Selected acceptance quotes

1. The irrevocable Hand That opes the year's fair gate, doth ope and shut The portals of our earthly destinies; We walk through blindfold, and the noiseless doors Close after us, for ever. Pause, my soul, On these strange words - for ever - whose large sound Breaks flood-like, drowning all the petty noise Our human moans make on the shores of Time. O Thou that openest, and no man shuts; That shut'st, and no man opens - Thee we wait!

2. Immortality alone could teach this mortal how to die.

3. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

4. If you judge people, you have no time to love them.

5. I wish they would only take me as I am.

6. There is no formula for generating the authentic warmth of love. It cannot be copied. You cannot talk yourself into it or rouse it by straining at the emotions or by dedicating yourself solemnly to the service of mankind. Everyone has love, but it can only come out when he is convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love himself. This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself, through calling self love bad names in the universe. It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love.

7. We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.

8. Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.

9. Andy Warhol: I think everybody should like everybody. Gene Swenson: Is that what Pop Art is all about? Andy Warhol: Yes, it's liking things.

10. So fades a summer cloud away; So sinks the gale when storms are o'er; So gently shuts the eye of day; So dies a wave along the shore.

11. Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die.

12. Without comprehension, the immigrant would forever remain shut-a stranger in America. Until America can release the heart as well as train the hand of the immigrant, he would forever remain driven back upon himself, corroded by the very richness of the unused gifts within his soul.

13. It's like you wanting to marry Miss World and she doesn't want you, what can I do about it? I can try to help you, but if she does not want to marry you what can I do?

14. Having failed to conquer myself, my best hope now is to arrange an alliance with myself.

15. I try to take life as it comes, and just hope it keeps coming.

16. The best thing about being too late is that there's no more need to hurry.

17. I feel much better, now that I've given up hope.

18. To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.

19. Ought to be easy, ought to be simple enough: Man meets woman, and they fall in love, But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough. You got to learn to live with what you can't rise above.

20. The highway is alive tonight But nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it goes I'm sittin' down here in the campfire light With the ghost of old Tom Joad.

21. The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

22. I think that's what I love about my life. There's no maniacal master plan. It's just unfolding before me.

23. A man must take the fat with the lean.

24. Whoever you hate will end up in your family. You don't like gays? You're gonna have a gay son. You don't like Puerto Ricans? Your daughter's gonna come home with Livin' La Vida Loca!

25. You can't be happy that fire cooks your food and be mad it burns your fingertips.

26. You play the hand you're dealt. I think the game's worthwhile.

27. I'm not the man to baulk at a low smell, I'm not the man to insist on asphodel. This sounds like a He-fellow, don't you think? It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.

28. When the situation is hopeless, there's nothing to worry about.

29. Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.

30. The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.

31. I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.

32. When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands to be believed.

33. In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.

34. Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

35. Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting: So were it with me if forgetting could be willed. Tell the grassy hollow that holds the bubbling well-spring, Tell it to forget the source that keeps it filled.

36. Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.

37. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

38. One does not get better but different and older and that is always a pleasure.

39. It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.

40. Adventure is making the distant approach nearer but romance is having what is where it is which is not where you are stay where it is.

41. If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.

42. I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed.

43. 'If we learn how to love others, really, truly love them, not for who we want them to be, but rather for who they are - for the perfect souls that God has created - then we have learnt one of the greatest lessons of life.'

44. Now, I believe that one of the reasons that Jesus was accused of being a homosexual is because he spent time with homosexuals. I've often had people ask me, would you allow a homosexual to be your friend. Yes, I will.

45. He was a man that really loved people, people of all colors and creed, it didn't matter what shape or color you came in, Reggie was a man who really loved people.

46. God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

47. There is no conclusive evidence of life after death. But there is no evidence of any sort against it. Soon enough you will know. So why fret about it?

48. My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree Toward heaven still. And there's a barrel that I didn't fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now.

49. 'I can repeat the very words you were saying: 'Three foggy mornings and one rainy day Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.' Think of it, talk like that at such a time! What had how long it takes a birch to rot To do with what was in the darkened parlor? You couldn't care! The nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all.

50. Why should we fear that which will come to all that is? We cannot tell, we do not know, which is the greater blessing - life or death. We do not know whether the grave is the end of this life, or the door of another, or whether the night here is not somewhere else at dawn. Neither can we tell which is the more fortunate - the child dying in its mother's arms, before its lips have learned to form a word, or he who journeys all the length of life's uneven road, painfully taking the last slow steps with staff and crutch.

51. Love is not a crime ... men and women should be proudly natural; they need not grovel on the earth and cover their faces for shame.

52. Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

53. The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.

54. Never do I hesitate to look squarely at the unexpected face that every passing hour unveils to us, and to sacrifice the false images of it formed in advance, however dear they may be. In me, the love of life in general predominates over love of my own life (that, indeed, would never have sufficed to bear me up). May life herself speak! However inadequate I may be in listening to her, and in repeating her words, I shall try to record them, even if they contradict my most secret desires. In all that I write, may her will, not mine, be done!

55. It's like a book, I think, this bloomin' world, Which you can read and care for just so long, But presently you feel that you will die Unless you get the page you're readin' done, An' turn another - likely not so good; But what you're after is to turn 'em all.

56. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.

57. The true purpose of Zen is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. Zen practice is to open up our small mind.

58. So the secret is just to say 'Yes!' and jump off from here. Then there is no problem. It means to be yourself, always yourself, without sticking to an old self.

59. I don't know, it's not like I was thinking about it being my trademark or whatever it is. I mean I don't think I'll get it removed or anything. But, I don't know - it's part of me, I'm used to it.

60. You couldn't get hold of the things you'd done and turn them right again. Such a power might be given to the gods, but it was not given to women and men, and that was probably a good thing. Had it been otherwise, people would probably die of old age still trying to rewrite their teens.

61. In a book, all would have gone according to plan.... but life was so fucking untidy - what could you say for an existence where some of your most crucial conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren't even any chapters?

62. You can't deny laughter; when it comes, it plops down in your favorite chair and stays as long as it wants.

63. I don't miss my youth. I'm glad I had one, but I wouldn't like to start over.

64. We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all - though naturally to differing extents - responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.

65. To the yoke of necessity every one willingly bows the head. Still, wherever an actually complicated aspect of things presents itself, it is more difficult to discover exactly what is necessary; but by the very acknowledgment of the principle, the problem invariably becomes simpler and the solution easier.

66. Love me, love my dog.

67. Well, I mean...there are certainly worse things to be called

68. ...I realized that once people are broken in certain ways they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one.

69. At twenty you know you're not going to be a rock star... by twenty-five you know you're not going to be a dentist or a professional... by thirty, a darkness starts moving in - you wonder if you're ever going to be fulfilled, let alone wealthy or successful... by thirty-five, you know, basically, what you're going to be doing the rest of your life; you become resigned to your fate.

70. If you're listening to this song You may think the chords are going wrong But they're not We just wrote it like that

71. We must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible. There have been war, plague, scandal, and treason, and there is no way of our preventing their having taken place; the executioner became an executioner and the victim underwent his fate as a victim without us; all that we can do is to reveal it, to integrate it into the human heritage, to raise it to the dignity of the aesthetic existence which bears within itself its finality; but first this history had to occur: it occurred as scandal, revolt, crime, or sacrifice, and we were able to try to save it only because it first offered us a form. Today must also exist before being confirmed in its existence: its destination in such a way that everything about it already seemed justified and that there was no more of it to reject, then there would also be nothing to say about it, for no form would take shape in it; it is revealed only through rejection, desire, hate and love. In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men. But at the heart of his existence he finds the exigency which is common to all men; he must first will freedom within himself and universally; he must try to conquer it: in the light of this project situations are graded and reasons for acting are made manifest.

72. Respect the burden.