To Fall In Love With The World

I had one of those moments today.  One of those moments where you can’t believe that all this is real.  One of those moments where you just feel so happy and content and comfortable in a place so incredibly different than the place you call home.  But then again, this place is feeling more and more like home everyday.  One of those moments that you just feel so lucky and so blessed to be in such an amazing place, surrounded by amazing people, and experiencing new and amazing experiences everyday.  It was a good day.

I have been collecting quotes for about two years now.  Quotes that I’ve found on the internet, quotes that I’ve read in books, quotes that friends and family have shared with me, and things that friends and family have said that have moved and inspired me. I collect these quotes and write them all down in a notebook.  And just this past weekend, I finally filled up the notebook.  To celebrate that achievement, I thought I’d dedicate this week’s blog post to my quote book and include some of my favorite quotes that I’ve come across in the past two years.  I hope you’re able to enjoy them as much as I have.

“The very motion of our lives is towards happiness.”  -Dalai Lama

“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”  -Gandhi

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life.  When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.  I wrote down ‘happy’.  They told me I didn’t understand the assignment and I told them they didn’t understand life.”  -John Lennon

“There are only two ways to live your life.  One is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other is as though everything is a miracle.”  -Albert Einstein

“She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes.  That’s life.  It hurts, it’s dirty, and it feels very, very good.”  -Orson Scott Card

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”  -John Steinbeck

“I myself am entirely made of flaws, stitched together with good intentions”  -Augusten Burroughs

“Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water, and everyone you love is made of stardust.  And I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and that the night sky is no home.  And you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent.  But nothing is infinite, not even loss.  You are made of the sea and the stars and one day you are going to find yourself again.”  -Finn Butler

“Being self luminous/ You cause everything to shine/  Delighting in your form/  You fill the universe with delight/  Rocking with your own bliss/  You make the world dance with joy.” -Utpaladeva

“Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the wind longs to play with your hair.”  -Menards Ad

“I think that we are like stars.  Something happens to burst us open; but when we burst open and think we are dying; we’re actually turning into a supernova.  And then when we look at ourselves again, we see that we’re suddenly more beautiful than we ever were before!”  -C. Joybell C.

“What is it you plan to do with your wild and precious life?”  -Mary Oliver

“Everything really good in our experience is in some way beyond our control.”  -Emmet Gowin

“It seems we are trying to leave our mark in a place that doesn’t need our fingerprints.”  -Hannah Rehak

“Why do you go away?  So that you can come back.  So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors.  And the people there see you differently, too.  Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”  -Terry Pratchett

“Life recently has had this weird tendency to stitch every important thing I hear together into one important blob of meaning.”  -Cody Tracey

“We fall in love with the world.  I know from my own wandering that embracing the unfamiliar in this way can be as terrifying as it is exhilarating, but I have learned to make the leap, to meet whatever the universe sends my way with a vulnerable and open heart.  Why?  Because when we approach the places and peoples of the planet this way, some amazing adventure always unfolds, diminishing and completing us in was we cannot begin to understand.  Just like love.”  -Don George