There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
–Aldous Huxley

The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
–Charles DuBois

I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that’s where you renew your springs that never dry up.
–Pearl S. Buck

According to the writer Jorge Luis Borges, the idea of the Zahir comes from Islamic tradition and is thought to have arisen at some point in the eighteenth century. Zahir, in Arabic, means visible, present, incapable of going unnoticed. It is someone or something which, once we have come in contact with them or it, gradually occupies our every thought, until we can think of nothing else. This can be considered either a state of holiness or of madness.
–Faubourg Saint-Peres, Encyclopedia of the Fantastic (1953)

As with yoga, this culture has taken a sublime, complicated mystical system, designed to birth the divine, and turned it into a form of decadent entertainment.
–Andrew Harvey, author of The Sun at Midnight

The depth of your mythology is the extent of your effectiveness.
–John C. Maxwell

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.
–Ernest Hemingway

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
–Anais Nin

… we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
–Paul Bowles

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.
–Gloria Steinem