"Holiness is reached not through effort or will, but by stopping; by an inward coming to rest; a place from which we can embody the spirit of all our holy days, a radical, inhabited simplicity, where we live in a kind of ongoing surprise and with some wonder and appreciation."

~ David Whyte

Burn the scorecards, balance out the scales
We are one wind distracted by our different sails
Underneath what's detectable with eyes
Every particle's vibrating with the same life

"There's a lot more going on in your brain and your body than you can ever be aware of. And yet, most people identify themselves with this little flash-lit area of consciousness."

~ Rae Armantrout 

"It’s a very difficult principle to grasp, this idea that actually, what I don’t know matters enormously, and what I can’t see matters enormously."

~ Daniel Kahneman

"My life is an open book. It lies here
on a glass tabletop, its pages shamelessly exposed,
outspread like a bird with hundreds of thin paper wings.

It is a biography, needless to say,
and I am reading and writing it simultaneously
in a language troublesome and private."

~ Billy Collins

"When we get caught up in the minutiae, the details that make us all different, there's two ways of seeing that. You can see the texture of that person, the qualities that make them unique. Or you can go to war about it – say, That person is different from me, I don't like you, so let's battle."

~ Mahershala Ali

"I do know enough as a psychologist about learning and memory. And I know that we learn. How much of this I need to do in order to change, I cannot say. But I can say that there is a point at which this brain is not just elastic in moving to what is being suggested, but that it may be plastic in that it can be reset into a new mold."

~ Mahzarin Banaji

"I began to realize that the only place where things were actually real was at this frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you." 

~ David Whyte

"An inner voice always used to be an outer voice. We absorb the tone of others. A harassed or angry parent. The menacing threats of an elder sibling keen to put us down. The words of a schoolyard bully or teacher who seemed impossible to please. We internalize the unhelpful voices, because at certain key moments in the past, they sounded compelling. The authority figures repeated their messages over and over until they got lodge in our own way of thinking." 

~ The School of Life

"Poetry helps us imagine one another's lives."

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Forget everything you've ever done.
Make no comparisons. Simply listen.

"My fear is that as we stop defending this interior space, we'll start to do things and think things and censor our very inner life in a way that doesn't cause us any anxiety. The real cost of surveillance is that our inner lives become impoverished.

~ Walter Kirn

"In this mode of consciousness, the most supremely banal transforms into the most supremely baffling and awe-inducing. That which is most obvious and taken for granted is simultaneously that which is most mysterious and astonishing."

~ Brian Maniscalco

Mindfulness practice doesn’t eliminate my personal narrative. It gradually changes my relationship to it.

"I think one of my gifts is also one of my weaknesses. Which is, I have a kind of antenna for other people. My friends and my producers might disagree with me about this, but I think an antenna that picks up on what other people are feeling. But there's something good and bad about that."

~ Terry Gross