Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
Rainer Maria Rilke
There’s more to life than increasing its speed.
Gandhi
Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough.
Garrison Keillor, Leaving Home
Let yourself be open and life will be easier. A spoon of salt in a glass of water makes the water undrinkable. A spoon of salt in a lake is almost unnoticed.
Siddhārtha Gautama
Your problem, my darling daughter, is that you’re afraid you’re going to miss something. But what you don’t realize is that, by not making a decision, you’re missing it all.
Claire Cook, Life’s a Beach
Life roars by you like a flood and you grab whatever looks like it will hold you up. If you ask me, that’s how it is and ever shall be.
Barbara Kingslover, The Poisonwood Bible

‎The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (via nedhepburn)

(via jess-agi)

Source: everydayepiphanies

A person cannot coast along in old destructive habits year after year and accept whatever comes along. A person must stand up on her own two legs and walk. Get off the bus and go get on another. Climb out of the ditch and cross the road. Find the road that’s where you want to go. … The only sermon that counts is the one that is formed by our actions. She would quit drinking and thereby show Kyle life is what you make it. A person can grab hold of her life and change things for the better. This happens all the time. We are not chips of wood drifting down the stream of time. We have oars.
Garrison Keillor, Pontoon: A Lake Wobegon Novel
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five 
You’re a human being, you live once and life is wonderful, so eat the damn red velvet cupcake.
Emma Stone
If things start happening, don’t worry, don’t stew, just go right along and you’ll start happening too.
Dr. Seuss
At the beauty of what she had stumbled onto, at the fear that something terrible would happen because she was not vigilant enough. She cried at the fear of something so good that she would not be brave enough to bear it.
Rebecca Wells,Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
At some point, as Richard keeps telling me, you gotta let go and sit still and allow contentment to come to you. Letting go, of course, is a scary enterprise for those of us who believe that the world revolves only because it has a handle on the top of it which we personally turn, and that if we were to drop this handle for even a moment, well – that would be the end of the universe. But try dropping it….Sit quietly for now and cease your relentless participation. Watch what happens. The birds do not crash dead out of the sky in mid-flight, after all. The trees do not wither and die, the rivers do not run red with blood. Life continues to go on…. Why are you so sure that your micromanagement of every moment in this whole world is so essential? Why don’t you let it be?
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books.
Julian Barnes
It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour.
Charles Dickens