Hannah tasted salty tears of infertility. Elijah howled for God to take his life. David asked his soul a thousand times why it was so downcast. God does great things through the greatly wounded. God sees the broken as the best and He sees the best in the broken and He calls the wounded to be the world changers.
— Ann Voskamp, The Broken Way, p. 24
Giving thanks is a way of gathering joy. Imagine yourself in a meadow chasing butterflies with a net. Though the meadow is full of spiders, you don’t notice these, neither are you concerned with weeds or scraps of litter. You aren’t collecting spiders or weeds or litter. You’re collecting butterflies, and your sole focus is on capturing those brightly colored flecks of beauty.
Joy requires single-mindedness. The world is full of reasons to be sad or distressed, but beauty and goodness also abound. Which to look at? What you see is what you get.
— Mike Mason, Champagne for the Soul, p. 49-50
We do violence to ourselves when we focus on what we are missing or lacking rather than appreciating the gifts we have been given. You don’t have to follow a particular religion or even any religion at all to appreciate the marvels and mysteries of the world — they are there for all of us. By bringing more appreciation into your life, you can change your attitude and your perspective on the world.
— Arun Gandhi, The Gift of Anger, p. 220-221
Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.
— Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist, p. 20
Teach her that to love is not only to give but also to take. This is important because we give girls subtle cues about their lives — we teach girls that a large component of their ability to love is their ability to sacrifice their selves. We do not teach this to boys. Teach her that to love she must give of herself emotionally but she must also expect to be given.
— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, p. 56
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.
— Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark, p. 3-4
The path away from judgment of self and neighbor requires major mercy, both giving and, horribly, receiving. Going without either of them leads to fundamentalism of all stripes, and fundamentalism is the bane of poor Mother Earth. Going without engenders blame, which offers its own solace but traps us like foxes. We trick out box traps with throw rugs and vases, until the pain grows too big. Then the only way out of jail is forgiveness.
— Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway, p. 48-49
I define forgiveness as the experience of peace and understanding that can be felt in the present moment. You forgive by challenging the rigid rules you have for other people’s behavior and by focusing your attention on the good things in your life as opposed to the bad. Forgiveness does not mean forgetting or denying that painful things occurred. Forgiveness is the powerful assertion that bad things will not ruin your today even though they may have spoiled your past.
— Dr. Fred Luskin, Forgive for Good, p. xii
To soar above is to go beyond limits, to become greater, to become the most empowered and humane persons we can be. This, I believe, is the evolved function of pain: not to suffer or to identify with suffering but to grow beyond it. As we’ve seen, the natural function of pain is to motivate behavior that will heal, correct, and improve. The Adult brain uses pain as fuel for growth.
— Steven Stosny, Soar Above, p. 144
“The natural response when someone hits you,” the Archbishop said, “is wanting to hit back. But why do we admire people who don’t choose revenge? It is our recognition of the fact that, yes, there are those who think an eye for an eye is going to satisfy you. But in the end you discover that an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind. We have an instinct for revenge but also for forgiveness.”
— Archbishop Desmond Tutu, quoted by Douglas Abrams in The Book of Joy, p. 236