Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit. It is never a narrowing of the mind or a restriction of the human spirit or the country’s spirit. -Jawaharlal Nehru, freedom fighter and the first Prime Minister of India

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone, and as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others. -Marianne Williamson

In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow. -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

You don’t have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.  – C.S. Lewis

You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.  – C.S. Lewis

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. -John Muir

If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new.  -Philip Glass

On Children

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

-Kahlil Gibran