The Messenger - Inspirational Quotes & Poetry

Our listening
creates a sanctuary
for the homeless parts
within another person.
––Rachel Naomi Remen

This is not the age of information.
Forget the news,and the radio,
and the blurred screen.
This is the time of loaves and fishes.
People are hungry,
and one good word is bread for a thousand.
––David Whyte
“Loaves and Fishes” from The House of Belonging

Based upon advice given young Native Americans
by their elders should they become lost in the forest.

LOST

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you. If you leave it,
you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows
Where you are.
You must let it find you.
––David Wagoner

I stand among you as one who offers a small message of hope,
that first, there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society,
who are not dependent on social acceptance,
not dependent on social routine,
and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk.
And among these people,
if they are faithful to their own calling,
to their own vocation, and to their own message from God,
communication on the deepest level is possible.
And the deepest level of communication is not communication,
but communion...
It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech,
and it is beyond concept.
Not that we discover a new unity.
We discover an older unity.
My dear brothers and sisters,
we are already one.
But we imagine that we are not.
So what we have to recover is our original unity.
What we have to be is what we are.
––Jonathan Montaldo
The Merton Institue for Contemplative Living

One must have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star.
––Friedrich Nietzsche

Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.
––Soren Kierkegaard

Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown.
––Claude Bernard

You know you’ve achieved perfection in design,
not when you have nothing more to add,
but when you have nothing more to take away.
––Antoine de Saint-Exupery Wind, Sand and Stars

Man has a responsibility to his own time,
not as if he could seem to stand outside it
and donate various spiritual and material benefits to it
from a position of compassionate distance.
Man has a responsibility to find himself where he is,
in his own proper time and place, in the history to which he belongs
and to which he must inevitably contribute
either his response or his evasions,either truth and act,
or mere slogan and gesture.
–-Thomas Merton
Choosing to Love the World

How did the rose ever open its heart and give to this world all of its beauty?
It felt the encouragement of Light against its being;
otherwise we all remain too frightened.
––Hafiz
translated by Daniel Ladinsky Love Poems from God