acceptance

Learning to sit with ambiguity can be a very important start at a life liberated from anxiety__nd the way to do it is to resist the urge to chase answers to questions that may actually be unanswerable.

What I__ starting to realize is that when you conform, people are not accepting you for who you are. They__e accepting you for who they think you are.

No matter where you go, there__ always something to deal with; if it__ not greed, it__ lust, or envy, or pride, or something else. You just have to live your life so uncorrupted that it offsets the corruption as much as possible.

He embraced his weirdness, and it was nice.

A good leader must have the wisdom to know when a pursuit is no longer worthy of being pursued - a time when the losses of the present must be accepted - and cut - to preserve the gains and providence of the future.

the only source whence any thing like consolation or composure could be drawn, was in the resolution of her own better conduct, and the hope that, however inferior in spirit and gaiety might be the following and every future winter of her life to the past, it would yet find her more rational, more acquainted with herself, and leave her less to regret when it were gone.

When we learn to respond to disappointments with acceptance, we give ourselves the space to realize that all our experiences__ood and bad alike__re opportunities to learn and grow.

I know my time will come soon enough, but I will not dwell on it. What is the purpose? We might as well dwell on the work of our teeth or on the mechanics of our walk. It is there, it will always be there, and I don't intend to spend my glorious hours looking over my shoulder to see death's icy face.

I started to discover the meaning of happiness when I started to discover--and practice--the art of acceptance. When I started to accept life for what it was and I started to accept whatever situation I was in as the way things were, I started to see that my happiness depended on my own attitude. When I started focusing on getting the most out of my life the way it was rather than trying to turn it into what I thought it should be, I started to realize that I was, indeed, becoming a much happier person.

There are billions of people in this world that don__ believe or act exactly as we do. It is not our place to reject them, only accept them. Again, we don__ have to agree with everything they believe or do, but we do need to love and accept who they are.

If you could do one thing to improve yourself today, it would be this: Rid yourself of bias. If you can do this, you can learn to listen. If you learn to listen, then you can learn to communicate. If you can communicate, then you can begin to verbalize your feelings. When you verbalize your feelings, then you can release stress and frustrations. When you free yourself of what bothers you, then you can fully give yourself to others. When you come this far, then you have learned to grow spiritually.

Living in the past is like choosing to cling to a chronic illness.

When you live with dignity no man will ever take it. Live without it and every boy will steal it.

We're truly alive when facing the prospect of our own mortality, if you convince yourself that you'll live forever, you'll never really have lived at all.

So many years of being lonely and discounted, no one ever truly seeing me, the person that I really am. The Gabriella I so desperately wanted to be. Yet somehow he broke through the walls and barriers and penetrated my frail, dejected heart. He loves me for all that I am and what I will become, even though it scares us both to death. He accepts the darkest parts of me and doesn't try to change me, in all my shattered complexity. Meeting him has given this facade of my life new meaning. He's given me purpose, strength. He's given me love. Dorian has given me everything and, in turn, is everything to me. Designed by the Divine Power especially for me.

The humanitarian philosophies that have been developed (sometimes under some religious banner and invariably in the face of religious opposition) are human inventions, as the name implies - and our species deserves the credit. I am a devout atheist - nothing else makes any sense to me and I must admit to being bewildered by those, who in the face of what appears so obvious, still believe in a mystical creator. However I can see that the promise of infinite immortality is a more palatable proposition than the absolute certainty of finite mortality which those of us who are subject to free thought (as opposed to free will) have to look forward to and many may not have the strength of character to accept it.Thus I am a supporter of Amnesty International, a humanist and an atheist. I believe in a secular, democratic society in which women and men have total equality, and individuals can pursue their lives as they wish, free of constraints - religious or otherwise. I feel that the difficult ethical and social problems which invariably arise must be solved, as best they can, by discussion and am opposed to the crude simplistic application of dogmatic rules invented in past millennia and ascribed to a plethora of mystical creators - or the latest invention; a single creator masquerading under a plethora of pseudonyms. Organisations which seek political influence by co-ordinated effort disturb me and thus I believe religious and related pressure groups which operate in this way are acting antidemocratically and should play no part in politics. I also have problems with those who preach racist and related ideologies which seem almost indistinguishable from nationalism, patriotism and religious conviction.

Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life,the idea came to him of what he called 'the love of your fate.' Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You__l see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.

You don__ have to keep living in a dystopia simply because you__e strong and noble enough to accept it.