Every once in a while, I share quotes I’ve been collecting in a rather beat-up leather journal that sits on my desk.

Today is one of those days.  Enjoy!

I know
it’s hard to be reconciled
not everything is exactly
the way it ought to be

but please turn around
and step into the future
leave memories behind
enter the land of hope

–Zhigniew Herbert, from A Life

“After long study and experience, I have come to the conclusion that [1] all religions are true; [2] all religions have some error in them; [3] all religions are almost as dear to me as my own Hinduism, in as much as all human beings should be as dear to one as one’s own close relatives. My own veneration for other faiths is the same as that for my own faith; therefore no thought of conversion is possible.” –Mahatma Gandhi, from All Men Are Brothers: Life and Thoughts of Mahatma Gandhi

“Making the decision to have a child is momentous.  It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

–Elizabeth Stone

“Then the time came when the risk it took
To remain tight in a bud was more painful
Than the risk it took to bloom.”

–Anais Nin

“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how.  The moment you know how, you begin to die a little.  The artist never entirely knows.  We guess.  We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”  –Agnes de Mille

“You say grace before meals.  All right.  But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.”  –G.K. Chesterton

“If one can actually revert to the truth, then a great deal of one’s suffering can be erased—because a great deal of one’s suffering is based on sheer lies.”  –R.D. Laing

“When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.”  –Anais Nin

“Let me listen to me and not to them.”  –Gertrude Stein

“If you do not ask yourself what it is you know, you will go on listening to others and change will not come because you will not hear your own truth.”  –Saint Bartholomew

“You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.”  –John Wooden, former UCLA coach

“I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul’s good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed. But there is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a more severe mortification. I have never failed to read the Literary Supplement of The Times. It is a salutary discipline to consider the vast number of books that are written, the fair hopes with which their authors see them published, and the fate which awaits them. What chance is there that any book will make its way among that multitude? And the successful books are but the successes of a season. Heaven knows what pains the author has been at, what bitter experiences he has endured and what heartache suffered, to give some chance reader a few hours’ relaxation or to while away the tedium of a journey. And if I may judge from the reviews, many of these books are well and carefully written; much thought has gone to their composition; to some even has been given the anxious labour of a lifetime. The moral I draw is that the writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of his thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success.”  –Somerset Maugham

So, there you have it.  Small packages of wisdom, wrapped especially for you, on this halfway-through-the-week day!