the same.
~~ Carlos Castaneda

Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them.
~~ Count Leo Tolstoy

In our concern for others, we worry less about ourselves. When we worry less about ourselves an experience of our own suffering is less intense. What does this tell us? Firstly, because our every action has a universal dimension, a potential impact on others’ happiness, ethics are necessary as a means to ensure that we do not harm others. Secondly, it tells us that genuine happiness consists in those spiritual qualities of love, compassion, patience, tolerance and forgiveness and so on. For it is these which provide both for our happiness and others’ happiness.
~~ His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
~~ Ingrid Bergman

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
~~ William Blake

If you are living a life of pain, learn to love the pain. It will leave you just like everything else you ever loved.
~~ Howard Swedlow

Here are fruits, flowers, leaves and branches,
And here is my heart which beats only for you.
~~ Paul Verlaine (Romances sans Paroles)

If I could take your troubles
I would toss them into the sea,
But all these things I'm finding
Are impossible for me.
I cannot build a mountain
Or catch a rainbow fair,
But let me be what I know best,
A friend that is always there.
~~ Khahlil Gibran (A True Friend)

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread.
Now that I am without you, all is so desolate;
And all that once was so beautiful is dead.
~~ Conrad Aiken (Bread and Music)

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
~~ Mark Strand

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way
of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants,
and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in
the end they always fall. Think of it...always.
~~Mahatma Gandhi

When it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen, those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.

May your hand be full for always
if only with another hand.
May your heart be empty only
long enough to give you cause
to fill it up again with love.
May your soul be lost by you
only to be found by God.
~~ Rod McKuen

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.
~~Anais Nin

No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film.
~~Robert Adams

To be an angel, one need not have wings.
In giving love there is an equal grace.
Nor need one seek the aura in the face,
As love unveils the beauty of all things.
~~Francois Couperin

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
~~e.e. cummings

Remember, we all stumble, every one of us. That's why it's a comfort to go hand in hand. ~~Emily Kimbrough

The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.
~~Paul Strand