Journeys Of The Heart Quotes & Sayings

For me, exploration was a personal venture. I did not go to the Arabian desert to collect plants nor to make a map; such things were incidental. At heart I knew that to write or even to talk of my travels was to tarnish the achievement. I went there to find peace in the hardship of desert travel and the company of desert peoples. I set myself a goal on these journeys, and, although the goal itself was unimportant, its attainment had to be worth every effort and sacrifice ... No, it is not the goal but the way there that matters, and the harder the way the more worth while the journey. — Wilfred Thesiger

Start from your heart. The greatest journeys begin on the inside. — Eleanor Brownn

Many men have a secret monster this way, a disease that they feed, a dragon that gnaws them, a despair that inhabits their night. Such a man seems like others, quite normal. Nobody knows that he has within him a fearful parasitic pain, with a thousand teeth, which lives in the miserable man, who is dying of it. Nobody knows that this man is a gulf. It is stagnant, but deep. From time to time a turmoil, of which we understand nothing, shows up on its surface. A mysterious wrinkle comes along, then vanishes, then reappears; an air bubble rises and bursts. It is a little thing, it is terrible. It is the breathing of the unknown monster. — Victor Hugo

Distance and time might keep people apart, but the heart and mind will always stay connected by memories, miracles and the power of two unlikely souls that were destined to meet. — Shannon L. Alder

The way the Establishment deals with people like me is to ignore them. When you become unignorable, they will try to smear you, and that's what I feared for a long time. Now I have somehow vaulted into this space where it's difficult for someone to smear me because it would look as though they were being vindictive and spiteful. — Heather Brooke

China
Whales follow
the whale-roads.
Geese,
roads of magnetized air.
To go great distance,
exactitudes matter.
Yet how often
the heart
that set out for Peru
arrives in China,
Steering hard.
consulting the charts
the whole journey. — Jane Hirshfield

When you have been with your partner for so many years, they become the glove compartment map that you've worn dog-eared and white-creased, the trail you recogonize so well you could draw it by heart and for this very reason keep it with you on journeys at all times. And yet, when you least expect it, one day you open your eyes and there is an unfamiliar turnoff, a vantage point taht wasn't there before, and you have to stop and wonder if maybe this landmark isn't new at all, but rather something you have missed all along. — Jodi Picoult

Libraries can offer important alternatives to the services provided by the corporate sector, which will always have incentives to offer biased, limited, and costly access to knowledge. — John Palfrey

The treasured vistas of our solo journeys are not always about the landscape. — Gina Greenlee

A birth we embark on a good journey, seeking a destination of happiness. The journeys on our life-road facilitate development of our emotional, mental, physical and spiritual states-of-being, into a way of true power and wisdom. The Heart-center power, expressed as happiness and love, will guide us upward on a path away from frustration, bitter toil and travail. These journeys are directed inward, not outwardly in material mementos of ego and possession. The lesson is relearning that which has been suppressed and forgotten, in ourselves, since our earliest childhood. — R. Carlos Nakai

Better to work for one's self alone. The public is so stupid. Who reads? And what do they read?
And what do they admire? Ah, blessed peaceful times of the past, blessed eras of powdered wigs! You lived with complete assurance, poised on your high heels, twirling your silver-headed canes! Beneath us the earth is trembling. Where can we place our fulcrum, even admitting that we possess the lever? The thing we all lack is not style, nor that dexterity of finger and bow known as talent. We have a large orchestra, a rich palette, a variety of resources. We know many more tricks and dodges, probably, than were ever known before. No; what we lack is the intrinsic principle, the soul of the thing, the very idea of the subject.We take notes, we make journeys: emptiness! Emptiness! We become scholars, archaeologists, historians, doctors, cobblers, connoisseurs. What good is all that? Where is the heart, the verve, the sap? Where to start out from? Where to go to? — Gustave Flaubert

He did not know what he sought or what his journeys would bring him; but he had a feeling that he would learn something new about life and gain some clue about the mystery that he had solved only to find more mysterious. And even if he found nothing he would allay the unrest which gnawed his heart. — W. Somerset Maugham

If you think it long and mad the wind of banners that passes through my life
And you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots
Remember
That on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms
And my roots will set off to seek another land — Pablo Neruda

These wrinkles are the hands of time,
The journeys I've been on
They've seen me through a thousand days,
And ev'ry victory won

These fragile hands, With exposed bones,
Are not a fearful sight
But rather, they, my faithful partners,
Rocked babies through the night

These eyes are weak, They see much less,
Than yours they've seen much more
They've guided me through birth, through death,
Through grief, through hurt, through war

These ears can hear so very little,
Yet they've learned to listen much
They perk up not for gossip now,
But for a heart to touch

Those younger often look my way,
With pity looks to give
Yet this old body doesn't mean I am dying,
But rather, that I have lived — Emily Nelson

The journey of the mind always has longer to travel than the heart because dreams carry weight, while love makes you float. — Shannon L. Alder

One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I've had some lovely, surprisingly good fortune with readers, and I've brought readers to my dad's work. I can't tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father's work was masterful. — Andre Dubus III

Roy Blount, who is the funniest person I know, journeys deep into the dark heart of humor and brings back a wonderfully insightful, superbly crafted song of the soul that had me laughing and crying too — Dave Barry

Submissive men, men who desire to serve as consensual slaves, are on one of the most difficult journeys in the world today, because they have rejected patriarchal privilege and embraced their own heart's calling instead. — TammyJo Eckhart

Sunsets are loved because they vanish.
Flowers are loved because they go.
The dogs of the field and the cats of the kitchen are loved because soon they must depart.
These are not the sole reasons, but at the heart of morning welcomes and afternoon laughters is the promise of farewell. In the gray muzzle of an old dog we see goodbye. In the tired face of an old friend we read long journeys beyond returns. — Ray Bradbury

Visual artists choreograph dances for the eyes, guiding visual journeys in specific ways. But when presented with little or nothing, the journeys of the eyes become erratic and finally still their restless searching. The eye and mind and heart grow quiet, come to rest, and begin to understand their own functioning more deeply. — John Paul Caponigro

The world has always teemed with a wide variety of spiritual thought and many differing journeys of the heart. But too often the world has used these differences as a weapon. How much agony has been wrought by what should be a thing of beauty - religious passion? — Steve Goodier

But the problem with looking back when you should be walking ahead is that you usually end up walking into something that hurts. — Megan Hart

My folks still live in my childhood home, and so when I'm home with them, I usually feel the best. — Topher Grace

The pride taken by the Italians in their gifted women is among the most important facts in the history of their Renaissance. — Walter Shaw Sparrow

Responsibilities and expectations are the basis of guilt and shame and judgement, and they provide the essential framework that promotes performance as the basis for identity and value ... Honey, I've never placed an expectation on your or anyone else. The idea behind expectations requires that someone does not know the future or outcome and is trying to control behavior to get the required result. Humans try to control behavior largely through expectations. I know you and everything about you. Why would I have an expectation other than what I already know? And beyond that, because I have no expectations, you never disappoint me ... What I do have is a constant and living expectancy in our relationship, and I give you an ability to respond in any situation and circumstance in which you find yourself. To the degree that you resort to expectations and responsibilities, to that extent you neither know me nor trust me ... — Wm. Paul Young

Bibles read without prayer; sermons heard without prayer; marriages contracted without prayer; journeys undertaken without prayer; residences chosen without prayer; friendships formed without prayer; the daily act of prayer itself hurried over, or gone through without heart: these are the kind of downward steps by which many a Christian descends to a condition of spiritual palsy, or reaches the point where God allows them to have a tremendous fall. — J.C. Ryle

A society that doesn't know any longer how to observe every death with proper rituals, that does not know that death is not the end, but only part of the journey, has lost its way, has had the very heart of its humanity torn out. — Marina Warner

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts ... .We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need - not all the time, surely, but from time to time - to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember - the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived. — Frederick Buechner

Sometimes the best journeys aren't necessarily from east to west, or from ground to summit, but from heart to head. Between them we find our voice. — Jeremy Collins

Alif, Lam, Ra. These are the verses of the Book and a clear Qur'an.Perhaps those who disbelieve will wish that they had been Muslims.Let them eat and enjoy themselves and be diverted by [false] hope, for they are going to know.And We did not destroy any city but that for it was a known decree." Quran :Surah Chapter AL-HIJR (THE ROCKY TRACT):15 :1-4 . — Qur'an

I descended to the ocean floor and encountered bloated, symmetrical creatures with pumping white hearts and translucent skin. Collapsed blue civilizations lived down there, fissured and antiseptic, craggy with barnacles and blistering rust. I reached into the heart of the earth, the sky, the moon. I colonized language, mathematics, schemes of chemical order and atomic weight. I studied the manufacture of automobiles, microcircuitry, Kleenex and planets. I memorized the gross national products of nations and hemispheres, the populations of cities and states and principalities, the achievements of presidents, tyrants and kings. I was trying to learn what I suspect Mom had learned already: that there were journeys we all make alone that take us far away from one another. — Scott Bradfield