If you relax, it comes.

"I like women who haven't lived with too many men. I don't expect virginity but I simply prefer women who haven't been rubbed raw by experience. There is a quality about women who choose men sparingly; it appears in their walk, in their eyes, in their laughter and in their gentle hearts. Women who have had too many men seem to choose the next one out of revenge rather than with feeling. When you play the field selfishly everything works against you: one can't insist on love or demand affection. You're finally left with whatever you have been willing to give which often is: nothing. Some women are delicate things, some women are delicious and wondrous. If you want to piss on the sun go ahead but please leave them alone."

--Charles Bukowski

“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.”

--Victor Hugo

“Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart; of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.”

--Edgar Allan Poe

“You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.”

--Eckhart Tolle

“Any idiot can face a crisis - it’s day to day living that wears you out.”

--Anton Chekhov

“…she laughed, I love it when she laughs, although the truth is I am not in love with her…”

--Jonathan Safran Foer, 'Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close'

“Worrying is carrying tomorrow’s load with today’s strength- carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn’t empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”

--Corrie Ten Boom

“Don’t seek, don’t search, don’t ask, don’t knock, don’t demand – relax. If you relax, it comes. If you relax, it is there. If you relax, you start vibrating with it.”

--Osho

You feel like running, but life is on a stroll.

All quotes by author Donald Miller

"I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people buy office supplies. But they get into the middle and discover it was harder than they thought. They can't see the distant shore anymore, and they wonder if their paddling is moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the trees ahead are getting bigger. They take it out on their spouses, and they go looking for an easier story."

"I can't do it. It would be like, say, trying to fall in love with somebody, or trying to convince yourself that your favorite food is pancakes. You don't decide those things, they just happen to you. If God is real, He needs to happen to me."

"I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me."

"Even our beliefs have become trend statements. We don’t even believe things because we believe them anymore. We only believe things because they are cool things to believe."

"My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don’t really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can prove He doesn't exist, and there are some other guys who do believe in God and they can prove He does exist, and the argument stopped being about God a long time ago and now it’s about who is smarter, and honestly I don’t care."

"There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.) And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there somewhere. Of course, I had always known He was, but this time I felt it, I realized it, the way a person realizes they are hungry or thirsty. The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart. I imagined Him looking down on this earth, half angry because His beloved mankind had cheated on Him, had committed adultery, and yet hopelessly in love with her, drunk with love for her."

"It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so. You feel like running, but life is on a stroll."

"Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself."

"No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath…"

"I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn't. It's a chocolate thing."

"I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently."

"I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or romance out of which the world has been constructed, a feeling there is something more than the mundane, and a reason for our plodding."

"When you live on your own for a long time, however, your personality changes because you go so much into yourself you lose the ability to be social, to understand what is and isn't normal behavior. There is an entire world inside yourself, and if you let yourself, you can get so deep inside it you will forget the way to the surface. Other people keep our souls alive, just like food and water does with our body."

"I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime."

"The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: life is a story about me."

"Everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves. I mean, maybe people want to be themselves, but they want to be different, with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. It's a fact. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn't want to be anybody else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him."

"I don't wonder anymore what I'll tell God when I go to heaven when we sit in the chairs under the tree, outside the city... I'll tell these things to God, and he'll laugh, I think and he'll remind me of the parts I forgot, the parts that were his favorite. We'll sit and remember my story together, and then he'll stand and put his arms around me and say, "well done," and that he liked my story. And my soul won't be thirsty anymore. Finally he'll turn and we'll walk toward the city, a city he will have spoken into existence a city built in a place where once there'd been nothing. "

“And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves…We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it? I want to repeat one word for you: Leave. Roll the word around on your tongue for a bit. It is a beautiful word, isn’t it? So strong and forceful, the way you have always wanted to be. And you will not be alone. You have never been alone. Don’t worry. Everything will still be here when you get back. It is you who will have changed.”

Loneliness adds beauty to life.

“Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.”

--Henry Rollins

I am alive and that is the best that I can do.

Thinking of me as others may see me scares the crap out of me.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

I think it used to mean

making enough

everyday

to provide for the people you love

and loving enough

so that those people

would also provide for you.

It seems like now it means

making more than you could ever need or use

and keeping as much of it as possible

because you don’t have time

everyday

to love anyone enough

for them to want to share.

--Dallas Clayton

THE RULES

Trying to explain to a child

why cavemen didn’t wear clothes in the summer

but we have to

is like admitting

that nothing we ever do

really makes any sense at all.

--Dallas Clayton

“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”

--Meister Eckhart

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

--Albert Einstein

Rise above the little things.

“Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.”

--Hafiz

And is often the case with faith, I thought I was being asked a favor, when in fact I was being given one.

“There is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”

--DH Lawrence

When you reach the little house, the place your journey started, you will recognize it, although it will seem much smaller than you remember. Walk up the path, and through the garden gate you never saw before but once. And then go home. Or make a home. Or rest.

There's no pleasure in having nothing to do. The fun is in having lots to do, and not doing it.

"I am neither better nor smarter, only luckier. And I should be ashamed of thinking I know everything because you can know the whole world and still feel lost in it. So many people are in pain – no matter how smart or accomplished – they cry, they yearn, they hurt. But instead of looking down on things, they look up, which is where I should be looking too. Because when the world quiets to the sound of your own breathing, we all want the same things: Comfort, love and a peaceful heart."

--Mitch Albom, 'Have A Little Faith'

"It is far more comforting to think God listened and said no, than to think that nobody’s out there."

--Mitch Albom, 'Have A Little Faith'

"If we tend to the things that are important in life, if we are right with those we love and behave in line with our faith, our lives will not be cursed with the aching throb of unfulfilled business. Our words will always be sincere, our embraces will be tight. We will never wallow in the agony of 'I could have, I should have.' We can sleep in a storm. And when it's time, our goodbyes will be complete."

--Mitch Albom, 'Have A Little Faith'

She was either crying or laughing. Her moods never gave warning. But we stuck with her; because that’s what friends do. We see past the bad to the good, to the purpose for loving them.

She decided to free herself, dance into the wind, create a new language. And birds fluttered around her, writing "yes" into the sky.

My thoughts tend to sound better in books I didn’t write, and in the songs I didn’t sing. Even then, sometimes there is no piece of literature, no song, no work of art that can really explain the way you feel. There is a double-edge comfort in knowing that no one really knows.

“Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won’t be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there — to the edge of the world. There’s something you can’t do unless you get there.”

--Haruki Murakami

“We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives…not looking for flaws, but for potential.”

--Ellen Goodman

“One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this: To rise above the little things.”

--John Burroughs

“We are all mortal until the first kiss and the second glass of wine.”

--Eduardo Galeano

“You can’t control when you lose your heart. The only thing you can do is trust, trust that the person who has your heart realizes it’s value.”

--'Grey's Anatomy'

“Make a wish and place it in your heart. Anything you want, everything you want. Do you have it? Good. Now believe it can come true. You never know where the next miracle is gonna come from, the next smile, the next wish come true. But if you believe that it’s right around the corner, and you open your heart and mind to the possibility of it, to the certainty of it. You just might get the thing you’re wishing for. The world is full of magic. You just have to believe in it. So make your wish. Do you have it? Good. Now believe in it. With all your heart.”

--'One Tree Hill'

“That’s the point,” he said. “Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. so people getting married think they’re wonderful and that they’re going to have a baby that’s wonderful, when actually they’re as ugly as a rhinoceroses. Just because we think we’re so wonderful doesn’t mean we really are. We could be terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.”