What is a soul?

It's like electricity-

we don't really know what it is,

but it's a force that can light a room.


Ray Charles

No matter how busy you may think you are,

you must find time for reading,

or surrender yourself

to self-chosen ignorance.

-Atwood H. Townsend

No American wildness that I know of is so dangerous as a city home "with all the modern conveniences".

One should go to the woods for safety, if nothing else.

-John Muir

We must be willing

to get rid of the life we’ve planned,

so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

Joseph Campbell

I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expects everything of the universe and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate goods.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

To what, then, must we aspire?

This, and this alone:

the just thought, the unselfish act,
the tongue that utters no falsehood,
the temper that greets each passing event
as something pre-destined, expected, and
emanating from the One source and origin.

-Marcus Aurelius

If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable,
you disconnect yourself from what you truly want,
and all that is left is a compromise.

-Robert Fritz

Don't aim at success- the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.

For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as a byproduce of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.

Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success; you have to let it happen by not caring about it.

I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run- in the long run, I say!- success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

Viktor E. Frankl
from Man's Search for Meaning

The maturity of man-
that means, to have acquired the seriousness that one had as a child at play.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

It is one of the beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

-Marcel Proust