"We are confronted by an interesting phenomenon: a literary hero losing gradually contact with the book that bore him; leaving his fatherland, leaving his creator’s desk and roaming space after roaming Spain. In result, Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes’s womb. He has ridden for three hundred and fifty years through the jungles and tundras of human thought–and he has gained in vitality and stature. We do not laugh at him any longer. His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become the paragon."  ---Nabokov

"Across every culture and every era, we find the same phenomenon: human beings reaching toward something larger than themselves. They seek meaning: Why are we here? Do we matter? They seek to make some peace in the face of suffering and death. And they seek connection, a sense of belonging to something beyond the narrow circle of their immediate lives. These are not neurotic symptoms. They are expressions of genuine psychological and existential needs, and they persist whether or not one is religious, whether or not one believes in anything supernatural at all.

"The spiritual impulse, in short, is universal and real. It deserves to be taken seriously. The question is not whether to honor it, but how."

-- Michael Rivera, "A Profound Source: Science and the Maturing of Spirituality" 

https://thehumanist.com/commentary/a-profound-source-science-and-the-maturing-of-spirituality

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”  --Carl Sagan

“Espero alegre la salida – y espero no volver jamás” (“I joyfully await the exit – and I hope to never return”)  --Frida Kahlo

"You will never change your life until you change something you do daily."  --John C. Maxwell

"We overestimate the grand gesture and underestimate the daily one ...

Life is not changed by decisions. It's changed by what happens after the decision — the repeated, unglamorous, often invisible actions that actually accumulate into something."  --Arnold's Pump Club

https://arnoldspumpclub.com/blogs/newsletter/stop-asking-what-to-focus-on-ask-what-you-ll-regret-not-doing

How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?

Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,

And custom the spreading laurel tree.

--W. B. Yeats, “A Prayer For My Daughter”