"I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being."  --Hafiz 

"Always remember: Silence and smile are two very powerful tools."  --Paulo Coelho

"Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho’s books — in particular, his beloved 1988 bestseller, “The Alchemist” — are infused with a spirituality that has resonated with millions of readers. In 2017 he took to Twitter to offer his followers this piece of advice. “Smile is the way to solve many problems,” he wrote. “Silence is the way to avoid many problems.” Coelho reminds us that the power of words can cut both ways, and the discretion to know when to keep quiet and offer a kind smile is just as valuable."  --inspiringquotes.com

"Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob.’ Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try ...

"The archaeology of grief is not ordered. It is more like earth under a spade, turning up things you had forgotten. Surprising things come to light: not simply memories, but states of mind, emotions, older ways of seeing the world."  --Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk (2015)

"There is a myth we live with, the myth of finding the meaning of life — as if meaning were an undiscovered law of physics. But unlike the laws of physics — which predate us and will postdate us and made us — meaning only exists in this brief interlude of consciousness between chaos and chaos, the interlude we call life. When you die — when these organized atoms that shimmer with fascination and feeling — disband into disorder to become unfeeling stardust once more, everything that filled your particular mind and its rosary of days with meaning will be gone too. From its particular vantage point, there will be no more meaning, for the point itself will have dissolved — there will only be other humans left, making meaning of their own lives, including any meaning they might make of the residue of yours."  --Maria Popova

"It is a mercy that we walk through the world half-blind to the reality of time and transience, or we would be walking through it in tears — through the immense cathedral of time that Earth is, with its neatly lined pews of geologic strata holding the history of life, which is the history of loss. And yet the very fact that any one life exists against the cosmic odds of eternal night and nothingness is miracle enough — a triumph of the possible over the probable, a concatenation of chemistry and chance gilded with wonder."  --Maria Popova

"Once, walking through a centuries-old gilded cathedral in a small Mexican town with a beloved companion, I found myself in tears at the thought of all the people now dead who once sat in those pews and lit candles at that altar and whispered their hopes to those saints; at the realization that we too will have been, that the sum total of our prayers and passions will one day be a votive melted in a pool of itself."  --Maria Popova 

"Every once in a while, the curtain of the ordinary parts and we touch the miraculous — the sense that there is another world not beyond this one but within it, a mirror-world any glimpse of which returns our own more luminous and full of wonder.

"This can never be willed, but one can be willing for it — a willingness woven of two things: total wakefulness to reality and total openness to possibility."  --Maria Popova

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could."  --Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum (2005)

Donald Sutherland's motto in 2005 (I don't know if it changed since):

"Try to stay passionate, leave your cool to constellations. Passion, above all, is a remedy against boredom." —Joseph Brodsky

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"  --Richard Dawkins

He was telling a friend about his recently failed relationship when the other drew an odd but interesting analogy. Talking about this ex-love, they said “She sounds like she was a snorkeler, not a scuba diver.”

He was confused. “I don’t get what you’re saying.”

“A snorkeler is content to float just below the surface of the water, looking at whatever pretty fish and reefs are within sight. At any sign of danger they can surface, swim back to the boat and get out quickly. 

"But the scuba diver wants to go deep because they know that’s where the really interesting things live. To do that though you’ve got to be willing to learn how to use and wear heavy equipment. Plus we all know diving into the depths can often be very dangerous. 

“I believe for real loves, the long lasting loves, even just the ones that are memorable and important to our growth, both of you need to be scuba divers. To make it real, to make a bond last and genuinely mean something, you’ve both got to be willing to put on the 'equipment' and go deep.” She smiled “Most of all, you have to have the courage and curiosity to swim into the caves and the darkness down there where the big ones live.”

--Jonathan Carroll

"For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly, and from sources you never imagined to be probable. No one chip gives you the answer for everything. No one chip stays in the same place throughout your entire life. The secret is to keep adding voices, adding ideas, and moving things around as you put together your life. If you’re lucky, putting together your life is a process that will last through every single day you’re alive."  --Ann Patchett 

"There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery,"  --Charles Darwin

"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."  --Will Durant 

“Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind's capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don't; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us." —Matthew Scully 

"The most effective way to do it, is to do it."  --Amelia Earhart 

"It's so easy to, like, not be a scumbag human? Sell your clip-ins and zip it, Insurrection Barbie."  -- the incredible Maren Morris to country singer Jason Aldean's wife after she posted a transphobic Instagram post.she posted a transphobic Instagram post.

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside ... Nature brings solace in all troubles."  --Anne Frank

"True love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have."  --Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

"French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of the classic 1943 novel “The Little Prince,” wrote often on themes of love, suffering, and connection. Saint-Exupéry himself was known for his long, complex marriage to writer and artist Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, who inspired the character of the Rose in “The Little Prince.” In the book, the Prince and the Rose eventually realize that while they do love each other, they show it in different ways. With this line, Saint-Exupéry reminds us that true love should always feel nourishing."  --inspiringquotes.com

“The reason why we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind the scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.”  --Steven Furtick