“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

“I prefer nothing, unless it is true.”

“Here’s a simple visual. You know those plants that grow through concrete, the ones that invade countryside properties, strangle them and decrease their value (Japanese knotweed, etc. etc.)? – yeah, I want that kind of persistence.”

“‘Even if…?’ I feared to mention it. ‘All is destroyed?’ He took up the challenge. 'Destruction doesn’t count. One can always create again.’“”

“A good mind possesses a kingdom.”

People with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character which is the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life.

“So now, like many another wreck, I am throwing myself into the arms of literature.”

“You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.”

“In order to be free you simply have to be so, without asking permission of anybody. You have to have your own hypothesis about what you are called to do, and follow it, not giving in to circumstances or complying with them. But that sort of freedom demands powerful inner resources, a high degree of self-awareness, a consciousness of your responsibility to yourself and therefore to other people.”

“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”

Empowering to learn to identify an emotion, label it clearly and to prevent a certain behavior. To learn to calmly and consciously take a step back and sometimes say : I need to think about it before giving any answer that is asked at a particularly moment.

Gamble everything, half-heartedness doesn't reach into majesty. You set out to find god, but then you keep stopping for long periods at petty roadhouses.

“You look at trees and called them ‘trees,’ and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star,’ and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree,’ ‘star,’ were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf patterned’.”

“Fortune favors the prepared mind.”