Acceptance

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Bereavement is not the truncation of married love but one of its regular phases—like the honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully through that phase too. If it hurts (and it certainly will) we accept the pains as a necessary part of this phase. . . . We were one flesh. Now that it has been cut in two, we don’t want to pretend that it is whole and complete. 

- C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, ch. 3 (1961)

I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. 
- William Faulkner, in his speech at the Nobel Prize Banquet after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature (10 December 1950)

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you greater one.  
- J. Russell Lynes, Reader's Digest (December 1954)

Happiness . . . can exist only in acceptance ... - Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, Princeton University Press (1983), p. 280

 

Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. 
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. I, Miscellanies - Essays, p. 242

 

Be willing to have it so; acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.  
- William James, as quoted in A Personal Journey to Positive Change: Contentment and the Wizard by W. T. Watts, p. 125

 

What it is forbidden to be put right becomes lighter by acceptance. 
- Horace, as quoted in Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (ed. Larry Chang), p. 22

 

Dispose thy Soul to all good and necessary things!
- Pythagoras, as translated in The Sayings of the Wise: Or, Food for Thought: A Book of Moral Wisdom, Gathered from the Ancient Philosophers (1555) by William Baldwin

 

The greatest gift that you can give to others is the gift of unconditional love and acceptance. 
- Brian Tracy, Earn What You're Really Worth: Maximize Your Income at Any Time in Any Market, Vanguard Press (2013), p. 180

 

Adapt yourself to the life you have been given; and truly love the people with whom destiny has surrounded you.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: The Spiritual Teachings of Marcus Aurelius (tr. Mark Forstater), Hodder Headline Australia, 2000

 

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
- Reinhold Niebuhr, in the The Serenity Prayer (c. 1942)

 

Things without remedy, should be without regard; what is done, is done.
 - William Shakespeare, Macbeth: A Tragedy (ed. Samuel Johnson, George Steevens, Isaac Reed),
Mathews and Leigh., 1807, p. 123

 

We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does liberate, it oppresses.
- Carl G. Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1969, p. 519.

"Sicut radix portat arborem, sic humilitas animam. Spiritus humilitatis est super mel dulcis, quo qui regitur dulcia poma facit." 

• Just as the root feeds the tree, so humility feeds the soul. The spirit of humility is sweeter than honey, and whoever is fed by this sweetness produces fruit. 

- St. Anthony of Padua, Sermon for the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost [Part II: De bonae arboris fructificatione et de malae arboris excisione, par. 10]