Mary Caroline Richards Quotes

In a lethal world, poetry is necessary for survival.

The imagination equips us to perceive reality when it is not fully materialized.

Am I willing to give up what I have in order to be what I am not yet? Am I willing to let my ideas of myself, of man be changed? Am I able to follow the spirit of love into the desert? To empty myself even of my concept of emptiness?

It is part of our pedagogy to teach the operations of thinking, feeling, and willing so that they may be made conscious. For if we do not know the difference between an emotion and a thought, we will know very little . . . We need to understand the components (of emotions) at work . . . in order to free their hold.

We have to trust these feelings. We have to trust the invisible gauges we carry within us. We have to realize that a creative being lives within ourselves, whether we like it or not, and that we must get out of its way, for it will give us no peace until we do.

Inhabit ourselves that we may indeed do what we want to do.

There is a creative spirit in you desiring to be free, and you may as well get out of its way for it will give you no peace until you do.

The child takes in his world as if it were food. And his world nourishes or starves him. Nothing escapes his thirst. Secrets are impossible. He identifies with his surroundings and they live within him unconsciously; it is perhaps for this reason that the small child has been characterized as naturally religious.

It is for each of us freely to choose whom we shall serve, and find in that obedience our freedom.

Let no one be deluded that a knowledge of the path can substitute for putting one foot in front of the other.

Love is not a doctrine, Peace is not an international agreement. Love and peace are beings who live as possibilities in us.

The big art is our life.

From the seed grows a root, then a sprout; from the sprout, the seedling leaves; from the leaves, the stem; around the stem, the branches; at the top, the flower. . . We cannot say that the seed causes the growth, nor that the soil does. We can say that the potentialities for growth lie within the seed, in mysterious life forces, which, when properly fostered, take on certain forms.

It helps, I think, to consider ourselves on a very long journey: the main thing is to keep to the faith, to endure, to help each other when we stumble or tire, to weep and press on.

Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

We must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration . . .

Compassion is an alternate perception

For since most of our living is unconscious, play is like matchstrokes in the void, bringing into light the structures we behave by, illuminating for us, however briefly, our deep meanings.

To have character is to be big enough to take life on.

And with listening, too, it seems to me, it is not the ear that hears, it is not the physical organ that performs the act of inner receptivity. It is the total person who hears. Sometimes the skin seems to be the best listener, as it prickles and thrills, say to a sound or a silence; or the fantasy, the imagination: how it bursts into inner pictures as it listens and then responds by pressing its language, its forms, into the listening clay. To be open to what we hear, to be open in what we say. .

Our works and our play. All our pleasures experienced as the pleasure of love. What could be better that? To feel in one's work the tender and flushed substance of one's dearest concern.

People don't want to feel stuck, they want to be able to change.

Bear ye one another's burdens, the Lord said, and he was talking law.

Who are enemies? Those who oppose each others will.