Some new mantras

I know one is supposed to choose a single mantra for repetition, d'habitude, but I lately I've found some longer quotes that I wish could be inscribed on the backs of my eyelids so I could be reminded of them approximately 25 times per minute. In reality, they're not mantras at all; they're long, quoted from mildly-famous-but-only-in-niches people, and not really spiritual in the least. I even took a class on Hinduism! How dare I . . .

Quotes, and how they relate to my life presently.

On these past days, weeks:

I am convinced that there are times in everybody's existence when there is so much to be done, that the only way to do it is to sit down and do nothing.

Fanny Fern 

On adulthood:

Grown-up people seem to be busy by clockwork . . . . They run their unswerving course from object to object, directed by some mysterious inner needle that points all the time to what they must do next. You can only marvel at such misuse of time.

Elizabeth Bowen

On living in New York City:

Have you ever noticed? Anybody going slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac.

George Carlin

On growing:

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.

Will Rogers

On current times: 

Leisure is gone — gone where the spinning wheels are gone, and the packhorses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.

George Eliot

On my love for my canine companion, Madison:

To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.

Milan Kundera

On yoga, both the textbook definition and the practice:

No one can get inner peace by pouncing on it.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

On smelling the roses:

Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world.

Alan Watts

On taking it as it comes: 

What am I doing? Nothing. I am letting life rain upon me.

Rahel Varnhagen

All of the above is taken from the October issue of The Sun, my all time favorite literary publication. Ultimate goal: a photograph of mine on the cover.