Saturday, May 15, 2010

Food for Thought, A Midnight Snack

“Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.” Henry Miller

"I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself.  But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself.  It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes--it is inevitable.  But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all.  So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.'  If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being.  You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self.  I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves.  Now mind you.  When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough.  But you can overcome that.  The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself.  If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach."--Maya Angelou


Two very powerful, thought-provoking quotes.  I will come back to these often myself, for guidance, inspiration, and a reminder that I am flawed, but I am also forgiven.

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