Inspirational Quotes

Quotes To Make Us Think

(Source: GoodReads.com)

The key is in accepting your thoughts, all of them, even the bad ones. Accept thoughts, but don’t become them. Understand, for instance, that having a sad thought, even having a continual succession of sad thoughts, is not the same as being a sad person. You can walk through a storm and feel the wind but you know you are not the wind.

Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

Obstacles are inevitable, so don’t get upset. Any form of worry erodes your strength. Never see a situation as difficult. Never ask why has this happened? Never feel you are on your own. Remember, God is always with you. God is giving you support. Take time to go into silence. Silence stops confusion. Your power will be restored.

Dadi Janki, Companion of God

Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.
Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle

Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.
Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

You need your nausea. You need your pain. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. All these depressed and anxious people, all over the world—they are giving us a message. They are telling us something has gone wrong with the way we live. We need to stop trying to muffle or silence or pathologize that pain. Instead, we need to listen to it, and honor it. It is only when we listen to our pain that we can follow it back to its source—and only there, when we can see its true causes, can we begin to overcome it.

Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression

When you’re lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you’ve just wandered off the path, that you’ll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it’s time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don’t even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.
Elizabeth Gilbert

The moment you accept what troubles you’ve been given, the door will open.

Rumi

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.
Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot

Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.
Amit Ray, Om Chanting and Meditation

I have had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. I had to experience despair. I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace.
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

If we think only of ourselves, forget about other people, then our minds occupy a very small area. Inside that small area, even tiny problem appears very big. But the moment you develop a sense of concern for others, you realize that, just like ourselves, they also want happiness; they also want satisfaction. When you have this sense of concern, your mind automatically widens. At this point, your own problems, even big problems, will not be so significant. The result? A big increase in peace of mind. So, if you think only of yourself, only your own happiness, the result is actually less happiness. You get more anxiety, more fear.

Dalai Lama XIV, The Wisdom of Forgiveness

You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?

Rumi

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning, or don’t find meaning, but ‘steal’ some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959

In order to ‎experience ‎silence I have to separate ‎myself from all worries and negative ‎thoughts. I need to engage the ‎intellect and ‎develop the ‎power of ‎concentration.‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Dadi Janki

The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love

Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it’s often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.
Brené Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Depression is also smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky but – if that is the metaphor – you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can’t exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.
Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless.
Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

Why, if we’re still breathing and eating, is there such unhappiness? Dissatisfaction is part of the deal of living because simple existence is full of contradictions; we want individuality, to stand out from the crowd, yet we want be part of a tribe. We’re driven and busy and yet we want peace. And worst of all, we want things to stay the same despite the fact that everything changes.

Ruby Wax, Sane New World: Taming the Mind

If you trade your authenticity for safety, you may experience the following: anxiety, depression, eating disorders, addiction, rage, blame, resentment, and inexplicable grief.
Brené Brown

Those with a grateful mindset tend to see the message in the mess. And even though life may knock them down, the grateful find reasons, if even small ones, to get up.
Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite. Made of flesh, but also stars.
Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

Your willingness to look at your darkness is what empowers you to change.
Iyanla Vanzant

A beautiful state of being is soul consciousness, where your whole sense of self is shifted from a physical identity to a spiritual one. In soul consciousness, you no longer feel yourself to be male or female, black or white. No worldly achievement forms your self-esteem. Instead, self-esteem is shaped by a deep, abiding experience of your intrinsic worth as a child of God.

Soul consciousness is cultivated through deliberate practice, and only those who have understood the need for this kind of true, inner self-respect will make the effort. Difficulties will arise to test your resolve for self-upliftment – physical illness, relationships, memories of the past, and so on. Yet with patience and introspection, you will come to see how these very tests are the means to strengthen your spiritual identity.

Dadi Janki, Companion of God

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

Rumi

What is it that would make a creature as fierce, majestic and powerful as a lion is, subject itself to the intimidation of a man, a whip and a chair? The lion has been taught to forget what it is.

Iyanla Vanzant, Peace From Broken Pieces

Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you
as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens.

Kahlil Gibran

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