Janice Taylor

14 from Janice Taylor

In most of our human relationships, we spend much of our time reassuring one another that our costumes of identity are on straight.
- Ram Dass

We know what we are, but not what we may be.
- Shakespeare

I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.
-Jeanette Winterson

We experience ourselves our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
- Albert Einstein

If you try to view yourself through the lenses that others offer you, all you will see are distortions; your own light and beauty will become blurred, awkward, and ugly. Your sense of inner beauty has to remain a very private thing.
- John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

The ego is the false self-born out of fear and defensiveness.
- John O’Donohue

Silent solitude makes true speech possible and personal. If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others. If I am estranged from myself, I am likewise a stranger to others.
- Brennan Manning, Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging

I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist. . . I am a person who does those things.
- Edward Gorey

I’ve tried to become someone else for a while, only to discover that he, too, was me.
- Stephen Dunn

I protect myself by refusing to know myself.
- Floriano Martins

Be not another, if you can be yourself.
- Paracelsus

How do you know you are who you are? How do you know you’re not simply a clone of who you think you are?
- Jarod Kintz, $3.33

We are what we love. We are the things, the people, the ideas we spend our days with. They center us, they drive us, they define us to our very core. Without them, we are empty.
- Daisy Whitney, The Rivals

Not only is there often a right and wrong, but what goes around does come around, Karma exists, chickens do come home to roost, and as my mother, Phyllis, liked to say, “There is always a day of reckoning.” The good among the great understand that every choice we make adds to the strength or weakness of our spirits—ourselves, or to use an old fashioned word for the same idea, our souls. That is every human’s life work: to construct an identity bit by bit, to walk a path step by step, to live a life that is worthy of something higher, lighter, more fulfilling, and maybe even everlasting.
- Donald Van de Mark, The Good Among the Great: 19 Traits of the Most Admirable, Creative, and Joyous People