Linda Rivenbark

“Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
Let there be spaces in your togetherness.
Yesterday is but today's memory, and tomorrow is today's dream.
I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
Work is love made visible.
If you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work.”
― Khalil Gibran

“Even despotism does not produce its worst effects, so long as individuality exists under it; and whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called, and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom now. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power ... that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”
― Marcel Proust

“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms