Best mindfulness & growth Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 2

“Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.” The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up-mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back. A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and then crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth’s surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any images. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.”

Source: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

“In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there. I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.”

Source: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

“The color-patches of vision part, shift, and reform as I move through space in time. The present is the object of vision, and what I see before me at any given second is a full field of color patches scattered just so. The configuration will never be repeated. Living is moving; time is a live creek bearing changing lights. As I move, or as the world moves around me, the fullness of what I see shatters. “Last forever!” Who hasn’t prayed that prayer? You were lucky to get it in the first place. The present is a freely given canvas. That it is constantly being ripped apart and washed downstream goes without saying; it is a canvas, nevertheless. But there is more to the present than a series of snapshots. We are not merely sensitized film; we have feelings, a memory for information and an eidetic memory for the imagery of our pasts. Our layered consciousness is a tiered track for an unmatched assortment of concentrically wound reels. Each one plays out for all of life its dazzle and blur of translucent shadow-pictures; each one hums at every moment its own secret melody in its own unique key. We tune in and out. But moments are not lost. Time out of mind is time nevertheless, cumulative, informing the present. From even the deepest slumber you wake with a jolt- older, closer to death, and wiser, grateful for breath. But time is the one thing we have been given, and we have been given to time. Time gives us a whirl. We keep waking from a dream we can’t recall, looking around in surprise, and lapsing back, for years on end. All I want to do is stay awake, keep my head up, prop my eyes open, with toothpicks, with trees.”

Source: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

“All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing the air with down. The lighted frame of my window filled. The down rose and spread in all directions, wafting over the dam’s waterfall and wavering between the tulip trunks and into the meadow. It vaulted towards the orchard in a puff; it hovered over the ripening pawpaw fruit and staggered up the steep faced terrace. It jerked, floated, rolled, veered, swayed. The thistle down faltered down toward the cottage and gusted clear to the woods; it rose and entered the shaggy arms of pecans. At last it strayed like snow, blind and sweet, into the pool of the creek upstream, and into the race of the creek over rocks down. It shuddered onto the tips of growing grasses, where it poised, light, still wracked by errant quivers. I was holding my breath. Is this where we live, I thought, in this place in this moment, with the air so light and wild? The same fixity that collapses stars and drives the mantis to devour her mate eased these creatures together before my eyes: the thick adept bill of the goldfinch, and the feathery coded down. How could anything be amiss? If I myself were lighter and frayed, I could ride these small winds, too, taking my chances, for the pleasure of being so purely played. The thistle is part of Adam’s curse. “Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.” A terrible curse: But does the goldfinch eat thorny sorrow with the thistle or do I? If this furling air is fallen, then the fall was happy indeed. If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom. I was weightless; my bones were taut skins blown with buoyant gas; it seemed that if I inhaled too deeply, my shoulders and head would waft off. Alleluia.”

Source: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

“Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?”

Source: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

“Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. “He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.”

Source: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

“You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo? You are a man, a retired railroad worker who makes replicas as a hobby. You decide to make a replica of one tree, the longleaf pine your great-grandfather planted- just a replica- it doesn’t have to work. How are you going to do it? How long do you think you might live, how good is your glue? For one thing, you are going to have to dig a hole and stick your replica trunk halfway to China if you want the thing to stand up. Because you will have to work fairly big; if your replica is too small, you’ll be unable to handle the slender, three-sided needles, affix them in clusters of three in fascicles, and attach those laden fascicles to flexible twigs. The twigs themselves must be covered by “many silvery-white, fringed, long-spreading scales.” Are your pine cones’ scales “thin, flat, rounded at the apex?” When you loose the lashed copper wire trussing the limbs to the trunk, the whole tree collapses like an umbrella. You are a sculptor. You climb a great ladder; you pour grease all over a growing longleaf pine. Next, you build a hollow cylinder around the entire pine…and pour wet plaster over and inside the pine. Now open the walls, split the plaster, saw down the tree, remove it, discard, and your intricate sculpture is ready: this is the shape of part of the air. You are a chloroplast moving in water heaved one hundred feet above ground. Hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen in a ring around magnesium…you are evolution; you have only begun to make trees. You are god- are you tired? Finished?”

Source: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

“Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep blank space high up above many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman’s tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of dots. At length I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn’t find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn’t make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at that very moment with great emotion, in intricate, detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which wholly worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, “that was a good time then, a good time to be living.” And I began to remember our time. I recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water. I saw white-faced cattle lowing and wading in creeks. I saw May apples in forests, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided, and apples grew spotted and striped in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. I remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wild ducks flew with outstretched necks, and called, one by one, and flew on. All these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remember the life of my time with increasing feeling. At last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean’s shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, “yes, that’s how it was then, that part there was called France.” I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes. We all ought to be able to conjure up sights like these at will, so that we can keep in mind the scope of texture’s motion in time.”

“Were the earth as smooth as a ball bearing, it might be beautiful seen from another planet, as the rings of Saturn are. But here we live and move; we wander up and down the banks of the creek, we ride a railway through the Alps, and the landscape shifts and changes. Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well; we would wake, blink, walk two steps to get the whole picture and lapse into dreamless sleep. Because we are living people, and because we are on the receiving end of beauty, another element necessarily enters the question. The texture of space is a condition of time. Time is the warp and matter the weft of woven texture of beauty in space, and death is the hurtling shuttle… What I want to do, then, is add time to the texture, paint the landscape on an unrolling scroll, and set the giant relief globe spinning on it stand.”

Source: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

“Those people who shoot endless time-lapse films of unfurling roses and tulips have the wrong idea. They should train their cameras instead on the melting of pack ice, the green filling of ponds, the tidal swings…They should film the glaciers of Greenland, some of which creak along at such a fast clip that even the dogs bark at them. They should film the invasion of the southernmost Canadian tundra by the northernmost spruce-fir forest, which is happening right now at the rate of a mile every 10 years. When the last ice sheet receded from the North American continent, the earth rebounded 10 feet. Wouldn’t that have been a sight to see?”

Source: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

“I am sitting here, you are sitting there. Say even that you are sitting across the kitchen table from me right now. Our eyes meet; a consciousness snaps back and forth. What we know, at least for starters, is: here we- so incontrovertibly- are. This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the meantime, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can work at making sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. I am as passionately interested in where I am as is a lone sailor sans sextant in a ketch on an open ocean. I have at the moment a situation which allows me to devote considerable hunks of time to seeing what I can see, and trying to piece it together. I’ve learned the name of some color-patches, but not the meanings. I’ve read books; I’ve gathered statistics feverishly: the average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees F…The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which is mostly oxygen…In these Appalachians we have found a coal bed with 120 seams, meaning 120 forests that just happened to fall into water…I would like to see it all, to understand it, but I must start somewhere, so I try to deal with the giant water bug in Tinker Creek and the flight of three hundred redwings from an Osage orange and let those who dare worry about the birthrate and population explosion among solar systems. So I think about the valley. And it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. The giant water bug’s predations, the frog’s croak, the tree with the lights in it are not in any real sense necessary per se to the world or its creator. Nor am I. The creation in the first place, being itself, is the only necessity for which I would die, and I shall. The point about that being, as I know it here and see it, is that as I think about it, it accumulates in my mind as an extravagance of minutiae. The sheer fringe and network of detail assumes primary importance. That there are so many details seems to be the most important and visible fact about creation. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it. If the world is gratuitous, then the fringe of a goldfish’s fin is a million times more so. The first question- the one crucial one- of the creation of the universe and the existence of something as a sign and an affront to nothing is a blank one… The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery of the Splintering of the Vessels.” The words refer to the shrinking or imprisonment of essences within the various husk-covered forms of emanation or time. The Vessels splintered and solar systems spun; ciliated rotifers whirled in still water, and newts laid tracks in the silt-bottomed creek. Not only did the Vessels splinter; they splintered exceeding fine. Intricacy then is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.”

Source: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The surface of mystery is not smooth, any more than the planet is smooth; not even a single hydrogen atom is smooth, let alone a pine. Nor does it fit together; not even the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules are a perfect match, for, even after the atom of iron replaces the magnesium, long streamers of disparate atoms trail disjointedly from the rims of the molecule’s loops. Freedom cuts both ways. Mystery itself is as fringed and intricate at the shape of the air at times. Forays into mystery cut bays and fine fjords, but the forested mainland itself is implacable both in its bulk and in its most filigreed fringe of detail.”

Source: PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK

“You are always going to meet disturbances outside yourself, it's the experience of living ~ There will be dark days and there will be days of laughter and somewhere in between you'll create a healthy balance within yourself and call it a life. We can't stop the storm, but we can learn to watch it pass.”

“Change your focus, give power to the positive and starve the negative. We reduce our inner wisdom to think with logic that's been instilled in us whilst expecting miraculous results. Retrain the core issue and the pathway will build itself.”

“Through grounding, we find growth”

Spirituality Growth Compassion Vision Kindness Mindfulness Yoga Wellness Affirmations Grounding

Book:A World of Yoga: 700 Asanas for Mindfulness and Well-Being

Source: A World of Yoga: 700 Asanas for Mindfulness and Well-Being

“Love is being able to view a situation without adding duality to it.”

Source: Living Peace: Essential Teachings For Enriching Life

“It’s all about reprogramming our minds to focus more on what brings us joy.”

Source: Living Peace: Essential Teachings For Enriching Life

“For people like us, looking towards the future can feel daunting. It can literally make us feel sick to the stomach and often induces panic attacks. Trust me, I’ve been there; I get it. That’s why the far-future should never be at the top of our “to-plan” list. It’s alright to have goals but to stress ourselves out with plans and options and worries of the future is a good way to drive us crazy. However, there is one time when I want you to consider the future. Always have something to look forward to.”

Life Inspiration Growth Plans Future Depression Anxiety Living Mindfulness Mental Health Busy New Things Do More The Now

Book:From My Suffering: 25 Ways to Break the Chains of Anxiety, Depression & Stress

Source: From My Suffering: 25 Ways to Break the Chains of Anxiety, Depression & Stress

“Accept where you are, accept what you have, accept who you are ~ do what you can with all of that and let it be enough.”

“The mind is just like a muscle - the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets and the more it can expand.”

Mind Growth Mindfulness Self Improvement Mindset Mind Power Self Development Growth Mindset Mind Control Mindfulness Practice Minds Self Development Quotes Mind Makeup

Book:Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

Source: Wealth for All: Living a Life of Success at the Edge of Your Ability

“The most profound personal growth does not happen while reading a book or meditating. It happens in the throes of conflict, when you are angry, afraid, frustrated. It happens when you are doing the same old thing and you suddenly realize that you have a choice.”

Mind Growth Mindfulness Self Awareness Personal Development Choice Self Knowledge Self Care Self Understanding

Author:Vironika Tugaleva

“We all have limitations. They are worth befriending. They teach us a lot. They can show us what we most need to pay attention to and honor. They become our cutting edge for learning and growing and gentling ourselves into the present moment as it is.”

Growth Mindfulness Limitations

Book:Full Catastrophe Living

Source: Full Catastrophe Living

“Water will flow, let it.”

Life Growth Acceptance Letting Go Mindfulness

Book:Finish the Sentence: Unscripted Lives: Lessons from Women Around the World

Source: Finish the Sentence: Unscripted Lives: Lessons from Women Around the World

“Time is a seed we’re given. We bloom, we decay, we’re reborn— shaped by the seasons we survive. Thorn or blossom, we become what we allow to take root.”

Inspirational Poetry Growth Nature Healing Mindfulness Transformation Resilience Self Reflection Emotional Growth

Author:Poe Avondet

“Some days, peace isn’t found. It’s built, one breath, one choice, one pause at a time.”

Growth Healing Mindfulness Reflection Calm Resilience Inner Strength Self Care Presence Peace Quotes

Author:Ajmal, from "The Border of a Mind"

“What you tend to quietly is often what grows most honestly.”

Purpose Growth Integrity Mindfulness Reflection Patience Simplicity Authenticity Stillness Nurturing

Author:Ajmal, from "The Border of a Mind"

“We scroll for meaning, but meaning grows slowly—like roots, not feeds.”

Philosophy Wisdom Growth Technology Mindfulness Reflection Social Media Meaning Modern Life Digital Age

Author:Lawrence Nault

“Emotions are normal and constantly in a state of flux. See them as energy in motion—it will serve you well.”

Energy Growth Healing Mindfulness Emotions Self Awareness Mental Health Personal Development Inner Peace Emotional Intelligence

Book:The Sun Rises in Eastmoor

Source: The Sun Rises in Eastmoor

“What was once a barren patch of earth is now alive with hummingbirds and butterflies… It didn’t take much money, just time, energy, and the willingness to care.”

Growth Healing Mindfulness Transformation Abundance Gardening Self Care Conscious Living Rewilding Nature Connection

Book:Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

Source: Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“You are not behind. You are already blooming.”

Growth Healing Mindfulness Encouragement Self Acceptance

Book:The Bloom Within: A Journey of Healing, Reflection, and Blooming

Source: The Bloom Within: A Journey of Healing, Reflection, and Blooming

“Meaningful learning cannot exist in spaces the ego occupies.”

Wisdom Understanding Growth Education Humility Perspective Mindfulness Enlightenment Insight Selflessness

Author:Erwin D. Maramat

“Flawless life is fragile life, Flawed life is resilient life. Greatest resilience is self-correction, the seed of true civilization, Flaws aware are instrument of flight.”

Life Lessons Growth Mindfulness Personal Development Flawed Perfectionism Perfectionist Flawless Self Correction

Book:Either Right or Human: 300 Limericks of Inclusion

Source: Either Right or Human: 300 Limericks of Inclusion

“as a leader, you can walk around like you're God, and give everyone the quiver, but, then, you're not going to learn anything”

God Growth Leadership Power Mindfulness

Book:Emotional Intelligence: Mindfulness

Source: Emotional Intelligence: Mindfulness

“SOPHISTICATED about consciousness and energy? If you’re seeking Enlightenment now, protect yourself by developing a more sophisticated kind of discernment about that.”

Growth Consciousness Awareness Mindfulness Energy Healing Chakras Energy Sensitivity Authentic Spiritual Growth Energy Reading

Author:Rose Rosetree

“There's a power in understanding what the neurological patterning of trauma can do to ones mind, body and soul. When you seek knowledge in areas of growth, it's life changing. Surviving is a different programming to thriving, don't beat yourself up if has taken you years to be attracted to what's good for you.”

Growth Freedom Perspective Disease Mindfulness Illness Crps Master Your Mind

Author:Nikki Rowe

“Healing—takes time, and—so does—not healing. Chose—how you spend your time —wisely.”

“The girl was a gypsy before an illness took control of her legs, now she watches in awe the world pass by whilst stillness teaches her about inner strength.”

“It will not always be easy, but it will always be beautiful.”

Beautiful Artist Fighting Growth Creativity Dreams Living Mindfulness Determination Strive Goals Self Discovery Present Career Self Development Goals In Life Songwriter The Glass Child

Author:Charlotte Eriksson

“Go slower—you’ll go further. Beautiful things aren’t rushed. A garden, a book, a work of art… they grow with time, care, and heart.”

Writing Art Inspiration Life Lessons Growth Beauty Creativity Mindfulness Patience Slow Living

Author:Angelika Regossi

“Failure is messy, uncomfortable, and sometimes downright painful—but it’s also where we grow.”

Wisdom Life Lessons Growth Healing Courage Failure Mindfulness Resilience Self Discovery Imperfection

Book:Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

Source: Subversive Acts of Humanity : A Survival Guide for Choosing Evolution over Self-Destruction

“Maturity isn’t about having all the answers — it’s about knowing when to listen, when to let go, and when your peace matters more than being right.”

Wisdom Life Lessons Growth Letting Go Mindfulness Self Awareness Inner Peace Maturity Emotional Intelligence

Book:Tales of Habib the Hoaxter: Sometimes Hoaxed, Always Good for a Laugh

Source: Tales of Habib the Hoaxter: Sometimes Hoaxed, Always Good for a Laugh

“The lack of mindfulness often makes us carry the unnecessary possessions, stale ideologies and rotten relationships along, which unnecessarily clutter our lives and consciousness, and stagnate our growth.”

Growth Relationships Letting Go Mindfulness Spiritual Growth Mindfulness Quotes Clutter Mindful Living Letting Go Of The Past Conscious Living Let Go Quotes Letting Go Of Negative People Clearing The Clutter Let Go Of Past

Book:Flow Yoga The Mindful Path of Action for Transforming Stress into Happiness

Source: Flow Yoga The Mindful Path of Action for Transforming Stress into Happiness

Mindfulness Quotes

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Mindfulness Quotes