Amelia Tang
INSPIRATIONS.
‘When we renounce our dreams and find peace,’ he said after a while, ‘we go through a short period of tranquillity. But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being. We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves. That’s when illnesses and psychoses arise. What we sought to avoid in combat – disappointment and defeat – come upon us because of our cowardice.
And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death. It’s death that frees us from our certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of our Sunday afternoons.’
~ Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage
With penetrating insight, the mystics will tell us that when we have a desire for a certain thing, a certain experience, and we fulfill that desire, the happiness we feel is not something given by that thing or experience; it is due to having no craving for a little while.
~ Eknath Easwaran, The Mantram Handbook
Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.
" Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have, that nobody else has is You, your voice, your story ... your vision. So write & draw & build & play & dance & live as only you can. The moment you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself, that's the moment, you may be starting to get it right. The things I've done that worked the best, were the things I was the least certain about ... " Neil Gaiman.
Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne (Or as a traveller once told me, like a bar of soap. The harder you squeeze, the quicker the soap flies from you !)
The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up. - Charles L. Morgan