Sonja Lekovic

50 Beautiful Quotes That Will Make You A Better Person

This silence, this moment, every moment, if it's genuinely inside you. 
Brianna Wiest
September 29, 2016
“Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (English and German Edition)
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Relationships
“And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don't give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers – perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (English and German Edition)
“As soon as you fear losing someone, you dehumanize them. Remember: they don’t belong to you. No one belongs to anyone. Instead, be grateful for the presence of others in your life while they are around.”
— Charlie Ambler, Healthy Detachment
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness
“The point of simple living, for me has got to be: A soft place to land. A wide margin of error. Room to breathe. Lots of places to find baseline happiness in each and every day.”
— Leo Babauta, The Effortless Life
Tagged: Structure
“The Balinese don't wait and see 'how things go.' That would be terrifying. They organize how things go, in order to keep things from falling apart.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
“It's not what you do but what you don't do - the things you postpone, not the things you accomplish - that make you tired.”
— Donna Otto, Finding Your Purpose as a Mom: How to Build Your Home on Holy Ground
Tagged: Structure
“Understand: your mind is weaker than your emotions. But you become aware of this weakness only in moments of adversity,precisely the time when you need strength. What best equips you to cope with the heat of battle is neither more knowledge nor more intellect. What makes your mind stronger, and more able to control your emotions, is internal discipline and toughness. No one can teach you this skill; you cannot learn it by reading about it. Like any discipline, it can come only through practice, experience, even a little suffering. The first step in building up presence of mind is to see the need for it, to want it badly enough to be willing to work for it.”
— Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War (Joost Elffers Books)
“Many people have a narcotic attitude towards suffering. It terrifies them and makes them uncomfortable and so instead of building a tool set for overcoming it, they aim to stifle it. The sheer popularity of entertainment, junk food, porn, video games and all these other modern distractions is testament to this. People have been led to believe that life is about satisfying simply impulses of instant gratification. They might not even be conscious of it; these distractions are provided to us as entertainment but they all serve as narcotics. The rise of tech and the rise of opioid abuse parallel one another. No surprises there.”
— Charlie Ambler, You're Supposed To Suffer
Tagged: How To Think, Daily Zen, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy
“The scale of circumstance is not ‘happiness’ and ‘unhappiness’. There are a lot of ‘happy’ people in this world and a lot of ‘unhappy’ people, but this doesn’t matter. Chasing happiness rearranges your life so that you prevent yourself from taking the risks and enduring the suffering that’s likely to provide you with any sort of lasting awareness or wisdom. And that wisdom will always be offset by more suffering, so it’s important to learn to navigate the world in a way that isn’t just centered around happiness and well-being.”
— Charlie Ambler
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy, Daily Zen
“Meditation allows us to rearrange the entire mental fabric of living. This makes perfect sense, since it’s been proven to change the brain chemistry of regular practitioners. The mind is able to recalibrate itself and focus on what really matters: present scenery and circumstances.”
— Charlie Ambler, How To Meditate All Day Long
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy, Daily Zen
“I like to say that meditating is the mind’s way of looking in the mirror and cleaning itself up. Except the mind won’t do this on its own volition. Just sit in silence with your eyes closed. Focus on the breath. Give your mind a chance to correct itself. Watch your life slowly transform into something tranquil and endlessly interesting.”
— Charlie Ambler, How To Meditate All Day Long
Tagged: How To Think, The Art of Awareness, Psychology, Philosophy, Daily Zen
“It‘s a curious fact, because Friday is a day of work and Sunday is a day for pleasure, so you would expect people to enjoy Sunday more, right? But we don’t. It’s not because we really like being in the office and can’t stand strolling in the park and having a lazy brunch. We prefer Friday to Sunday because Friday brings with it the thrill of anticipating the weekend ahead. In contrast, on Sunday the only thing to look forward to is work on Monday.”
— Tali Sharot, The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain
“According to Dr. Judith Orloff, the voice, words or images brought on by intuitive knowledge, are ‘neutral’, without much emotional charge. Also your intuition is your inner wisdom, your soul speaking to you. It will approach you with a ‘compassionate, affirming tone’.

On the other hand, your fear will speak in a ‘highly emotionally charged’ way.

It will provide ‘cruel, demeaning or delusional content’. Other experts, such as transformational leadership coach Rosalie Puiman, also mention this as a key way to tell the difference between fear speaking or intuition speaking.”
— Unknown, The Difference Between Intuition & Fear: How To Tell Them Apart
“Very many of us suffer from a peculiar-sounding problem: an inability to properly inhabit the stretch of time we call ‘the present’. Maybe we’re on a beautiful beach on a sunny day, the sky is azure and the palm trees slender and implausibly delicate, but most of ‘us’ isn’t actually here at all, it’s somewhere at work or in imaginary discussion with a rival or plotting a new enterprise.

Or maybe we’re at the birthday of a child: it’s enormously significant for her and we love her dearly, but we are elsewhere; our body is rooted in the now, but our minds are skipping to points in both the future and in the past. What is it that makes the present, especially the nicer moments of the present, so difficult to experience properly? And why, conversely, can so many events feel easier to enjoy, appreciate and perceive, when they are firmly over?”
— Alain de Botton, The Difficulty of Being in the Present
“I tell parents: Love your kid a bit less,’ Dr. Shefali says. ‘Because the love is messing this up.’

The reason for that, she continues, is because of the blinding effect that love has.

‘Love is blind, and what that means is not that it’s unconditional. It’s truly blind,’ she clarifies. ‘You’re not even seeing the child in front of you. You’re just so consumed by your need to be loved back, by your need to feel love yourself.’

This is why Dr. Shefali suggests shifting the focus.

‘Let’s put love aside. Now let’s talk about consciousness,’ she says. ‘Because love without consciousness becomes need, dependency. It becomes control in the name of love.’”
— Lisa Capretto, Why This Psychologist Suggests That You 'Love Your Kid A Bit Less'
“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.”
— Stephen King, Awaken
“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”
— David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
“Create with the heart; build with the mind.”
— Criss Jami, Healology
“Forgive the past. It is over. Learn from it and let go. People are constantly changing and growing. Do not cling to a limited, disconnected, negative image of a person in the past. See that person now. Your relationship is always alive and changing.”
— Brian Weiss, Many Lives, Many Masters: The True Story of a Prominent Psychiatrist, His Young Patient, and the Past-Life Therapy That Changed Both Their Lives
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
— Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
“If you obsess over whether you are making the right decision, you are basically assuming that the universe will reward you for one thing and punish you for another.

The universe has no fixed agenda. Once you make any decision, it works around that decision. There is no right or wrong, only a series of possibilities that shift with each thought, feeling, and action that you experience.

If this sounds too mystical, refer again to the body. Every significant vital sign- body temperature, heart rate, oxygen consumption, hormone level, brain activity, and so on- alters the moment you decide to do anything… decisions are signals telling your body, mind, and environment to move in a certain direction.”
— Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams
“If you don't behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.”
— Fulton Sheen, Life of Christ
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.”
— Albert Einstein, The World As I See It
“To say that one waits a lifetime for his soulmate to come around is a paradox. People eventually get sick of waiting, take a chance on someone, and by the art of commitment become soulmates, which takes a lifetime to perfect.”
— Criss Jami, Healology
“The truest form of love is how you behave toward someone, not how you feel about them.”
— Steve Hall, Me Before You
“Be mindful of what you're mindful of. You actually have some control over what your brain decides to delete while you sleep. It's the synaptic connections you don’t use that get marked for recycling. The ones you do use are the ones that get watered and oxygenated. If you spend too much time reading theories about the end of Game of Thrones and very little on your job, guess which synapses are going to get marked for recycling?”
— Jonah Pollock, Your Brain Has A "Delete" Button--Here's How To Use It
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Modern Library Classics)
“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel (Modern Library 100 Best Novels)
“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.”
— Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (Image Classics)