Courtesy of Gretchen Rubin
“Energy is Eternal Delight.”
“Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses.”
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, toward those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.”
May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep
“Seeing them come and go [from the graveyard], and come and stay, I began to be moved by a compassion that seemed to come to me from outside. I never said to myself that it was happening. It just came to me, or I came to it. As I buried the dead and walked among them, I wanted to make my heart as big as Heaven to include them all and love them and not be distracted. I couldn’t do it, of course, but I wanted to.”
Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow
“Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”
James Joyce, Ulysses
“Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.”
Bertrand Russell
“Touch has its ecstasies.”
Helen Keller, The World I Live In
“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” from The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s all I have to bring today—
This, and my heart beside—
This, and my heart, and all the fields—
And all the meadows wide—
Be sure you count—should I forget
Some one the sum could tell—
This, and my heart, and all the Bees Which in the Clover dwell.
Emily Dickinson, “It’s all I have to bring today”
