You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

We resist the allure of love, while still longing for it’s comfort. First, it is resistance to the experience of a bigger life, in which our small and separate identity disappears. What is actually the birth of our spiritual identity feels to the ego like death. The ego, our small and separate sense of self, is an imposter personality. It is a false self. It resists our genuinely remembering God, because in the recognition of our oneness with Him lies the death of the ego and the end of all fear.

The mortal mind cannot understand how miracles work, and for our entire lives we are taught to mistrust what cannot be rationally explained.
Sometimes reason competes with gut instinct, which only seems to make matters worse. But what if we place all our decisions in the hands of God? What if a decision surrendered to the divine was a decision surrendered to the highest level of intelligence, wisdom, and love?

One picture that I very much wanted to take - which we finally were able to take - was a picture of the Earth from the outskirts of the solar system. And there it was, a single pixel, or a single picture element, a pale blue dot. No continents, no national boundaries, no beings, no humans, just a dot. That’s us. That’s where we live. That’s where everyone we know, everyone we love, everyone we ever heard of, every human being who ever lived has lived: on that pale blue dot. Every hopeful child, every couple in love, every prince and pauper, every revered religious leader, every corrupt politician, every scientist, every humble person living out his or her days - all of us - every one of us and all the other beings, live on the pale blue dot. To me, it underscores our responsibility, because you look at that dot and you think how fragile and vulnerable it is. Our central responsibility is to cherish and care for the environment on the only home we have ever known and the only home for all those other beings with whom we are so profoundly connected.