10 Quotes on Accepting & Appreciating People for Who they Are

At some point, I started saving these quotes on accepting and appreciating the beauty in who people already are.

Before I knew it, I had compiled enough for a post. Enjoy (and revisit these often)!

10 Thoughtful Quotes on Accepting & Appreciating People for Who they Are

🌅 People are like sunsets:

“People are just as wonderful as sunsets if you let them be. When I look at a sunset, I don’t find myself saying, ‘Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner.’ I don’t try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds.” — Carl Rogers

🌲 The crooked tree:

“When you have a crooked tree in the woods and you say, ‘How’d that tree get crooked? Let’s straighten it out’ that’s really different than if you are looking at where the water is, where the insects are, where the wind blows, where the shadows are, and you say, ‘Ok, how is this tree learning to be in its world? How am I learning to perceive and describe this tree?’ All of those things are in flux.” — Nora Bateson

🥬 Don’t blame the lettuce:

“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

🌳 Turn people into trees:

”When you go out into the woods and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You appreciate it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn’t get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don’t get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying, ‘You’re too this’ or ‘I’m too this.’ That judging mind comes in. So, I practice turning people into trees—which means appreciating them just the way they are.” — Ram Dass

🌹 A rose is a rose:

“When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as ‘rootless and stemless.’ We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.” — Timothy Gallwey

🦌 The edge of the deer:

“Nature never does things one purpose at a time. A male deer has antlers. Those antlers might be described as there for the purpose of fighting other male deer or dangers that he encounters. Or, they could be described as attractors for female deer. When the deer scratches his antlers on particular treebarks, the conditions are made for particular insects. When he drops the antlers, they become home to some organisms and food for others—they decompose into the forest floor and become minerals/oils in the soil. Those organisms that feed on the particular decomposing bits of the antlers that are under the soil become a description of the deer. The antlers do not serve one purpose. The deer is not necessarily about the deer. Where is the edge of the deer?” — Nora Bateson

🌲 Tiny seed to giant redwood:

“We are rooted in our environment and depend on its offerings no less than a tree whose health is inextricable from the sunlight, air, and soil that surround it. We, too, begin as a seed whose growth and development depend on its environment. Our capacity for happiness, confidence, ecstasy, empathy, love and hate, is not of our own making. None of this means that we cannot change, learn and grow, or that making the effort to do so is unimportant – on the contrary, it is essential – but it does mean that the extent to which we succeed in our attempt, relative to others, is not something for which we can take credit. Just as the tiny seed that grows into a giant redwood cannot take credit for its height, we cannot take credit for what we become. In an important sense, our achievements are not really our achievements. We are notes in life’s melody, not its composer.” — Raoul Martinez

🎣 The tourist & the fisherman:

“The story is set in an unnamed harbor on the west coast of Europe. A smartly-dressed enterprising tourist is taking photographs when he notices a shabbily dressed local fisherman taking a nap in his fishing boat. The tourist is disappointed with the fisherman’s apparently lazy attitude towards his work, so he approaches the fisherman and asks him why he is lying around instead of catching fish. The fisherman explains that he went fishing in the morning, and the small catch would be sufficient for the next two days. The tourist tells him that if he goes out to catch fish multiple times a day, he would be able to buy a motor in less than a year, a second boat in less than two years, and so on. The tourist further explains that one day, the fisherman could even build a small cold storage plant, later a pickling factory, fly around in a helicopter, build a fish restaurant, and export lobster directly to Paris without a middleman. The nonchalant fisherman asks, ‘Then what?’ The tourist enthusiastically continues, ‘Then, without a care in the world, you could sit here in the harbor, doze in the sun, and look at the glorious sea.’ ‘But I’m already doing that’, says the fisherman. The enlightened tourist walks away pensively, with no trace of pity for the fisherman, only a little envy.” — Source

🏺 The cracked pot:

“A water bearer in India had two large pots, each hung on each end of a pole which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, and while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water at the end of the long walk from the stream to the master’s house, the cracked pot arrived only half full. For a full two years, this went on daily, with the bearer delivering only one and a half pots full of water in his master’s house. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, perfect to the end for which it was made. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it had been made to do. After two years of what it perceived to be a bitter failure, it spoke to the water bearer one day by the stream. ‘I am ashamed of myself, and I want to apologize to you.’ The bearer asked, ‘Why? What are you ashamed of?’ The pot replied, ‘For these past two years I am able to deliver only half of my load because this crack in my side causes water to leak out all the way back to your master’s house. Because of my flaws, you don’t get full value for your efforts.’ The water bearer felt sorry for the old cracked pot, and in his compassion, he said, ‘As we return to the master’s house, I want you to notice the beautiful flowers along the path.’ As they went up the hill, the old cracked pot took notice of the sun warming the beautiful wild flowers on the side of the path, and this cheered it somewhat. But at the end of the trail, it still felt bad because it had leaked out half its load, and so again it apologized to the bearer for its failure. The bearer said to the pot, ‘Did you notice that there were flowers only on your side of your path, but not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I have always known about your flaw, and I took advantage of it. I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back from the stream, you’ve watered them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate my master’s table. Without you being just the way you are, he would not have this beauty to grace his house.'” — Source

🌎 The pale blue dot:

“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” — Carl Sagan

🦵 Why do we forget all this? Because humans have legs:

“Let’s take the bees and the flowers. In a world of no bees there’s no flowers; in a world of no flowers—no bees. Because bees and flowers are aspects of the same organism, or organization. They go together, so I invent the word ‘goeswith’ to indicate organic relationships. And we as human beings, obviously, we ‘gowith’ an enormous cosmos of geological, botanical, and zoological events. And we are entirely dependent on them, and we cannot treat them as really and truly separate species. The bees are as much a part of us as they are a part of the flowers, because we need vegetables—and we can’t have those without bees or other insects. So what we’ve got is a universe that all hangs together, and where each so-called part of it implies all the other parts … There is really and truly no way of separating out independent things. And this is difficult for people to understand because of our method of motion. A plant is understandable as something growing out of the earth because it’s rooted. But human beings wander about on legs. And we don’t seem so stuck to things as plants do. And therefore we have delusions of separation.” — Alan Watts

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