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“I remind myself, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” (Cribbed from Voltaire.) A twenty-minute walk that I do is better than the four-mile run that I don’t do. The imperfect book that gets published is better than the perfect book that never leaves my computer. The dinner party of take-out Chinese food is better than the elegant dinner that I never host.”
Gretchen Rubin
“Let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you… Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone. Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.”
Khalil Gibran – The Prophet
“Elegance tends to be mistaken for superficiality and mere appearance. Nothing could be further from the truth;
“In order to hear Love’s words, you must allow Love to approach. However, when it does draw near, we fear what it might say to us, because Love is free and is not ruled by our will or by what we do.
All lovers know this but refuse to accept it. They think they can seduce Love through submission, power, beauty, wealth, tears, and smiles.
True Love, however, is the love that seduces and will never allow itself to be seduced.
“Understanding is love’s other name — that to love another means to fully understand his or her suffering. ‘Suffering’ sounds rather dramatic, but it refers to any source of profound dissatisfaction — be it physical or psychoemotional or spiritual. Understanding, after all, is what everybody needs — but even if we grasp this on a theoretical level, we habitually get too caught in the smallness of our fixations to be able to offer such expansive understanding.
If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water to cook, wash, and drink.
“Our dream, the desire that is in our soul, did not come out of nowhere. Someone placed it there. And that Someone, who is pure love and wants only our happiness, did so only because he also gave us the tools to realize our dreams and our desires. When you are going through difficult times, remember: you might have lost some major battles, but you survived and you’re still here. Pour your love generously and never miss an opportunity to show your love, especially to those close to you, because we are always at our most cautious with them for fear of being hurt. Love—because you will be the first to benefit.
“Friendship is like a river; it flows around rocks, adapts itself to valleys and mountains, occasionally turns into a pool until the hollow in the ground is full and it can continue on its way. Just as the river never forgets that its goal is the sea, so friendship never forgets that its only reason for existing is to love other people.”
Paulo Coelho – Manuscript Found in Accra
“No one can go back, but everyone can go forward. And tomorrow, when the sun rises, all you have to say to yourselves is: I am going to think of this day as the first day of my life.
I will look at everything and everyone as if for the first time, especially the small things that I have grown used to, quite forgetting the magic surrounding them.
If it’s sunny tomorrow, I want to look at the sun properly for the first time. If it’s cloudy, I want to watch and see in which direction the clouds are going. Well, I will forget everything I learned about the stars, and they will be transformed once more into angels or children or whatever I feel like believing at that moment. For the first time, I will smile without feeling guilty,