Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or as heroes. 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.
—Henry Miller in The World of Sex
Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
—Bertrand Russell
The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.
—Carl Jung
There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.
—John Lennon
Our entire life consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.
—Jean Anouilh
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.
—Ray Bradbury
Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.
—Wally Lamb
You've got to take the bitter with the sour.
—Samuel Goldwyn
Sometimes you have to accept how things are. You can make it easy on yourself, or you can make it hard. The choice is yours.
—Susan Mallery in Almost Perfect
You made me happy when I should have been miserable. You were the only person who could reach me, and maybe that scared me. You accepted me—broken and faulty.
—Monica Alexander in Buried Castles
“You’re better equipped for this world than I am,” she said. “I’m always trying to change the world. You know how to live in it.”
—Tom Robbins
The body has its own way of knowing, a knowing that has little to do with logic, and much to do with truth; little to do with control, and much to do with acceptance; little to do with division and analysis, and much to do with union.
—Marilyn Sewell
Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.
—Zelda Fitzgerald
Acceptance is hard. To accept my pain means holding it in my arms, like a package handed to me, my proper burden to be carried. The package may be heavy as lead, or burning hot, or stuck through with razors, but I must concede that it is my package, simply because it has arrived in my life. It is not a mistake. It has not been sent by accident to the wrong person. I may not welcome it, but accepting it means I carry it without protest for as long as necessary—and then I lay it down.
—Jeanne Duprau
Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
—Jeffrey Eugenides in Middlesex