Anne Morrow Lindbergh - Gift from the Sea (1955)

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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
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
The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed, but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach — waiting for a gift from the sea.

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I must try to be alone for part of each year...and part of each day...in order to keep my core, my center...Women must be still as the axis of a wheel in the midst of her activities. She must be the pioneer of achieving this stillness, not only for her own salvation, but for the salvation of family life, of society, perhaps even of our civilization.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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
Intermittency — an impossible lesson for human beings to learn. How can one learn to live through the ebb-tides of one's existence? How can one learn to take the trough of the wave?... Perhaps this is the most important thing.... Simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid; each cycle of the wave is valid; each cycle of relationship is valid.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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
I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! 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
Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone. The artist knows he must be alone to create; the writer, to work out his thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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
The world today does not understand, in either man or woman, the need to be alone. How inexplicable it seems. Anything else will be accepted as a better excuse.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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
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
Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be refound through solitude.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I would like to achieve a state of inner spiritual grace from which I could function and give as I was meant to in the eye of God.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The collector walks with blinders on; he sees nothing but the prize. In fact, the acquisitive instinct is incompatible with true appreciation of beauty.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
I believe that true identity is found... in creative activity springing from within. It is found when one loses oneself.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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
When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The present is passed over in the race for the future; the here is neglected in favor of the there. Enjoy the moment, even if it means merely a walk in the country.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
We Americans, with our terrific emphasis on youth, action, and material success, certainly tend to belittle the afternoon of life and even to pretend it never comes. We push the clock back and try to prolong the morning, over-reaching and over-straining ourselves in the unnatural effort.... In our breathless attempts we often miss the flowering that waits for afternoon.

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
It is only framed in space that beauty blooms; only in space are events, and objects and people unique and significant and therefore beautiful.

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Woman must be the pioneer in this turning inward for strength. In a sense, she has always been the pioneer.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
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
Who is not afraid of pure space - that breathtaking empty space of an open door?

Anne Morrow Lindbergh
When we start at the center of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending toward the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh