1. “To lose balance sometimes for love is part of living a balanced life.”
2. “I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, ‘There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who’s in charge?”
3. “So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.”
4. “A true soulmate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet because they tear down your walls and smack you awake.”
5. “The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement.”
6. “In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it’s wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.”
7. “What do I believe that I deserve in this life?”
8. “There’s a part of me which has always wanted to hear a man say, “Let me take care of you forever,” and I have never heard it spoken before. Over the last few years, I’d given up looking for that person, learned how to say this heartening sentence to myself, especially in times of fear. But to hear it from someone else now, from someone who is speaking sincerely…”
9. “I am choosing happiness over suffering.”
10. “You’re wishin’ too much, baby. You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.”
11. “But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with think, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn’t. Useful, then, might be to accept how I was made and embody myself fully therein.”
12. “I wondered, ‘Why have I been chasing happiness my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?‘”
13. “Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.”
14. “The search for contentment is, therefore, not merely a self-reserving and self-benefiting act, but also a generous gift to the world. Clearing out all your misery gets you out of the way. You cease being an obstacle, not only to yourself but to anyone else. Only then are you free to serve and enjoy other people.”
15. “The Bhagavad Gita–that ancient Indian Yogic text–says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.”
16. “He looks at you like you’re someone he’s never met before, much less someone he once loved with high passion. The irony is, you can hardly blame him. I mean, check yourself out. You’re a pathetic mess, unrecognizable even to your own eyes.”
17. “The search for God is a reversal of the normal, mundane worldly order. In the search for God, you revert from what attracts you and swim toward that which is difficult. You abandon your comforting and familiar habits with the hope (the mere hope!) that something greater will be offered you in return for what you’ve given up.”
18. “We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme self who is eternally at peace.”
19. “My heart was broken so badly last time that it still hurts. Isn’t that crazy? To still have a broken heart almost two years after a love story ends? ”
20. “Whatever this feeling is – this is what I have been praying for. And this is also what I have been praying to.”
21. “Religion is for those who don’t want to go to hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there.”
22. “Man, they got mosquitoes ’round this place big enough to rape a chicken.”
23. “A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.”
24. “What should I do with all my energy instead? – Look for God. Look for God like a man with his head on fire looks for water.”
25. “God never slams a door in your face without opening a box of Girl Scout cookies.”
26. “Learn your way around loneliness.”
27. “Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever.”
28. “Saint Anthony said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which by the way you feel after the creature has left your company.”
29. “I was perfectly happy in my boring life before you came along.”
30. “One must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation.”
31. “But a true soulmate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.”
32. “Time — when pursued like a bandit — will behave like one; always remaining one country or one room ahead of you, changing its name and hair color to elude you, slipping ou the back door of the motel just as you’re banging through the lobby with your newest search warrant, leaving only a burning cigarette in the ashtray to taunt you.”
33. “Dear Lord, please show me everything I need to understand about forgiveness and surrender”
34. “When the karma of a relationship is done, only love remains. It’s safe. Let go.”
35. “it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you ARE lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you’ve just wandered a few feet off the path, that you’ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it’s time to admit you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don’t even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.”
36. “You have the opposite of poker face. You have like.. miniature golf face.”
37. “We must take care of our families, wherever we find them.”
38. “To find the balance you want, this is what you must become. You must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it’s like you have 4 legs instead of 2. That way, you can stay in the world. But you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead. That way, you will know God.”
39. “You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.”
40. “Oh my God, baby, you are in so much trouble.”
41. “Prayer is a relationship; half the job is mine. If I want transformation, but can’t even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I’m aiming for, how will it ever occur. Half the benefit of prayer is in the asking itself, in the offering of a clearly posed and well-considered intention.”
42. “In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.”
43. “You are what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”
44. “I wonder if I am capable of being somebody’s sun, somebody’s everything. Am I centered enough now to be the center of somebody else’s life?”
45. “Once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it.”
46. “To know God, you need only to renounce one thing – your sense of division from God. Otherwise, just stay as you were made, within your natural character.”
47. “You may return here once you have fully come to understand that you are always here.”
48. “It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainment.”
49. “Om Namah Shivaya, meaning, I honor the divinity that resides within me.”
50. “To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver.”
51. “I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.”
52. “I will not harbor unhealthy thoughts anymore.”
53. “We search for happiness everywhere, but we are like Tolstoy’s fabled beggar who spent his life sitting on a pot of gold, begging for pennies from every passerby, unaware that his fortune was right under him the whole time.”
54. “At some point, you gotta let go and sit still, and allow contentment to come to you.”
55. “Some days are meant to be counted, others are meant to be weighed.”
56. “I think I deserve something beautiful.”
57. “Mostly you meet friends when traveling by accident, like by sitting next to them on the train, or in a restaurant, or in a holding cell.”
58. “Also, I could finally sleep. And this was the real gift, because when you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch–there’s not a chance.”
59. “I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long, I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and I am braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.”
60. “We call it ‘dolce far niente’, the sweetness of doing nothing.”
61. “As smoking is to the lungs, so is resentment to the soul; even one puff is bad for you.”
62. “God dwells within you as you yourself, exactly the way you are. God isn’t interested in watching you enact some performance of personality in order to comply with some crackpot notion you have about how a spiritual person looks or behaves.”
63. “The Yogis say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We’re miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair.”
64. “But if you can plant yourself in stillness long enough, you will, in time, experience the truth that everything (both uncomfortable and lovely) does eventually pass.”
65. “People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.
66. “Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.”
67. “There is a reason they call God a presence – because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.”
68. “You are, after all, what you think. Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”
69. “You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestation of your own blessings.”
70. “Liz, you must be very polite with yourself when you are learning something new.”
71. “Having a baby is like getting a tattoo on your face. You really need to be certain it’s what you want before you commit.”
72. “The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.”
73. “But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”
74. “Having a baby is like having a tattoo on your face. You kind of want to be committed.”
75. “This was not my moment to be seeking romance and (as day follows night) to further complicate my already knotty life. This was my moment to look for the kind of healing and peace that can only come from solitude.”
76. “I didn’t want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.”
77. “If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind.”
78. “How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn’t it?”
79. “People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each other’s personalities. Who wouldn’t? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But that’s not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, ‘I can work around that. I can make something out of it.’? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it’s always going to pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.”
80. “I’m choosing happiness over suffering, I know I am. I’m making space for the unknown future to fill up my life with yet-to-come surprises.”
81. “You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select what clothes you’re gonna wear every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control. Drop everything else but that. Because if you can’t learn to master your thinking, you’re in deep trouble forever.”
82. “To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.”
83. “It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away.”
84. “When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”
85. “Well, just remember–all your misery will be waiting for you at the door upon your exit, should you care to pick it up again when you leave.”
86. “If you clear out all of that space in your mind you would have a door way.”
87. “God is an experience of supreme love.”
88. “Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it. If you don’t, you will leak away your innate contentment. It’s easy enough to pray when you’re in distress but continuing to pray even when your crisis has passed is like a sealing process, helping your soul hold tight to its good attainments.”
89. “You gotta stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone oughtta be.”
90. “As Epictetus once wrote, “You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.”
91. “Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy.”
92. “This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
93. “Imagine that the universe is a great spinning engine. You want to stay near the core of the thing – right in the hub of the wheel – not out at the edges where all the wild whirling takes place, where you can get frayed and crazy. The hub of calmness – that’s your heart. That’s where God lives within you. So stop looking for answers in the world. Just keep coming back to that center and you’ll always find peace.”
94. “You gotta learn how to let go…otherwise, you’re gonna make yourself sick…shut the door.”
95. “for you, I am even willing to suffer. Whatever pain happens to us in the future, I accept it already, just for the pleasure of being with you now. Let’s enjoy this time. It’s marvelous.”
96. “Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.”
97. “I can choose how I’m going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life – whether I will see them as curses or opportunities…and most of all, I can choose my thoughts.”
98. “Traveling-to-a-place energy and living-in-a-place energy are two fundamentally different energies”
99. “In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.”
100. “As one guru said, “You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead.”
