Everyone is doing their best, even when it seems like they are doing their worst.
Everyone is dreaming or having a nightmare, battling with pain you may never understand.
You don't have to condone their actions.
You may not be able to wake them up.
You don't have to like what happened.
Simply let go of the illusion
that it could have been any different.

~ Jeff Foster

"Because I write poetry, I can sit down and write things that I don’t have proof of, or even know the end of the sentence. I can feel around and nobody gets hurt, right? It’s a poem. And so I wrote this poem out of grief and an attempt to make it very plain to myself, the argument that I’d come up with." 
 

~ Jennifer Michael Hecht

There’s a place in my brain
where hate won’t grow.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

"I don’t like when precious things slip through people’s fingers—especially things that seem defenseless or undercelebrated, like old newspapers, but also unheralded people who may have said sensible things at a certain time in history, but who were completely drowned out by other people. Or minor poets whose lives were instructive."

~ Nicholson Baker

"The serene isolation that can be felt in a crowded and often chaotic world." ~ Genevieve

"Truth clears away / So many souvenirs. The shelves come clean." ~ Clive James

"The quite cynical response would be to say, Why we love nihilism in pop culture is that it saves us having to be burdened with it. It saves us from feeling it. We can enjoy it in our rooms. We can get off on it. And then we let it go and we go back to work." ~ Simon Critchley 

"We do still believe in the gut feeling." ~ HERAKUT

"The world in front of me and the world 'inside' me are not merely adjacent, but overlapping; superimposed. A book feels like the intersection between these two domains – or like a conduit; a bridge; a passage between them." ~ Peter Mendelsund 

"Meditating on the body means meditating on body sensation, not mental images of the body."

~ Michael Taft

"I know this world is far from perfect." ~ Andrea Gibson

"Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity." ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Musician Emily Caudill believes that life is a song, and the music is composed by our stories. Her life-saving chemotherapy treatment causes her to lose her hearing. Her response to this obstacle is an inspiration to anyone engaged in daily practice regardless of the day-to-day results.

It’s okay to feel, deeply.
It’s okay to not know. 
It’s okay to play 
on the raw edge of life.

Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor in Examined Life (2008), a documentary by Astra Taylor, discussing about disability as not merely some physical status but largely a social status.

When it comes to developing any new skill, it is more important to be clever than to be disciplined.

"I spent so much of my life telling people the things they wanted to hear instead of the things they needed to, told myself I wasn't meant to be anyone's conscience because I still had to figure out being my own, so sometimes I just wouldn't say anything, appeasing ignorance with my silence." ~ Clint Smith

"I think we’re looking at meditation as the next big public health revolution." ~ Dan Harris

"The world is an illusion, but it is an illusion which we must take seriously, because it is real as far as it goes, and in those aspects of the reality which we are capable of apprehending. Our business is to wake up." ~ Aldous Huxley 

“There is always what will turn out to be the life we led, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life (or lives) that never actually happened, that we lived in our minds, the wished-for life (or lives): the risks untaken and the opportunities avoided or unprovided.” ~ Adam Phillips