Unknown: "No one can truly..."

"No one can truly think of God.  It is therefore my wish to leave everything that I can think and choose for my love the thing that I cannot think.  God can be loved but not thought.  He can be taken and held by love, but not by thought."

—Unknown, The Cloud of Unknowing

Unknown: "Take just a little..."

"Take just a little word of one syllable rather than two... Such a one is the word God or the word love.  Choose which you prefer... and fasten this word to your heart so that whatever happens it will never go away.  This word is to be your shield and your spear, whether you are riding in peace or in war.  With this word you are to beat upon the cloud and the darkness above and beneath you.  With this word you are to strike down every kind of thought, driving it down into a pool of forgetting.  If any thought should press upon you, asking what you would have, answer with no word but this one.  If your thoughts should offer, out of their great learning to analyze your word for you and tell you its meanings, say to your thoughts that you want to keep it whole... It is not a matter of analyzing or elucidating... "

—Unknown, The Cloud of Unknowing

Rumi: "Out beyond ideas of..."

"Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field.  I will meet you there."

—Rumi

Eleanor Roosevelt: "No one can make..."

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

—Eleanor Roosevelt

Laura Munson, "You might think all..."

"You might think all this would find me in a place of intense pain. panic, even. State of emergency. But I am choosing something else.  I am choosing not to suffer."


—Laura Munson, This Is Not The Story You Think It Is

Katherine Rosman: "She was our mom..."

"She was our mom. We were her girls. Inevitabilities like adulthood and marriage didn't change that."

—Katherine Rosman, If You Knew Suzy

Dante: "A mighty flame followeth..."

"A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark."

—Dante

Nujood Ali: "I'd like so much..."

"I'd like so much for someone here to take my hand, to look at me with kindness."


—Nujood Ali, with Delphine Minoui, I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced

Buckminster Fuller: "When I'm working on..."

"When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong."

—Buckminster Fuller

Anais Nin: "Each friend represents a..."

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

—Anaïs Nin

Antonio Machado: "Wanderer, there is no..."

"Wanderer, there is no path. You lay down a path in your walking."

—Antonio Machado

Ganz & Mandel: "You know, when I..."

"You know, when I was nineteen, Grandpa took me on a roller coaster. Up, down, up, down. Oh, what a ride! I always wanted to go again. You know, it was just so interesting to me that a ride could make me so frightened, so scared, so sick, so excited, and so thrilled all together! Some didn't like it. They went on the merry-go-round. That just goes around. Nothing. I like the roller coaster. You get more out of it."

—Lowell Ganz & Babaloo Mandel, Character of Grandma, Parenthood (1989)