A Quote by Wendell Berry

There are moments when the heart is generous, and then it knows that for better or worse our lives are woven together here, one with one another and with the place and all the living things.

Wendell Berry

Quote Topics

Another Better Generous Heart Knows Lives Living Living Thing Living Things Moments Our Our Lives Place Then Things Together Worse Woven

Quote Author

Wendell Berry
American - Novelist
Born: August 5, 1934

I truly believe that to stay home, to learn the names of things, to realize who we live among . . . then I believe a politics of place emerges where we are deeply accountable to our communities, to our neighborhoods, to our home . . . If we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put . . . then I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of true desolation.

Terry Tempest Williams

There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual- become clairvoyant. We reach then into reality. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. It is in the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it.

Robert Henri

Members in the Commonwealth of God are not bound together by the specifics of their religion, for the nature of our interdependency does not require this. Rather we are bound by the shared recognition that when one person suffers, all suffer; when we violate one life, all lives are violated; when we pollute the earth, all living things are stained; when one nation threatens the security of another, it, too, becomes less secure; when we place the planet in mortal danger, we hazard the future of our own children as well as the children of our enemies.

Forrest Church

If we do not live and manifest in our lives what we realize in our deepest moments of revelation, then we are living a split life.

Adyashanti

Yet still, there are those special secret moments in our lives, when we smile unexpectedly-when all our forces are resolved. A woman can often see these moments in us, better than a man, better than we ourselves, even. When we know these moments, when we smile, when we are not on guard at all-these are the moments when our most important forces show themselves; whatever it is you are doing at such a moment, hold on to it, repeat it-for that certain smile is the best knowledge that we ever have of what our hidden forces are, and where they lie, and how they can be loosed.

Christopher Alexander

Separation happens in so many different dimensions. We see it everywhere. I believe we are all part of the spiritual heart. We all come from that place of oneness, so that place in us that knows love, that knows connection, hurts. It's a challenge that we also feel more than any other time because it's in the news and social media. It's in our families. There is division with people in our lives, as well as political division and religious division.

Agapi Stassinopoulos

The things that matter most in our lives are not fantastic or grand. They are the moments when we touch one another.

Jack Kornfield

There is something in these moments of crisis that is really extraordinary about humanity and human beings' resilience and the way in which everyone naturally comes together. I think you see the best in people in those moments for better or for worse and you find your best self.

Carla Gugino

What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from, she thought absently. For better or worse, that's what we have to sustain us in our endeavors, to buttress us in our darker moments, and to remind us of our identity. Without those things, we are adrift.

Terry Brooks

Around every corner is another gift waiting to surprise us, and it will surprise us if we can achieve control over our natural tendencies to make comparisons [to things that are better rather than things that are worse], to take things for granted [rather than imagining how much worse things would be if they weren't there and so feeling grateful], and to feel entitled!

Gilbert K. Chesterton

They alone live whose lives are in the whole universe, and the more we concentrate our lives on limited things, the faster we go towards death. Those moments alone we live when our lives are in the universe, in others; and living this little life is death, simply death, and that is why the fear of death comes.

Swami Vivekananda

The things I do, I do from the heart and out of love and respect for our planet and all living things. And I draw my courage from my love for justice and truth, and I calm my fears by comforting those who are more scared than me. And I try to do my best to make the world a better place, one small action at a time, as good as I can.

Q'orianka Kilcher

In a world of chance is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger's embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them? (Susan Barton)

J. M. Coetzee

We read about secret lives that people have on the Internet, or alternate lives of a serial killer where the whole family didn't know that their dad or their brother or their child was that. There are all the things in our heart that no one really knows, and I thought that that was interesting territory to explore.

Catherine Hardwicke

We all have those moments where we realize how easily our lives could be so different, for better or for worse. I met my husband at a gym in NYC! What if I'd joined a different gym? What if I hadn't worked out in the afternoons? These questions are endless.