To all readers who are in any stage of eating disorder recovery, this page is an offering of substance and nourishment for those times when we are on the verge of acting out our eating disorder. My hope is that we all learn to reach for inspiration rather than any mind numbing behavior. Please consider these quotes a selection of inspirational treats. Reach for one whenever you wish.
At any time in recovery we can reach moments, sometimes extended moments, of bewilderment, pain and isolation. We think we have descended into a vast dark emptiness from which we can never emerge. We feel that "this is the way it really is." Maybe we are remembering or reliving a time of rejection and abandonment when we were too vulnerable and immature to care for ourselves. Maybe we are in a clear and new space of health in which we have no tools, thoughts or sense of direction to help us understand our experience or our choices.
At such times, other voices of wisdom and experience can enter our empty and frightened state. We can use our loneliness to reach out for wisdom from people whose experience can inspire and reassure us now. These voices can help give us direction and rekindle our energies so we can move in the best way we can to create the best lives we can for ourselves.
I invite you to read through these inspirational quotes regularly. Your heart and mind will pause at the quotes that are right for you at any particular time. Let them nourish you. The first quote is a favorite of mine that never ceases to sustain me. Read on and discover your favorites.
Learn how to use affirmations to inspire you.
How to use & affirmations 1-40
More affirmations: 41-134
Suggest an Inspirational Quote
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
Wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing;
There is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.
So the darkness shall be the light,
And the stillness the dancing.
T.S. Eliot, from: East Coker in the Four Quartets.
1. Out of clutter, find simplicity.
2. From discord, find harmony.
3. In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
- Albert Einstein, three rules of work
In the end we will conserve only what we love.
We love only what we understand.
We will understand only what we are taught.
- Baba Dioum, Senegalese Ecologist
Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while
A great wind is bearing me across the sky.
- Ojibwa Saying
When all is said and done,
it is persistence that is the antidote to powerlessness....
The sight of goodness undeterred
has more power than all the forces on earth arrayed against it.
- Joan Chittister
The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
- Paul Vale'ry
Try.
Fail.
Try Again.
Fail Better.
- Samuel Beckett
Remember: Only one thing registers on the subconscious mind: repetitive application - practice. What you practice is what you manifest.
- Grace Speare
It is easy to dodge our responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our responsibilities.
- Sir Josiah Charles Stamp, an English Economist
The spirit of poetry came to me and said
"You poor thing. You don't know how to listen.
Listen to me.
Listen."
When I began to listen to poetry is when I began to listen to stones,
and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say,
and I began to listen to others.
And what is most important for all of us, is to learn to listen to the soul,
the soul of yourself,
in here,
but which is also the soul of everyone else.
- The Native American poet Joy Harjo on PBS
Contentment is a pearl of great price, and whoever procures it at the expense of ten thousand desires makes a wise and a happy purchase.
- John Balguy
When you do things from the soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.
- Jelaluddin Rumi
If you live your life with a shield up, even the good things in life will pass you by.
- Anonymous
The attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one's whole being. Nothing less will do; there can be no easier conditions, no substitutes, no compromises.
-C. G. Jung
What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.
- Mark Twain
"Health is not merely the absence of disease, it is the balance of mind, body and soul."
- Hippocrates
There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.
- Martha Graham
Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.
- Lao-Tzu
The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created --- created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.
- John Schaar
The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.
- William James
We must take care not to make intellect our god. It has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality. It cannot rule, only serve.
- Albert Einstein
Seven blunders of the world that lead to violence: wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, politics without principle.
- Mahatma Gandhi
"...any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests..."
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
The doctor of the future will give no medicine but will interest
his patients in the care of the human frame,
in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease.
Thomas Edison
The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you,
the better you will hear what is sounding outside.
And only a person who listens can speak.
Dag Hammarskjold
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.
Jimi Hendrix
Finish each day and be done with it... You have done what you could;
some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in;
forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day;
you shall begin it well and serenely.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men (sic) - true nobility is being superior to your former self.
Author Unknown
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
Voltaire
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
A Native American grandfather was talking to his grandson about how he felt about a tragedy.
He said, 'I feel as if I have two wolves fighting in my heart.
One wolf is the vengeful, angry, violent one. The other wolf is the loving, compassionate one.'
The grandson asked him, 'Which wolf will win the fight in your heart?'
The grandfather answered, 'The one I feed.'
Native American story
Darkness is your candle.
Your boundaries are your quest.
By Rumi: 1207 - 1273
"Don't ask yourself what the world needs...
Ask yourself what makes you alive
because what the world needs
are people who have come
alive."
Ranier Maria Rilke - poet
To any reader, young or old, scholar or layman,
I would say one thing:
No great book was ever written to be lectured on or explained in schools.
Every masterpiece was first written for the use of (human beings).
Don't be frightened by famous names.
Don't think that famous books are dull.
They wouldn't be famous now if they hadn't interested their first readers.
Get yourself a comfortable chair and a good light
---and have confidence in your own mind.
John Erskine, February 28, 1937 Columbia University
By Perseverance the snail reached the ark.
True wisdom consists of not departing from Nature
but in molding our conduct according to her laws and model.
Roman philosopher Lucius Anaeus Seneca
The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon.
We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Even in our sleep,
pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop
upon the heart
until in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
Greek playwright, Aeschyles
The significant problems we face cannot be solved
at the same level of thinking
we were at when we created them.
Albert Einstein
You depend on things and marvel at them:
why not unfold your own abilities and transform them?
Hsun-Tsu
Healing is a matter of time,
but it is sometimes also
a matter of opportunity.
Hippocrates (460-400 B.C.)
The music that can deepest reach,
And cure all ill,
is cordial speech.
Emerson
Common sense is not so common.
Voltaire
Enlighten the people generally,
and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind
will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
Thomas Jefferson
What can be done at any time will be done at no time.
old Scottish proverb
The improvement of understanding is for two ends:
first, for our own increase in knowledge;
secondly, to enable us to deliver and make
out that knowledge to others.
John Locke
Death and taxes and childbirth!
There's never any convenient time
for any of them.
Scarett O'Hara
(Character in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind.)
What a wonderful life I've had!
I only wish I'd realized it sooner.
Colette
Work keeps away the three great vices:
boredom, vice and poverty..
Voltaire
We are healed of a suffering
only by experiencing it to the full.
Marcel Proust
We should be careful
to get out of an experience
only the wisdom
that is in it
and stop there;
lest we be like the cat
that sits down
on a hot stove lid.
She will never sit down
on a hot stove lid again
--and that is well;
but also she will never sit
down on a cold one
any more.
Mark Twain
Do what you can,
with what you have,
with where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt
The greatest pleasure I
know is to do a good
action by stealth,
and to have it found out
by accident.
Charles Lamb
We lived for days
on nothing
but food and water.
W. C. Fields
The secret of success
is constancy to purpose.
Benjamin Disraeli
When you get right down
to the root of the meaning
of the word succeed,
you find it simply means
to follow through.
Life is too short to waste
In critic peep
or cynic bark,
Quarrel or reprimand:
Twill soon be dark;
Up! Mind thine own aim,
and God speed the mark!
Everything should be made as simple as possible,
but not simpler.
It often happens
that I wake at night
and begin to think about
a serious problem
and decide I must tell
the Pope about it.
Then I wake up
completely and remember
that I am the Pope.
Pope John XXIII
As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth,
so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind.
To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again.
To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over
the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.
Henry David Thoreau
How many cares
one loses
when one decides
not to be something
A faithful friend
is the medicine of life.
Ecclesiasticus 6:16
There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken.
There is a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is sorrow beyond all grief,
which leads to joy; and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.
There is a hollow space too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctioned into being. .
Rashani
I have never made
but one prayer to God,
a very short one:
O Lord,
make my enemies
ridiculous.
And God granted it.
Voltaire
One's friends are that part
of the human race with which
one can be human.
George Santayana
The price of greatness
is responsibility.
Winston Churchill
Statistically 100 percent of the shots you don't take
don't go in.
Wayne Gretsky
It is easier to fight
for one's principles
than to live up to them.
Alfred Adler
Nothing is so certain
as that the evils of
idleness can be shaken off
by hard work.
Seneca (4 B.C. - A.D. 65)
|
