Shaped and Fashioned

"We are shaped and fashioned by what we love."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Beauty

"Beauty is not a luxury. It ennobles our hearts so we can see infinity within ourselves."

-John O'Donohue

Poem/Prayer dealing with Loss

And when your eyes freeze behind the gray window and the ghost of loss gets in to you, may a flock of colors, indigo, red, green and azure blue come to awaken in you a meadow of delight.

John O'Donohue

Why hate is not the worst thing in the world, there is something worse

The true opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Hate, bad as it is, at least treats the neighbour as a thou, whereas indifference turns the neighbour into an it, a thing. This is why we may say that there is actually one thing worse than evil itself and that is indifference to evil. In human relations the nadir of morality, the lowest point as far as Christian ethics is concerned, is manifest in the phrase, I couldn't care less.'
- Joseph Fletcher

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
- Rollo May

There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference.

- Juan Montalvo

History

"The only thing that history has taught us is that men learn nothing from it."

Hegel

It takes time and work to be succinct

I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it short. 
- Blaise Pascal

Place in you never wounded

Your identity is not equivalent to your biography.

There is a place in you where you have never been wounded,

where there is still a sureness in you,

where there is a seamlessness in you,

and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you.

And I think the intention of prayer, and spirituality and Love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary

John O'Donohue

Beauty

Perhaps it is beauty that will save us in the end

Dostoyevski