Here are 100 grounding quotes to bring us back to ourselves. Centering, soulful and loving – my hope is that this evergrowing list of quotes and poems will help remind us of who we are beneath the surface and how to reconnect with this part of ourselves. 

This is not a recipe and may not be what you are looking for on the blog, but it is my birthday today and I wanted to give myself a gift! HA! 😉

I thought there may be a few of you out there that would enjoy this too. A little space to hold the wise words that seem to come at just the right time. I am going to keep adding to the list and I wholeheartedly encourage you to please add your own quotes, poems, or simple words of grounding or wisdom in the comments below.

If you’ve been here a while, you’ll probably already know how much I turn to cooking as an act of self-love. Not only the making of something nourishing and nutritious for our bodies but the actual act of taking time after a busy day to unwind, reset, be present and mindful and look inward, while creating a meal.

This time, for some of you, is the only time you have during the day to connect with yourself. And it can one of the most healing and restorative gifts! But the amazing and beautiful thing is how our reconnecting with ourselves actually affects those around us, without us even uttering a word.

Those closest to us will feel it.

A gift to your family too. Magic.


 

  1. Peace is this moment without judgment. That is all. This moment in the Heart-space where everything is welcome.~Dorothy Hunt 
  2. Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.— Ekhart Tolle
  3. Your self-love is a medicine for the earth.  ~ Yung Pueblo
  4. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection. ~Buddha
  5. Do not try to save the world or do anything grandiose.Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently,until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then, will you know how to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue.- Martha Postlewaite
  6. Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands. ~ Linda Hogan
  7. Your sadness doesn’t make you less of a human being. In fact, it makes you more. More expansive. More connected. Painfully beautiful. Raw. Open. Completely alive. ~ Panache Desai
  8. I have woven a parachute out of everything broken. ~William Stafford
  9. We must teach ourselves, actively remind ourselves, what being wild means. We must make room for it and invite it back. ~Brian Meier,  Awaken the Bear
  10. Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.~Mozart
  11. Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is an adequate perception of the world.  Hans Margolius
  12. It is in the nature of things to be drawn to the very experiences that will spoil our innocence, transform our lives, and give us necessary complexity and depth. ~Thomas Moore
  13. I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am. ~ Sylvia Plath
  14. Continually trying to look on the bright side interferes with our finding the wisdom that lies in the fruitful darkness.~ Stephen Buhner
  15. Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside awakens.~ Carl Jung
  16. Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know. ~Pema Chodron
  17. Empty yourself and let the universe fill you. ~ Yogi Tea
  18. You have walked through fire, survived floods and have triumphed over demons- remember this the next time you doubt your own power.  Jung Pueblo
  19. The more grateful I am, the more beauty I see.~ Mary Davis
  20. When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement.~  Mary Oliver
  21. We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide an example for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves.~ James Hollis
  22. From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.~ Emerson
  23. “Look deep into nature and you will understand everything better”-Albert Einstein
  24. If bein’ afraid is a crime, we’ll hang side by side. ~ Paul Westerberg
  25. What am I asking of my beloved that I need to do for myself? – James Hollis
  26. What happens when people open their hearts? They get better. ~Haruki Murakami
  27. Poetry is a language against which you have no defenses. ~David Whyte. 
  28. Once you realize this floating life is the perfect mirage of change, it’s breathtaking – this wild joy at wandering boundless and free. ~Han Shan
  29. God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare-up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.~Rilke
  30. The world changes when we change. the world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love the world.~ Marianne Williamson 
  31. Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. ~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum
  32. What does it mean to fully experience a moment—any moment? It means to directly experience what is here now without separation from it. It means opening, seeing, listening, feeling, being intimate and at one with what is. While thoughts may appear in the present moment, thoughts do not experience anything. Thoughts do not see, but YOU do. ~Dorothy Hunt
  33. The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.~ Anias Nin
  34. Even if you are on the right track, you will still get run over if you just sit there. -Will Rogers
  35. Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises… ― James Hollis
  36. Slowly slowly, gently gently.  My Grandmother, in a dream. 
  37. Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable. ~Mary Oliver
  38. To fall seven times, to get up eight, life starts from now. ~Japanese Proverb
  39. The world is not here to make you happy- it’s here to make you conscious. ~ Ekhart Tolle 
  40. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? ~Mary Oliver 
  41. The healer you have been looking for is your own courage to know and love yourself completely. ~ Yung Pueblo
  42. Learn the alchemy true human beings know. The moment you accept what troubles you’ve been given, the door will open.-Rumi
  43. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you. ― David Whyte.
  44. I am gathering past like skin and reeling towards what I haven’t seen yet;  a moth suddenly struck by moonlight. ~Jodi Miller
  45. Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
  46. Our work (career) is the excuse by which we get to love people. We are put in exactly the place we need to be, to love the people we are around. ~Panache Desai
  47. It always seems impossible until it’s done.~ Nelson Mandela
  48. Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor. ~Marianne Williamson
  49. Letting go doesn’t mean forgetting, it just means we stop carrying the energy of the past into the present. ~ Yung Pueblo
  50. In each life there comes at least one moment which, if recognized and seized, transforms the course of that life forever. Rely, therefore, on radical trust, even though the moment may call for you to leap empty-handed into the void.~ Ralph Blum
  51. And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. ~Kahlil Gibran
  52. You can not teach someone to love, you must show them. ~Finnish Saying
  53. Hear blessings dropping their blossoms around you. ~ Rumi 
  54. A spark is a little thing, yet it may kindle the world.~ Tupper
  55. The shortest interval between two points is the awareness that they are not two.~ Eric Micha’el Leventhal
  56. Nothing is worth more than this day. ~ Goethe
  57. But Sylvia, I am everywhere. ~my mother, in a dream, after her passing.
  58. Your healing lifts up the ocean of existence. When you heal we all heal.  ~ Yung Pueblo
  59. Life is to be experienced, not fought against, run from, or engaged halfheartedly. Though we may wish to make changes in the future, to be conscious is to be with an experience as it’s unfolding, rather than thinking about how we would like to change it. Taking charge of our life so that we alter the quality of our experiences in the future comes after an experience.~Shefali Tsabary
  60. The soul often asks more of us than we plan on giving. ~  James Hollis.
  61. One of the best actions we can take, with courage, is to relax. ~Yogi tea
  62. Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke 
  63. A new moon teaches gradualness and deliberation and how one gives birth to oneself slowly. ~ Rumi
  64. Our inner monologues have tremendous power over us. They can affect not only our mood, not only our physical bodies, but also our every waking moment—and, therefore, every consequence.~ Panache Desai
  65. If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life. ~Wu-men
  66. Whatever is rejected from the self, appears in the world as an event. ~Carl Jung
  67. It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. ~Wendell Berry
  68. Always we hope someone else has the answer. Some other place will be better, some other time it will all turn out. This is it.No one else has the answer. no other place will be better, and it has already turned out. At the center of your being, you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want. Lao Tzu
  69. Nothing the heart gives away is gone… it is kept in the hearts of others. ~Robin St. John
  70. The world around us is nothing more and nothing less than a mirror of what we have become from within.~ Gregg Braden
  71. Whatever arises, love that. ~ Matt Kahn 
  72. There is no need to run outside for better seeing. Nor to peer from a window. Rather abide at the center of your being; for the more you leave it, the less you learn. Search your heart and see the way to do is to be.  Lao Tzu
  73. At one glance, I love you with a thousand hearts.~   Mihri Hatun, Turkish poet
  74. The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. ― W.B. Yeats
  75. Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.― Mary Oliver
  76. Enter with love the temple that is your own heart.~ Ramana Maharshi
  77. Remember the pure open sky of your own true nature~ Tibetan Book of the Dead 
  78. When we repress our emotions or suppress our emotional content, whatever we are denying accumulates weight, or what I call vibrational density. This heaviness can take on many forms. But in all cases, it impedes your spirit’s natural ability to shine. ~Panache Desai
  79. If someone comes along and shoots an arrow into your heart, it’s fruitless to stand there and yell at the person. It would be much better to turn your attention to the fact that there’s an arrow in your heart… Pema Chodron
  80. Hold on to what is good even if it is a handful of earth.  Hold on to what you believe even if it is a tree which stands by itself. Hold on to what you must do even if it is a long way from here…Hold on to my hand even when I have gone away from you. -Nancy Wood, from Many Winters
  81. Therein lies the universal truth that puts us all on equal footing: each of us must come to discover through our many life experiences whether we have faith in our spiritual purpose, in our very existence, or whether we fear the journey of our life. ~Carolyn Myss
  82. Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time. ~Naomi Shihab Nye
  83. The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that it is everything. ~Anatole France
  84.  Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving until the right action arises by itself? The Master doesn’t seek fulfillment. Not seeking, not expecting, she is present, and can welcome all things.” – Lao Tzu, trans. by Stephen Mitchell
  85. I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which comes to me as seed goes to the next as blossom and that which comes to me as blossom, goes on as fruit. Dawna Markova
  86. Every blade of grass has an angel that bends over it and whispers, “Grow, grow.” The Talmud
  87. You make the path by walking. Robert Bly
  88. Listen–are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? ― Mary Oliver
  89. Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. ~Harold Whitman
  90. The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.— Ekhart Tolle
  91. We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us, that they may see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer, life because of our quiet. ~William Butler Yeats
  92. Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. ~James Arthur Baldwin 
  93. I am not fully healed, I am not fully wise, I am still on my way. What matters is that I am moving forward. ~ Yung Pueblo
  94. In the midst of the chaos when the wind is howling I hear the ancient song of the ones who went before and know that peace will come. – Anonymous
  95. I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. ~Pablo Neruda
  96. The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment, every sin already carries grace in it. Hermann Hesse
  97. Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is a nobler art of leaving things undone…. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials. — Lin Yutang
  98. We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things … [but] there are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.— James Carroll
  99. The time came when the risk it took to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ~Anais nin
  100. Above all, trust in the slow work of the Spirit.
    We are quite naturally impatient in everything
    to reach the end without delay.
    We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
    We are impatient of being on the way to something
    unknown, something new.
    And yet it is the law of all progress
    that it is made by passing through
    some stages of instability-
    and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you.
    Let your ideas mature gradually-let them grow
    let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
    Don’t try to force them on,
    as though you could be today what time
    (that is to say, grace and circumstances
    acting on your own good will)
    will make of you tomorrow
    Only God could say what this new spirit
    gradually forming within you will be.
    Give her the benefit of believing
    that her hand is leading you,
    and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
    in suspense and incomplete.~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:
  101. The days come and go like muffled and veiled figures sent from a distant friendly party, but they say nothing, and if we do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
  102. You are today where your thoughts have brought you. You will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you. ~  James Allen
  103. Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?~ Marcus Aurelius
  104. Regardless of desire, life hands you who you are.  ~Casey Haymes
  105. Love after Love The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile the others welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. ~Derek Walcott

Share this with the world!

Subscribe
to get recipes via email

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comments

  1. Sylvia,
    I’ve been enjoying your meals for quite a while now and see we have a common thread. I am in a sitting group with Dorothy Hunt, and share your open heart to all these wonderful quotes you have from a few of our best speakers of the soul. Thank you for sharing all these delights, they gave me pause today and reminded me to sit and be aware.

  2. Was looking for some takes regarding this topic and I found your article quite informative. It has given me a fresh perspective on the topic tackled. Thanks!

    Please see also my blog
    My Journey
    Hope this will help,Thank you so much

  3. Sylvia,

    I just recently discovered your blog through one of recipes posted in Pinterest. And its beautiful, your blog & recipe brings so much positivity. God bless to you and your family.

  4. “Look deep into nature and you will understand everything better”

    -Albert Einstein

    Your blog is so inspirational to me. Thank you for being here 🙂

  5. I am grateful to have stumbled across your blog for the first time today. Meandering through the labyrinth of food blogs (a comforting distraction during these challenging times), it was a joy to discover your special gem of inspiring thoughts along with inspirational recipes! I found myself taking a longer than intended journey through your generous offerings, downloading many of your recipes and these quotes. Thank you for your uplifting contribution, especially now. I would like to contribute something simple myself, a quote from the Chandogya Upanishad, “There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in your heart.”

    1. Hi Kathy, thank you for this. I’m happy the blog is resonating with you. I love this quote and will add. xoxo

  6. Forgot to add one of my favorite poems;)
    Do not try to save the world or do anything grandiose.
    Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently,
    until the song that is your life falls into your own cupped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then, will you know how to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue.- Martha Postlewaite

  7. Love your Blog, Sylvia! My favorite combination- soulful words and food for the soul!
    Heartfelt greetings from the PNW, also:)

  8. Happy Birthday Sylvia 🙂 <3 Thank you for all these beautiful quotes…I look forward to them at the beginning of many of your recipes. May your year a head be filled with wonder and delight !!

  9. Sylvia, thank you for the invitation to share some of my favorite quotations. Many of those you shared above will be going into my “commonplace book,” the latest in a series of little journals I have kept of quotes over the years. As I’m sure you can understand, my favorites are always changing! You reminded me of several authors I have loved over the years. So here are 6 quotes I love. Again, Happy Birthday!

    “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.”
    – John Muir, The Yosemite (1912), page 256

    “Someone else does not have to be wrong in order that you might be right…. This tolerance for mystery invigorates the imagination; and it is the imagination that gives shape to the universe.”
    – Barry Lopez, Pacific NW author

    “When eating fruit, think of the person who planted the tree.”
    – Vietnamese saying

    “Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”
    – May Sarton, American poet

    “The greatest distance is not from the earth to the stars, it is not from here to there. The greatest distance for Man is from his heart to his mind. Unless he conquers that distance, he can never learn to soar like an eagle and realize his own immensity within.”
    – Aangangauk, Eskimo shaman, Greenland

    “When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself…. That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitiude for the gift of life.”
    – Stanley Kunitz, American poet laureaute and gardener

    1. Thank you for these. So moving, I have tears in my eyes. All of them so beautiful. Such a gift… and if you ever feel like adding more, we all would be grateful.

  10. Wishing you a very happy belated birthday Sylvia and many more! Love the quotes and will keep them near. Here is a quote from Edith Wharton that I just love: There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

  11. Happy Birthday Sylvia! Love the recipes & Love the quotes!
    Here is the one I like:
    “No matter what problem you may have to face today, there is a solution, because you have nothing to deal with but your own thoughts.” – Emmet Fox

  12. These are so beautiful. Thank you Sylvia. My favorite quote is: “Do the impossible for someone else.” – Yogi Tea.

  13. Love these Sylvia and that you often include quotes at the top of your recipes- always a sweet surprise. Here is one of my favorites: “Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” ― Mary Oliver

  14. Happy birthday! What a lovely gift! Other than your astoundingly beautiful and healthy recipes, one of the things I love about your posts is the quotations. I’ve been collecting quotes since I was 13; I am now 61. This made my day.

Categories

Our Latest Recipes