As exams approach and the semester quickly escapes us, feeling stressed and overwhelmed is pretty much guaranteed. The unpleasant head space we can get in during this time of year can be combated by beauty in areas that are often overlooked. We should take a step back and gain some perspective through words that can get us not only through the week, but through life.
- And as one door opens and another closes, I will move forward with the knowledge that unlike so many others, I have another year ahead of me—another shot at making it all the way around the sun, and a chance to get it right this time around.- Lang Leav, New Beginnings
- Have patience in everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
- Not seeking, not expecting, she is present. And can welcome all things.- Lao Tzu
- The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life. It’s so easy to make it complex. What’s important is living an examined life. -Yvon Chouinard, 180 Degrees South
- Everything here seems to need us.- Rainer Maria Rilke
- Sometimes your mountain to climb is made up of weekdays and months, made up of pushing yourself forward even when you want to nestle into the past. Sometimes changing your world, as gradually as you need to, as gently as you heal, because sometimes courage isn’t made up of war, and bloodshed; sometimes courage isn’t made up of combat. Sometimes courage is a quiet fight, a dim softness within you, that flickers even on your darkest days, and reminds you that you are strong, that you are growing, that there is hope.- Bianca Sparacino
- And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.- John Steinbeck, East of Eden
- He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life.- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- If you truly love nature you will find beauty everywhere. -Vincent Van Gogh
- I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. -Henry David Thoreau
- To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation. – Yann Martel, Life of Pi
- I just want to tell you that you’re very special and the only reason I’m telling you is that I don’t know if anyone else ever has.- Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
- No, I say. You knew me. You knew that person, but you don’t know the person that I am trying to become.- Mitch Albom, Have a Little Faith
- I’m not sure what I’ll do, but – well, I want to go places and see people, I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Ice Palace
- Resolve to be thyself and know that he who finds himself loses his misery.- Matthew Arnold
- Don’t watch the clock, do what it does. Keep going.- Sam Levenson
- And now, after everything, I know this: There is a reason I am here, and that reason is bigger than me. So I will carry on with great faith beyond what I can see in pursuit of bold courage on the adventure of the journey.- Morgan Harper Nichols
- I tell myself I am searching for something. But more and more, it feels like I am wandering, waiting for something to happen to me, something that will change everything, something that my whole life has been leading up to.- Khaled Hosseini, And the Mountains Echoed
- I have a fear of living a surface kind of life; barely existing, barely touching or tasting anything. That’s why you’ll always see me giving my all or walking away. I’m too full of depth to dance in the middle of anything.- Nikki Rowe
- It is both a blessing and a curse to feel everything so very deeply. -David Jones, Love and Space Dust
