"When we see God in each other, we will be able to live in peace."
~Mother Teresa
Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me.
Frederick Buechner
We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to LOVE... and then we return home.
If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
While you are proclaiming peace with your lips, be careful to have it even more fully in your heart.
Peace is the deliberate adjustment of my life to the will of God.
Let the ideas clash but not the hearts.
When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.
If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.
One little person, giving all of her time to peace, makes news. Many people, giving some of their time, can make history.
We shall find peace. We shall hear angels. We shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?
This is the way of peace: Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love.
If there is light in the soul,
There will be beauty in the person;
If there is beauty in the person,
There will be harmony in the home;
If there is harmony in the home,
There will be order in the nation;
If there is order in the nation,
There will be peace in the world!
Peace starts with a smile
If we could read the secret history of our enemies,
we should find in each man's life
sorrow and suffering enough
to disarm all hostility.
I will fight no more forever.
Peace hath higher tests of manhood than battle ever knew
There was never a good war or a bad peace.
May we live in peace without weeping.
May our joy outline the lives we touch without ceasing.
And may our love fill the world, angel wings tenderly beating.
Peace is every step. The shining red sun is my heart.
Each flower smiles with me. How green, how fresh all that grows.
How cool the wind blows. Peace is every step.
It turns the endless path to joy.
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
A Brave and Startling Truth
Maya Angelou
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
This poem was written and delivered in honor
of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations.
~Maya Angelou, from 'A Brave And Startling Truth'
