Inspirational life quotes

"Oh, that it might be ours to rest year by year upon that high level of the heart to which at times we momentarily attain! Oh, that we could shake loose the prisoned pinions of the soul and soar to that superior point, whence, like to some traveler looking out through space from Darrien's giddiest peak, we might gaze with the spiritual eyes of noble thoughts into deep Infinity! ...to be done forever with these earthly thoughts... to rest on high wrapped for ever in the brightness of our better selves, that even now shines in us as fire faintly shines within those lurid balls, and lay down our littleness in that wide glory of our dreams, that invisible but surrounding good, from which all truth and beauty comes!"

H. Rider Haggard (SHE, p119)

"Amid the monotony of conventionalities only a few sense...reality. ...Only a few know how to overcome the dragon [hence the colloquial 'drag'] of everyday routine. The consciousness of humanity has become so saturated with the dust of usualness that it is necessary to break through this wall. One should learn to feel oneself beyond trivial usualness and to adhere in spirit to the manifested world of Beauty."

Stepan Stulginsky (Cosmic Legends of the East, p16)

“Try to choose carefully… when the great choices must be made. When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I lept at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.”

Ursula K. LeGuin (The Farthest Shore, p34)

"'Know thyself!' was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world 'Be thyself' shall be written."

Oscar Wilde (The Soul of Man, p27)

"That's…the problem! Your brain cannot figure it out; you can only feel it. …[And] when you do, in rare and expanded moments, your mind will finally come to rest; you'll bathe in absolute bliss…peace and joy." 

Dan Millman (The Laws of Spirit, p102)

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These fragments and quotes are taken from the unpublished writings of Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.