Do not play for safety - it is the most dangerous thing in the world.

Hugh Walpole

If you want a place in the sun,
you must leave the shade of the family tree.


Osage Saying

There are some days when I think I am going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.

Salvador Dali

We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our worst enemies.

Roderick Thorp

Never bend your head, always hold it high. Look the world straight in the face.

Helen Keller

We are what we pretend to be,
so we must be careful what we pretend to be.


Kurt Vonnegut

The codfish lays 10,000 eggs, the homely hen just one; the codfish never cackles to tell you that she is done. And so we scorn the codfish, and the homely hen we prize. Which demonstrates to you and me that it pays to advertise.

The Toronto Globe

If at first you do not succeed
you are running about average.


M. H. Alderson

The hopeful man sees success where others see failure, sunshine where others see shadow and storm.

O. S. Marsden

I do not know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

Bill Cosby

Each soul must meet the morning sun, the new sweet earth, and the Great Silence alone!

Ohiyesha

Go to your bosom; Knock there,
and ask your heart what it doth know.


William Shakespeare

The poor long for riches and rich for heaven,
but the wise long for a state of tranquillity.


Swari Rama

When man closes his lips, it is then that God speaks.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

One word spoke the Father, which Word was His Son, and this Word He speaks ever in eternal silence, and in silence must it be heard by the soul.

St John of the Cross

Breathe through the heats of our desire Thy coolness and Thy balm; Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire; Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire, O still small voice of calm.

John Whittier

How then are we going to reach God? How, but in quietness and in confidence, in the stillness and the Silence? How, but by learning to abide in a quietness within, by being still.

Joel S. Goldsmith

That place which is everywhere at all times present (being of all that evolves) and in which, in the beginning, at the end, or in the middle, there is no living creature, that place which is their own Self, the yogis call "Solitude".

Tejo-Bindu Upanishad 1.23

There is nothing so much like God
in all the universe as silence.


Meister Eckhart

We have to learn to listen in different ways and in different places: in silence and in noise. Perhaps it is because so many people have lost the art of listening that they have also lost the ability to pray.

Shiela Cassidy

"Be still and know that I am God." Here "stillness" is a total surrender without vestige of individuality. Stillness will prevail and there will be no agitation of mind. Agitation of mind is the cause of desire, the sense of doership and personality. If that is stopped, there is quiet.

Ramana Maharshi

As soon as He speaks my name, my silence is the silence of infinite life, and I know that I am because my heart has opened to my Father in the echo of the eternal years. My life is a listening, His is a speaking. My salvation is to hear and respond. For this, my life must be silent. Hence, my silence is my salvation.

Thomas Merton

The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. And only he who listens can speak.

Dag Hammarskjold

To preserve the silence within - amid all the noise. To remain open and quiet, a moist humus in the fertile darkness where the rain falls and the grain ripens - no matter how many tramp across the parade-ground in whirling dust under an arid sky.

Dag Hammarskjold

Be still and know that I am God.


Psalm 46:10