To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.

One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly.

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

Ah, when to the heart of man was it ever less than a treason to go with the drift of things to yield with a grace to reason and bow and accept at the end of a love or a season.

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

Accept everything about yourself -- I mean everything, You are you and that is the beginning and the end -- no apologies, no regrets.

For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.

We must accept life for what it actually is -- a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.