"There isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,

No matter where it’s going."

Edna St. Vincent Millay

"For what it’s worth: it’s never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There’s no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it — it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking…ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.” — Charles Baudelaire

"After I reached my teens I decided I didn’t want to hang out with anyone. I couldn’t handle the stupidity."

 Kurt Cobain

"My encounter with another world and another culture and the beginnings of an attachment to them had set up an irritation, barely perceptible but incurable-rather like unrequited love, like a symptom of the hopelessness of trying to grasp what is boundless, or unite what cannot be joined; a reminder of how finite, how curtailed, our experience on earth must be"

— Andrei Tarkovsky, from Sculpting in Time: Tarkovsky The Great Russian Filmaker Discusses His Art

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being."

Carl Jung

"(exists no miracle mightier than this: to feel)"

e.e. cummings

"I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most melancholy propensities; for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?"

Voltaire

I believe there is an important distinction to be made between religion and spirituality. Religion I take to be concerned with belief in the claims to salvation of one faith tradition or another–an aspect of which is acceptance of some form of meta-physical or philosophical reality, including perhaps an idea of heaven or hell. Connected with this are religious teachings or dogma, ritual, prayers and so on.

Spirituality I take to be concerned with those qualities of the human spirit–such as love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility,a sense of harmony, which bring happiness to both self and others.

From “Ethics for the New Millenium” — Susan Piver

"Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."

Rumi

"Happy. Just in my swim shorts, barefooted, wild-haired, in the red fire dark, singing, swigging wine, spitting, jumping, running; that’s the way to live."

Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

"Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between the two, my life flows."

Nisargadatta Maharaj

“There are quiet places also in the mind”, he said meditatively. “But we build bandstands and factories on them. Deliberately - to put a stop to the quietness. All the thoughts, all the preoccupations in my head - round and round, continually… What is it for? What is it all for? To put an end to the quiet, to break it up and disperse it, to pretend at any cost that it isn’t there. Ah, but it is; it is there, in spite of everything, at the back of everything. Lying awake at night - not restlessly, but serenely, waiting for sleep - the quiet re-establishes itself, piece by piece; all the broken bits we’ve been so busily dispersing all day long. It re-establishes itself, an inward quiet, like the outward quiet of grass and trees. It fills one, it grows - a crystal quiet, a growing, expanding crystal. It grows, it becomes more perfect; it is beautiful and terrifying… For one’s alone in the crystal, and there’s no support from the outside, there is nothing external and important, nothing external and trivial to pull oneself up by or stand on. There is nothing to laugh at or feel enthusiast about. But the quiet grows and grows. Beautifully and unbearably. And at last you are conscious of something approaching; it is almost a faint sound of footsteps. Something inexpressively lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And it’s inexpressively terrifying. For if it were to touch you, if it were to seize you and engulf you, you’d die; all the regular, habitual daily part of you would die… One would have to begin living arduously in the quiet, arduously in some strange, unheard of manner.”

Aldous Huxley