And…Bloom where you are planted

When God the Creator made all things, He commanded the plants to bring forth fruit according to its own kind. He has likewise commanded Christians, who are the living plants of his Church, to bring forth the fruits of devotion…in accord with their characters, their stations and their callings…Therefore, in whatever situations we happen to be, we can and we must aspire to the life of perfection.

– St. Francis de Sales, The Introduction to the Devout Life

If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world on fire.
– St. Catherine of Siena, here.

No creature is fully itself till it is, like the dandelion, opened in the bloom of pure relationship to the sun, the entire living cosmos.
– D.H. Lawrence

Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
– Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired.
– Mother Theresa of Calcutta

There is just one life for each of us: our own.
– Euripides

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
– e.e. cummings

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
– Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, 1905

Although the constellations in which I have found myself – and naturally also the periods of life and their different influences – have led to changes and development in the accents of my thought, my basic impulse…was always to free up the authentic kernel of the faith from encrustations and to give this kernel strength and dynamism. This impulse is the constant of my life … what’s important to me is that I have never deviated from this constant, which from my childhood has molded my life, and that I have remained true to it as the basic direction of my life.
– Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium

Just be what you are and speak from your guts and heart – it’s all a man has.
– Hubert H. Humphrey

Find your own Calcutta.
– Mother Theresa

How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization.
– Eric Hoffer

If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.
– Johann von Goethe

At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Rabbi Zusya said that on the Day of Judgment, God would ask him, not why he had not been Moses, but why he had not been Zusya.
– Walter Kaufmann

Beware the urge to utilarianism. Everything does not have to be of “use.” Nor does everyone. It is enough to be, if being is what you have been called to. The Pope is not a CEO. He doesn’t have to do anything. He just has to be. Terri Schiavo does not have to get up and dance a jig to be valuable. She is valuable in her being, as the object of her family’s love. And God’s.
– Anonymous Crank

One of the most dangerous prayers to make, in a world full of dangerous prayers: Lord, help me to be what you have made me to be. Lord, help me to be myself, in all the vulnerability that comes with authenticity.