Anne Morrow Lindbergh famous quotes

It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Inspirational #Courage #Recovery

By and large, mothers and housewives are the only workers who do not have regular time off. They are the great vacationless class.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Mom #Mother #Class

I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Love #Inspirational #Motivational

A simple enough pleasure, surely, to have breakfast alone with one's husband, but how seldom married people in the midst of life achieve it.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Marriage #Memories #Husband

My father taught me that a bill is like a crying baby and has to be attended to at once.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Baby #Father #Taught

I feel we are all islands - in a common sea.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Women #Islands #Sea

Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Women #Order #Essence

If you surrender completely to the moments as they pass, you live more richly those moments.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Life #Letting Go #Moments

The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Life #Wearing A Mask #Social

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Beautiful #Beach #Shells

Him that I love, I wish to be free -- even from me.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Love #Inspirational #Dream

The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Life #Relationship #Real

Don't wish me happiness - I don't expect to be happy it's gotten beyond that, somehow. Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor - I will need them all.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Strength #Courage #Wish

Arranging a bowl of flowers in the morning can give a sense of quiet in a crowded day - like writing a poem or saying a prayer.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Morning #Prayer #Flower

The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Patience #Beach #Nature

The most exhausting thing in life is being insincere.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Life #Being Yourself #Being Original

Grief can't be shared. Everyone carries it alone. His own burden in his own way.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Grief #Grieving #Losing Someone

Flying was a very tangible freedom. In those days, it was beauty, adventure, discovery - the epitome of breaking into new worlds.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Adventure #Discovery #Flying

To give without any reward, or any notice, has a special quality of its own.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Inspirational #Angel #Helping Others

Good communication is just as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Coffee #Communication #Memorable

I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Eye #Want #Purity

A note of music gains significance from the silence on either side.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Music #Silence #Gains

I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Life #Morning #Lakes

Travelers are always discoverers, especially those who travel by air. There are no signposts in the sky to show a man has passed that way before. There are no channels marked. The flier breaks each second into new uncharted seas.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Men #Air #Sea

No one, it has been said, will ever look at the Moon in the same way again. More significantly can one say that no one will ever look at the earth in the same way. Man had to free himself from earth to perceive both its diminutive place in a solar system and its inestimable value as a life -fostering planet. As earthmen, we may have taken another step into adulthood. We can see our planet earth with detachment, with tenderness, with some shame and pity, but at last also with love.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Taken #Moon #Men

When one is out of touch with oneself, one cannot touch others.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Inspirational #Self Esteem #Esteem

One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Beach #Art #Ocean

When you love someone you do not love them, all the time, in the exact same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Lying #Ebb And Flow #When You Love Someone

You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Inspirational #Gratitude #Appreciation

Nothing feeds the center of being so much as creative work.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Creativity #Creative #Creative Work

Perhaps middle-age is, or should be, a period of shedding shells; the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of the ego.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Ambition #Ego #Age

In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Mom #Baby #Circles

Forsythia is pure joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia. Pure, undiluted, untouched joy.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Spring #Sadness #Joy

Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Inspirational #Peace #Spring

...I want first of all - in fact, as an end to these other desires - to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central cor to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact - to borrow from the language of the saints -to live 'in grace' as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony...
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Life #Spiritual #Peace

For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Sleep #Depth #Needs

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Inspirational #Change #Leadership

Why is it that you can sometimes feel the reality of people more keenly through a letter than face to face?
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Reality #People #Faces

One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay 'in kind' somewhere else in life.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Motivational #Thank You #Gratitude

there is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Change #Resistance #Sin

When the heart is flooded with love there is no room in it for fear, for doubt, for hesitation.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Inspirational #Heart #Doubt

Love is a force. . . . It is not a result; it is a cause. It is not a product. It is a power, like money, or steam or electricity. It is valueless unless you can give something else by means of it.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Love #Mean #Giving

Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Funny #Friendship #Football

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Happiness #Spring #Flower

I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Education #Powerful #Writing

Only love can be divided endlessly and still not diminish.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Love #Stills

One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Prayer #Mistake #Writing

After all, I don't see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Nature #Selfish #Years

The beach is not a place to work; to read, write or to think.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Beach #Writing #Thinking

It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for that long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Courage #Long #Uphill Climbs

What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Practice #Civilization #Solitude

Only with winter-patience can we bring the deep-desired, long-awaited Spring.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Spring #Winter #Long

Eternally, woman spills herself away in driblets to the thirsty, seldom being allowed the time, the quiet, the peace, to let the pitcher fill up to the brim.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Quiet #Thirsty #Pitcher

Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Strong #Holiday #Winter

When one is a stranger to oneself, then one is estranged from others, too.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Self Esteem #Stranger #Esteem

So many things we love are you!
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Grandparent

Only when a tree has fallen can you take the measure of it. It is the same with a man.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Death #Suicide #Men

Flowers always have it - poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection . . .
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Flower #Perfection #Fulfillment

For relationships, too, must be like islands. One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continuously visited and abandoned by the tides. One must accept the serenity of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Life #Islands #Sea

We tend not to choose the unknown, which might be a shock or a disappointment or simply a little difficult to cope with. An yet it is the unknown with all its disappointments and surprises that is the most enriching.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Disappointment #Littles #Might

Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distraction...What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Life #Knowing #What Matters

Purposeful giving is not as apt to deplete one's resources; it belongs to that natural order of giving that seems to renew itself even in the act of depletion.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Inspirational #Order #Giving

The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray. But women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Artist #Order #Essence

...the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom. The only real security is... living in the present and accepting it as it is now.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Love #Real #Growth

The world has different owners at sunrise... Even your own garden does not belong to you. Rabbits and blackbirds have the lawns; a tortoise-shell cat who never appears in daytime patrols the brick walls, and a golden-tailed pheasant glints his way through the iris spears.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Wall #Cat #Garden

When you love someone . . .
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Love #When You Love Someone #One Love

Total freedom is never what one imagines and, in fact, hardly exists. It comes as a shock in life to learn that we usually only exchange one set of restrictions for another. The second set, however, is self-chosen, and therefore easier to accept.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Life #Self #Facts

We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of time and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Life #Love Is #Ebb And Flow

Ideally, both members of a couple in love free each other to new and different worlds.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Inspirational #Couple #World

People "died" all the time. . . . Parts of them died when they made the wrong kinds of decisions-decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you were perceptive you could see it in their eyes; the fire had gone out. . . you always knew when you made a decision against life. The door clicked and you were safe inside-safe and dead.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Eye #Fire #Doors

The ball of rumor and criticism, once it starts rolling, is difficult to stop.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Gossip #Criticism #Rumor

For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives but the important as well
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Important #Clutter #Wells

What release to write so that one forgets oneself, forgets one's companion, forgets where one is or what one is going to do next to be drenched in sleep or in the sea. Pencils and pads and curling blue sheets alive with letters heap up on the desk.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Sleep #Writing #Blue

the final lesson of learning to be independent - widowhood ... is the hardest lesson of all.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Independent #Finals #Widowhood

People talk about love as though it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers. And a lot of people give love like that -- just dump it down on top of you, a useless strong-scented burden.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Strong #Flower #People

My passport photo is one of the most remarkable photographs I have ever seen- no retouching, no shadows, no flattery-just stark me.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Photography #Shadow #Flattery

Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you're off, that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Rocks #Earthquakes #Feelings

But I want first of all- in fact, as an end to these other desires- to be at peace with myself.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Peace #Desire #Want

People talk about love as if it were something you could give, like an armful of flowers.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Love #Flower #People

Duration is not a test of truth or falsehood.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Tests #Duration #Spirituality

The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls - women's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Running #Children #House

Great problems that face the world today in both the private and the public sphere cannot be solved by women – or by men – alone. They can only be surmounted by men and women side by side.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Men #World #Today

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Anniversary #Doors #Want

How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Hate #Thinking #Rejection

How hard it is to have the beautiful interdependence of marriage and yet be strong in oneself alone.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Beautiful #Strong #Interdependence

Perhaps both men and women in America may hunger, in our material, outward, active, masculine culture, for the supposedly feminine qualities of heart, mind and spirit--qualities which are actually neither masculine nor feminine, but simply human qualities that have been neglected. It is growth along these lines that will make us whole, and will enable the individual to become world to himself.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Heart #Men #America

Can one make the future a substitute for the present? And what guarantee have we that the future will be any better if we neglect the present?
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Guarantees #Neglect #Substitutes

Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It's like an amputation, I feel a limb is being torn off, without which I shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done... life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid and fuller than before.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Death #Grief #Grieving

I believe that true identity is found . . . in creative activity springing from within. It is found, paradoxically, when one loses oneself. Woman can best refind herself in some kind of creative activity of her own.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Believe #Creative #Identity

I am very fond of the oyster shell. It is humble and awkward and ugly. It is slate-colored and unsymmetrical. Its form is not primarily beautiful but functional. I make fun of its knobbiness. Sometimes I resent its burdens and excrescences. But its tireless adaptability and tenacity draw my astonished admiration and sometimes even my tears. And it is comfortable in its familiarity, its homeliness, like old garden gloves when have molded themselves perfectly to the shape of the hand. I do not like to put it down. I will not want to leave it.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Beautiful #Fun #Humble

To be deeply in love is, of course, a great liberating force.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Love Is #Deeply In Love #Force

The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Heart #Childhood #Mind

Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves; that firm strand which will be the indispensable center of a whole web of human relationships.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Spring #Order #Essence

Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us - many days, many nights of stars.
-- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

#Stars #Memories #Night