“What a long, strange trip it’s been…” from Truckin’, Grateful Dead
It’s been QUITE a year, hasn’t it?
For most of us this has been the hardest year of our lives and I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to start fresh in 2021!
I was wondering what I could do to brighten your inbox on this last day of the year and then it dawned on me…
I’ll share the thing that never fails to bring me home to myself and that’s to enter the Temple of Wise Words.
The Temple is basically built from timeless words of wisdom that I’ve collected over the years.
These are wise, inspiring and loving phrases, sayings, proverbs and quotes from adventurers, philosophers, elders, spiritual guides, writers, leaders, musicians, inventors, entrepreneurs, teachers throughout history — people from all walks of life and from all parts of the world.
Many of these words are from those who have endured and overcome tremendous struggle, challenge and hardship while staying true to themselves.
In line with my free, signature 100-Day 1 Healing Breath series, this list consists of 100 handpicked sayings 🙂
These words are arranged in no particular order and I feel they’re especially suitable for all that we’ve been through and for all that we desire for the coming year.
You can read through the entire list all at once, read a little at a time or come back to it again and again… just know that whatever you decide is absolutely perfect!
You might have heard of some of these sayings before while others might be completely new to you…
Either way, I invite you to step into the Temple of Wise Words with me, so we may welcome 2021 with the beautiful, healing energies of love, gratitude, wisdom, strength and hope in our hearts.
The Temple of Wise Words
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
– Goethe
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
– Miles Kington
Stopping the endless pursuit of getting somewhere else is the perhaps most beautiful offering we can make to our spirit.
– Tara Brach
Everything you have ever wanted is sitting on the other side of fear.
– George Addair
If you want to see brave, look at those who can forgive.
– Bhagavad Gita
Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
– Harper Lee
If you were born with the weakness to fall you were born with the strength to rise.
– Rupi Kaur
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.
– Alice Walker
In the middle of chaos lies opportunity.
– Bruce Lee
Don’t surrender all your joy for an idea you used to have about yourself that isn’t true anymore.
– Cheryl Strayed
Whatever you say you see. When you say nothing, you see everything.
– Matt Kahn
Even after all this time the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.
– Hafiz
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
– Rabindranath Tagore
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.
– Albert Camus
The function of freedom is to free someone else.
– Toni Morrison
Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.
– Rumi
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.
– Maya Angelou
Love is a flame that burns everything other than itself. It is the destruction of all that is false and the fulfilment of all that is true.
– Adyashanti
In the end these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you let go?”
– Jack Kornfield
It isn’t what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.
– Jane Austen
A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.
– Chinese Proverb
There is never anything but the present, and if one cannot live there, one cannot live anywhere.
– Alan Watts
Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
– Rainier Maria Rilke
We all have ability. The difference is how we use it.
– Stevie Wonder
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
– Audre Lorde
Detachment is not that you should own nothing but that nothing should own you.
– Ali ibn Abi Talib
The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.
– Montaigne
Do you see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
– John Keats
Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
– Erica Jong
Life is the flower for which love is the honey.
– Zora Neale Hurston
The aspects of things that are most important to us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.
– Ludwig Wittgenstein
Beliefs and thoughts alter cells in your body.
— Bruce Lipton
You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.
– Native American saying
When things fall apart around you, you’re really left with what you’ve developed inside you.
– Rick Hanson
Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.
– Arundhati Roy
We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
– Ray Bradbury
You are never stronger…than when you land on the other side of despair.
– Zadie Smith
Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance.
– Carl Sandburg
If you are depressed you are living in the past if you are anxious you are living in the future, if you are at peace, you are living in the present.
– Lao Tzu
When things change inside you, things change around you.
– Unknown
There is no greater threat to the critics and cynics and fearmongers than those of us who are willing to fall because we have learned how to rise.
– Brené Brown
To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.
– Allen Ginsberg
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
– Mark Twain
Give the ones you love wings to fly, roots to come back, and reasons to stay.
– Dalai Lama
Life is really simple but we insist on making it complex.
– Confucius
Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.
– Voltaire
At an early age I learned that people make mistakes, and you have to decide if their mistakes are bigger than your love for them.
– Angie Thomas
If you can’t get a miracle, become one.
– Nick Vujicic
The greatest danger to our future is apathy.
– Jane Goodall
The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.
– Mahatma Gandhi
There are no ordinary moments.
– Dan Millman
We are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice.
– Barbara Marx Hubbard
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
– Carl Jung
Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
– Kahlil Gibran
If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.
– Emily Dickinson
There is only one journey. Going inside yourself.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave.
– Indira Gandhi
You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.
– Jodi Picoult
The creative adult is the child who survived.
– Ursula K Le Guin
None but ourselves can free our mind.
– Bob Marley
All healing is essentially the release from fear.
– A Course In Miracles
Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.
– Anatole France
Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless.
– Mother Theresa
True freedom is when all the stories, all the insights, all the realizations, concepts, beliefs and positions dissolve. What remains is what you are; a vast, conscious, luminous space simply resting in itself, not knowing a thing, at the point where all things are possible.
– Enza Vita
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
– Robert Frost
There is no way to happiness – happiness is the way.
– Thich Nhat Hanh
You cannot be lonely if you like the person you’re alone with.
– Dr. Wayne Dyer
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.
– Native American Proverb
Talk does not cook rice.
– Chinese Proverb
Stars can’t shine without darkness.
– D.H. Sidebottom
Works of art make rules. Rules don’t make works of art.
– Claude DeBussy
There is no other teacher but your own soul.
– Swami Vivekananda
If you can’t imagine it, you can’t have it.
– Toni Morrison
The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and the acceptance of love.
– Marianne Williamson
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
– Virginia Woolf
Within you there is a stillness and a sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself.
– Hermann Hesse
And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
– Anais Nin
The spiritual life does not remove us from the world but leads us deeper into it.
– Henri J.M. Nouwen
When you realise your own magnificence, you will only attract magnificence into your life.
– Anita Moorjani
Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know that everything in this life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from.
– Elizabeth Kübler-Ross
Quiet the mind and the soul will speak.
– Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati
The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
– W.B. Yeats
You and your purpose in life are the same thing. Your purpose is to be you.
– George Alexiou
The music is not in the notes but in the silence in between.
– Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
It’s a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
– Amy Tan
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you really are.
– Carl Jung
Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.
– Joseph Campbell
Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.
– Louis L’Amour
As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.
– Audrey Hepburn
Take care of your inner, spiritual beauty. That will reflect in your face.
– Dolores del Rio
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
– George Eliot
There is a presence within you that has never suffered. It lives in joy that has no cause. It is who you most deeply are.
– Jan Frazier
Earth laughs in flowers.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
– Adlai Stevenson
Realization is not acquisition of anything new nor is it a new faculty. It is only removal of all camouflage.
– Ramana Maharshi
Elegance is when the inside is as beautiful as the outside.
– Coco Chanel
Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
– Neil Gaiman
Everything you can imagine is real.
– Pablo Picasso
People who wonder if the glass is half empty or full miss the point. The glass is refillable.
– Unknown
Breathing in, I experience calm in me.
Breathing out, I smile to the calm in me.
Breathing in, I experience joy in me.
Breathing out, I smile to the joy in me.
Breathing in, I experience equanimity in me.
Breathing out, I smile to the equanimity in me.
Breathing in, I experience openness in me.
Breathing out, I smile to the openness in me.
Breathing in, I experience happiness in me.
Breathing out, I smile to the happiness in me.
– Thich Nhat Hanh