RON HENGGELER

January 1, 2018
Reflections and thoughts for stepping into the New Year

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

If you're reading this...

Congratulations, you're alive.

If that's not something to smile about,

then I don't know what is.

Chad Sugg

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.

Og Mandino

 

You are not your body. You are the sum of all your actions, and they live on after your body dies. You may be mortal, but your brand is eternal.

Jarod Kintz

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.”

Oprah Winfrey

I live and love in God's peculiar light.

Michelangelo

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

Buddha

The most reliable way to predict the future is to create it.

Abraham Lincoln

True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.

Socrates

Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.

Hans Christian Andersen

One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.

Joseph Campbell

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.

Joseph Campbell

A camera alone does not make a picture. To make a picture you need a camera, a photographer and above all a subject. It is the subject that determines the interest of the photograph.

Man Ray

Shut your eyes and see.

James Joyce

The source of wisdom and power, of love and beauty, is within ourselves, but not within our egos. It is within our consciousness. Indeed, its presence provides us with a conscious contrast which enables us to speak of the ego as if it were something different and apart: it is the true Self whereas the ego is only an illusion of the mind.

Paul Brunton

What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

Joseph Campbell

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.

Joseph Campbell

Beyond a doubt truth bears the same relation to falsehood as light to darkness.

Leonardo da Vinci

Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.

Emily Dickinson

 

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

Mark Twain

 

Every hour of every day is an unspeakably perfect miracle.

Walt Whitman

Knock, And He'll open the door

Vanish, And He'll make you shine like the sun

Fall, And He'll raise you to the heavens

Become nothing, And He'll turn you into everything.

Rumi

 

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

Henry David Thoreau

Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.

Jane Goodall

Finding Nirvana is like locating silence.

Jack Kerouac

The future is always beginning now.

Mark Strand

Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.

Ernest Holmes

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does. 

William James

The greatest danger to our future is apathy.

Jane Goodall

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. 

Desmond Tutu

 

We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep. 

William Shakespeare

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Henry David Thoreau

My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

Albert Einstein

 

We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary.

Aaron Rose

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

 

There is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.”

J.R.R. Tolkien

The Two Towers

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

Lao Tzu

Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.

Dr. Seuss

Though the eye is small, the soul which sees through it is greater and vaster than all the things which it perceives. In fact, it is so great that it includes all objects, however large or numerous, within itself. For it is not so much that you are within the cosmos as that the cosmos is within you.

Meher Baba

The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.

Emily Dickinson

We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.

Joseph Campbell

Whoever lives in the spirit lives in perennial peace. It is a happy peace, a smiling peace, but one is not lost in it. One is aware also of the suffering which exists around him or her and the world at large.

Paul Brunton

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.

Marcus Aurelius

This whole universe, with all its vastness, grandeur and beauty, is nothing but sheer imagination. In spite of so many discoveries, researches and scientific knowledge, the creation remains a great unsolved riddle.

Meher Baba

I hope I go to Heaven, and when I do, I'm going to do what every San Franciscan does when he gets there. He looks around and says, 'It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco.'

Herb Caen

Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life. 

Omar Khayyam

It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters.

Amit Ray

 

Hope

Smiles from the threshold of the year to come, 

Whispering 'it will be happier'. . .

Alfred Lord Tennyson

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Albert Einstein

 

Whatever we believe about how we got to be the extraordinary creatures we are today is far less important than bringing our intellect to bear on how do we get together now around the world and get out of the mess that we've made. That's the key thing now. Never mind how we got to be who we are.

Jane Goodall

What we think, we become.

Buddha

Every morning is like a new reincarnation into this world. Let us take it then for what it is and live each moment anew.

Paul Brunton

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Henry David Thoreau

 

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.

Marcus Aurelius

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

You must be the change you wish to see in the world. 

Mahatma Gandhi

Everything you can imagine is real.

Pablo Picasso

Hem your blessings with thankfulness so they don't unravel.

Author Unknown

Forget the past, for it is gone from your domain! Forget the future, for it is beyond your reach! Control the present! Live supremely well now! This is the way of the wise. . .

Paramahansa Yogananda

Your life matters. You can't live through a day without making an impact on the world. And what's most important is to think about the impact of your actions on the world around you.

Jane Goodall

What is past is prologue. 

William Shakespeare

Your future depends on what you do today.

Mahatma Gandhi

We are shaped by our thoughts; we become what we think. When the mind is pure, joy follows like a shadow that never leaves.

Buddha

To the one who knows how to look and feel, every moment of this free wandering life is an enchantment.

Alexandra David Neel

Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

Dr. Seuss

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset."

Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator

Let our New Year's resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word. 

Goran Persson

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

Paul Valery

Re-examine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul.

Walt Whitman

For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

T.S. Eliot

Four Quartets

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

Buddha

Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children."

Ancient Native American Proverb

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.

Joseph Campbell

When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.

Buddha

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

Thornton Wilder

You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,

Love like you'll never be hurt,

Sing like there's nobody listening,

And live like it's heaven on earth.” 

William Purkey

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way, and never again.

Hermann Hesse

Hold fast to dreams,

For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird,

That cannot fly.

Langston Hughes

And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.

Rainer Maria Rilke

There is more to life than increasing its speed.

Mahatma Gandhi

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go. . .

Dr. Seuss

Oh, The Places You'll Go

Humanity is the earth’s nerve-endings through which planetary vibrations are received for transmission.

Gurdjieff

Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the while I am being carried across the sky by beautiful clouds.

Ojibway proverb

Almost all sadness comes from thinking about the past, and all worry from thinking about the future — present-mindedness is your only safe haven.”

Bryant McGill

Each age has deemed the new-born year

The fittest time for festal cheer. 

Walter Scott

Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

Chief Seattle 

Duwamish

This above all: to thine own self be true, 

And it must follow, as the night the day, 

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

William Shakespeare

Hamlet

 

Newsletters Index: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006

Photography Index  | Graphics Index | History Index

Home | Gallery | About Me | Links | Contact

© 2019 All rights reserved.
The images are not in the public domain. They are the sole property of the artist and may not be reproduced on the Internet, sold, altered, enhanced, modified by artificial, digital or computer imaging or in any other form without the express written permission of the artist. Non-watermarked copies of photographs on this site can be purchased by contacting Ron.