“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
–Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living
Also erroneously dispersed as:
“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.”
-Carl Jung
Category Book Quote
“You can’t create chaos in the lives of others and expect peace to come to yours. No matter what they did or how you feel, causing hurt to others will never bring healing to you.”
“If your compassion does not include yourself it is incomplete.”
–Jack Kornfield, Buddha’s Little Instruction Book, pp 28
“I Worried,” by Mary Oliver
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?
Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.
“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than be false, and incur my own abhorrence.”
–Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, p 31
“May all that has been reduced to noise in you, become music again.”
<<Blogger’s note: I’m taking a quick vacation and will be back Thursday. Go touch grass. ❤️>>
“Past tears are present strength.”
-George MacDonald, Phantastes
“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before.
“Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant.
“But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”
-Alice Walker, Living by the Word
“In myths the hero is the one who conquers the dragon, not the one who is devoured by it. And yet both have to deal with the same dragon. Also, he is no hero who never met the dragon, or who, if he once saw it, declared afterwards that he saw nothing. Equally, only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard, the ‘treasure hard to attain.’ He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself.
“This experience gives some faith and trust, the pistis in the ability of the self to sustain him, for everything that menaced him from inside he has made his own. He has acquired the right to believe that he will be able to overcome all future threats by the same means. He has arrived at an inner certainty which makes him capable of self-reliance.”
–Carl Jung, Mysterium coniunctionis, CW 14
“Never let hard lessons harden your heart; the hard lessons of life are meant to make you better, not bitter.”
–Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
Chel Owens 