“The is a quote by Karen Casey, PhD, who turns 87 next week. She’s an author mostly known for her writing about recovery. I’m not in recovery, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate her wisdom just as fully. I think her book Each Day a New Beginning sold 4 million copies. I’m aging and saging, and I’m reading her book, Peaceful Aging. I found this quote that totally resonated with me. It’s simple but powerful.”

Remember, it’s not about doing great things. It’s about doing small things in a loving way.

Karen Casey PhD, writer and spiritual teacher who
teaches how to connect to our Higher Power.
She’s the author of Let Go Now: Embraced Detachment
As a Path to Freedom

“This is the truth. We, as souls, are equal, not one soul is bigger or better than another. We must treat each other with respect and recognize each other’s rights on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

U.S. Declaration of Independence

“This quote inspired me to write my first book, Staying Healthy with the Seasons. It tuned me in to traditional Chinese medicine, the cycles, and to write a book that said: Let’s get back to nature. This book first came out in 1981 and I’m proud to say that it is still in print and popular with people because the message is eternal. Paying attention to the earth, honoring the earth, and primarily eating from the earth as well as paying attention to your own rhythms, is primary. I’ve been called a cycleologist because I study cycles, rhythms, astronomy, and all those things that have to do with cycles. I’m aware of the moon and the sun and the whole lunar cycle. It’s been fun to embrace the natural world as part of the healing process.”

Whoever wishes to investigate medicine properly should proceed thus: in the first place to consider the seasons of the year, and what effects each of them produces, for they are not at all alike but differ much from themselves in regard to their changes.

Hippocrates (BC 460-377)

“To me that’s the heart of the wisdom of resilience. The storms are always going to happen in life; we can’t prevent that – that’s part of the human condition. But when we learn how to sail our ship we’re taking responsibility for our own choices, our own resilience. Then we no longer have to be afraid of those storms and we can stay open and confident in our capacity to meet those storms. For me that was the nugget of resilience. When we’re open to learning, we use our tools and practices to learn how to meet difficulty, disappointment, and disaster more efficiently, more effectively, more skillfully, and that’s the basis of our resilience.”

I am no longer afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship.

Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women

“Dr. Howard Thurman is my mentor. I have his picture right here on the wall. He looks over me every day and this quote is a mantra for me. That’s why I do aromatherapy, make greeting cards, and write books about justice. All those things make me come alive. I think when we do what makes us come alive, we don’t burn out because we have energy and are rejuvenated on a daily basis. Burnout is when we are pushing against ourselves and using energy that really is not ours. That is when we are living somebody else’s life, which is a losing battle. I thank God and the angels who were good enough to allow me to meet him while he was still living and had a chance to spend some time with him, which was an amazing gift.”

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and go do that. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.

 Howard Thurman (1899–1981) was an American theologian,
mystic, author and educator.
Thurman is recognized as a key spiritual mentor
of the civil rights movement.

“This is one of the sinister aspects of technology. People are constantly looking at empty and false images. These impoverished images are filling up the inner world of the heart.”

When you really look deeply at something, it becomes part of you.

John O’Donohue, Irish author, poet, and theologian
from his book Anam Cara

“This quote is from my father-in-law, who had to deal with Hitler during WWII when he worked at Peenemünde from 1940–1944 on a remote-controlled glide bomb. He spoke this to me and my husband Christian just before he died. He’s the man that I admire the most. He came to the U.S. in 1947 and was Deputy Director of NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Astrionic Lab, which developed the guidance and control systems for the Apollo spaceflight mission to the Moon, both landing and return trips. They did get there and back. Wow, man on the Moon.”

 Beware the charismatic man.

Herman Kroeger (1908-1984)

More than being an inspiration as an artist, I would call this a mission statement. I’m very struck by his comment that without a global revolution in the sphere of consciousness nothing will change for the better. I firmly believe that the creative process as it manifests in art, photography, and music, can help enlarge consciousness. And, I further believe that consciousness alone is what’s needed to change the challenges that we face in the 21^st century.”

The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility. Without a global revolution in the sphere of consciousness nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans and the catastrophe toward which the world is headed, be it ecological, social, demographic or general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war or by the danger that the absurd mountains of accumulated nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have definitely won. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of all of our actions, if they are to be moral, is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my company, my success. Responsibility to the order of being where all our actions are indelibly recorded and where and only where they will be properly judged.

Václav Havel, playwright,
President of the Czech Republic,
from an address to the joint session of
the U.S. Congress in March 1990

 “This quote is a line from a poem of the Sufi poet Attar, who lived a generation before Rumi. He’s famous for his book length poem called The Conference of Birds, I love that it points to the unnamable divine reality, and basically all the philosophy, all the different traditions, we’re all just guessing, The essential meaning is a classic Sufi metaphor: no matter how a single drop of water intellectualizes or theorizes about its own nature, the vast ocean remains what it is regardless. It points to the idea that ultimate reality (the sea, often standing for God or the Divine) is unaffected by the limited perspectives, opinions, or “philosophies” of the individual self (the drop).

The Sea
Will be the Sea
Whatever the drop’s philosophy.

Farid ud-Din Attar (c. 1145–1221) was a Persian Sufi poet
and mystic from Nishapur whose writings profoundly
influenced later Sufi masters including Rumi

“This quote is an invitation to extend our compassion, not just to our dogs, but to all animals, and to all living creatures and nature. And when we do that, not only do we become better people, but we create a better world.”

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison [of separateness] by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) was a German-born
theoretical physicist best known for
developing the theory of relativity
and for his contributions to quantum theory, work
that earned him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.