Open Heart

Everybody's heart is open...when they have recently escaped from severe pain, or are recovering the blessing of health.
--Jane Austen

Proof

The proof of gold is fire.
--Benjamin Franklin

Last Word

Never say you know the last word about any human heart.
--William James

Let Go

If you're going to change the politics, you must change people's understandings of what it means to be human, to make them let go of the possessive individualism that has led to such disaster.
--Linda Hirshman

Naked

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
--C. S. Lewis

All Children

Rosa Parks sat so that Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so that Barack Obama could run. Barack Obama ran so that all children could fly.
--Various, combined

Not Give Them Up

Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.
--Barack Obama (first inaugural address; January 20, 2009)

Support

In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt (first inaugural address; March 4, 1932)

The Arc Is Long

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
--Martin Luther King, Jr.

Not The End

This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
--Winston Churchill

Meaning of Life

The meaning of life is that it ends.
--Franz Kafka

Eternal Hanging

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
--William James

Love and Pity

Love and pity and wish well to every soul in the world.
--William Law

Suffer Less

I didn't become a Buddhist because I wanted to be a good meditator. I wanted to suffer less.
--Sylvia Boorstein

Prompted

All human activity is prompted by desire.
--Bertrand Russell

Yet Not Disenchanted

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
--C. S. Lewis

Sense of Fairness

Debt is a subject much larger than money. It has to do with our basic sense of fairness, a sense that is embedded in all of our exchanges with our fellow human beings.
--Margaret Atwood

The Suspicion

According to my interpretation of Buddhism, our dissatisfaction with life derives from a depression even more immediate than death-terror: the suspicion that "I" am not real.
--David Loy

Same Success

My resolution is the same one every year--Get your shit together--and I suspect I'll have the same success I had last year.
--Nancy Nall