if you have a garden and a library you have everything you need.

-cicero

In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” -Jack Kornfield

The most human part of humanity is not our animal instincts nor our computer-like rationality, but our mutual social creation of meanings and values around arbitrary choices.

I don’t believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or to make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.

– Gloria Naylor

She was coming to look on men and women as fellow-survivors: well-dissemblers of their woes, who, with few signals of grief, had contained, assimilated, or put to use their own destruction. Of those who had endured the worst, not all behaved nobly or consistently. but all, involuntarily, became part of some deeper assertion of life.

— Shirley Hazzar

People change in four seasons: when they hurt enough they have to, when they see enough they are inspired to, when they learn enough that they want to, and when they receive enough that they are able to

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“Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

- Brian Eno

Poet Mary Oliver on allowing yourself to be happy and full: "If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. ...whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb."