“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” 

— John Muir

 

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” 

— Kurt Vonnegut

 

“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” 

— Pablo Picasso

 

“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree… Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” 

— Albert Einstein

 

“Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.” — Carl Sagan

 

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.” 

— Henry David Thoreau

 

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.” 

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

“I offer you peace. I offer you love. I offer you friendship. I see your beauty. I hear your need. I feel your feelings. My wisdom flows from the Highest Source. I salute that source in you. Let us work together for unity and love.” 

— Mahatma Gandhi

 

“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.” 

— William Butler Yeats

 

“By Being, It Is.” 

— Parmenides

 

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” 

— Friedrich Nietzsche

 

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” 

— George Santayana

 

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.” 

— Carl Jung

 

“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” 

— Rene Descartes

 

“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.” 

— Richard Feynman

 

“Then he said ‘Remember Bob: no fear, no envy, no meanness,’ and I said ‘hmmm, right.'”

— Bob Dylan

 

“The reverse side also has a reverse side.” 

— Japanese Proverb

 

“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.” 

— William James

 

“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do… How would I be? What would I do?” 

— Buckminster Fuller

 

“The most vital issue of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is to be governed by the modern economic and materialistic mind of the West or by a nobler pragmatism guided, uplifted and enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge….” 

— Sri Aurobindo

 

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.” 

— Neil Gaiman

 

“Write about it by day, and dream about it by night.” 

— E. B. White

 

“One has to assume that every man is a thinking reed and a noble nature, even if only part-time” 

— Mary McCarthy 

 

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” 

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

“Nothing can be done but by inches.” 

— Adrienne Rich

 

“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” 

— Anne Frank

 

“There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.” 

— Andre Gide

 

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

— William Blake

 

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

“When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something, to say something, and not be quiet.”

— Rep. John Lewis

 

“Not only will we have to repent for the sins of bad people; but we also will have to repent for the appalling silence of good people.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

 

“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

— E. M. Forster

 

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

 

I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.

 

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

 

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

 

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

 

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

 

There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.

 

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

 

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

 

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

 

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

— Jorge Luis Borges

 

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we’ve learned most of what we know. Recently we’ve waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting.

 

Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

 

The cosmic calendar compresses the local history of the universe into a single year. If the universe began on January 1st it was not until May that the Milky Way formed. Other planetary systems may have appeared in June, July and August, but our Sun and Earth not until mid-September. Life arose soon after.

 

We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.

 

We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.

 

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.

 

A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

 

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

 

For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves. This is a time of great danger, but our species is young, and curious, and brave. It shows much promise.

We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads. But to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact. The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature.

 

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of 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.

 

Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants, it is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition or greed or stupidity we could plunge our world into a time of darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilisation and the Italian Renaissance. But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet.

 

I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs.

 

…The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

 

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

 

Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

 

Spirit comes from the Latin word to breathe. What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word spiritual that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.

 

We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.

 

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

 

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day.

 

As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky.

 

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

 

In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.

 

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

 

Exactly the same technology can be used for good and for evil. It is as if there were a God who said to us, I set before you two ways: You can use your technology to destroy yourselves or to carry you to the planets and the stars. It’s up to you.

 

Look again at 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 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… Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

 

The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.

Here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants.

In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.

— Carl Sagan

 

You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

— Stephen King

 

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe. 

— John Muir

 

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

— Kurt Vonnegut

 

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

— Pablo Picasso

 

Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.

— June Jordan

 

One can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

— Anne Sexton

 

Do not interrupt the flight of your soul; do not distress what is best in you; do not enfeeble your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts. Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one may have known something many times, acknowledged it; one may have willed something many times, attempted it — and yet, only the deep inner motion, only the heart’s indescribable emotion, only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs to you, that no power can take it from you — for only the truth that builds up is truth for you.

— Søren Kierkegaard

 

He that loveth not, Knoweth not God; for God is Love. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us. God is Love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him.

— Yeshua (Jesus Christ)

 

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

— Vaclav Havel

 

Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.

— John F. Kennedy

 

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree… Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. 

 

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving …

— Albert Einstein

 

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters. 

— Henry David Thoreau

 

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality. 

 

I have decided to stick to love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.

— William Butler Yeats

 

By Being, It Is. 

— Parmenides

 

Without music, life would be a mistake. 

— Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. 

— George Santayana

 

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.

 

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart … Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

 

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

 

Consciousness is a precondition of being.

 

The judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.

 

No language exists that cannot be misused… Every Interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text.

 

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.

 

I have chosen the term collective because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals.

 

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

 

We cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist. 

— Carl Jung

 

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. 

— Rene Descartes

 

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. 

— Richard Feynman

 

Then he said ‘Remember Bob: no fear, no envy, no meanness,’ and I said ‘hmmm, right.’ 

— Bob Dylan

 

The reverse side also has a reverse side. 

— Japanese Proverb

 

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

 

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

 

We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.

 

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. 

— William James

 

If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do… How would I be? What would I do? 

— Buckminster Fuller

 

The most vital issue of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is to be governed by the modern economic and materialistic mind of the West or by a nobler pragmatism guided, uplifted and enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge…. 

— Sri Aurobindo

 

The Self alone exists; and the Self alone is real. Verily the Self alone is the world, the I-I and God. All that exists is but the manifestation of the Supreme Being. 

— Ramana Maharshi

 

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. 

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

 

Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind. 

— John F. Kennedy

 

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

— Baruch Spinoza

 

You are the universe experiencing itself.

— Alan Watts

 

The unfolding of the bare human soul … that is what interests me.

— Bruce Lee

 

It’s wonderful to be alive and to walk on earth.

 

Peace is every step.

 

You are a miracle, and everything you touch could be a miracle. 

— Thich Nhat Hanh

 

Be the change that you wish to see in the world.

 

I offer you peace. I offer you love. I offer you friendship. I see your beauty. I hear your need. I feel your feelings. My wisdom flows from the Highest Source. I salute that source in you. Let us work together for unity and love.

 

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. 

— Mahatma Gandhi

 

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. 

— Laozi

 

Peace is the only battle worth waging. 

— Albert Camus

 

Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age. 

— Adlai E. Stevenson

 

I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I’m with you.

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

 

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it. 

— George Eliot

 

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

― Walt Whitman

 

When the mind is still, we can become an instrument of peace.

― Eknath Easwaran, Strength in the Storm

 

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

— Confucius

 

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

— Plato

 

I usually say the aim of life is to be happy. Our existence is based on hope. Our life is rooted in the opportunity to be happy, not necessarily wealthy, but happy within our own minds. If we only indulge in sensory pleasure, we’ll be little different from animals. In fact, we have this marvellous brain and intelligence; we must learn to use it.

 

As you breathe in, cherish yourself. As you breathe out, cherish all beings.

 

Some people consider the practice of love and compassion is only related to religious practice and if they are not interested in religion they neglect these inner values. But love and compassion are qualities that human beings require just to live together.

— Dalai Lama

 

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them. 

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

— Neil Gaiman

 

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

— Theodore Roosevelt

 

May all beings be filled with joy and peace.

May all beings everywhere,

The strong and the weak,

The great and the small,

The mean and the powerful,

The short and the long,

The subtle and the gross:

May all beings everywhere,

Seen and unseen,

Dwelling far off or nearby,

Being or waiting to become:

May all be filled with lasting joy.

Let no one deceive another,

Let no one anywhere despise another,

Let no one out of anger or resentment

Wish suffering on anyone at all.

Just as a mother with her own life

Protects her child, her only child, from harm,

So within yourself let grow

A boundless love for all creatures.

Let your love flow outward through the universe,

To its height, its depth, its broad extent,

A limitless love, without hatred or enmity.

Then, as you stand or walk,

Sit or lie down,

As long as you are awake,

Strive for this with a one-pointed mind;

Your life will bring heaven to earth.

 

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

 

Dream as if you will live forever, live as if you will die today.

 

Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds.

 

If you want to understand the causes that existed in the past, look at the results as they are manifested in the present. And if you want to understand what results will be manifested in the future, look at the causes that exist in the present.

 

Words do not express thoughts very well; everything immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom of one man seems nonsense to another.

 

Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.

 

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

 

When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.

If you light a lamp for somebody, it will also brighten your own path.

 

Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.

 

Better than a thousand hollow words

Is one word that brings peace.

Better than a thousand hollow verses

Is one verse that brings peace.

Better than a hundred hollow lines

Is one line of the law, bringing peace.

 

We are what we think.

All that we are arises with our thoughts.

With our thoughts we make the world.

 

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage… If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.

 

Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.

 

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love. This is the eternal rule.

 

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

 

All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. 

 

Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.

— Siddhartha Gautama Buddha

 

Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

 

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

— Lao Tzu

 

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

 

To be awake is to be alive.

— Henry David Thoreau

 

Faith is taking the first step even when you can’t see the whole staircase. 

― Martin Luther King Jr.

 

Never memorize something that you can look up. 

― Albert Einstein

 

We need to strengthen such inner values as contentment, patience and tolerance, as well as compassion for others. Keeping in mind that it is expressions of affection rather than money and power that attract real friends, compassion is the key to ensuring our own well-being.

— Dalai Lama

 

Follow the voice of your heart, even if it leads you off the path of timid souls. Do not become hard and embittered, even if life tortures you at times. There is only one thing that counts: to live one’s life well and happily…

— Wilhelm Reich

 

After the summer’s yield, Lord, it is time

to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials

and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.

As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness.

Direct on them two days of warmer light

to hale them golden toward their term, and harry

the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.

Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter;

who lives alone will live indefinitely so,

waking up to read a little, draft long letters,

and, along the city’s avenues,

fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Day in Autumn

 

Imagine there’s no heaven

It’s easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace…

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope someday you’ll join us

And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope someday you’ll join us

And the world will live as one

— John Lennon, Imagine

 

Calmness is the criterion of spiritual progress. Plunge the purified mind into the Heart. Then the work is over.

— Ramana Maharshi

 

Ignorance can be compared to a dark room in which you sleep. No matter how long the room has been dark, an hour or a million years, the moment the lamp of awareness is lit the entire room becomes luminous. You are that luminosity. You are that clear light.

— Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

 

Creative artists … are mankind’s wakeners to recollection: summoners of our outward mind to conscious contact with ourselves, not as participants in this or that morsel of history, but as spirit, in the consciousness of being. Their task, therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another.

— Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume IV: Creative Mythology

 

Look: the trees exist; the houses

we dwell in stand there stalwartly.

Only we

pass by it all, like a rush of air.

And everything conspires to keep quiet

about us,

half out of shame perhaps, half out of

some secret hope.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

 

Grace is within you. Grace is your self. Grace is not something to be acquired from others. If it is external, it is useless. All that is necessary is to know its existence is in you. You are never out of its operation.

— Ramana Maharshi

 

Ultimately there is light and love and intelligence in this universe. And we are it, we carry that within us, it’s not just something out there, it is within us and this is what we are trying to reconnect with, our original light and love and intelligence, which is who we are, so do not get so distracted by all this other stuff, you know, really remember what we are here on this planet for.

— Tenzin Palmo

 

In the Middle Ages, a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune. There’s the hub of the wheel, and there is the revolving rim of the wheel. For example, if you are attached to the rim of the wheel of fortune, you will be either above going down or at the bottom coming up. But if you are at the hub, you are in the same place all the time. That is the sense of the marriage vow—I take you in health or sickness, in wealth or poverty: going up or going down. But I take you as my center, and you are my bliss, not the wealth that you might bring me, not the social prestige, but you. That is following your bliss.

— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers

 

I thought the earth remembered me,

she took me back so tenderly,

arranging her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds.

I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,

nothing between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths

among the branches of the perfect trees.

All night I heard the small kingdoms

breathing around me, the insects,

and the birds who do their work in the darkness.

All night I rose and fell, as if in water,

grappling with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

— Mary Oliver, Sleeping In The Forest

 

In the past, destruction of your neighbour might have been considered a victory, but today we are all interdependent. We live in a global economy; we face problems like climate change that affect us all. The 7 billion human beings alive today belong to one human family. In the context that others’ interests are in our interest and our interest is in their interest, the use of force is self-destructive.

— Dalai Lama

 

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

— Albert Camus

 

Each one of us is responsible for other living beings’ happiness, besides our own. As a result, your loving kindness is the most wish-fulfilling thing in life, more precious than anything else in this world. That makes for a most satisfying, fulfilling life.

— Lama Zopa Rinpoche

 

The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.

 

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

— Thich Nhat Hanh

 

Your naked body should only belong to those who fall in love with your naked soul.

— Charlie Chaplin in a letter to his daughter, Geraldine

 

A compassionate community will not be achieved only through prayer; I pray myself, but I accept its limitations. We need to take action to develop compassion, to create inner peace within ourselves and to share that inner peace with our family and friends. Peace and warm-heartedness can then spread through the community just as ripples radiate out across the water when you drop a pebble into a pond.

— Dalai Lama

 

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.

— William James

 

The realms of the gods and demons — heaven, purgatory, hell — are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world.

— Joseph Campbell, Myths of Light

 

There is one story and one story only.

Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,

Do not forget what flowers

The great boar trampled down in ivy time.

Her brow was creamy as the long ninth wave,

Her sea-blue eyes were wild.

But nothing promised that is not performed.

— Robert Graves

 

Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.

— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.

— Richard Feynman

 

There is nothing to do. Just be. Do nothing. Be. No climbing mountains and sitting in caves. I do not even say: ‘be yourself’, since you do not know yourself. Just be. Having seen that you are neither the ‘outer’ world of perceivables, not the ‘inner’ world of thinkables, that you are neither body nor mind, just be.

— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

— Marcel Proust

 

Universal peace as a result of cumulative effort through centuries past might come into existence quickly — not unlike a crystal that suddenly forms in a solution which has been slowly prepared.

Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity.

— Nikola Tesla

 

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

— Marcel Proust

 

All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combatted, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.

— Nikola Tesla (born 10 July 1856)

 

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

 

Lead me from the unreal to the real.

Lead me from darkness to light.

Lead me from death to immortality.

— Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

 

The wave is the same as the ocean, though it is not the whole ocean. So each wave of creation is a part of the eternal Ocean of Spirit. The Ocean can exist without the waves, but the waves cannot exist without the Ocean.

— Paramahansa Yogananda

 

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

— Aldous Huxley

 

Everyone wants a happy life without difficulties or suffering. We create many of the problems we face. No one intentionally creates problems, but we tend to be slaves to powerful emotions like anger, hatred and attachment that are based on misconceived projections about people and things. We need to find ways of reducing these emotions by eliminating the ignorance that underlies them and applying opposing forces.

— Dalai Lama

 

Beneath the surface level of conditioned thinking in every one of us there is a single living spirit. The still small voice whispering to me in the depths of my consciousness is saying exactly the same thing as the voice whispering to you in your consciousness. ‘I want an earth that is healthy, a world at peace, and a heart filled with love.’ It doesn’t matter if your skin is brown or white or black, or whether you speak English, Japanese, or Malayalam – the voice, says the Gita, is the same in every creature, and it comes from your true self.

— Eknath Easwaran

 

We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.This is true for the entire universe.

— Upanishads

 

Although we live in the colony of time, we owe our allegiance to the empire of eternity.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

 

Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

 

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

— Marcus Aurelius

 

If your mind is happy, then you happy anywhere you go. When wisdom awakens within you, you will see Truth wherever you look. Truth is all there is. It’s like when you’ve learned how to read, you can then read anywhere you go.

— Ajahn Chah

 

Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.

— Madeleine L’Engle

 

The morning breezes have secrets to tell; don’t go back to sleep.

— Rumi

 

You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this universe. You didn’t come into this world; you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.

— Alan Watts

 

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

— Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces

 

You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

— Alan Watts

 

Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

— Rabindranath Tagore

 

Make your God transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn’t matter what his name is.

— Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss

 

I’ve learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision. I’ve learned that even when I have pains, I don’t have to be one. I’ve learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. I’ve learned that I still have a lot to learn.

 

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.

 

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

 

Have enough courage to love.

 

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.

— Maya Angelou

 

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

— John Maynard Keynes

 

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

— Mahatma Gandhi

 

I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.

— Charles Dickens

 

Education is the best way to train ourselves that we will secure our own well-being by concerning ourselves with others. It is possible to create a better world, a more compassionate, more peaceful world, which is not only in everyone’s interest, but is everyone’s responsibility to achieve.

— Dalai Lama

 

Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final

— Rainer Maria Rilke

 

My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.

― Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.

― William Shakespeare

 

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.

― Sylvia Plath

 

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

― Anaïs Nin

 

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

― Robert Fulghum

 

I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let people fool themselves. They didn’t bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn’t argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn’t.

― Marilyn Monroe

 

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

― Arundhati Roy

 

The unfolding through time of all things from one is the simple message, finally, of every one of the creation myths reproduced in the pages of these volumes—including that of our contemporary biological view, which becomes an effective mythic image the moment we recognize its own inner mystery. By the same magic, every god that is dead can be conjured again to life, as any fragment of rock from a hillside, set respectfully in a garden, will arrest the eye.

― Joseph Campbell

 

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

― Virginia Woolf

 

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

― Ernest Hemingway

 

Seven Deadly Sins

Wealth without work

Pleasure without conscience

Science without humanity

Knowledge without character

Politics without principle

Commerce without morality

Worship without sacrifice.

― Mahatma Gandhi

 

If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.

― Albert Einstein

 

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

― Neil Gaiman

 

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

― Thomas Jefferson

 

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

― William Shakespeare

 

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.

― Pablo Neruda

 

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

― Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.

― Eleanor Roosevelt

 

I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

― Marilyn Monroe

 

If you don’t know where you’re going, any road’ll take you there

― George Harrison

 

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

― John Stuart Mill

 

A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part.

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

— John Muir

 

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

― Pablo Picasso

 

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree… Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

 

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking… The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.

 

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds…

— Albert Einstein

 

Ultimately, humanity is one, and this small planet is our only home. If we are to protect this home of ours, each of us needs to feel a vivid sense of universal altruism. It is only this feeling that can remove the self-centered motives that cause people to deceive and misuse one another. If you have a sincere and open heart, you naturally feel self-worth and confidence, and there is no need to be fearful of others.

 

For the rest of your life to be as meaningful as possible, engage in spiritual practice if you can. It is nothing more than acting out of concern for others. If you practice sincerely and with persistence, little by little, step by step you will gradually reorder your habits and attitudes so as to think less about your own narrow concerns and more about others’ – and thereby find peace and happiness yourself.

— Dalai Lama

 

It is only in the act of contemplation when words and even personality are transcended, that the pure state of the Perennial Philosophy can actually be known. The records left by those who have known it in this way make it abundantly clear that all of them, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Hebrew, Taoist, Christian, or Mohammedan, were attempting to describe the same essentially indescribable Fact.

 

The phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness — the world of things and animals and men and even gods — is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

 

Human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

 

Something inexpressively lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressively terrifying…

 

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

 

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

 

There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

 

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

— Aldous Huxley

 

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

— Leonardo da Vinci

 

No great thing is created suddenly.

— Epictetus

 

All life is an experiment.

 

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.

 

I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.

 

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

— Italo Calvino

 

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way.

— Pablo Neruda

 

A beginning is a very delicate time ….

 

Bless the Maker and all His Water. Bless the coming and going of Him, May His passing cleanse the world. May He keep the world for his people.— Fremen saying, recited by Liet-Kynes, in the presence of Paul Atreides.

 

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

 

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

 

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

 

We are generalists. You can’t draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.

— Frank Herbert, Dune

 

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one… I have been… and always shall be… your friend. Live long… and prosper.

— Spock

 

An idea is salvation by imagination.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

 

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

— Maya Angelou

 

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

— Vincent van Gogh

 

God is that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part.

 

God alone exists truly. Man manifests Him in time, space and matter.

 

I know that most men — not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems — can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.

 

The indubitable, eternal truth inherent in man, which is one and the same in all the great religions of the world. It will in due time emerge and make its way to general recognition, and the nonsense that has obscured it will disappear of itself, and with it will go the evil from which humanity now suffers.

 

We acknowledge God only when we are conscious of His manifestation in us.

— Leo Tolstoy

 

The meaning of our self is not to be found in its separateness from God and others, but in the ceaseless realisation of yoga, of union.

— Rabindranath Tagore

 

Legends can be now and forever

Teaching us to love for goodness sake.

Legends can be now and forever

Loved by the sun, loved by the sun.

— Jon Anderson

 

This that we are now … The human body and the universe grew from this, not this from the universe and the human body.

 

Love said to me, there is nothing that is not me. Be silent.

 

Love is the ark appointed for the righteous,

Which annuls the danger and provides a way of escape.

 

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition.

 

Observe the wonders as they occur around you.

Don’t claim them. Feel the artistry

moving through, and be silent.

 

Reason is like an officer when the King appears;

The officer then loses his power and hides himself.

 

Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.

 

If in thirst you drink water from a cup, you see God in it. Those who are not in love with God will see only their own faces in it.

 

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I will meet you there.

 

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about

language, ideas, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.

— Mevlana Rumi

 

We’re playing those mind games together

Pushing the barriers, planting seeds

Playing the mind guerrilla

Chanting the mantra, Peace on Earth.

We all been playing those mind games forever

Some kinda druid dudes lifting the veil.

Doing the mind guerrilla,

Some call it magic — the search for the grail.

Love is the answer and you know that for sure.

Love is a flower, you got to let it — you got to let it grow.

Yes is the answer and you know that for sure.

Yes is surrender, you got to let it, you got to let it go…

So keep on playing those mind games together

Doing the ritual dance in the sun.

Millions of mind guerrillas

Putting their soul power to the karmic wheel.

I want you to make love, not war — I know you’ve heard it before.

— John Lennon

 

The truth is that my work — I was going to say my mission — is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.

— Miguel de Unamuno

 

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear,

Or like a fairy trip upon the green,

Or, like a nymph, with long dishevell’d hair,

Dance on the sands, and yet no footing seen:

Love is a spirit all compact of fire,

Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.

Foul words and frowns must not repel a lover;

What though the rose have prickles, yet ’tis pluck’d:

Were beauty under twenty locks kept fast,

Yet love breaks through and picks them all at last.

For where Love reigns, disturbing Jealousy

Doth call himself Affection’s sentinel;

Gives false alarms, suggesteth mutiny.

This carry-tale, dissentious Jealousy,

That sometime true news, sometime false doth bring.

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain.

Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest,

From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,

And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast

The sun ariseth in his majesty.

— William Shakespeare

 

There are people that can’t go to Fantastica. There are those who can but never return. And there are just a few who go to Fantastica and come back. And they make both worlds well again.

— Michael Ende

 

Here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that Love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.

 

Love does not entreat; or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.

 

One never reaches home. But whenever friendly paths intersect, the whole world looks like home for a time.

— Hermann Hesse

 

It is the way of the superior man to prefer the concealment of his virtue, while it daily becomes more illustrious, and it is the way of the mean man to seek notoriety, while he daily goes more and more to ruin. It is characteristic of the superior man, appearing insipid, yet never to produce satiety; while showing a simple negligence, yet to have his accomplishments recognized; while seemingly plain, yet to be discriminating. He knows how what is distant lies in what is near. He knows where the wind proceeds from. He knows how what is minute becomes manifested. Such a one, we may be sure, will enter into virtue.

— Confucius

 

Activism is my rent for living on the planet.

— Alice Walker

 

God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is afoot. Magic is alive. Alive is afoot. Magic never died. God never sickened. Many poor men lied. Many sick men lied. Magic never weakened. Magic never hid. Magic always ruled. God is afoot. God was ruler though his funeral lengthened. Though his mourners thickened Magic never fled…

— Leonard Cohen

 

I was still blind, but twinkling stars did dance

Throughout my being’s limitless expanse,

Nothing had yet drawn close, only at distant stages

I found myself, a mere suggestion sensed in past and future ages.

— Novalis

 

Grand is the seen, the light, to me — grand are the sky and stars,

Grand is the earth, and grand are lasting time and space,

And grand their laws, so multiform, puzzling, evolutionary;

But grander far the unseen soul of me, comprehending, endowing all those,

Lighting the light, the sky and stars, delving the earth, sailing the sea,

(What were all those, indeed, without thee, unseen soul? of what amount without thee?)

More evolutionary, vast, puzzling, O my soul!

More multiform far — more lasting thou than they.

I stand as on some mighty eagle’s beak,

Eastward the sea absorbing, viewing,

(nothing but sea and sky,)

The tossing waves, the foam,

the ships in the distance,

The wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps —

that inbound urge and urge of waves….

— Walt Whitman

 

I don’t take drugs: I am drugs.

 

Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy – the joy of being Salvador Dalí – and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things this Salvador Dalí is going to accomplish today?

 

The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad.

— Salvador Dali

 

Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.

— June Jordan

 

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

— V. S. Naipaul

 

One can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

— Anne Sexton

 

Do not interrupt the flight of your soul; do not distress what is best in you; do not enfeeble your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts. Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one may have known something many times, acknowledged it; one may have willed something many times, attempted it — and yet, only the deep inner motion, only the heart’s indescribable emotion, only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs to you, that no power can take it from you — for only the truth that builds up is truth for you.

— Søren Kierkegaard

 

He that loveth not, Knoweth not God; for God is Love. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us. God is Love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him.

— Yeshua (Jesus Christ)

 

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out

— Vaclav Havel

 

Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.

— John F. Kennedy

 

If you realize what the real problem is—losing yourself, giving yourself to some higher end, or to another—you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial. When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. And what all the myths have to deal with is transformations of consciousness of one kind or another. You have been thinking one way, you now have to think a different way.

― Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth

 

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know? 

― Ernest Hemingway

 

An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.

― Mohandas Gandhi

 

This is our time — to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can! 

― Barack Obama (2008)

 

My father used to say, Don’t raise your voice. Improve your argument. 

— Archbishop Desmond Tutu

 

We Hear what you say

One Earth, one Mother

One does not sell the Earth

The people walk upon

We are the land

How do we sell our Mother?

How do we sell the stars?

How do we sell the air?

— John Trudell, Crazy Horse

 

Psychological type is nothing static — it changes in the course of life.

 

We need more understanding of human nature, because the only danger that exists is man himself — he is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man — far too little.

 

I think there will be a reaction — a reaction will set in against this communal dissociation. You know, man doesn’t stand forever, his nullification. Once, there will be a reaction, and I see it setting in, you know, when I think of my patients, they all seek their own existence and to assure their existence against that complete atomization into nothingness or into meaninglessness. Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

— Carl Jung, Face to Face BBC Interview (1959)

 

The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them. 

― Maya Angelou

 

What’s meant to be will always find a way. 

― Trisha Yearwood

 

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s beautiful. 

― Milan Kundera

 

May you live every day of your life. 

― Jonathan Swift

 

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. 

― Edgar Allan Poe

 

Anyone who aspires to a writing career, before developing his talent, would be wise to develop a thick hide. 

― Harper Lee

 

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. 

― Louise Erdrich

 

Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you. 

― Spanish Proverb

 

So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you. ― Paulo Coelho

 

To love yourself right now, just as you are, is to give yourself heaven. Don’t wait until you die. If you wait, you die now. If you love, you live now. ― Alan Cohen

 

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life. 

― John Lennon

 

Sex appeal is fifty percent what you’ve got and fifty percent what people think you’ve got. 

― Sophia Loren

 

One day I had to sit down with myself and decide that I loved myself no matter what my body looked like and what other people thought about my body. I got tired of hating myself. 

― Gabourey Sidibe

 

To love yourself right now, just as you are, is to give yourself heaven. Don’t wait until you die. If you wait, you die now. If you love, you live now. 

― Alan Cohen

 

Sex appeal is fifty percent what you’ve got and fifty percent what people think you’ve got. 

― Sophia Loren

 

You can never be overdressed or overeducated. 

― Oscar Wilde

 

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. 

― Mahatma Gandhi

 

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. 

― Socrates

 

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. 

― A.A. Milne

 

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.

― John Steinbeck

 

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age. 

― Anthony Burgess

 

Of course I thought I was Jo in Little Women. But I didn’t want to write what Jo wrote. Then in Martin Eden I found a writer-protagonist with whose writing I could identify, so then I wanted to be Martin Eden—minus, of course, the dreary fate Jack London gives him. I saw myself as (I guess I was) a heroic autodidact. I looked forward to the struggle of the writing life. I thought of being a writer as a heroic vocation. 

― Susan Sontag

 

I’ve always been keenly aware of the passing of time. I’ve always thought that I was old. Even when I was twelve, I thought it was awful to be thirty. I felt that something was lost. At the same time, I was aware of what I could gain, and certain periods of my life have taught me a great deal. But, in spite of everything, I’ve always been haunted by the passing of time and by the fact that death keeps closing in on us. For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay. It’s that, rather than the fact that things disintegrate, that love peters out. 

― Simone de Beauvoir

 

Now, if you don’t like that, Berrigan, that’s the history of my family. They don’t take no shit from nobody. In due time I ain’t going to take no shit from nobody. You can record that. 

― Jack Kerouac

 

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. 

― Ray Bradbury

 

It’s a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to. Writing is very pleasurable, very seductive, and very therapeutic. Time passes very fast when I’m writing—really fast. I’m puzzling over something, and time just flies by. It’s an exhilarating feeling. How bad can it be? It’s sitting alone with fictional characters. You’re escaping from the world in your own way and that’s fine. Why not? 

― Woody Allen

 

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool—and I’m not any of those—to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues. 

― Maya Angelou

 

When I began to lose my sight, the last color I saw, or the last color, rather, that stood out, because of course now I know that your coat is not the same color as this table or of the woodwork behind you—the last color to stand out was yellow because it is the most vivid of colors. That’s why you have the Yellow Cab Company in the United States. At first they thought of making the cars scarlet. Then somebody found out that at night or when there was a fog that yellow stood out in a more vivid way than scarlet. So you have yellow cabs because anybody can pick them out. Now when I began to lose my eyesight, when the world began to fade away from me, there was a time among my friends… well they made, they poked fun at me because I was always wearing yellow neckties. Then they thought I really liked yellow, although it really was too glaring. I said, ‘Yes, to you, but not to me, because it is the only color I can see, practically!’ I live in a gray world, rather like the silver-screen world. But yellow stands out.

― Jorge Luis Borges

 

The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It’s as psychological as malaria. It’s a matter of exposure. 

― William S. Burroughs

 

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. 

― Ernest Hemingway

 

Art is a revolt against fate.

— André Malraux

 

Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness. 

— Wilhelm Reich

 

Once the masterpiece has emerged, the lesser works surrounding it fall into place; and it then gives the impression of having been led up to and foreseeable, though actually it is inconceivable — or, rather, it can only be conceived of once it is there for us to see it.

 

History may clarify our understanding of the supreme work of art, but can never account for it completely; for the Time of art is not the same as the Time of history.

 

All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful. 

— Wilfred Owen

 

Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind then that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. 

 

I may not be able to say all I think; but I am not going to say anything that I do not think. I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets. 

— Eugene V. Debs

 

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. 

— Anaïs Nin

 

I found a book on how to be invisible —

On the edge of the labyrinth —

Under a veil you must never lift —

Pages you must never turn —

In the Labyrinth.

— Kate Bush

 

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness. 

 

All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At very most, such a mind will consent to use past experience as a basis for its future actions. 

 

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me — that I understand. And these two certainties — my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle — I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?

 

In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence and doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror’s attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: There is no frontier between being and appearing.

— Albert Camus

 

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. 

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me. 

― Stephen Fry

 

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. 

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. 

― Albert Camus

 

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty. 

― Maya Angelou

 

Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness. 

― Albert Camus

 

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see. 

― Arthur Schopenhauer

 

Always do what you are afraid to do. 

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

If you find me not within you, you will never find me. For, I have been with you, from the beginning of me. 

― Rumi

 

Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.

 

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

 

One becomes sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and consonance with other people. No doubt, such a person loses some of his innocence and unconcern; on the other hand, he is largely independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and avoids the temptation to build his inner equilibrium upon such insecure foundations.

 

When we survey our lives and endeavors we soon observe that almost the whole of our actions and desires are bound up with the existence of other human beings. We see that our whole nature resembles that of the social animals. We eat food that others have grown, wear clothes that others have made, live in houses that others have built. The greater part of our knowledge and beliefs has been communicated to us by other people through the medium of a language which others have created. Without language our mental capacities would be poor indeed, comparable to those of the higher animals; we have, therefore, to admit that we owe our principal advantage over the beasts to the fact of living in human society. The individual, if left alone from birth would remain primitive and beast-like in his thoughts and feelings to a degree that we can hardly conceive. The individual is what he is and has the significance that he has not so much in virtue of his individuality, but rather as a member of a great human society, which directs his material and spiritual existence from the cradle to the grave.

 

A man’s value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows. We call him good or bad according to how he stands in this matter. It looks at first sight as if our estimate of a man depended entirely on his social qualities.

 

And yet such an attitude would be wrong. It is clear that all the valuable things, material, spiritual, and moral, which we receive from society can be traced back through countless generations to certain creative individuals. The use of fire, the cultivation of edible plants, the steam engine — each was discovered by one man.

 

Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society — nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.

 

The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close social cohesion.

 

Everybody has certain ideals which determine the direction of his endeavors and his judgments. In this sense I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty.

― Albert Einstein

 

A writer, or any artist, can’t expect to be embraced by the people [but] you just keep doing your work — because you have to, because it’s your calling.

 

Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful — be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.

 

To be an artist — actually, to be a human being in these times — it’s all difficult. … What matters is to know what you want and pursue it.

Life is like a roller coaster. It’s never going to be perfect — it is going to have perfect moments, and then rough spots, but it’s all worth it.

 

Secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

 

William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He’d appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway.

 

He camped in the Bunker with his typewriter, his shotgun, and his overcoat. From time to time he’d slip on his coat, saunter our way, and take his place at the table we reserved for him in front of the stage.

― Patti Smith

 

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. 

― Albert Einstein

 

If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.

—Albert Camus

 

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet. 

― Plato

 

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on. 

― Robert Frost

 

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it. 

― Bertrand Russell

 

I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person. ― Oscar Wilde

 

Books may well be the only true magic. 

― Alice Hoffman

 

Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism.

― Carl Sagan

 

To love another is something

like prayer and it can’t be planned, you just fall

into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

― Anne Sexton

 

A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief. 

— John Steinbeck

 

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, Why god? Why me? and the thundering voice of God answered, There’s just something about you that pisses me off. 

― Stephen King

 

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Continue to plant a kiss of concern on the cheek of the sick and the aged and infirm and count that actions as natural and to be expected.

― Maya Angelou

 

This above all: to thine own self be true, 

And it must follow, as the night the day, 

Thou canst not then be false to any man. 

― William Shakespeare

 

Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike. 

― J.K. Rowling

 

It’s a strange thing, how you can love somebody, how you can be all eaten up inside with needing them – and they simply don’t need you. That’s all there is to it, and neither of you can do anything about it. And they’ll be the same way with someone else, and someone else will be the same way about you and it goes on and on – this desperate need – and only once in a rare million do the same two people need each other. 

— Madeleine L’Engle

 

The thing is you have to fight the whole time. You can’t stop. Otherwise you just end up somewhere, bobbing in the middle of a life you never wanted. 

— Alexander Maksik

 

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad. 

― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. 

― Dr. Seuss

 

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them! 

― Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Oh my God, does art engender humanity? It awakens your humanity. But humanity has nothing to do with political theory. Political theory is in the interests of one group of humanity, or one ideal for humanity. But humanity—my heavens, that’s what proper art renders. We have a paradox. Going into the deepest aspects of inner space connects you with something that is the most vital for the outer realm.

― Joseph Campbell, interviewed by Joan Marler for the Yoga Journal (1987)

 

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life. 

― John Lennon

 

Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you. 

― George R.R. Martin

 

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most? 

― Mark Twain

 

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, 

in secret, between the shadow and the soul. 

― Pablo Neruda

 

I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then. 

― Lewis Carroll

 

‘We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love & then to return Home.’

– Aboriginal Proverb

 

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. 

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

We love the things we love for what they are. 

― Robert Frost

 

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity. 

― Albert Einstein

 

He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two. 

― Victor Hugo

 

It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it.

― Hunter S. Thompson

 

We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world.

― Neil Gaiman

 

Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error, and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom. 

― Friedrich Schiller

 

There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous. 

― Mr. Wednesday in American Gods by Neil Gaiman

 

The dignity of mankind is in your hands; protect it!

It sinks with you! With you it will ascend.

 

He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times. 

 

Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.

― Friedrich Schiller

 

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

― Neil Gaiman in American Gods

 

Dare to be wise! Energy and spirit is needed to overcome the obstacles which indolence of nature as well as cowardice of heart oppose to our instruction. It is not without significance that the old myth makes the goddess of Wisdom emerge fully armed from the head of Jupiter; for her very first function is warlike. Even in her birth she has to maintain a hard struggle with the senses, which do not want to be dragged from their sweet repose. The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error. Content if they themselves escape the hard labor of thought, men gladly resign to others the guardianship of their ideas, and if it happens that higher needs are stirred in them, they embrace with a eager faith the formulas which State and priesthood hold in readiness for such an occasion.

― Friedrich Schiller

 

For things to reveal themselves to us,

we need to be ready to abandon our

views about them.

― Thích Nhất Hạnh

 

One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life and dedicate ourselves to that.

― Joseph Campbell

 

The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

 

All the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

 

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

― Kurt Vonnegut

 

I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. But how can I help believing it? I have seen the truth — it is not as though I had invented it with my mind, I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul for ever. I have seen it in such full perfection that I cannot believe that it is impossible for people to have it. And so how can I go wrong? I shall make some slips no doubt, and shall perhaps talk in second-hand language, but not for long: the living image of what I saw will always be with me and will always correct and guide me. Oh, I am full of courage and freshness, and I will go on and on if it were for a thousand years! Do you know, at first I meant to conceal the fact that I corrupted them, but that was a mistake — that was my first mistake! But truth whispered to me that I was lying, and preserved me and corrected me. But how establish paradise — I don’t know, because I do not know how to put it into words. After my dream I lost command of words. All the chief words, anyway, the most necessary ones. But never mind, I shall go and I shall keep talking, I won’t leave off, for anyway I have seen it with my own eyes, though I cannot describe what I saw. But the scoffers do not understand that. It was a dream, they say, delirium, hallucination. Oh! As though that meant so much! And they are so proud! A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that’s the chief thing, and that’s everything; nothing else is wanted — you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it’s an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times — but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness — that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.

― Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

 

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side.

 

I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativism is defensible and attractive. It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.

― Kurt Vonnegut

 

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies. 

― Aristotle

 

I used to take pride in the fact that i am not a belief philosopher: I am primarily interested in ideas, in theories, and I find it comparatively unimportant whether or not anybody ‘believes’ in them. And I suspect that the interest of philosophers in belief results from that mistaken philosophy which I call ‘inductivism’. They are theorists of knowledge, and starting from subjective experiences they fail to distinguish between objective and subjective knowledge. This leads them to believe in belief as the genus of which knowledge is a species (‘justification’ or perhaps a ‘criterion of truth’ such as clarity and distinctness, or vivacity, or ‘sufficient reason’, providing the specific difference).

This is why, like E.M. Forster, I do not believe in belief

― Karl Popper, ‘Objective Knowledge’

 

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. 

― F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens. 

― J.R.R. Tolkien

 

Kiss me, and you will see how important I am. 

― Sylvia Plath

 

Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre. 

― Carlos Fuentes

 

God created war so that Americans would learn geography. 

― Mark Twain

 

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. 

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

― George Eliot

 

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy. 

― Anne Frank

 

Being crazy isn’t enough. 

― Dr. Seuss

 

The secret of success is… to be fully awake to everything about you.

— LeRoy Pollock

 

When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books. 

― John Green

 

I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don’t matter anymore.

 

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.

— Kurt Vonnegut

 

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man.

— Albert Einstein

 

Educate yourself, welcome life’s messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.

― Kurt Vonnegut

 

Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are. 

― Niccolò Machiavelli

 

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

― Dalai Lama

 

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

― Aristotle

 

What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable? 

― John Green

 

If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign? 

― Albert Einstein

 

The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret. It has come to be believed that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

 

― Albert Schweitzer

 

Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary. 

― Oscar Wilde

 

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, human liberty as the source of national action, the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas.

― John F. Kennedy

 

We are always hoping for an Utopian world, and most people have at least a few Utopian dreams.

 

We would like to see the world around us as beautiful as we know it could be, but this cannot be achieved until the soul world within us is as beautiful as it must be to transform the outer surface of things.

― Manly P. Hall Lecture #195 – The Soul as the Immortal Mortal

 

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do. 

― Eleanor Roosevelt

 

The responsibility of tolerance lies in those who have the wider vision.

― T. S. Eliot

 

It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.

 

If the learned and worldly-wise men of this age were to allow mankind to inhale the fragrance of fellowship and love, every understanding heart would apprehend the meaning of true liberty, and discover the secret of undisturbed peace and absolute composure.

 

Justice and equity are twin Guardians that watch over men. From them are revealed such blessed and perspicuous words as are the cause of the well-being of the world and the protection of the nations.

― Bahá’u’lláh

 

Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; whether thou spare, through love do thou spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good. 

― Augustine of Hippo

 

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

 

Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

― Louis Brandeis

 

It is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God’s sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!

― Robert Louis Stevenson

 

The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but — what is worse — the slave of as many masters as he has vices.

 

Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.

 

I do not fear but that He will go on to supply what is yet wanting when once I have begun to use what He has already given. For a possession which is not diminished by being shared with there, if it is possessed and not shared, is not yet possessed as it ought to be possessed.

― Augustine of Hippo

 

All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

 

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant. 

― Robert Louis Stevenson

 

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

― Stephen King

 

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.

― Anaïs Nin

 

If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.

 

No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.

 

Knowledge and ability were tools, not things to show off.

― Haruki Murakami

 

Compassion is not just about kind acts; actually it is about being aware of the suffering of other sentient beings from the view of the actual nature of things.

― 17th Karmapa

 

And just as in the past each civilization was the vehicle of its own mythology, developing in character as its myth became progressively interpreted, analyzed, and elucidated by its leading minds, so in this modern world—where the application of science to the fields of practical life has now dissolved all cultural horizons, so that no separate civilization can ever develop again—each individual is the center of a mythology of his own, of which his own intelligible character is the Incarnate God, so to say, whom his empirically questing consciousness is to find. The aphorism of Delphi, ‘Know thyself,’ is the motto. And not Rome, not Mecca, not Jerusalem, Sinai, or Benares, but each and every ‘thou’ on earth is the center of this world, in the sense of that formula quoted from the twelfth-century Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers, of God as ‘an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere.’

― Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. IV: Creative Mythology

 

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weights so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

― Milan Kundera

 

Words belong to each other.

― Virginia Woolf

 

Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time. 

― Haruki Murakami

 

For you, the world is weird because if you’re not bored with it you’re at odds with it. For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here in this marvelous time. 

― Carlos Castaneda

 

When the ear hears,

observe the mind. Does it

get caught up and make a

story out of the sound? Is it

disturbed? You can know

this, stay with it, be aware.

At times you may want to

escape from the sounds, but

that is not the way out. You

must escape through

awareness.

― Ajahn Chah

 

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. 

― Oscar Wilde

 

The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.’’

― President John F. Kennedy

 

I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong. 

― Haruki Murakami

 

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. 

― Pablo Picasso

 

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. 

― William Shakespeare

 

You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do. 

― Eleanor Roosevelt

 

Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet. 

― Bob Marley

 

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. 

― Mark Twain

 

Being tender and open is beautiful. As a woman, I feel continually shhh’ed. Too sensitive. Too mushy. Too wishy washy. Blah blah. Don’t let someone steal your tenderness. Don’t allow the coldness and fear of others to tarnish your perfectly vulnerable beating heart. Nothing is more powerful than allowing yourself to truly be affected by things. Whether it’s a song, a stranger, a mountain, a rain drop, a tea kettle, an article, a sentence, a footstep, feel it all – look around you. All of this is for you. Take it and have gratitude. Give it and feel love. 

— Zooey Deschanel

 

This life is what you make it. No matter what, you’re going to mess up sometimes, it’s a universal truth. But the good part is you get to decide how you’re going to mess it up. Girls will be your friends – they’ll act like it anyway. But just remember, some come, some go. The ones that stay with you through everything – they’re your true best friends. Don’t let go of them. Also remember, sisters make the best friends in the world. As for lovers, well, they’ll come and go too. And baby, I hate to say it, most of them – actually pretty much all of them are going to break your heart, but you can’t give up because if you give up, you’ll never find your soulmate. You’ll never find that half who makes you whole and that goes for everything. Just because you fail once, doesn’t mean you’re gonna fail at everything. Keep trying, hold on, and always, always, always believe in yourself, because if you don’t, then who will, sweetie? So keep your head high, keep your chin up, and most importantly, keep smiling, because life’s a beautiful thing and there’s so much to smile about. 

― Marilyn Monroe

 

Compassionate action involves working with ourselves as much as working with others.

― Pema Chodron

 

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. 

― Mark Twain

 

The best supply of raw materials now available is inside of us.

Here there is apparently an unlimited amount of what we might call energy reserve.

 

Here we have the capacity to change all things by changing ourselves, by releasing into manifestation the tremendous potential that we have.

 

And by gradually simplifying our pattern of living and making greater use of our internal potential.

 

We can reach a point where our way of life again has the dignities and the values which make living important.

― Manly P. Hall, Lecture #203, The Economy that will not Economize: Inflation in the Light of Philosophy

 

Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck. 

― Dalai Lama

 

This is how it works. I love the people in my life, and I do for my friends whatever they need me to do for them, again and again, as many times as is necessary. For example, in your case you always forgot who you are and how much you’re loved. So what I do for you as your friend is remind you who you are and tell you how much I love you. And this isn’t any kind of burden for me, because I love who you are very much. Every time I remind you, I get to remember with you, which is my pleasure. 

― James Lecesne

 

To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one’s self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—this is to have succeeded. 

― Bessie Anderson Stanley

 

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

― The Buddha

 

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. 

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

We live in a world of theophanies. Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can only happen if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure. 

― Macrina Wiederkehr

 

When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.

― Dalai Lama

 

As a writer you should not judge. You should understand.

― Ernest Hemingway

 

Think before you speak. Read before you think. 

― Fran Lebowitz

 

You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear. 

― Oscar Wilde

 

The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times. 

― Paulo Coelho

 

This book is for

ALL:

for every man, woman, and child.

My former work has been misunderstood, and its scope limited, by my use of technical terms. It has attracted only too many dilettanti and eccentrics, weaklings seeking in Magic an escape from reality. I myself was first consciously drawn to the subject in this way. And it has repelled only too many scientific and practical minds, such as I most designed to influence.

But

MAGICK

is for

ALL.

― Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Part III: Magick in Theory and Practice

 

The Self is the one Reality that always exists, and it is by the light of the Self that all other things are seen.

― Ramana Maharshi

 

Not recognizing natural mind is simply an example of the mind’s unlimited capacity to create whatever it wants.

― Mingyur Rinpoche

 

The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.

 

Go to Tibet

Ride a camel.

Read the bible.

Dye your shoes blue.

Grow a beard.

Circle the world in a paper canoe.

Subscribe to The Saturday Evening Post.

Chew on the left side of your mouth only.

Marry a woman with one leg and shave with a straight razor.

And carve your name in her arm.

Brush your teeth with gasoline.

Sleep all day and climb trees at night.

Be a monk and drink buckshot and beer.

Hold your head under water and play the violin.

Do a belly dance before pink candles.

Kill your dog.

Run for mayor.

Live in a barrel.

Break your head with a hatchet.

Plant tulips in the rain.

But don’t write poetry.

― Charles Bukowski

 

Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule — in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk — exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go.

 

In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night — six hours, seven, maybe the recommended eight — so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.

 

The space can be humble … and it really needs only one thing: A door you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world that you mean business. . . .

If possible, there should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there’s a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall. For any writer, but for the beginning writer in particular, it’s wise to eliminate every possible distraction. If you continue to write, you will begin to filter out these distractions naturally, but at the start it’s best to try and take care of them before you write. … When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

― Stephen King

 

People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.

― Wendell Berry

 

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness. 

― Jonathan Safran Foer

 

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. 

― Kurt Vonnegut

 

I need to tell a story. It’s an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later. Why a particular story? I don’t know when I begin. That I learn much later. Over the years I’ve discovered that all the stories I’ve told, all the stories I will ever tell, are connected to me in some way. If I’m talking about a woman in Victorian times who leaves the safety of her home and comes to the Gold Rush in California, I’m really talking about feminism, about liberation, about the process I’ve gone through in my own life, escaping from a Chilean, Catholic, patriarchal, conservative, Victorian family and going out into the world.

 

Storytelling and literature will exist always, but what shape will it take? Will we write novels to be performed? The story will exist, but how, I don’t know. The way my stories are told today is by being published in the form of a book. In the future, if that’s not the way to tell a story, I’ll adapt.

 

It’s worth the work to find the precise word that will create a feeling or describe a situation. Use a thesaurus, use your imagination, scratch your head until it comes to you, but find the right word.

 

When you feel the story is beginning to pick up rhythm—the characters are shaping up, you can see them, you can hear their voices, and they do things that you haven’t planned, things you couldn’t have imagined—then you know the book is somewhere, and you just have to find it, and bring it, word by word, into this world.

 

When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it’s full of mistakes and repetitions. It’s good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It’s not a lecture.

― Isabel Allende

 

The discoveries of yesterday are the truisms of tomorrow, because we can add to our knowledge but cannot subtract from it.

― Arthur Koestler

 

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.

― Brian Eno

 

Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you. 

— David Foster Wallace

 

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician — make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor — make good art. IRS on your trail — make good art. Cat exploded — make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before — make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and that doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too.

 

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

 

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

 

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

 

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

 

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

— Neil Gaiman

 

Requirements for Creativity:

Space (You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.)

Time (It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.)

Time (Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original, and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)

Confidence (Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.)

Humor (The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.)

 

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

 

We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem — but! — once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it. Because once we’ve made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.

 

To be at our most efficient, we need to be able to switch backwards and forward between the two modes. But — here’s the problem — we too often get stuck in the closed mode. Under the pressures which are all too familiar to us, we tend to maintain tunnel vision at times when we really need to step back and contemplate the wider view.

 

This is particularly true, for example, of politicians. The main complaint about them from their nonpolitical colleagues is that they’ve become so addicted to the adrenaline that they get from reacting to events on an hour-by-hour basis that they almost completely lose the desire or the ability to ponder problems in the open mode.

 

This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.

— John Cleese

 

There is always some madness in love. But there is always, also, some method in madness. 

— Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Everything you can imagine is real. 

― Pablo Picasso

 

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

― George Eliot

 

If I want to understand something, I must observe, I must not criticize, I must not condemn, I must not pursue it as pleasure or avoid it as non-pleasure. There must merely be the silent observation of a fact.

― J. Krishnamurti

 

The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.

 

Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.

 

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

 

To be in good moral condition requires at least as much training as to be in good physical condition. 

 

The world of today has achieved much, but for all its declared love for humanity, it has based itself far more on hatred and violence than on the virtues that make one human. War is the negation of truth and humanity. War may be unavoidable sometimes, but its progeny are terrible to contemplate. Not mere killing, for man must die, but the deliberate and persistent propagation of hatred and falsehood, which gradually become the normal habits of the people. It is dangerous and harmful to be guided in our life’s course by hatreds and aversions, for they are wasteful of energy and limit and twist the mind and prevent it from perceiving truth.

 

Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit. It is never a narrowing of the mind or a restriction of the human spirit or the country’s spirit.

 

Where freedom is menaced or justice threatened or where aggression takes place, we cannot be and shall not be neutral.

 

Most of us seldom take the trouble to think. It is a troublesome and fatiguing process and often leads to uncomfortable conclusions. But crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think.

― Jawaharlal Nehru

 

Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men’s souls to joy.

― Jack Kerouac in On The Road

 

Every painful event contains in itself a seed of growth and liberation. In the light of this truth return to your life now and take a look at one or another of the events that you are not grateful for, and see if you can discover the potential for growth that they contain which you were unaware of and therefore failed to benefit from. Now think of some recent event that caused you pain, that produced negative feelings in you. Whoever or whatever caused those feelings was your teacher, because they revealed so much to you about yourself that you probably did not know. And they offered you an invitation and a challenge to self-understanding, self-discovery, and therefore to growth and life and freedom. 

— Anthony de Mello

 

In the Confucian tradition is a simple formula that appeals to me deeply: ‘If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.’ I urge everyone to reflect deeply on these words, as simple as they are profound.

— Eknath Easwaran

 

The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.

— William Faulkner

 

The present is always invisible because it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone but the artist, the man of integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day. 

— Marshall McLuhan

 

And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept. 

— Jean Cocteau

 

I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once.

— 

Haruki Murakami

 

I am convinced that most people do not grow up … our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.

— Maya Angelou

 

Breathe. It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. Just breathe. Breathe, and remind yourself of all the times in the past you felt this scared. All of the times you felt this anxious and this overwhelmed. All of the times you felt this level of pain. And remind yourself how each time, you made it through. Life has thrown so much at you, and despite how difficult things have been, you’ve survived. Breathe and trust that you can survive this too. Trust that this struggle is part of the process. And trust that as long as you don’t give up and keep pushing forward, no matter how hopeless things seem, you will make it. 

— Daniell Koepke

 

But when I know that the glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.

— Ajahn Chah

 

Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes. 

― Oscar Wilde

 

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry. 

― Cassandra Clare

 

It is only necessary to destroy in oneself the roots of those motives which determine a man’s course, in order to enjoy the omnipotence and immunity of a god.

― Aleister Crowley

 

You know, when real trouble comes your humanity is awakened. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.

― Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey

 

We live in an age where we feel guilt whenever we have to cut someone off but the reality is that some relationships do need to die, some people do need to be unfollowed and defriended. We aren’t meant to be this tethered to the people in our past. The Internet mandates that we don’t burn bridges and keep everyone around like relics but those expectations are unrealistic and unhealthy. Simply put, we don’t need to know what everyone else is up to. We’re allowed to be choosy about who we surround ourselves with online and in real life, even if it might hurt people’s feelings. 

― Ryan O’Connell

 

Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.

― Dalai Lama XIV

 

I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met. 

― John Green

 

Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man … living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money. 

― George Carlin

 

If you are going through hell, keep going. 

― Winston Churchill

 

The Divine in us can little by little gain authority if we give it a chance.

 

The simplest way to give it a chance is to subside those things which destroy its chance, which frustrate its purpose, and which lend themselves to an infinite delay.

 

By small steps we reach a point where we come to the gate of the the shut place of the king, as it was called in alchemy.

 

When we open the door we go not into a strange place but we stand in the presence of the altar of our own soul.

― Manly P Hall, Lecture #271 – The Third Eye in the Soul

 

There’s a lot of things wrong with this country, but one of the few things still right with it is that a man can steer clear of the organized bullshit if he really wants to. It’s a goddamned luxury, and if I were you, I’d take advantage of it while you can.

― Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

 

To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.

― Michel de Montaigne

 

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. 

― Leo Tolstoy

 

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

― Mark Twain

 

When I am among the trees, 

especially the willows and the honey locust,

equally the beech, the oaks, and the pines, 

they give off such hints of gladness.

 

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment, 

and never hurry through the world 

but walk slowly, and bow often. 

Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out, Stay awhile.

 

The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, It’s simple,

they say, and you, too, have come

into the world to do this, to go easy,

to be filled with light, and to shine.

― Mary Oliver

 

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. 

― Arthur Conan Doyle

 

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. 

― Ursula K. Le Guin

 

If the mind is happy, not only the body but the whole world will be happy. So one must find out the way of becoming happy oneself. One cannot do this except by finding out about oneself by Self-enquiry. To think of reforming the world without doing that is like thinking of covering the whole world with leather to avoid the pain caused by walking on stones and thorns when the much simpler method of wearing leather shoes is available. When by holding an umbrella over your head you can avoid the sun, will it be possible to cover the face of the whole earth by tying a cloth over it to avoid the sun? 

 

If a person realises his position and stays in his own self, things that are to happen will happen. Things that are not to happen will not happen. The shakti that is in the world, is only one. All these troubles arise if we think that we are separate from that shakti.

― Ramana Maharshi

 

This day shall be the best day of my life. Today I will start with a new determination to dedicate my devotion forever at the feet of omnipresence.

― Paramahansa Yogananda

 

I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place. 

― Anne Tyler

 

You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear. 

― Oscar Wilde

 

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty. 

You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.

― Maya Angelou

 

Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way. 

― Charles Bukowski

 

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

― Mortimer J. Adler

 

The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.

― Raymond Chandler

 

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. 

― Robert Louis Stevenson

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. 

― Jane Austen

 

I once read a good aphorism from Buckminster Fuller: ‘We are not nouns,’ he says, pointedly; ‘we are verbs.’ People who are content with rigid images of others are thinking of themselves and others as nouns, as things. Those who keep trying to get closer to others, to understand and appreciate them more all the time, are verbs: active, creative, dynamic, able to change themselves and to make changes in the world around them.

― Eknath Easwaran, from Conquest of Mind

 

If we have a good motivation then

whatever we do with our body and

speech will reflect that. It will

change the way we lead our lives,

and benefit everyone and everything

to which we are connected.

― 17th Karmapa

 

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. 

― Mahatma Gandhi

 

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. 

― Sylvia Plath

 

You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music. 

― Annie Proulx

 

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. 

― Oscar Wilde

 

I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love.

 

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

― Anais Nin

 

A million salutations at Thy petaled feet, O Lotus of Light! I pour my heart at Thy feet. I pour all my soul at Thy feet. I pour all the fragrant musk of my love at Thy feet of omnipresence.

― Paramahansa Yogananda

 

If you obey all of the rules, you miss all of the fun. 

― Katharine Hepburn

 

Here’s what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, said May Kasahara. Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.

— Haruki Murakami – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

 

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple. ― Jack Kerouac

 

I am the owner of my actions (kamma), inheritor of my actions, born of my actions, created by my actions, and have my own actions as my judge! Whatever I do, good or evil, I will feel the resulting effects of that …

— The Buddha

 

I do have one great hope. It is that with the disappearance of Marxism, we may succeed in eliminating the pressure of ideologies as the centre of politics. Marxism needed an anti-Marxist ideology, so what you had was the clash between two ideologies which were both in a sense completely mad. There was nothing real behind them – only wrong problems. What I hope from the open society is that we will re-establish a list of priorities of the things which have to be done in society.

— Karl Popper, interviewed by Giancarlo Bosetti, in The Lesson of this Century

 

Morality can muddle mystical understanding and virtue is only necessary in so far as it favours success. All wisdom must be encompassed in order to achieve enlightenment.

— Aleister Crowley

 

No medicine cures what happiness cannot. 

― Gabriel García Márquez

 

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed. 

― Sylvia Plath

 

Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything. 

― Muhammad Ali

 

Over and over again I sail towards joy, which is never in the room with me, but always near me, across the way, like those rooms full of gayety one sees from the street, or the gayety in the street one sees from a window. Will I ever reach joy? It hides behind the turning merry-go-round of the traveling circus. As soon as I approach it, it is no longer joy. Joy is a foam, an illumination. I am poorer and hungrier for the want of it. When I am in the dance, joy is outside in the elusive garden. When I am in the garden, I hear it exploding from the house. When I am traveling, joy settles like an aurora borealis over the land I leave. When I stand on the shore I see it bloom on the flag of a departing ship. What joy? Have I not possessed it? I want the joy of simple colors, street organs, ribbons, flags, not a joy that takes my breath away and throws me into space alone where no one else can breathe with me, not the joy that comes from a lonely drunkenness. There are so many joys, but I have only known the ones that come like a miracle, touching everything with light.

― Anais Nin

 

If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself. 

― Rick Riordan

 

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. 

― Oscar Wilde

 

If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. 

― Emily Brontë

 

Whatever I do, I do with the greatest love that I have in me. Try this, and you will see that you do not become fatigued at all. Love is one of the greatest stimulants to the will. Under the influence of love the will can do almost anything.

― Paramahansa Yogananda

 

Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you. 

― Stephanie Klein

 

Dionysus

 

I bring ye wine from above,

From the vats of the storied sun;

For every one of your love,

And life for everyone.

Ye shall dance on hill and level;

Ye shall sing in hollow and height

In the festal mystical revel,

The rapturous Bacchanal rite!

The rocks and trees are yours,

And the waters under the hill,

By the might of that which endures,

The holy heaven of will!

I kindle a flame like a torrent

To rush from star to star;

Your hair as a comet’s horrent,

Ye shall see things as they are!

I lift the mask of matter;

I open the heart of man;

For I am of force to shatter

The cast that hideth -Pan!

Your loves shall lap up slaughter,

And dabbled with roses of blood

Each desperate darling daughter

Shall swim in the fervid flood.

I bring ye laughter and tears,

The kisses that foam and bleed,

The joys of a million years,

The flowers that bear no seed.

My life is bitter and sterile,

Its flame is a wandering star.

Ye shall pass in pleasure and peril

Across the mystic bar

That is set for wrath and weeping

Against the children of earth;

But ye in singing and sleeping

Shall pass in measure and mirth!

I lift my wand and wave you

Through hill to hill of delight :

My rosy rivers lave you

In innermost lustral light..

I lead you, lord of the maze,

In the darkness free of the sun;

In spite of the spite that is day’s

We are wed, we are wild, we are one.

 

At Shigar Baltistan.

― Aleister Crowley

 

We’re in a world now where it’s not enough to be smart. You have to be curious. 

― Barry Diller

 

Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before. ― Steven Wright

 

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect. 

― Anaïs Nin

 

I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I’ve bought a big bat. I’m all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me! 

― Dr. Seuss

 

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. This every sister of the Bene Gesserit knows. — Frank Herbert in Dune

 

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. — Henry David Thoreau

 

It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily. — Martin Scorsese

 

It’s a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it’s equally assumed you’re lying your head off. — Margaret Atwood

 

Whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience — who knows when such a malady may strike? — Margaret Atwood

 

War is what happens when language fails. — Margaret Atwood

 

A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately. — Margaret Atwood

 

Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is. 

 

Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel … with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky.

 

It doesn’t even matter if we ever fire these missiles or not. They are having their effect upon us because there is a generation growing up now who cannot see past the final exclamation mark of a mushroom cloud. They are a generation who can see no moral values that do not end in a crackling crater somewhere. I’m not saying that nuclear bombs are at the root of all of it, but I think it is very, very naïve to assume that you can expose the entire population of the world to the threat of being turned to cinders without them starting to act, perhaps, a little oddly.

 

I believe in some sort of strange fashion that the presence of the atom bomb might almost be forcing a level of human development that wouldn’t have occurred without the presence of the atom bomb. Maybe this degree of terror will force changes in human attitudes that could not have occurred without the presence of these awful, destructive things. Perhaps we are faced with a race between the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in one line and the 7th Cavalry in the other. We have not got an awful lot of mid ground between Utopia and Apocalypse, and if somehow our children ever see the day in which it is announced that we do not have these weapons any more, and that we can no longer destroy ourselves and that we’ve got to do something else to do with our time than they will have the right to throw up their arms, let down their streamers and let forth a resounding cheer.

– On the issue of nuclear weapons, in England Their England : Monsters, Maniacs and Moore (1987)

 

There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth. 

— Alan Moore

 

So… all of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will — where do you want to start?

— Steven Moffat

 

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. 

― Douglas Adams

 

The danger is not in possessing things, but in being possessed by things.

 

It is not that the person loses, but the fact that he is part of his own loss and in losing, loses himself.

 

So, it is not the fact of renunciation that solves the problem.

 

It is the ability to accept or release with equal gentleness of spirit.

 

Very often it is easy to hold on and difficult to let go.

 

In this case, the two must be perfectly balanced.

 

—Excerpted from Manly P Hall Lecture #114 – Does the Universal Plan for Living Require Personal Suffering? Is Growth Possible Without Pain?

 

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing. 

– Bukowski

 

To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose is the next best. 

– William Makepeace Thackeray

 

Never ignore a person who loves you, cares for you, and misses you. Because one day, you might wake up from your sleep and realize that you lost the moon while counting the stars. 

— Nico Lang

 

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen. 

― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

 

Sometimes we say that we met people at the wrong time. But maybe we meet them when we are the wrong person, when we have not yet met and fallen in love with ourselves. We are only half of a thing—even if we can imagine that there is a better version of us out there—and we are hoping that someone else will fill in the missing parts so that we don’t have to. 

― Chelsea Fagan

 

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you find you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over again. 

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

— Stephen King

 

Know the personal,

yet keep to the impersonal:

accept the world as it is.

If you accept the world,

the Tao will be luminous inside you

and you will return to your primal self.

 

The world is formed from the void,

like utensils from a block of wood.

The Master knows the utensils,

yet keeps to the the block:

thus she can use all things.

— Lao Tzu 

 

You are a Buddha, and so is everyone else. I didn’t make that up. It was the Buddha himself who said so. He said that all beings had the potential to become awakened. To practice walking meditation is to practice living in mindfulness. Mindfulness and enlightenment are one. Enlightenment leads to mindfulness and mindfulness leads to enlightenment.

— Thich Nhat Hanh

 

If we are demoralized, sad and only complain, we’ll not solve our problems. If we only pray for a solution, we’ll not solve our problems. We need to face them, to deal with them without violence, but with confidence – and never give up. If you adopt a non-violent approach, but are also hesitant within, you’ll not succeed. You have to have confidence and keep up your efforts – in other words, never give up.

— Dalai Lama

 

There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke. 

― Vincent van Gogh 

 

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. 

― Mark Twain

 

The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist…destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. 

– Thomas Merton 

 

A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.

— Leo Tolstoy

 

Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That’s its balance. 

― Osho

 

The most important knowledge is that which guides the way you lead your life.

— Leo Tolstoy

 

Expose yourself to aloneness.

When a person is left alone, he starts thinking of higher reality – about death, life, soul, God and the mystery of all.

— Swami Chinmayananda

 

He drew a circle that shut me out —

 

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

 

But Love and I had the wit to win:

 

We drew a circle that took him in!

 

— Edwin Markham 

 

Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.

— Chuck Close

 

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. 

 

—Victor Frankl

 

I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people.

— Leo Tolstoy

 

The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.

 

If all things are in common among friends, the most precious is Wisdom…

 

Anything we take in the Universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way, the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it.

 

Everything that consists in generation, decay, alteration and change is not an entity, but a condition and circumstance of entity and being…

 

This whole which is visible in different ways in bodies, as far as formation, constitution, appearance, colors and other properties and common qualities, is none other than the diverse face of the same substance…

 

What you receive from others is a testimony to their virtue; but all that you do for others is the sign and clear indication of your own.

 

That which others saw from afar, I leave far behind me.

 

Divinity reveals herself in all things… everything has Divinity latent within itself.

 

The fools of the world have been those who have established religions, ceremonies, laws, faith, rule of life…

 

The infinity of All ever bringing forth anew, and even as infinite space is around us, so is infinite potentiality, capacity, reception, malleability, matter.

 

Eternity maintaineth her substance throughout time, immensity throughout space, universal form throughout motion.

 

The single spirit doth simultaneously temper the whole together; this is the single soul of all things; all are filled with God.

– Giordano Bruno

 

This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say. I don’t plan it. When I’m outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

 

Love is the ark appointed for the righteous, Which annuls the danger and provides a way of escape.

 

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.

 

I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

 

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.

 

Come even though you have broken your vows a thousand times, Come, and come yet again. Ours is not a caravan of despair.

 

I want a heart which is split, part by part, because of the pain of separation from God, so that I might explain my longing and complaint to it.

 

You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?

 

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one.

 

The lion who breaks the enemy’s ranks is a minor hero compared to the lion who overcomes himself.

 

Whoever gives reverence receives reverence.

 

If you wish to shine like day, burn up the night of self-existence. Dissolve in the Being who is everything.

 

What is the body? That shadow of a shadow of your love, that somehow contains the entire universe.

 

There is a community of the spirit Join it, and feel the delight of walking in the noisy street, and being the noise.

 

There is no reality but God, says the completely surrendered sheik, who is an ocean for all beings.

 

I can’t stop pointing to the beauty. Every moment and place says, Put this design in your carpet!

 

Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being.

 

Every object and being in the universe is a jar overflowing with wisdom and beauty, a drop of the Tigris that cannot be contained by any skin.

 

Christ is the population of the world, and every object as well.

 

The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did about the future.

 

Good and bad are mixed. If you don’t have both,you don’t belong with us.

 

Learn from Ali how to fight without your ego participating.

 

God’s lion did nothing that didn’t originate from his deep center.

 

This that we are now … The human body and the universe grew from this, not this from the universe and the human body.

 

Do not grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

 

Observe the wonders as they occur around you. Don’t claim them. Feel the artistry moving through, and be silent.

 

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.

 

Are you fleeing from Love because of a single humiliation? What do you know of Love except the name? Love has a hundred forms of pride and disdain, and is gained by a hundred means of persuasion.

 

Come, seek, for search is the foundation of fortune: every success depends upon focusing the heart.

 

That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.

 

To Love is to reach God.

 

Love rests on no foundation. It is an endless ocean, with no beginning or end.

 

My head is bursting with the joy of the unknown.

 

This is a gathering of Lovers. In this gathering there is no high, no low, no smart, no ignorant, no special assembly, no grand discourse, no proper schooling required…

 

Love said to me, there is nothing that is not me. Be silent.

 

Even if you lose yourself in wrath for a hundred thousand years, at the end you will discover, it is me, who is the culmination of your dreams.

 

Didn’t I tell you?They will accuse you of all the wrongdoings, they will call you ugly names, they will make you forget it is me, who is the source of your happiness.

 

The branch might seem like the fruit’s origin: In fact, the branch exists because of the fruit.

— Rumi

 

No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part. Even sight heightened to become all-seeing will do you no good without a sense of taking part.

 

Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists…

 

Whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

 

I’m sorry that my voice was hard. Look down on yourselves from the stars, I cried, look down on yourselves from the stars…

 

We, my lord, are your dream, which finds you innocent for now.

 

Everything the dead predicted has turned out completely different. Or a little bit different — which is to say, completely different.

 

My apologies to great questions for small answers.

 

How can we talk of order overall when the very placement of the stars leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?

 

Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light…

 

We call it a grain of sand but it calls itself neither grain nor sand…

 

The view doesn’t view itself. It exists in this world colorless, shapeless, soundless, odorless, and painless.

 

There’s no life that couldn’t be immortal if only for a moment…

 

Nothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan…

 

For the sake of research, the big picture and definitive conclusions, one would have to transcend time, in which everything scurries and whirls.

 

I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds — a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.

— Wislawa Szymborska

 

Knowing others is intelligence; 

knowing yourself is true wisdom.

Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

 

There is a thing inherent and natural, 

Which existed before heaven and earth. 

Motionless and fathomless, 

It stands alone and never changes; 

It pervades everywhere and never becomes exhausted. 

It may be regarded as the Mother of the Universe. 

I do not know its name. If I am forced to give it a name, I call it Tao, and I name it as supreme.

 

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao;

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.

The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.

Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.

These two spring from the same source but differ in name;

this appears as darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gate to all mystery.

 

The Tao is called the Great Mother: 

empty yet inexhaustible, 

it gives birth to infinite worlds.

 

The Tao is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

filled with infinite possibilities.

 

A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people, They fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, We did this ourselves.

 

Since before time and space were,

the Tao is. 

It is beyond is and is not.

How do I know this is true?

I look inside myself and see.

 

A good traveler has no fixed plans

and is not intent upon arriving.

A good artist lets his intuition

lead him wherever it wants.

 

Without the laughter, there would be no Tao.

 

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try, the world is beyond the winning.

 

A journey of a thousand li starts with a single step.

 

The mark of a moderate man 

is freedom from his own ideas. 

Tolerant like the sky, 

all-pervading like sunlight, 

firm like a mountain,

supple like a tree in the wind, 

he has no destination in view 

and makes use of anything 

life happens to bring his way.

 

Wise men don’t need to prove their point;

men who need to prove their point aren’t wise.

The Master has no possessions.

The more he does for others, the happier he is.

The more he gives to others, the wealthier he is.

The Tao nourishes by not forcing.

By not dominating, the Master leads.

— Laozi

 

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

— Kahlil Gibran

 

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel nothing can befall me in life – no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes) which Nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

There is no enlightenment outside of daily life.

— Thich Nhat Hanh

 

The true hero is one who conquers his own anger and hatred.

— Dalai Lama

 

The wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water molds itself to the pitcher. 

— Buddhist Proverb

 

However much fighting there is in the world, however much darkness there is, we must be able to serve as small lamps in that darkness.

— 17th Karmapa

 

A fine quotation is a diamond in the hand of a man of wit and a pebble in the hand of a fool. — Joseph Roux

 

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything … 

— George Bernard Shaw

 

Truly, those who are good people are thankful and grateful. 

— The Buddha

 

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility. 

— Eleanor Roosevelt

 

Only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly. … Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change. 

 

A revolution is coming — a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough — But a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability. 

— Robert F. Kennedy

 

My life seemed to be a series of events and accidents. Yet when I look back I see a pattern. 

 

An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something. It’s an arrogance that some enjoy, and others do not. Now I reach beyond arrogance when I proclaim that fractals had been pictured forever but their true role remained unrecognized and waited for me to be uncovered. 

 

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself. 

— Benoît Mandelbrot

 

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

— Robert F. Kennedy

 

Fame is something which must be won; honor is something which must not be lost. 

— Arthur Schopenhauer

 

I think what you ought to do is start by thinking about the simplest things and go from there. For example, you could stand on a street corner somewhere day after day and look at the people who come by there. You’re not in any hurry to decide anything. It may be tough, but sometimes you’ve got to just stop and take time. You ought to train yourself to look at things with your own eyes until something comes clear. And don’t be afraid of putting some time into it. Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge. 

— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

 

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it. 

― Maya Angelou

 

I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you’re doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can’t play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don’t lead anywhere. One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment

— Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

 

If you are still following your likes

and dislikes,

you have not even begun to practise Dhamma.

— Ajahn Chah

 

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. 

― Steve Jobs

 

The man of taste will read only what is good; but the statesman will permit both bad and good.

— Voltaire

 

A mind that is fast is sick. A mind that is slow is sound. A mind that is still is divine.

— Meher Baba, quoted by Eknath Easwaran in Words to Live By

 

It’s being here now that’s important. There’s no past and there’s no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one. 

― George Harrison

 

The one who practices

loving-kindness sleeps and

wakes in comfort and has no

bad dreams; he is dear to both

humans and creatures; no

danger harms him. His mind

can be quickly concentrated,

his expression is happy and

serene. He dies without any

confusion of mind. Loving-

kindness protects him.

— The Buddha

 

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world. 

― Voltaire

 

Wherever a person goes, his deeds, like a shadow, will follow.

— The Buddha

 

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. 

― Apple Inc.

 

How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world. 

― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice 

 

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. 

— Steve Jobs

 

People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.

 

— Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

 

Without sattva you can never reach the Supreme.

Wherever you are, in whatever station, from there you have to reach sattva in varying degrees because tamas will be reduced only when the mind’s agitations, vikshepas are quietened. As agitations quieten, sattva increases slowly.

— Swami Chinmayananda

 

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

— John F. Kennedy

 

Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value. 

― Albert Einstein

 

It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life. 

― Terry Pratchett

 

Hard to hold down,

nimble,

alighting wherever it likes:

the mind.

The mind well-tamed,

brings ease.

So hard to see,

so very, very subtle,

alighting wherever it likes:

the mind.

The wise should guard it.

The mind protected brings ease.

— Dhammapada, Buddha

 

Existence precedes and rules essence. 

— Sartre

 

When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That’s the message he is sending. 

— Thích Nhất Hạnh

 

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones. 

— Marcus Aurelius

 

You are the universe experiencing itself. 

— Alan Watts

 

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in a long-shot. 

— Charlie Chaplin

 

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

 

Before you talk, listen.

Before you react, think.

Before you spend, earn.

Before you criticize, wait.

Before you pray, forgive.

Before you quit, try.

― Ernest Hemingway

 

Innocence has a single voice that can only say over and over again, I didn’t do it. Guilt has a thousand voices, all of them lies. 

― Leonard Peltier, Prison Writings

 

I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker. 

― Stanley Kubrick

 

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love. 

― Neil Gaiman

 

If you have no critics you’ll likely have no success. 

—Malcolm X

 

Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.

— John F. Kennedy

 

Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.

— Eckhart Tolle

 

If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on. 

— Kant 

 

I’d rather be a climbing ape than a falling angel. 

— Terry Pratchett

 

O may I join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in minds made better by their presence; live in pulses stirred to generosity, in deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn for miserable aims that end with self, in thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, and with their mild persistence urge men’s search to vaster issues. 

— George Eliot

 

The very essence of romance is uncertainty. 

― Oscar Wilde

 

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other? 

— George Eliot

 

This is life to come, —

Which martyred men have made more glorious

For us who strive to follow. May I reach

That purest heaven, — be to other souls

The cup of strength in some great agony,

Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,

Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,

Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,

And in diffusion ever more intense!

So shall I join the choir invisible

Whose music is the gladness of the world.

 

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it. 

 

It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium. 

— George Eliot

 

It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not. 

— André Gide

 

subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium. 

— George Eliot

 

It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not. 

— André Gide

 

It should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America which has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to all concerned the opportunities of our system and society.

— John F. Kennedy

 

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. 

 

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear. 

 

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

— George Eliot

 

The unexamined life is not worth living. 

― Socrates

 

Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer. 

― Joseph Campbell

 

I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner. 

― Aleister Crowley

 

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

― Carl Sagan 

 

Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,

Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels. 

― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

 

Where there is love there is life. 

— Mahatma Gandhi

 

Some people care too much. I think it’s called love. 

― A.A. Milne

 

Resist much, obey little. 

― Walt Whitman

 

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

— Maya Angelou

 

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. 

― Frank Herbert

 

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. 

― John F. Kennedy

 

It hurts to let go. Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold on to something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted. It confuses you, because you think that your feelings were wrong and it makes you feel so small because it’s so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn’t come back. You’re left so alone that you can’t explain. Damn, there’s nothing like that, is there? I’ve been there and you have too. You’re nodding your head. 

― Henry Rollins

 

I believe that even ‘returning-to-nature’ and anti pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the overdevelopment of the present age. 

― Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

 

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. 

— Václav Havel

 

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. 

 

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play on the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? 

— John Milton in Areopagitica

 

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. 

― Eleanor Roosevelt

 

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist. 

― Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. 

― Albert Camus

 

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. 

― Albert Einstein

 

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. 

― Haruki Murakami

 

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music. 

― Albert Einstein

 

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need. 

― Cicero

 

A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.

— Mahatma Gandhi

 

What

Do Sad people have in

Common?

It seems

They have all built a shrine

To the past

And often go there

And do a strange wail and

Worship.

What is the beginning of

Happiness?

It is to stop being

So religious

Like That.

— Hafiz

 

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it. 

— Marcus Aurelius

 

Hatred which is completely vanquished by love passes into love: and love is thereupon greater than if hatred had not preceded it. 

 

The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others. No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty. 

 

Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner.

 

As men’s habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude … that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honoured save justice and charity.

 

Schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy. From all these considerations it is clearer than the sun at noonday, that the true schismatics are those who condemn other men’s writings, and seditiously stir up the quarrelsome masses against their authors, rather than those authors themselves, who generally write only for the learned, and appeal solely to reason. In fact, the real disturbers of the peace are those who, in a free state, seek to curtail the liberty of judgment which they are unable to tyrannize over.

 

I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate human actions, but to understand them.

— Baruch Spinoza

 

You exist in time, but you belong to eternity. You are a penetration of eternity into the world of time. You are deathless, living in a body of death. Your consciousness knows no death, no birth, it is only your body that is born and dies, but you are not aware of your consciousness. You are not conscious of your consciousness, and that is the whole art of meditation; becoming conscious of consciousness itself. 

— Osho

 

Those who know do not talk.

Those who talk do not know.

 

Keep your mouth closed.

Guard your senses.

Temper your sharpness.

Simplify your problems.

Mask your brightness.

Be at one with the dust of the earth.

This is primal union.

 

He who has achieved this state

Is unconcerned with friends and enemies,

With good and harm, with honour and disgrace.

This therefore is the highest state of man.

— Lao Tzu

 

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

— Marcus Aurelius

 

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

 ― Rudyard Kipling

 

Everything in the world is purchased by labor.

— David Hume

 

He’s not a friend,

who’s always wary,

suspecting a split,

focusing just on your weakness.

But him on whom you can depend,

like a child on its parent’s breast,

that’s a true friend,

whom others can’t split from you.- Hiri Sutta 

— Buddha

 

The surest defense against evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even eccentricity. Evil is a sucker for solidarity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balance sheets. 

— Joseph Brodsky

 

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. 

— Carl Jung

 

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. 

 

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

— Arthur C. Clarke

 

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

 

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

— Frank Herbert, Dune Books

 

God has no religion. 

― Mahatma Gandhi

 

Screenplay is the toughest form of writing for me, because you need to be in present tense. You need to be describing things as they occur.

— Guillermo del Torro

 

Never memorize what you can look up in books.

— Albert Einstein

 

Pure Consciousness, which is the Heart, includes all, and nothing is outside or apart from it. That is the ultimate Truth. 

— Sri Ramana Maharshi

 

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

 

Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source. 

— Leo Tolstoy

 

True Silence is really endless speech. 

— Ramana Maharshi

 

What Do Sad people have in Common? It seems They have all built a shrine … To the past And often go there And do a strange wail and Worship. What is the beginning of Happiness? It is to stop being So religious Like That. 

— Hafiz

 

People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain. 

― Jim Morrison

 

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

— William Blake

 

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. 

― Herman Melville

 

Every night, and every morn,

Some to misery are born.

Every morn, and every night,

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to endless night.

— William Blake

 

When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a Communist.

— Dom Helder Camara

 

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

— John Muir

 

The three states come and go, but you are always there. It is like a cinema. The screen is always there but several types of pictures appear on the screen and then disappear. Nothing sticks to the screen, it remains a screen. Similarly, you remain your own Self in all the three states. If you know that, the three states will not trouble you, just as the pictures which appear on the screen do not stick to it. On the screen, you sometimes see a huge ocean with endless waves; that disappears. Another time, you see fire spreading all around; that too disappears. The screen is there on both occasions. Did the screen get wet with the water or did it get burned by the fire? Nothing affected the screen. In the same way, the things that happen during the wakeful, dream and sleep states do not affect you at all; you remain your own Self.

— Ramana Maharshi

 

I never change, I simply become more myself. 

― Joyce Carol Oates

 

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart. 

― Mahatma Gandhi

 

I’ve never been lonely. I’ve been in a room — I’ve felt suicidal. I’ve been depressed. I’ve felt awful — awful beyond all — but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me…or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I’ve never been bothered with because I’ve always had this terrible itch for solitude. It’s being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I’ll quote Ibsen, The strongest men are the most alone. I’ve never thought, Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I’ll feel good. No, that won’t help. You know the typical crowd, Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there? Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I’ve never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn’t want to hide in factories. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have. Let’s drink more wine! 

― Charles Bukowski

 

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

— Hegel

 

He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. 

― Emily Brontë

 

Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of Universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life.

— Dalai Lama

 

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace. 

― Jimi Hendrix

 

Act without expectation.

— Lao Tzu

 

All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle. 

― St. Francis of Assisi

 

A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light. 

― Leonardo da Vinci

 

The Present is the womb of the future.

A greater future happiness can be had only by investing in the present correctly.

Look after the present and the future will look after itself.

— Swami Chinmayananda

 

Call it by any name, God, Self, the Heart, or the Seat of Consciousness, it is all the same. 

— Sri Ramana Maharshi

 

I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.

― Neil Gaiman

 

Presently we have to train our unconscious to function better. Then we can depend upon our instincts, that will be noble instincts. At this moment, our instincts are very impure. 

When we have practiced for a long time, living the higher values of life and following the instructions of great masters or the Scriptures, that is when you have trained your unconscious. 

Then when a situation comes, you can to an extent, depend on your inner voice.

— Swami Chinmayananda

 

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

— T. S. Eliot

 

Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. 

 

Listen to the voice of duty, of honor, of nature and of your endangered country. Let us form one body, one heart, and defend to the last warrior our country, our homes, our liberty, and the graves of our fathers.

— Tecumseh

 

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

— John F. Kennedy

 

Home is everything you can walk to. 

― Jerry Spinelli 

 

Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.

 

A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man.

― Arthur Schopenhauer

 

When we speak of man, we have a conception of humanity as a whole, and before applying scientific methods to the investigation of his movement we must accept this as a physical fact. But can anyone doubt today that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole?

 

For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of ensuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one. Metaphysical proofs are, however, not the only ones which we are able to bring forth in support of this idea. Science, too, recognizes this connectedness of separate individuals, though not quite in the same sense as it admits that the suns, planets, and moons of a constellation are one body, and there can be no doubt that it will be experimentally confirmed in times to come, when our means and methods for investigating psychical and other states and phenomena shall have been brought to great perfection. Still more: this one human being lives on and on. The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains. Therein lies the profound difference between the individual and the whole.

― Nikola Tesla

 

We all have the potential to show others love and affection, but as we progress in our materialistic world, these values tend to remain dormant. We can develop them on the basis of common sense, common experience and scientific findings. The response to the recent tragedy in the Philippines is an example of how such values are awakened; people helped simply because others are suffering and in need of support.

— Dalai Lama

 

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. 

― Confucius

 

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

― Rainer Maria Rilke

 

If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.

― Meister Eckhart 

 

The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.

— Confucius

 

We have found that scientific laws pervade all of nature, that the same rules apply on Earth as in the skies, that we can find a resonance, a harmony, between the way we think and the way the world works…

 

Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don’t have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen…

 

History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power have destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again. 

 

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

 

Shouldn’t we consider in every nation major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental restructuring of economic political social and religious institutions. We’ve reached a point where there can be no more special interests or special cases, nuclear arms threaten every person on the Earth. Fundamental changes in society are sometimes labelled impractical or contrary to human nature, as if nuclear war were practical or as if there’s only one human nature. But fundamental changes can clearly be made, we’re surrounded by them. In the last two centuries abject slavery which was with us for thousands of years has almost entirely been eliminated in a stirring worldwide revolution. Women, systematically mistreated for millennia are gradually gaining the political and economic power traditionally denied them and some wars of aggression have recently been stopped or curtailed because of a revulsion felt by the people in the aggressor nations. The old appeals to racial sexual religious chauvinism and to rabid nationalist fervor are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.

— Carl Sagan

 

Maybe, he thought, there aren’t any such things as good friends or bad friends—maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you’re hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they’re always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that’s what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.

― Stephen King

 

Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.

― Henry James

 

The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.

― T.H. White

 

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. 

― George Orwell

 

What’s made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.

― Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey

 

Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting

still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.

When something’s let go of, it circles; and though we are

rarely the center

of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous

curve.

― Rainer Maria Rilke

 

In the moment of crisis, the wise build bridges and the foolish build dams.

― Nigerian Proverb

 

Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.

― Gustave Flaubert

 

Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

― Richard P. Feynman

 

You are never too old to be what you might have been.

― George Eliot

 

We have to have a purpose greater than the endless struggle to satisfy personal desires.

― Eknath Easwaran

 

A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts…

― John Dos Passos

 

Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it.

― Dalai Lama

 

Forgiveness is the remission of sins. For it is by this that what has been lost, and was found, is saved from being lost again.

― Saint Augustine

 

Though we live in the colony of time, we are ultimately responsible to the empire of eternity.

― Martin Luther King Jr.

 

If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough. 

― Meister Eckhart 

 

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

 

There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in your heart.

― Chandogya Upanishad

 

The great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasure of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination. 

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” 

— John Muir

 

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” 

— Kurt Vonnegut

 

“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” 

— Pablo Picasso

 

“All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree… Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” 

— Albert Einstein

 

“Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.” — Carl Sagan

 

“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.” 

— Henry David Thoreau

 

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.” 

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

“I offer you peace. I offer you love. I offer you friendship. I see your beauty. I hear your need. I feel your feelings. My wisdom flows from the Highest Source. I salute that source in you. Let us work together for unity and love.” 

— Mahatma Gandhi

 

“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.” 

— William Butler Yeats

 

“By Being, It Is.” 

— Parmenides

 

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” 

— Friedrich Nietzsche

 

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” 

— George Santayana

 

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.” 

— Carl Jung

 

“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” 

— Rene Descartes

 

“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.” 

— Richard Feynman

 

“Then he said ‘Remember Bob: no fear, no envy, no meanness,’ and I said ‘hmmm, right.'”

— Bob Dylan

 

“The reverse side also has a reverse side.” 

— Japanese Proverb

 

“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.” 

— William James

 

“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do… How would I be? What would I do?” 

— Buckminster Fuller

 

“The most vital issue of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is to be governed by the modern economic and materialistic mind of the West or by a nobler pragmatism guided, uplifted and enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge….” 

— Sri Aurobindo

 

“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.” 

— Neil Gaiman

 

“Write about it by day, and dream about it by night.” 

— E. B. White

 

“One has to assume that every man is a thinking reed and a noble nature, even if only part-time” 

— Mary McCarthy 

 

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” 

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

“Nothing can be done but by inches.” 

— Adrienne Rich

 

“In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” 

— Anne Frank

 

“There are very few monsters who warrant the fear we have of them.” 

— Andre Gide

 

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.

— William Blake

 

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

“When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have a moral obligation to do something, to say something, and not be quiet.”

— Rep. John Lewis

 

“Not only will we have to repent for the sins of bad people; but we also will have to repent for the appalling silence of good people.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

 

“We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

— E. M. Forster

 

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.

— Thomas Merton

 

“If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to.”

— Lao Tzu

 

“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”

— William James

 

Behind every beautiful thing, there’s some kind of pain.

― Bob Dylan

 

The path into the light seems dark,⁣

the path forward seems to go back,⁣

the direct path seems long,⁣

true power seems weak,⁣

true purity seems tarnished,⁣

true steadfastness seems changeable,⁣

true clarity seems obscure,⁣

the greatest art seems unsophisticated,⁣

the greatest love seems indifferent,⁣

the greatest wisdom seems childish.⁣

⁣

The Tao is nowhere to be found.⁣

Yet it nourishes and completes all things.⁣

⁣— Lao Tzu⁣

 

“Beneath the surface level of conditioned thinking in every one of us there is a single living spirit. The still small voice whispering to me in the depths of my consciousness is saying exactly the same thing as the voice whispering to you in your consciousness. ‘I want an earth that is healthy, a world at peace, and a heart filled with love.’ It doesn’t matter if your skin is brown or white or black, or whether you speak English, Japanese, or Malayalam – the voice, says the Gita, is the same in every creature, and it comes from your true self.”

— Eknath Easwaran

 

As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul…

― Hermes Trismegistus

 

The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there accomplishes his adventure or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder. Nevertheless—and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol—the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero.

— Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

 

The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be defined is not the unchanging name.

Non-existence is called the antecedent of heaven and earth; Existence is the mother of all things.

From eternal non-existence, therefore, we serenely observe the mysterious beginning of the Universe; From eternal existence we clearly see the apparent distinctions.

These two are the same in source and become different when manifested.

This sameness is called profundity. Infinite profundity is the gate whence comes the beginning of all parts of the Universe.

 

Also as Tao called Tao is not Tao.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao;

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.

The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.

Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.

These two spring from the same source but differ in name;

this appears as darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gate to all mystery.

 

The tao that can be told

is not the eternal Tao

The name that can be named

is not the eternal Name.

The unnameable is the eternally real.

Naming is the origin

of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.

Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations

arise from the same source.

This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gateway to all understanding.

Ch. 1, as interpreted by Stephen Mitchell (1992)

The tao that can be described

is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be spoken

is not the eternal Name.

The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth.

The named is the mother of creation.

Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery.

By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.

Yet mystery and reality

emerge from the same source.

This source is called darkness.

Darkness born from darkness.

The beginning of all understanding.

 

The way you can go

isn’t the real way.

The name you can say

isn’t the real name.

Heaven and earth

begin in the unnamed:

name’s the mother

of the ten thousand things.

So the unwanting soul

sees what’s hidden,

and the ever-wanting soul

sees only what it wants.

Two things, one origin,

but different in name,

whose identity is mystery.

Mystery of all mysteries!

The door to the hidden.

 

A way can be a guide but not a fixed path

names can be given but not permanent labels

Nonbeing is called the beginning of heaven and earth

being is called the mother of all things

Always passionless thereby observe the subtle

ever intent thereby observe the apparent

These two come from the same source but differ in name

both are considered mysteries

The mystery of mysteries is the gateway of marvels

— Tao Te Ching (Various Translations)

 

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. 

— Baruch Spinoza

 

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can.

— Thomas Merton

 

“If you realize that all things change, there is nothing you will try to hold on to.”

— Lao Tzu

 

“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”

— William James

 

Behind every beautiful thing, there’s some kind of pain.

― Bob Dylan

 

The path into the light seems dark,⁣

the path forward seems to go back,⁣

the direct path seems long,⁣

true power seems weak,⁣

true purity seems tarnished,⁣

true steadfastness seems changeable,⁣

true clarity seems obscure,⁣

the greatest art seems unsophisticated,⁣

the greatest love seems indifferent,⁣

the greatest wisdom seems childish.⁣

⁣

The Tao is nowhere to be found.⁣

Yet it nourishes and completes all things.⁣

⁣— Lao Tzu⁣

 

“Beneath the surface level of conditioned thinking in every one of us there is a single living spirit. The still small voice whispering to me in the depths of my consciousness is saying exactly the same thing as the voice whispering to you in your consciousness. ‘I want an earth that is healthy, a world at peace, and a heart filled with love.’ It doesn’t matter if your skin is brown or white or black, or whether you speak English, Japanese, or Malayalam – the voice, says the Gita, is the same in every creature, and it comes from your true self.”

— Eknath Easwaran

 

As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul…

― Hermes Trismegistus

 

The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there accomplishes his adventure or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder. Nevertheless—and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol—the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero.

— Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

 

The Tao that can be expressed is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be defined is not the unchanging name.

Non-existence is called the antecedent of heaven and earth; Existence is the mother of all things.

From eternal non-existence, therefore, we serenely observe the mysterious beginning of the Universe; From eternal existence we clearly see the apparent distinctions.

These two are the same in source and become different when manifested.

This sameness is called profundity. Infinite profundity is the gate whence comes the beginning of all parts of the Universe.

 

Also as Tao called Tao is not Tao.

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao;

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.

The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.

Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.

These two spring from the same source but differ in name;

this appears as darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gate to all mystery.

 

The tao that can be told

is not the eternal Tao

The name that can be named

is not the eternal Name.

The unnameable is the eternally real.

Naming is the origin

of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.

Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations

arise from the same source.

This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gateway to all understanding.

Ch. 1, as interpreted by Stephen Mitchell (1992)

The tao that can be described

is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be spoken

is not the eternal Name.

The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth.

The named is the mother of creation.

Freed from desire, you can see the hidden mystery.

By having desire, you can only see what is visibly real.

Yet mystery and reality

emerge from the same source.

This source is called darkness.

Darkness born from darkness.

The beginning of all understanding.

 

The way you can go

isn’t the real way.

The name you can say

isn’t the real name.

Heaven and earth

begin in the unnamed:

name’s the mother

of the ten thousand things.

So the unwanting soul

sees what’s hidden,

and the ever-wanting soul

sees only what it wants.

Two things, one origin,

but different in name,

whose identity is mystery.

Mystery of all mysteries!

The door to the hidden.

 

A way can be a guide but not a fixed path

names can be given but not permanent labels

Nonbeing is called the beginning of heaven and earth

being is called the mother of all things

Always passionless thereby observe the subtle

ever intent thereby observe the apparent

These two come from the same source but differ in name

both are considered mysteries

The mystery of mysteries is the gateway of marvels

— Tao Te Ching (Various Translations)

 

“When We Try To Pick Out Anything By Itself, We Find It Hitched To Everything Else In The Universe.” 

— John Muir

 

“We Are What We Pretend To Be, So We Must Be Careful About What We Pretend To Be.” 

— Kurt Vonnegut

 

“The Purpose Of Art Is Washing The Dust Of Daily Life Off Our Souls.” 

— Pablo Picasso

 

“All Religions, Arts And Sciences Are Branches Of The Same Tree… Science Without Religion Is Lame, Religion Without Science Is Blind.” 

— Albert Einstein

 

“Human History Can Be Viewed As A Slowly Dawning Awareness That We Are Members Of A Larger Group.” — Carl Sagan

 

“Dreams Are The Touchstones Of Our Characters.” 

— Henry David Thoreau

 

“Injustice Anywhere Is A Threat To Justice Everywhere. We Are Caught In An Inescapable Network Of Mutuality, Tied In A Single Garment Of Destiny. Whatever Affects One Directly, Affects All Indirectly. I Can Never Be What I Ought To Be Until You Are What You Ought To Be. This Is The Interrelated Structure Of Reality.” 

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

“I Offer You Peace. I Offer You Love. I Offer You Friendship. I See Your Beauty. I Hear Your Need. I Feel Your Feelings. My Wisdom Flows From The Highest Source. I Salute That Source In You. Let Us Work Together For Unity And Love.” 

— Mahatma Gandhi

 

“Happiness Is Neither Virtue Nor Pleasure Nor This Thing Nor That But Simply Growth. We Are Happy When We Are Growing.” 

— William Butler Yeats

 

“By Being, It Is.” 

— Parmenides

 

“Without Music, Life Would Be A Mistake.” 

— Friedrich Nietzsche

 

“Those Who Cannot Remember The Past Are Condemned To Repeat It.” 

— George Santayana

 

“As Far As We Can Discern, The Sole Purpose Of Human Existence Is To Kindle A Light Of Meaning In The Darkness Of Mere Being.” 

— Carl Jung

 

“If You Would Be A Real Seeker After Truth, It Is Necessary That At Least Once In Your Life You Doubt, As Far As Possible, All Things.” 

— Rene Descartes

 

“We Are At The Very Beginning Of Time For The Human Race. It Is Not Unreasonable That We Grapple With Problems. But There Are Tens Of Thousands Of Years In The Future. Our Responsibility Is To Do What We Can, Learn What We Can, Improve The Solutions, And Pass Them On.” 

— Richard Feynman

 

“Then He Said ‘remember Bob: No Fear, No Envy, No Meanness,’ And I Said ‘hmmm, Right.'”

— Bob Dylan

 

“The Reverse Side Also Has A Reverse Side.” 

— Japanese Proverb

 

“We Are Like Islands In The Sea, Separate On The Surface But Connected In The Deep.” 

— William James

 

“If Success Or Failure Of This Planet And Of Human Beings Depended On How I Am And What I Do… How Would I Be? What Would I Do?” 

— Buckminster Fuller

 

“The Most Vital Issue Of The Age Is Whether The Future Progress Of Humanity Is To Be Governed By The Modern Economic And Materialistic Mind Of The West Or By A Nobler Pragmatism Guided, Uplifted And Enlightened By Spiritual Culture And Knowledge….” 

— Sri Aurobindo

 

“I Hope That In This Year To Come, You Make Mistakes.

Because If You Are Making Mistakes, Then You Are Making New Things, Trying New Things, Learning, Living, Pushing Yourself, Changing Yourself, Changing Your World. You’re Doing Things You’ve Never Done Before, And More Importantly, You’re Doing Something.

So That’s My Wish For You, And All Of Us, And My Wish For Myself. Make New Mistakes. Make Glorious, Amazing Mistakes. Make Mistakes Nobody’s Ever Made Before. Don’t Freeze, Don’t Stop, Don’t Worry That It Isn’t Good Enough, Or It Isn’t Perfect, Whatever It Is: Art, Or Love, Or Work Or Family Or Life.

Whatever It Is You’re Scared Of Doing, Do It.

Make Your Mistakes, Next Year And Forever.” 

— Neil Gaiman

 

“Write About It By Day, And Dream About It By Night.” 

— E. B. White

 

“One Has To Assume That Every Man Is A Thinking Reed And A Noble Nature, Even If Only Part-time” 

— Mary Mccarthy 

 

“The Arc Of The Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Towards Justice.” 

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

“Nothing Can Be Done But By Inches.” 

— Adrienne Rich

 

“In Spite Of Everything, I Still Believe That People Are Really Good At Heart.” 

— Anne Frank

 

“There Are Very Few Monsters Who Warrant The Fear We Have Of Them.” 

— Andre Gide

 

In Seed Time Learn, In Harvest Teach, In Winter Enjoy.

— William Blake

 

Power Without Love Is Reckless And Abusive, And Love Without Power Is Sentimental And Anemic. Power At Its Best Is Love Implementing The Demands Of Justice, And Justice At Its Best Is Power Correcting Everything That Stands Against Love.

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

“When You See Something That Is Not Right, Not Fair, Not Just, You Have A Moral Obligation To Do Something, To Say Something, And Not Be Quiet.”

— Rep. John Lewis

 

“Not Only Will We Have To Repent For The Sins Of Bad People; But We Also Will Have To Repent For The Appalling Silence Of Good People.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

 

“We Must Be Willing To Let Go Of The Life We Have Planned, So As To Have The Life That Is Waiting For Us.”

— E. M. Forster

 

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

 

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

 

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

 

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

 

There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.

 

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

 

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

 

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

 

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.”

— Jorge Luis Borges : Labyrinths / Dreams

 

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we’ve learned most of what we know. Recently we’ve waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting.

 

Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

 

The cosmic calendar compresses the local history of the universe into a single year. If the universe began on January 1st it was not until May that the Milky Way formed. Other planetary systems may have appeared in June, July and August, but our Sun and Earth not until mid-September. Life arose soon after.

 

We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.

 

We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.

 

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.

 

A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

 

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

 

For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves. This is a time of great danger, but our species is young, and curious, and brave. It shows much promise.

We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads. But to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact. The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature.

 

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of 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.

 

Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants, it is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition or greed or stupidity we could plunge our world into a time of darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilisation and the Italian Renaissance. But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet.

 

I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs.

 

…The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

 

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

 

Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

 

Spirit comes from the Latin word to breathe. What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word spiritual that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.

 

We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.

 

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

 

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day.

 

As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky.

 

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

 

In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe.

 

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

 

Exactly the same technology can be used for good and for evil. It is as if there were a God who said to us, I set before you two ways: You can use your technology to destroy yourselves or to carry you to the planets and the stars. It’s up to you.

 

Look again at 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 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… Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

 

The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.

Here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants.

In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.

— Carl Sagan

 

You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.

— Stephen King

 

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

— John Muir

 

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

— Kurt Vonnegut

 

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

— Pablo Picasso

 

Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.

— June Jordan

 

One can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

— Anne Sexton

 

Do not interrupt the flight of your soul; do not distress what is best in you; do not enfeeble your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts. Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one may have known something many times, acknowledged it; one may have willed something many times, attempted it — and yet, only the deep inner motion, only the heart’s indescribable emotion, only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs to you, that no power can take it from you — for only the truth that builds up is truth for you.

— Søren Kierkegaard

 

He that loveth not, Knoweth not God; for God is Love. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us. God is Love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him.

— Yeshua (Jesus Christ)

 

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

— Vaclav Havel

 

Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.

— John F. Kennedy

 

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree… Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

 

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving …

— Albert Einstein

 

Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.

— Henry David Thoreau

 

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

 

I have decided to stick to love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.

— William Butler Yeats

 

By Being, It Is.

— Parmenides

 

Without music, life would be a mistake.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

— George Santayana

 

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.

 

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart … Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

 

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

 

Consciousness is a precondition of being.

 

The judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy.

 

No language exists that cannot be misused… Every Interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text.

 

The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.

 

I have chosen the term collective because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal; in contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals.

 

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

 

We cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist.

— Carl Jung

 

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.

— Rene Descartes

 

We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.

— Richard Feynman

 

Then he said ‘Remember Bob: no fear, no envy, no meanness,’ and I said ‘hmmm, right.’

— Bob Dylan

 

The reverse side also has a reverse side.

— Japanese Proverb

 

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

 

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

 

We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.

 

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.

— William James

 

If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do… How would I be? What would I do?

— Buckminster Fuller

 

The most vital issue of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is to be governed by the modern economic and materialistic mind of the West or by a nobler pragmatism guided, uplifted and enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge….

— Sri Aurobindo

 

The Self alone exists; and the Self alone is real. Verily the Self alone is the world, the I-I and God. All that exists is but the manifestation of the Supreme Being.

— Ramana Maharshi

 

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

— Jiddu Krishnamurti

 

Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.

— John F. Kennedy

 

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.

— Baruch Spinoza

 

You are the universe experiencing itself.

— Alan Watts

 

The unfolding of the bare human soul … that is what interests me.

— Bruce Lee

 

It’s wonderful to be alive and to walk on earth.

 

Peace is every step.

 

You are a miracle, and everything you touch could be a miracle.

— Thich Nhat Hanh

 

Be the change that you wish to see in the world.

 

I offer you peace. I offer you love. I offer you friendship. I see your beauty. I hear your need. I feel your feelings. My wisdom flows from the Highest Source. I salute that source in you. Let us work together for unity and love.

 

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

— Mahatma Gandhi

 

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

— Laozi

 

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

— Albert Camus

 

Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.

— Adlai E. Stevenson

 

I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I’m with you.

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

 

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

— George Eliot

 

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

― Walt Whitman

 

When the mind is still, we can become an instrument of peace.

― Eknath Easwaran, Strength in the Storm

 

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

— Confucius

 

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 

Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

— Plato

 

I usually say the aim of life is to be happy. Our existence is based on hope. Our life is rooted in the opportunity to be happy, not necessarily wealthy, but happy within our own minds. If we only indulge in sensory pleasure, we’ll be little different from animals. In fact, we have this marvellous brain and intelligence; we must learn to use it.

 

As you breathe in, cherish yourself. As you breathe out, cherish all beings.

 

Some people consider the practice of love and compassion is only related to religious practice and if they are not interested in religion they neglect these inner values. But love and compassion are qualities that human beings require just to live together.

— Dalai Lama

 

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

— Neil Gaiman

 

Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

— Theodore Roosevelt

 

May all beings be filled with joy and peace.

May all beings everywhere,

The strong and the weak,

The great and the small,

The mean and the powerful,

The short and the long,

The subtle and the gross:

May all beings everywhere,

Seen and unseen,

Dwelling far off or nearby,

Being or waiting to become:

May all be filled with lasting joy.

Let no one deceive another,

Let no one anywhere despise another,

Let no one out of anger or resentment

Wish suffering on anyone at all.

Just as a mother with her own life

Protects her child, her only child, from harm,

So within yourself let grow

A boundless love for all creatures.

Let your love flow outward through the universe,

To its height, its depth, its broad extent,

A limitless love, without hatred or enmity.

Then, as you stand or walk,

Sit or lie down,

As long as you are awake,

Strive for this with a one-pointed mind;

Your life will bring heaven to earth.

 

If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

 

Dream as if you will live forever, live as if you will die today.

 

Neither fire nor wind, birth nor death can erase our good deeds.

 

If you want to understand the causes that existed in the past, look at the results as they are manifested in the present. And if you want to understand what results will be manifested in the future, look at the causes that exist in the present.

 

Words do not express thoughts very well; everything immediately becomes a little different, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom of one man seems nonsense to another.

 

Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.

 

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

 

When you realize how perfect everything is you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.

If you light a lamp for somebody, it will also brighten your own path.

 

Every morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.

 

Better than a thousand hollow words

Is one word that brings peace.

Better than a thousand hollow verses

Is one verse that brings peace.

Better than a hundred hollow lines

Is one line of the law, bringing peace.

 

We are what we think.

All that we are arises with our thoughts.

With our thoughts we make the world.

 

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage… If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.

 

Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.

 

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love. This is the eternal rule.

 

You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.

 

All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions.

 

Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.

— Siddhartha Gautama Buddha

 

Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.

 

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

— Lao Tzu

 

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

 

To be awake is to be alive.

— Henry David Thoreau

 

Faith is taking the first step even when you can’t see the whole staircase.

― Martin Luther King Jr.

 

Never memorize something that you can look up.

― Albert Einstein

 

We need to strengthen such inner values as contentment, patience and tolerance, as well as compassion for others. Keeping in mind that it is expressions of affection rather than money and power that attract real friends, compassion is the key to ensuring our own well-being.

— Dalai Lama

 

Follow the voice of your heart, even if it leads you off the path of timid souls. Do not become hard and embittered, even if life tortures you at times. There is only one thing that counts: to live one’s life well and happily…

— Wilhelm Reich

 

After the summer’s yield, Lord, it is time

to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials

and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.

As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness.

Direct on them two days of warmer light

to hale them golden toward their term, and harry

the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.

Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter;

who lives alone will live indefinitely so,

waking up to read a little, draft long letters,

and, along the city’s avenues,

fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Day in Autumn

 

Imagine there’s no heaven

It’s easy if you try

No hell below us

Above us only sky

Imagine all the people

Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Imagine all the people

Living life in peace…

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope someday you’ll join us

And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions

I wonder if you can

No need for greed or hunger

A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people

Sharing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer

But I’m not the only one

I hope someday you’ll join us

And the world will live as one

— John Lennon, Imagine

 

Calmness is the criterion of spiritual progress. Plunge the purified mind into the Heart. Then the work is over.

— Ramana Maharshi

 

Ignorance can be compared to a dark room in which you sleep. No matter how long the room has been dark, an hour or a million years, the moment the lamp of awareness is lit the entire room becomes luminous. You are that luminosity. You are that clear light.

— Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

 

Creative artists … are mankind’s wakeners to recollection: summoners of our outward mind to conscious contact with ourselves, not as participants in this or that morsel of history, but as spirit, in the consciousness of being. Their task, therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another.

— Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume IV: Creative Mythology

 

Look: the trees exist; the houses

we dwell in stand there stalwartly.

Only we

pass by it all, like a rush of air.

And everything conspires to keep quiet

about us,

half out of shame perhaps, half out of

some secret hope.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

 

Grace is within you. Grace is your self. Grace is not something to be acquired from others. If it is external, it is useless. All that is necessary is to know its existence is in you. You are never out of its operation.

— Ramana Maharshi

 

Ultimately there is light and love and intelligence in this universe. And we are it, we carry that within us, it’s not just something out there, it is within us and this is what we are trying to reconnect with, our original light and love and intelligence, which is who we are, so do not get so distracted by all this other stuff, you know, really remember what we are here on this planet for.

— Tenzin Palmo

 

In the Middle Ages, a favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune. There’s the hub of the wheel, and there is the revolving rim of the wheel. For example, if you are attached to the rim of the wheel of fortune, you will be either above going down or at the bottom coming up. But if you are at the hub, you are in the same place all the time. That is the sense of the marriage vow—I take you in health or sickness, in wealth or poverty: going up or going down. But I take you as my center, and you are my bliss, not the wealth that you might bring me, not the social prestige, but you. That is following your bliss.

— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers

 

I thought the earth remembered me,

she took me back so tenderly,

arranging her dark skirts, her pockets

full of lichens and seeds.

I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,

nothing between me and the white fire of the stars

but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths

among the branches of the perfect trees.

All night I heard the small kingdoms

breathing around me, the insects,

and the birds who do their work in the darkness.

All night I rose and fell, as if in water,

grappling with a luminous doom. By morning

I had vanished at least a dozen times

into something better.

— Mary Oliver, Sleeping In The Forest

 

In the past, destruction of your neighbour might have been considered a victory, but today we are all interdependent. We live in a global economy; we face problems like climate change that affect us all. The 7 billion human beings alive today belong to one human family. In the context that others’ interests are in our interest and our interest is in their interest, the use of force is self-destructive.

— Dalai Lama

 

Peace is the only battle worth waging.

— Albert Camus

 

Each one of us is responsible for other living beings’ happiness, besides our own. As a result, your loving kindness is the most wish-fulfilling thing in life, more precious than anything else in this world. That makes for a most satisfying, fulfilling life.

— Lama Zopa Rinpoche

 

The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.

 

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

— Thich Nhat Hanh

 

Your naked body should only belong to those who fall in love with your naked soul.

— Charlie Chaplin in a letter to his daughter, Geraldine

 

A compassionate community will not be achieved only through prayer; I pray myself, but I accept its limitations. We need to take action to develop compassion, to create inner peace within ourselves and to share that inner peace with our family and friends. Peace and warm-heartedness can then spread through the community just as ripples radiate out across the water when you drop a pebble into a pond.

— Dalai Lama

 

The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party.

— William James

 

The realms of the gods and demons — heaven, purgatory, hell — are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world.

— Joseph Campbell, Myths of Light

 

There is one story and one story only.

Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,

Do not forget what flowers

The great boar trampled down in ivy time.

Her brow was creamy as the long ninth wave,

Her sea-blue eyes were wild.

But nothing promised that is not performed.

— Robert Graves

 

Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.

— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything, and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here. I don’t have to know an answer. I don’t feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.

— Richard Feynman

 

There is nothing to do. Just be. Do nothing. Be. No climbing mountains and sitting in caves. I do not even say: ‘be yourself’, since you do not know yourself. Just be. Having seen that you are neither the ‘outer’ world of perceivables, not the ‘inner’ world of thinkables, that you are neither body nor mind, just be.

— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

— Marcel Proust

 

Universal peace as a result of cumulative effort through centuries past might come into existence quickly — not unlike a crystal that suddenly forms in a solution which has been slowly prepared.

Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity.

— Nikola Tesla

 

The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.

— Marcel Proust

 

All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combatted, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.

— Nikola Tesla (born 10 July 1856)

 

Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

 

Lead me from the unreal to the real.

Lead me from darkness to light.

Lead me from death to immortality.

— Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

 

The wave is the same as the ocean, though it is not the whole ocean. So each wave of creation is a part of the eternal Ocean of Spirit. The Ocean can exist without the waves, but the waves cannot exist without the Ocean.

— Paramahansa Yogananda

 

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

— Aldous Huxley

 

Everyone wants a happy life without difficulties or suffering. We create many of the problems we face. No one intentionally creates problems, but we tend to be slaves to powerful emotions like anger, hatred and attachment that are based on misconceived projections about people and things. We need to find ways of reducing these emotions by eliminating the ignorance that underlies them and applying opposing forces.

— Dalai Lama

 

Beneath the surface level of conditioned thinking in every one of us there is a single living spirit. The still small voice whispering to me in the depths of my consciousness is saying exactly the same thing as the voice whispering to you in your consciousness. ‘I want an earth that is healthy, a world at peace, and a heart filled with love.’ It doesn’t matter if your skin is brown or white or black, or whether you speak English, Japanese, or Malayalam – the voice, says the Gita, is the same in every creature, and it comes from your true self.

— Eknath Easwaran

 

We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream.This is true for the entire universe.

— Upanishads

 

Although we live in the colony of time, we owe our allegiance to the empire of eternity.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

 

Thus I spoke, more and more softly; for I was afraid of my own thoughts and the thoughts behind my thoughts.

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

 

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.

— Marcus Aurelius

 

If your mind is happy, then you happy anywhere you go. When wisdom awakens within you, you will see Truth wherever you look. Truth is all there is. It’s like when you’ve learned how to read, you can then read anywhere you go.

— Ajahn Chah

 

Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.

— Madeleine L’Engle

 

The morning breezes have secrets to tell; don’t go back to sleep.

— Rumi

 

You, yourself, are the eternal energy which appears as this universe. You didn’t come into this world; you came out of it. Like a wave from the ocean.

— Alan Watts

 

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

— Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces

 

You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky, you look in you.

— Alan Watts

 

Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

— Rabindranath Tagore

 

Make your God transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn’t matter what his name is.

— Joseph Campbell, Pathways to Bliss

 

I’ve learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision. I’ve learned that even when I have pains, I don’t have to be one. I’ve learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. I’ve learned that I still have a lot to learn.

 

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.

 

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

 

Have enough courage to love.

 

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.

— Maya Angelou

 

Words ought to be a little wild for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

— John Maynard Keynes

 

Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

— Mahatma Gandhi

 

I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.

— Charles Dickens

 

Education is the best way to train ourselves that we will secure our own well-being by concerning ourselves with others. It is possible to create a better world, a more compassionate, more peaceful world, which is not only in everyone’s interest, but is everyone’s responsibility to achieve.

— Dalai Lama

 

Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final

— Rainer Maria Rilke

 

My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.

― Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them.

― William Shakespeare

 

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.

― Sylvia Plath

 

I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.

― Anaïs Nin

 

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

― Robert Fulghum

 

I’ve never fooled anyone. I’ve let people fool themselves. They didn’t bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn’t argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn’t.

― Marilyn Monroe

 

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

― Arundhati Roy

 

The unfolding through time of all things from one is the simple message, finally, of every one of the creation myths reproduced in the pages of these volumes—including that of our contemporary biological view, which becomes an effective mythic image the moment we recognize its own inner mystery. By the same magic, every god that is dead can be conjured again to life, as any fragment of rock from a hillside, set respectfully in a garden, will arrest the eye.

― Joseph Campbell

 

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

― Virginia Woolf

 

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

― Ernest Hemingway

 

Seven Deadly Sins

Wealth without work

Pleasure without conscience

Science without humanity

Knowledge without character

Politics without principle

Commerce without morality

Worship without sacrifice.

― Mahatma Gandhi

 

If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.

― Albert Einstein

 

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

― Neil Gaiman

 

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

― Thomas Jefferson

 

Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.

― William Shakespeare

 

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.

― Pablo Neruda

 

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

― Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.

― Eleanor Roosevelt

 

I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.

― Marilyn Monroe

 

If you don’t know where you’re going, any road’ll take you there

― George Harrison

 

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.

― John Stuart Mill

 

A quiet mind is all you need. All else will happen rightly, once your mind is quiet. As the sun on rising makes the world active, so does self-awareness affect changes in the mind. In the light of calm and steady self-awareness, inner energies wake up and work miracles without any effort on your part.

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

— John Muir

 

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

― Pablo Picasso

 

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree… Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

 

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking… The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.

 

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds…

— Albert Einstein

 

Ultimately, humanity is one, and this small planet is our only home. If we are to protect this home of ours, each of us needs to feel a vivid sense of universal altruism. It is only this feeling that can remove the self-centered motives that cause people to deceive and misuse one another. If you have a sincere and open heart, you naturally feel self-worth and confidence, and there is no need to be fearful of others.

 

For the rest of your life to be as meaningful as possible, engage in spiritual practice if you can. It is nothing more than acting out of concern for others. If you practice sincerely and with persistence, little by little, step by step you will gradually reorder your habits and attitudes so as to think less about your own narrow concerns and more about others’ – and thereby find peace and happiness yourself.

— Dalai Lama

 

It is only in the act of contemplation when words and even personality are transcended, that the pure state of the Perennial Philosophy can actually be known. The records left by those who have known it in this way make it abundantly clear that all of them, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Hebrew, Taoist, Christian, or Mohammedan, were attempting to describe the same essentially indescribable Fact.

 

The phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness — the world of things and animals and men and even gods — is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

 

Human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

 

Something inexpressively lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressively terrifying…

 

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

 

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

 

There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

 

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

— Aldous Huxley

 

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

— Leonardo da Vinci

 

No great thing is created suddenly.

— Epictetus

 

All life is an experiment.

 

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.

 

I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.

 

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

— Italo Calvino

 

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way.

— Pablo Neruda

 

A beginning is a very delicate time ….

 

Bless the Maker and all His Water. Bless the coming and going of Him, May His passing cleanse the world. May He keep the world for his people.— Fremen saying, recited by Liet-Kynes, in the presence of Paul Atreides.

 

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

 

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

 

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

 

We are generalists. You can’t draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.

— Frank Herbert, Dune

 

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one… I have been… and always shall be… your friend. Live long… and prosper.

— Spock

 

An idea is salvation by imagination.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

 

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

— Maya Angelou

 

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

— Vincent van Gogh

 

God is that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part.

 

God alone exists truly. Man manifests Him in time, space and matter.

 

I know that most men — not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems — can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.

 

The indubitable, eternal truth inherent in man, which is one and the same in all the great religions of the world. It will in due time emerge and make its way to general recognition, and the nonsense that has obscured it will disappear of itself, and with it will go the evil from which humanity now suffers.

 

We acknowledge God only when we are conscious of His manifestation in us.

— Leo Tolstoy

 

The meaning of our self is not to be found in its separateness from God and others, but in the ceaseless realisation of yoga, of union.

— Rabindranath Tagore

 

Legends can be now and forever

Teaching us to love for goodness sake.

Legends can be now and forever

Loved by the sun, loved by the sun.

— Jon Anderson

 

This that we are now … The human body and the universe grew from this, not this from the universe and the human body.

 

Love said to me, there is nothing that is not me. Be silent.

 

Love is the ark appointed for the righteous,

Which annuls the danger and provides a way of escape.

 

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition.

 

Observe the wonders as they occur around you.

Don’t claim them. Feel the artistry

moving through, and be silent.

 

Reason is like an officer when the King appears;

The officer then loses his power and hides himself.

 

Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.

 

If in thirst you drink water from a cup, you see God in it. Those who are not in love with God will see only their own faces in it.

 

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I will meet you there.

 

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about

language, ideas, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.

— Mevlana Rumi

 

We’re playing those mind games together

Pushing the barriers, planting seeds

Playing the mind guerrilla

Chanting the mantra, Peace on Earth.

We all been playing those mind games forever

Some kinda druid dudes lifting the veil.

Doing the mind guerrilla,

Some call it magic — the search for the grail.

Love is the answer and you know that for sure.

Love is a flower, you got to let it — you got to let it grow.

Yes is the answer and you know that for sure.

Yes is surrender, you got to let it, you got to let it go…

So keep on playing those mind games together

Doing the ritual dance in the sun.

Millions of mind guerrillas

Putting their soul power to the karmic wheel.

I want you to make love, not war — I know you’ve heard it before.

— John Lennon

 

The truth is that my work — I was going to say my mission — is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.

— Miguel de Unamuno

 

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear,

Or like a fairy trip upon the green,

Or, like a nymph, with long dishevell’d hair,

Dance on the sands, and yet no footing seen:

Love is a spirit all compact of fire,

Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.

Foul words and frowns must not repel a lover;

What though the rose have prickles, yet ’tis pluck’d:

Were beauty under twenty locks kept fast,

Yet love breaks through and picks them all at last.

For where Love reigns, disturbing Jealousy

Doth call himself Affection’s sentinel;

Gives false alarms, suggesteth mutiny.

This carry-tale, dissentious Jealousy,

That sometime true news, sometime false doth bring.

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain.

Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest,

From his moist cabinet mounts up on high,

And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast

The sun ariseth in his majesty.

— William Shakespeare

 

There are people that can’t go to Fantastica. There are those who can but never return. And there are just a few who go to Fantastica and come back. And they make both worlds well again.

— Michael Ende

 

Here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that Love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.

 

Love does not entreat; or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.

 

One never reaches home. But whenever friendly paths intersect, the whole world looks like home for a time.

— Hermann Hesse

 

It is the way of the superior man to prefer the concealment of his virtue, while it daily becomes more illustrious, and it is the way of the mean man to seek notoriety, while he daily goes more and more to ruin. It is characteristic of the superior man, appearing insipid, yet never to produce satiety; while showing a simple negligence, yet to have his accomplishments recognized; while seemingly plain, yet to be discriminating. He knows how what is distant lies in what is near. He knows where the wind proceeds from. He knows how what is minute becomes manifested. Such a one, we may be sure, will enter into virtue.

— Confucius

 

Activism is my rent for living on the planet.

— Alice Walker

 

God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is afoot. Magic is alive. Alive is afoot. Magic never died. God never sickened. Many poor men lied. Many sick men lied. Magic never weakened. Magic never hid. Magic always ruled. God is afoot. God was ruler though his funeral lengthened. Though his mourners thickened Magic never fled…

— Leonard Cohen

 

I was still blind, but twinkling stars did dance

Throughout my being’s limitless expanse,

Nothing had yet drawn close, only at distant stages

I found myself, a mere suggestion sensed in past and future ages.

— Novalis

 

Grand is the seen, the light, to me — grand are the sky and stars,

Grand is the earth, and grand are lasting time and space,

And grand their laws, so multiform, puzzling, evolutionary;

But grander far the unseen soul of me, comprehending, endowing all those,

Lighting the light, the sky and stars, delving the earth, sailing the sea,

(What were all those, indeed, without thee, unseen soul? of what amount without thee?)

More evolutionary, vast, puzzling, O my soul!

More multiform far — more lasting thou than they.

I stand as on some mighty eagle’s beak,

Eastward the sea absorbing, viewing,

(nothing but sea and sky,)

The tossing waves, the foam,

the ships in the distance,

The wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps —

that inbound urge and urge of waves….

— Walt Whitman

 

I don’t take drugs: I am drugs.

 

Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy – the joy of being Salvador Dalí – and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things this Salvador Dalí is going to accomplish today?

 

The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad.

— Salvador Dali

 

Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter.

— June Jordan

 

People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.

— V. S. Naipaul

 

One can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.

— Anne Sexton

 

Do not interrupt the flight of your soul; do not distress what is best in you; do not enfeeble your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts. Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one may have known something many times, acknowledged it; one may have willed something many times, attempted it — and yet, only the deep inner motion, only the heart’s indescribable emotion, only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs to you, that no power can take it from you — for only the truth that builds up is truth for you.

— Søren Kierkegaard

 

He that loveth not, Knoweth not God; for God is Love. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us. God is Love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him.

— Yeshua (Jesus Christ)

 

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out

— Vaclav Havel

 

Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.

— John F. Kennedy

 

If you realize what the real problem is—losing yourself, giving yourself to some higher end, or to another—you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial. When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. And what all the myths have to deal with is transformations of consciousness of one kind or another. You have been thinking one way, you now have to think a different way.

― Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth

 

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?

― Ernest Hemingway

 

An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.

― Mohandas Gandhi

 

This is our time — to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth, that, out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope. And where we are met with cynicism and doubts and those who tell us that we can’t, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes, we can!

― Barack Obama (2008)

 

My father used to say, Don’t raise your voice. Improve your argument.

— Archbishop Desmond Tutu

 

We Hear what you say

One Earth, one Mother

One does not sell the Earth

The people walk upon

We are the land

How do we sell our Mother?

How do we sell the stars?

How do we sell the air?

— John Trudell, Crazy Horse

 

Psychological type is nothing static — it changes in the course of life.

 

We need more understanding of human nature, because the only danger that exists is man himself — he is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man — far too little.

 

I think there will be a reaction — a reaction will set in against this communal dissociation. You know, man doesn’t stand forever, his nullification. Once, there will be a reaction, and I see it setting in, you know, when I think of my patients, they all seek their own existence and to assure their existence against that complete atomization into nothingness or into meaninglessness. Man cannot stand a meaningless life.

— Carl Jung, Face to Face BBC Interview (1959)

 

The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.

― Maya Angelou

 

What’s meant to be will always find a way.

― Trisha Yearwood

 

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that’s beautiful.

― Milan Kundera

 

May you live every day of your life.

― Jonathan Swift

 

Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.

― Edgar Allan Poe

 

Anyone who aspires to a writing career, before developing his talent, would be wise to develop a thick hide.

― Harper Lee

 

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

― Louise Erdrich

 

Whoever gossips to you will gossip about you.

― Spanish Proverb

 

So, I love you because the entire universe conspired to help me find you. ― Paulo Coelho

 

To love yourself right now, just as you are, is to give yourself heaven. Don’t wait until you die. If you wait, you die now. If you love, you live now. ― Alan Cohen

 

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.

― John Lennon

 

Sex appeal is fifty percent what you’ve got and fifty percent what people think you’ve got.

― Sophia Loren

 

One day I had to sit down with myself and decide that I loved myself no matter what my body looked like and what other people thought about my body. I got tired of hating myself.

― Gabourey Sidibe

 

To love yourself right now, just as you are, is to give yourself heaven. Don’t wait until you die. If you wait, you die now. If you love, you live now.

― Alan Cohen

 

Sex appeal is fifty percent what you’ve got and fifty percent what people think you’ve got.

― Sophia Loren

 

You can never be overdressed or overeducated.

― Oscar Wilde

 

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.

― Mahatma Gandhi

 

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.

― Socrates

 

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.

― A.A. Milne

 

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.

― John Steinbeck

 

The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be about my age.

― Anthony Burgess

 

Of course I thought I was Jo in Little Women. But I didn’t want to write what Jo wrote. Then in Martin Eden I found a writer-protagonist with whose writing I could identify, so then I wanted to be Martin Eden—minus, of course, the dreary fate Jack London gives him. I saw myself as (I guess I was) a heroic autodidact. I looked forward to the struggle of the writing life. I thought of being a writer as a heroic vocation.

― Susan Sontag

 

I’ve always been keenly aware of the passing of time. I’ve always thought that I was old. Even when I was twelve, I thought it was awful to be thirty. I felt that something was lost. At the same time, I was aware of what I could gain, and certain periods of my life have taught me a great deal. But, in spite of everything, I’ve always been haunted by the passing of time and by the fact that death keeps closing in on us. For me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay. It’s that, rather than the fact that things disintegrate, that love peters out.

― Simone de Beauvoir

 

Now, if you don’t like that, Berrigan, that’s the history of my family. They don’t take no shit from nobody. In due time I ain’t going to take no shit from nobody. You can record that.

― Jack Kerouac

 

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices.

― Ray Bradbury

 

It’s a wonderful thing to be able to create your own world whenever you want to. Writing is very pleasurable, very seductive, and very therapeutic. Time passes very fast when I’m writing—really fast. I’m puzzling over something, and time just flies by. It’s an exhilarating feeling. How bad can it be? It’s sitting alone with fictional characters. You’re escaping from the world in your own way and that’s fine. Why not?

― Woody Allen

 

I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool—and I’m not any of those—to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues.

― Maya Angelou

 

When I began to lose my sight, the last color I saw, or the last color, rather, that stood out, because of course now I know that your coat is not the same color as this table or of the woodwork behind you—the last color to stand out was yellow because it is the most vivid of colors. That’s why you have the Yellow Cab Company in the United States. At first they thought of making the cars scarlet. Then somebody found out that at night or when there was a fog that yellow stood out in a more vivid way than scarlet. So you have yellow cabs because anybody can pick them out. Now when I began to lose my eyesight, when the world began to fade away from me, there was a time among my friends… well they made, they poked fun at me because I was always wearing yellow neckties. Then they thought I really liked yellow, although it really was too glaring. I said, ‘Yes, to you, but not to me, because it is the only color I can see, practically!’ I live in a gray world, rather like the silver-screen world. But yellow stands out.

― Jorge Luis Borges

 

The idea that addiction is somehow a psychological illness is, I think, totally ridiculous. It’s as psychological as malaria. It’s a matter of exposure.

― William S. Burroughs

 

You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love.

― Ernest Hemingway

 

Art is a revolt against fate.

— André Malraux

 

Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.

— Wilhelm Reich

 

Once the masterpiece has emerged, the lesser works surrounding it fall into place; and it then gives the impression of having been led up to and foreseeable, though actually it is inconceivable — or, rather, it can only be conceived of once it is there for us to see it.

 

History may clarify our understanding of the supreme work of art, but can never account for it completely; for the Time of art is not the same as the Time of history.

 

All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

— Wilfred Owen

 

Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind then that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; and while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

 

I may not be able to say all I think; but I am not going to say anything that I do not think. I would rather a thousand times be a free soul in jail than to be a sycophant and coward in the streets.

— Eugene V. Debs

 

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

— Anaïs Nin

 

I found a book on how to be invisible —

On the edge of the labyrinth —

Under a veil you must never lift —

Pages you must never turn —

In the Labyrinth.

— Kate Bush

 

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.

 

All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible persons, but there are no guilty ones, in its opinion. At very most, such a mind will consent to use past experience as a basis for its future actions.

 

I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me — that I understand. And these two certainties — my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle — I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?

 

In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence and doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror’s attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: There is no frontier between being and appearing.

— Albert Camus

 

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

― Stephen Fry

 

To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

― Albert Camus

 

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

― Maya Angelou

 

Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.

― Albert Camus

 

Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.

― Arthur Schopenhauer

 

Always do what you are afraid to do.

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

If you find me not within you, you will never find me. For, I have been with you, from the beginning of me.

― Rumi

 

Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.

 

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.

 

One becomes sharply aware, but without regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and consonance with other people. No doubt, such a person loses some of his innocence and unconcern; on the other hand, he is largely independent of the opinions, habits, and judgments of his fellows and avoids the temptation to build his inner equilibrium upon such insecure foundations.

 

When we survey our lives and endeavors we soon observe that almost the whole of our actions and desires are bound up with the existence of other human beings. We see that our whole nature resembles that of the social animals. We eat food that others have grown, wear clothes that others have made, live in houses that others have built. The greater part of our knowledge and beliefs has been communicated to us by other people through the medium of a language which others have created. Without language our mental capacities would be poor indeed, comparable to those of the higher animals; we have, therefore, to admit that we owe our principal advantage over the beasts to the fact of living in human society. The individual, if left alone from birth would remain primitive and beast-like in his thoughts and feelings to a degree that we can hardly conceive. The individual is what he is and has the significance that he has not so much in virtue of his individuality, but rather as a member of a great human society, which directs his material and spiritual existence from the cradle to the grave.

 

A man’s value to the community depends primarily on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his fellows. We call him good or bad according to how he stands in this matter. It looks at first sight as if our estimate of a man depended entirely on his social qualities.

 

And yet such an attitude would be wrong. It is clear that all the valuable things, material, spiritual, and moral, which we receive from society can be traced back through countless generations to certain creative individuals. The use of fire, the cultivation of edible plants, the steam engine — each was discovered by one man.

 

Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society — nay, even set up new moral standards to which the life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently thinking and judging personalities the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.

 

The health of society thus depends quite as much on the independence of the individuals composing it as on their close social cohesion.

 

Everybody has certain ideals which determine the direction of his endeavors and his judgments. In this sense I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — such an ethical basis I call more proper for a herd of swine. The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty.

― Albert Einstein

 

A writer, or any artist, can’t expect to be embraced by the people [but] you just keep doing your work — because you have to, because it’s your calling.

 

Build a good name. Keep your name clean. Don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful — be concerned with doing good work and make the right choices and protect your work. And if you build a good name, eventually, that name will be its own currency.

 

To be an artist — actually, to be a human being in these times — it’s all difficult. … What matters is to know what you want and pursue it.

Life is like a roller coaster. It’s never going to be perfect — it is going to have perfect moments, and then rough spots, but it’s all worth it.

 

Secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

 

William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He’d appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway.

 

He camped in the Bunker with his typewriter, his shotgun, and his overcoat. From time to time he’d slip on his coat, saunter our way, and take his place at the table we reserved for him in front of the stage.

― Patti Smith

 

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

― Albert Einstein

 

If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.

—Albert Camus

 

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

― Plato

 

In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.

― Robert Frost

 

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

― Bertrand Russell

 

I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone and not be defined by another person. ― Oscar Wilde

 

Books may well be the only true magic.

― Alice Hoffman

 

Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism.

― Carl Sagan

 

To love another is something

like prayer and it can’t be planned, you just fall

into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

― Anne Sexton

 

A man so painfully in love is capable of self-torture beyond belief.

— John Steinbeck

 

When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, Why god? Why me? and the thundering voice of God answered, There’s just something about you that pisses me off.

― Stephen King

 

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Continue to plant a kiss of concern on the cheek of the sick and the aged and infirm and count that actions as natural and to be expected.

― Maya Angelou

 

This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

― William Shakespeare

 

Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.

― J.K. Rowling

 

It’s a strange thing, how you can love somebody, how you can be all eaten up inside with needing them – and they simply don’t need you. That’s all there is to it, and neither of you can do anything about it. And they’ll be the same way with someone else, and someone else will be the same way about you and it goes on and on – this desperate need – and only once in a rare million do the same two people need each other.

— Madeleine L’Engle

 

The thing is you have to fight the whole time. You can’t stop. Otherwise you just end up somewhere, bobbing in the middle of a life you never wanted.

— Alexander Maksik

 

Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.

― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.

― Dr. Seuss

 

It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!

― Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Oh my God, does art engender humanity? It awakens your humanity. But humanity has nothing to do with political theory. Political theory is in the interests of one group of humanity, or one ideal for humanity. But humanity—my heavens, that’s what proper art renders. We have a paradox. Going into the deepest aspects of inner space connects you with something that is the most vital for the outer realm.

― Joseph Campbell, interviewed by Joan Marler for the Yoga Journal (1987)

 

When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.

― John Lennon

 

Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you.

― George R.R. Martin

 

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

― Mark Twain

 

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

― Pablo Neruda

 

I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.

― Lewis Carroll

 

‘We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love & then to return Home.’

– Aboriginal Proverb

 

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

We love the things we love for what they are.

― Robert Frost

 

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

― Albert Einstein

 

He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.

― Victor Hugo

 

It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it.

― Hunter S. Thompson

 

We are always living in the final days. What have you got? A hundred years or much, much less until the end of your world.

― Neil Gaiman

 

Rarely do we arrive at the summit of truth without running into extremes; we have frequently to exhaust the part of error, and even of folly, before we work our way up to the noble goal of tranquil wisdom.

― Friedrich Schiller

 

There’s never been a true war that wasn’t fought between two sets of people who were certain they were in the right. The really dangerous people believe they are doing whatever they are doing solely and only because it is without question the right thing to do. And that is what makes them dangerous.

― Mr. Wednesday in American Gods by Neil Gaiman

 

The dignity of mankind is in your hands; protect it!

It sinks with you! With you it will ascend.

 

He who has done his best for his own time has lived for all times.

 

Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.

― Friedrich Schiller

 

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

― Neil Gaiman in American Gods

 

Dare to be wise! Energy and spirit is needed to overcome the obstacles which indolence of nature as well as cowardice of heart oppose to our instruction. It is not without significance that the old myth makes the goddess of Wisdom emerge fully armed from the head of Jupiter; for her very first function is warlike. Even in her birth she has to maintain a hard struggle with the senses, which do not want to be dragged from their sweet repose. The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error. Content if they themselves escape the hard labor of thought, men gladly resign to others the guardianship of their ideas, and if it happens that higher needs are stirred in them, they embrace with a eager faith the formulas which State and priesthood hold in readiness for such an occasion.

― Friedrich Schiller

 

For things to reveal themselves to us,

we need to be ready to abandon our

views about them.

― Thích Nhất Hạnh

 

One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life and dedicate ourselves to that.

― Joseph Campbell

 

The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

 

All the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

 

A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

― Kurt Vonnegut

 

I have seen the truth; I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the power of living on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of mankind. And it is just this faith of mine that they laugh at. But how can I help believing it? I have seen the truth — it is not as though I had invented it with my mind, I have seen it, seen it, and the living image of it has filled my soul for ever. I have seen it in such full perfection that I cannot believe that it is impossible for people to have it. And so how can I go wrong? I shall make some slips no doubt, and shall perhaps talk in second-hand language, but not for long: the living image of what I saw will always be with me and will always correct and guide me. Oh, I am full of courage and freshness, and I will go on and on if it were for a thousand years! Do you know, at first I meant to conceal the fact that I corrupted them, but that was a mistake — that was my first mistake! But truth whispered to me that I was lying, and preserved me and corrected me. But how establish paradise — I don’t know, because I do not know how to put it into words. After my dream I lost command of words. All the chief words, anyway, the most necessary ones. But never mind, I shall go and I shall keep talking, I won’t leave off, for anyway I have seen it with my own eyes, though I cannot describe what I saw. But the scoffers do not understand that. It was a dream, they say, delirium, hallucination. Oh! As though that meant so much! And they are so proud! A dream! What is a dream? And is not our life a dream? I will say more. Suppose that this paradise will never come to pass (that I understand), yet I shall go on preaching it. And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that’s the chief thing, and that’s everything; nothing else is wanted — you will find out at once how to arrange it all. And yet it’s an old truth which has been told and retold a billion times — but it has not formed part of our lives! The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness — that is what one must contend against. And I shall. If only everyone wants it, it can be arranged at once.

― Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man

 

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side.

 

I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativism is defensible and attractive. It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.

― Kurt Vonnegut

 

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.

― Aristotle

 

I used to take pride in the fact that i am not a belief philosopher: I am primarily interested in ideas, in theories, and I find it comparatively unimportant whether or not anybody ‘believes’ in them. And I suspect that the interest of philosophers in belief results from that mistaken philosophy which I call ‘inductivism’. They are theorists of knowledge, and starting from subjective experiences they fail to distinguish between objective and subjective knowledge. This leads them to believe in belief as the genus of which knowledge is a species (‘justification’ or perhaps a ‘criterion of truth’ such as clarity and distinctness, or vivacity, or ‘sufficient reason’, providing the specific difference).

This is why, like E.M. Forster, I do not believe in belief

― Karl Popper, ‘Objective Knowledge’

 

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

― F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.

― J.R.R. Tolkien

 

Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.

― Sylvia Plath

 

Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.

― Carlos Fuentes

 

God created war so that Americans would learn geography.

― Mark Twain

 

Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

― George Eliot

 

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.

― Anne Frank

 

Being crazy isn’t enough.

― Dr. Seuss

 

The secret of success is… to be fully awake to everything about you.

— LeRoy Pollock

 

When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.

― John Green

 

I still catch myself feeling sad about things that don’t matter anymore.

 

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.

— Kurt Vonnegut

 

Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man.

— Albert Einstein

 

Educate yourself, welcome life’s messiness, read Chekhov, avoid becoming an architect at all costs.

― Kurt Vonnegut

 

Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.

― Niccolò Machiavelli

 

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.

― Dalai Lama

 

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

― Aristotle

 

What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?

― John Green

 

If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?

― Albert Einstein

 

The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret. It has come to be believed that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to mankind.

 

― Albert Schweitzer

 

Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.

― Oscar Wilde

 

I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, human liberty as the source of national action, the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas.

― John F. Kennedy

 

We are always hoping for an Utopian world, and most people have at least a few Utopian dreams.

 

We would like to see the world around us as beautiful as we know it could be, but this cannot be achieved until the soul world within us is as beautiful as it must be to transform the outer surface of things.

― Manly P. Hall Lecture #195 – The Soul as the Immortal Mortal

 

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

― Eleanor Roosevelt

 

The responsibility of tolerance lies in those who have the wider vision.

― T. S. Eliot

 

It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.

 

If the learned and worldly-wise men of this age were to allow mankind to inhale the fragrance of fellowship and love, every understanding heart would apprehend the meaning of true liberty, and discover the secret of undisturbed peace and absolute composure.

 

Justice and equity are twin Guardians that watch over men. From them are revealed such blessed and perspicuous words as are the cause of the well-being of the world and the protection of the nations.

― Bahá’u’lláh

 

Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; whether thou spare, through love do thou spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.

― Augustine of Hippo

 

The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

 

Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

― Louis Brandeis

 

It is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God’s sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!

― Robert Louis Stevenson

 

The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but — what is worse — the slave of as many masters as he has vices.

 

Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.

 

I do not fear but that He will go on to supply what is yet wanting when once I have begun to use what He has already given. For a possession which is not diminished by being shared with there, if it is possessed and not shared, is not yet possessed as it ought to be possessed.

― Augustine of Hippo

 

All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

 

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.

― Robert Louis Stevenson

 

I try to create sympathy for my characters, then turn the monsters loose.

― Stephen King

 

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living.

― Anaïs Nin

 

If you can love someone with your whole heart, even one person, then there’s salvation in life. Even if you can’t get together with that person.

 

No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.

 

Knowledge and ability were tools, not things to show off.

― Haruki Murakami

 

Compassion is not just about kind acts; actually it is about being aware of the suffering of other sentient beings from the view of the actual nature of things.

― 17th Karmapa

 

And just as in the past each civilization was the vehicle of its own mythology, developing in character as its myth became progressively interpreted, analyzed, and elucidated by its leading minds, so in this modern world—where the application of science to the fields of practical life has now dissolved all cultural horizons, so that no separate civilization can ever develop again—each individual is the center of a mythology of his own, of which his own intelligible character is the Incarnate God, so to say, whom his empirically questing consciousness is to find. The aphorism of Delphi, ‘Know thyself,’ is the motto. And not Rome, not Mecca, not Jerusalem, Sinai, or Benares, but each and every ‘thou’ on earth is the center of this world, in the sense of that formula quoted from the twelfth-century Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers, of God as ‘an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere.’

― Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. IV: Creative Mythology

 

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weights so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.

― Milan Kundera

 

Words belong to each other.

― Virginia Woolf

 

Taking crazy things seriously is a serious waste of time.

― Haruki Murakami

 

For you, the world is weird because if you’re not bored with it you’re at odds with it. For me the world is weird because it is stupendous, awesome, mysterious, unfathomable; my interest has been to convince you that you must assume responsibility for being here in this marvelous time.

― Carlos Castaneda

 

When the ear hears,

observe the mind. Does it

get caught up and make a

story out of the sound? Is it

disturbed? You can know

this, stay with it, be aware.

At times you may want to

escape from the sounds, but

that is not the way out. You

must escape through

awareness.

― Ajahn Chah

 

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

― Oscar Wilde

 

The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.’’

― President John F. Kennedy

 

I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.

― Haruki Murakami

 

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

― Pablo Picasso

 

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.

― William Shakespeare

 

You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.

― Eleanor Roosevelt

 

Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.

― Bob Marley

 

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

― Mark Twain

 

Being tender and open is beautiful. As a woman, I feel continually shhh’ed. Too sensitive. Too mushy. Too wishy washy. Blah blah. Don’t let someone steal your tenderness. Don’t allow the coldness and fear of others to tarnish your perfectly vulnerable beating heart. Nothing is more powerful than allowing yourself to truly be affected by things. Whether it’s a song, a stranger, a mountain, a rain drop, a tea kettle, an article, a sentence, a footstep, feel it all – look around you. All of this is for you. Take it and have gratitude. Give it and feel love.

— Zooey Deschanel

 

This life is what you make it. No matter what, you’re going to mess up sometimes, it’s a universal truth. But the good part is you get to decide how you’re going to mess it up. Girls will be your friends – they’ll act like it anyway. But just remember, some come, some go. The ones that stay with you through everything – they’re your true best friends. Don’t let go of them. Also remember, sisters make the best friends in the world. As for lovers, well, they’ll come and go too. And baby, I hate to say it, most of them – actually pretty much all of them are going to break your heart, but you can’t give up because if you give up, you’ll never find your soulmate. You’ll never find that half who makes you whole and that goes for everything. Just because you fail once, doesn’t mean you’re gonna fail at everything. Keep trying, hold on, and always, always, always believe in yourself, because if you don’t, then who will, sweetie? So keep your head high, keep your chin up, and most importantly, keep smiling, because life’s a beautiful thing and there’s so much to smile about.

― Marilyn Monroe

 

Compassionate action involves working with ourselves as much as working with others.

― Pema Chodron

 

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

― Mark Twain

 

The best supply of raw materials now available is inside of us.

Here there is apparently an unlimited amount of what we might call energy reserve.

 

Here we have the capacity to change all things by changing ourselves, by releasing into manifestation the tremendous potential that we have.

 

And by gradually simplifying our pattern of living and making greater use of our internal potential.

 

We can reach a point where our way of life again has the dignities and the values which make living important.

― Manly P. Hall, Lecture #203, The Economy that will not Economize: Inflation in the Light of Philosophy

 

Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

― Dalai Lama

 

This is how it works. I love the people in my life, and I do for my friends whatever they need me to do for them, again and again, as many times as is necessary. For example, in your case you always forgot who you are and how much you’re loved. So what I do for you as your friend is remind you who you are and tell you how much I love you. And this isn’t any kind of burden for me, because I love who you are very much. Every time I remind you, I get to remember with you, which is my pleasure.

― James Lecesne

 

To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one’s self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—this is to have succeeded.

― Bessie Anderson Stanley

 

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

― The Buddha

 

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

We live in a world of theophanies. Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can only happen if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure.

― Macrina Wiederkehr

 

When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.

― Dalai Lama

 

As a writer you should not judge. You should understand.

― Ernest Hemingway

 

Think before you speak. Read before you think.

― Fran Lebowitz

 

You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

― Oscar Wilde

 

The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.

― Paulo Coelho

 

This book is for

ALL:

for every man, woman, and child.

My former work has been misunderstood, and its scope limited, by my use of technical terms. It has attracted only too many dilettanti and eccentrics, weaklings seeking in Magic an escape from reality. I myself was first consciously drawn to the subject in this way. And it has repelled only too many scientific and practical minds, such as I most designed to influence.

But

MAGICK

is for

ALL.

― Aleister Crowley, Liber ABA, Part III: Magick in Theory and Practice

 

The Self is the one Reality that always exists, and it is by the light of the Self that all other things are seen.

― Ramana Maharshi

 

Not recognizing natural mind is simply an example of the mind’s unlimited capacity to create whatever it wants.

― Mingyur Rinpoche

 

The crowd is the gathering place of the weakest; true creation is a solitary act.

 

Go to Tibet

Ride a camel.

Read the bible.

Dye your shoes blue.

Grow a beard.

Circle the world in a paper canoe.

Subscribe to The Saturday Evening Post.

Chew on the left side of your mouth only.

Marry a woman with one leg and shave with a straight razor.

And carve your name in her arm.

Brush your teeth with gasoline.

Sleep all day and climb trees at night.

Be a monk and drink buckshot and beer.

Hold your head under water and play the violin.

Do a belly dance before pink candles.

Kill your dog.

Run for mayor.

Live in a barrel.

Break your head with a hatchet.

Plant tulips in the rain.

But don’t write poetry.

― Charles Bukowski

 

Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule — in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk — exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go.

 

In both writing and sleeping, we learn to be physically still at the same time we are encouraging our minds to unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daytime lives. And as your mind and body grow accustomed to a certain amount of sleep each night — six hours, seven, maybe the recommended eight — so can you train your waking mind to sleep creatively and work out the vividly imagined waking dreams which are successful works of fiction.

 

The space can be humble … and it really needs only one thing: A door you are willing to shut. The closed door is your way of telling the world that you mean business. . . .

If possible, there should be no telephone in your writing room, certainly no TV or videogames for you to fool around with. If there’s a window, draw the curtains or pull down the shades unless it looks out at a blank wall. For any writer, but for the beginning writer in particular, it’s wise to eliminate every possible distraction. If you continue to write, you will begin to filter out these distractions naturally, but at the start it’s best to try and take care of them before you write. … When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

― Stephen King

 

People use drugs, legal and illegal, because their lives are intolerably painful or dull. They hate their work and find no rest in their leisure. They are estranged from their families and their neighbors. It should tell us something that in healthy societies drug use is celebrative, convivial, and occasional, whereas among us it is lonely, shameful, and addictive. We need drugs, apparently, because we have lost each other.

― Wendell Berry

 

You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

― Jonathan Safran Foer

 

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

― Kurt Vonnegut

 

I need to tell a story. It’s an obsession. Each story is a seed inside of me that starts to grow and grow, like a tumor, and I have to deal with it sooner or later. Why a particular story? I don’t know when I begin. That I learn much later. Over the years I’ve discovered that all the stories I’ve told, all the stories I will ever tell, are connected to me in some way. If I’m talking about a woman in Victorian times who leaves the safety of her home and comes to the Gold Rush in California, I’m really talking about feminism, about liberation, about the process I’ve gone through in my own life, escaping from a Chilean, Catholic, patriarchal, conservative, Victorian family and going out into the world.

 

Storytelling and literature will exist always, but what shape will it take? Will we write novels to be performed? The story will exist, but how, I don’t know. The way my stories are told today is by being published in the form of a book. In the future, if that’s not the way to tell a story, I’ll adapt.

 

It’s worth the work to find the precise word that will create a feeling or describe a situation. Use a thesaurus, use your imagination, scratch your head until it comes to you, but find the right word.

 

When you feel the story is beginning to pick up rhythm—the characters are shaping up, you can see them, you can hear their voices, and they do things that you haven’t planned, things you couldn’t have imagined—then you know the book is somewhere, and you just have to find it, and bring it, word by word, into this world.

 

When you tell a story in the kitchen to a friend, it’s full of mistakes and repetitions. It’s good to avoid that in literature, but still, a story should feel like a conversation. It’s not a lecture.

― Isabel Allende

 

The discoveries of yesterday are the truisms of tomorrow, because we can add to our knowledge but cannot subtract from it.

― Arthur Koestler

 

Stop thinking about art works as objects, and start thinking about them as triggers for experiences.

― Brian Eno

 

Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.

— David Foster Wallace

 

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician — make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor — make good art. IRS on your trail — make good art. Cat exploded — make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before — make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and that doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too.

 

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

 

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

 

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

 

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.

 

Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

— Neil Gaiman

 

Requirements for Creativity:

Space (You can’t become playful, and therefore creative, if you’re under your usual pressures.)

Time (It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.)

Time (Giving your mind as long as possible to come up with something original, and learning to tolerate the discomfort of pondering time and indecision.)

Confidence (Nothing will stop you being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.)

Humor (The main evolutionary significance of humor is that it gets us from the closed mode to the open mode quicker than anything else.)

 

Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating.

 

We need to be in the open mode when pondering a problem — but! — once we come up with a solution, we must then switch to the closed mode to implement it. Because once we’ve made a decision, we are efficient only if we go through with it decisively, undistracted by doubts about its correctness.

 

To be at our most efficient, we need to be able to switch backwards and forward between the two modes. But — here’s the problem — we too often get stuck in the closed mode. Under the pressures which are all too familiar to us, we tend to maintain tunnel vision at times when we really need to step back and contemplate the wider view.

 

This is particularly true, for example, of politicians. The main complaint about them from their nonpolitical colleagues is that they’ve become so addicted to the adrenaline that they get from reacting to events on an hour-by-hour basis that they almost completely lose the desire or the ability to ponder problems in the open mode.

 

This is the extraordinary thing about creativity: If just you keep your mind resting against the subject in a friendly but persistent way, sooner or later you will get a reward from your unconscious.

— John Cleese

 

There is always some madness in love. But there is always, also, some method in madness.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Everything you can imagine is real.

― Pablo Picasso

 

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

― George Eliot

 

If I want to understand something, I must observe, I must not criticize, I must not condemn, I must not pursue it as pleasure or avoid it as non-pleasure. There must merely be the silent observation of a fact.

― J. Krishnamurti

 

The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.

 

Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.

 

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.

 

To be in good moral condition requires at least as much training as to be in good physical condition.

 

The world of today has achieved much, but for all its declared love for humanity, it has based itself far more on hatred and violence than on the virtues that make one human. War is the negation of truth and humanity. War may be unavoidable sometimes, but its progeny are terrible to contemplate. Not mere killing, for man must die, but the deliberate and persistent propagation of hatred and falsehood, which gradually become the normal habits of the people. It is dangerous and harmful to be guided in our life’s course by hatreds and aversions, for they are wasteful of energy and limit and twist the mind and prevent it from perceiving truth.

 

Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit. It is never a narrowing of the mind or a restriction of the human spirit or the country’s spirit.

 

Where freedom is menaced or justice threatened or where aggression takes place, we cannot be and shall not be neutral.

 

Most of us seldom take the trouble to think. It is a troublesome and fatiguing process and often leads to uncomfortable conclusions. But crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think.

― Jawaharlal Nehru

 

Every now and then a clear harmonic cry gave new suggestions of a tune that would someday be the only tune in the world and would raise men’s souls to joy.

― Jack Kerouac in On The Road

 

Every painful event contains in itself a seed of growth and liberation. In the light of this truth return to your life now and take a look at one or another of the events that you are not grateful for, and see if you can discover the potential for growth that they contain which you were unaware of and therefore failed to benefit from. Now think of some recent event that caused you pain, that produced negative feelings in you. Whoever or whatever caused those feelings was your teacher, because they revealed so much to you about yourself that you probably did not know. And they offered you an invitation and a challenge to self-understanding, self-discovery, and therefore to growth and life and freedom.

— Anthony de Mello

 

In the Confucian tradition is a simple formula that appeals to me deeply: ‘If there is righteousness in the heart, there will be beauty in the character. If there is beauty in the character, there will be harmony in the home. If there is harmony in the home, there will be order in the nation. If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.’ I urge everyone to reflect deeply on these words, as simple as they are profound.

— Eknath Easwaran

 

The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost.

— William Faulkner

 

The present is always invisible because it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone but the artist, the man of integral awareness, is alive in an earlier day.

— Marshall McLuhan

 

And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.

— Jean Cocteau

 

I was always hungry for love. Just once, I wanted to know what it was like to get my fill of it — to be fed so much love I couldn’t take any more. Just once.

—

Haruki Murakami

 

I am convinced that most people do not grow up … our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.

— Maya Angelou

 

Breathe. It’s okay. You’re going to be okay. Just breathe. Breathe, and remind yourself of all the times in the past you felt this scared. All of the times you felt this anxious and this overwhelmed. All of the times you felt this level of pain. And remind yourself how each time, you made it through. Life has thrown so much at you, and despite how difficult things have been, you’ve survived. Breathe and trust that you can survive this too. Trust that this struggle is part of the process. And trust that as long as you don’t give up and keep pushing forward, no matter how hopeless things seem, you will make it.

— Daniell Koepke

 

But when I know that the glass is already broken, every minute with it is precious.

— Ajahn Chah

 

Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

― Oscar Wilde

 

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

― Cassandra Clare

 

It is only necessary to destroy in oneself the roots of those motives which determine a man’s course, in order to enjoy the omnipotence and immunity of a god.

― Aleister Crowley

 

You know, when real trouble comes your humanity is awakened. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.

― Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey

 

We live in an age where we feel guilt whenever we have to cut someone off but the reality is that some relationships do need to die, some people do need to be unfollowed and defriended. We aren’t meant to be this tethered to the people in our past. The Internet mandates that we don’t burn bridges and keep everyone around like relics but those expectations are unrealistic and unhealthy. Simply put, we don’t need to know what everyone else is up to. We’re allowed to be choosy about who we surround ourselves with online and in real life, even if it might hurt people’s feelings.

― Ryan O’Connell

 

Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.

― Dalai Lama XIV

 

I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met.

― John Green

 

Religion has convinced people that there’s an invisible man … living in the sky. Who watches everything you do every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a list of ten specific things he doesn’t want you to do. And if you do any of these things, he will send you to a special place, of burning and fire and smoke and torture and anguish for you to live forever, and suffer, and suffer, and burn, and scream, until the end of time. But he loves you. He loves you. He loves you and he needs money.

― George Carlin

 

If you are going through hell, keep going.

― Winston Churchill

 

The Divine in us can little by little gain authority if we give it a chance.

 

The simplest way to give it a chance is to subside those things which destroy its chance, which frustrate its purpose, and which lend themselves to an infinite delay.

 

By small steps we reach a point where we come to the gate of the the shut place of the king, as it was called in alchemy.

 

When we open the door we go not into a strange place but we stand in the presence of the altar of our own soul.

― Manly P Hall, Lecture #271 – The Third Eye in the Soul

 

There’s a lot of things wrong with this country, but one of the few things still right with it is that a man can steer clear of the organized bullshit if he really wants to. It’s a goddamned luxury, and if I were you, I’d take advantage of it while you can.

― Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

 

To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.

― Michel de Montaigne

 

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

― Leo Tolstoy

 

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

― Mark Twain

 

When I am among the trees,

especially the willows and the honey locust,

equally the beech, the oaks, and the pines,

they give off such hints of gladness.

 

I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,

in which I have goodness, and discernment,

and never hurry through the world

but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves

and call out, Stay awhile.

 

The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, It’s simple,

they say, and you, too, have come

into the world to do this, to go easy,

to be filled with light, and to shine.

― Mary Oliver

 

When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

― Arthur Conan Doyle

 

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

― Ursula K. Le Guin

 

If the mind is happy, not only the body but the whole world will be happy. So one must find out the way of becoming happy oneself. One cannot do this except by finding out about oneself by Self-enquiry. To think of reforming the world without doing that is like thinking of covering the whole world with leather to avoid the pain caused by walking on stones and thorns when the much simpler method of wearing leather shoes is available. When by holding an umbrella over your head you can avoid the sun, will it be possible to cover the face of the whole earth by tying a cloth over it to avoid the sun?

 

If a person realises his position and stays in his own self, things that are to happen will happen. Things that are not to happen will not happen. The shakti that is in the world, is only one. All these troubles arise if we think that we are separate from that shakti.

― Ramana Maharshi

 

This day shall be the best day of my life. Today I will start with a new determination to dedicate my devotion forever at the feet of omnipresence.

― Paramahansa Yogananda

 

I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place.

― Anne Tyler

 

You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

― Oscar Wilde

 

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.

― Maya Angelou

 

Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.

― Charles Bukowski

 

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

― Mortimer J. Adler

 

The test of a writer is whether you want to read him again years after he should by the rules be dated.

― Raymond Chandler

 

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

― Robert Louis Stevenson

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

― Jane Austen

 

I once read a good aphorism from Buckminster Fuller: ‘We are not nouns,’ he says, pointedly; ‘we are verbs.’ People who are content with rigid images of others are thinking of themselves and others as nouns, as things. Those who keep trying to get closer to others, to understand and appreciate them more all the time, are verbs: active, creative, dynamic, able to change themselves and to make changes in the world around them.

― Eknath Easwaran, from Conquest of Mind

 

If we have a good motivation then

whatever we do with our body and

speech will reflect that. It will

change the way we lead our lives,

and benefit everyone and everything

to which we are connected.

― 17th Karmapa

 

Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.

― Mahatma Gandhi

 

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

― Sylvia Plath

 

You know, one of the tragedies of real life is that there is no background music.

― Annie Proulx

 

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

― Oscar Wilde

 

I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love.

 

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

― Anais Nin

 

A million salutations at Thy petaled feet, O Lotus of Light! I pour my heart at Thy feet. I pour all my soul at Thy feet. I pour all the fragrant musk of my love at Thy feet of omnipresence.

― Paramahansa Yogananda

 

If you obey all of the rules, you miss all of the fun.

― Katharine Hepburn

 

Here’s what I think, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, said May Kasahara. Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me, and it shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really. So I get worked up sometimes, and I do some crazy things.

— Haruki Murakami – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

 

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple. ― Jack Kerouac

 

I am the owner of my actions (kamma), inheritor of my actions, born of my actions, created by my actions, and have my own actions as my judge! Whatever I do, good or evil, I will feel the resulting effects of that …

— The Buddha

 

I do have one great hope. It is that with the disappearance of Marxism, we may succeed in eliminating the pressure of ideologies as the centre of politics. Marxism needed an anti-Marxist ideology, so what you had was the clash between two ideologies which were both in a sense completely mad. There was nothing real behind them – only wrong problems. What I hope from the open society is that we will re-establish a list of priorities of the things which have to be done in society.

— Karl Popper, interviewed by Giancarlo Bosetti, in The Lesson of this Century

 

Morality can muddle mystical understanding and virtue is only necessary in so far as it favours success. All wisdom must be encompassed in order to achieve enlightenment.

— Aleister Crowley

 

No medicine cures what happiness cannot.

― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

 

If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.

― Sylvia Plath

 

Friendship is the hardest thing in the world to explain. It’s not something you learn in school. But if you haven’t learned the meaning of friendship, you really haven’t learned anything.

― Muhammad Ali

 

Over and over again I sail towards joy, which is never in the room with me, but always near me, across the way, like those rooms full of gayety one sees from the street, or the gayety in the street one sees from a window. Will I ever reach joy? It hides behind the turning merry-go-round of the traveling circus. As soon as I approach it, it is no longer joy. Joy is a foam, an illumination. I am poorer and hungrier for the want of it. When I am in the dance, joy is outside in the elusive garden. When I am in the garden, I hear it exploding from the house. When I am traveling, joy settles like an aurora borealis over the land I leave. When I stand on the shore I see it bloom on the flag of a departing ship. What joy? Have I not possessed it? I want the joy of simple colors, street organs, ribbons, flags, not a joy that takes my breath away and throws me into space alone where no one else can breathe with me, not the joy that comes from a lonely drunkenness. There are so many joys, but I have only known the ones that come like a miracle, touching everything with light.

― Anais Nin

 

If my life is going to mean anything, I have to live it myself.

― Rick Riordan

 

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.

― Oscar Wilde

 

If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.

― Emily Brontë

 

Whatever I do, I do with the greatest love that I have in me. Try this, and you will see that you do not become fatigued at all. Love is one of the greatest stimulants to the will. Under the influence of love the will can do almost anything.

― Paramahansa Yogananda

 

Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.

― Stephanie Klein

 

Dionysus

 

I bring ye wine from above,

From the vats of the storied sun;

For every one of your love,

And life for everyone.

Ye shall dance on hill and level;

Ye shall sing in hollow and height

In the festal mystical revel,

The rapturous Bacchanal rite!

The rocks and trees are yours,

And the waters under the hill,

By the might of that which endures,

The holy heaven of will!

I kindle a flame like a torrent

To rush from star to star;

Your hair as a comet’s horrent,

Ye shall see things as they are!

I lift the mask of matter;

I open the heart of man;

For I am of force to shatter

The cast that hideth -Pan!

Your loves shall lap up slaughter,

And dabbled with roses of blood

Each desperate darling daughter

Shall swim in the fervid flood.

I bring ye laughter and tears,

The kisses that foam and bleed,

The joys of a million years,

The flowers that bear no seed.

My life is bitter and sterile,

Its flame is a wandering star.

Ye shall pass in pleasure and peril

Across the mystic bar

That is set for wrath and weeping

Against the children of earth;

But ye in singing and sleeping

Shall pass in measure and mirth!

I lift my wand and wave you

Through hill to hill of delight :

My rosy rivers lave you

In innermost lustral light..

I lead you, lord of the maze,

In the darkness free of the sun;

In spite of the spite that is day’s

We are wed, we are wild, we are one.

 

At Shigar Baltistan.

― Aleister Crowley

 

We’re in a world now where it’s not enough to be smart. You have to be curious.

― Barry Diller

 

Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before. ― Steven Wright

 

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

― Anaïs Nin

 

I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I’ve bought a big bat. I’m all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!

― Dr. Seuss

 

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. This every sister of the Bene Gesserit knows. — Frank Herbert in Dune

 

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. — Henry David Thoreau

 

It seems to me that any sensible person must see that violence does not change the world and if it does, then only temporarily. — Martin Scorsese

 

It’s a feature of our age that if you write a work of fiction, everyone assumes that the people and events in it are disguised biography — but if you write your biography, it’s equally assumed you’re lying your head off. — Margaret Atwood

 

Whatever the scientists may come up with, writers and artists will continue to portray altered mental states, simply because few aspects of our nature fascinate people so much. The so-called mad person will always represent a possible future for every member of the audience — who knows when such a malady may strike? — Margaret Atwood

 

War is what happens when language fails. — Margaret Atwood

 

A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately. — Margaret Atwood

 

Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish. They remain immortal, immaterial and everywhere, like all Divine things. Ideas are a golden, savage landscape that we wander unaware, without a map. Be careful: in the last analysis, reality may be exactly what we think it is.

 

Life isn’t divided into genres. It’s a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel … with a bit of pornography if you’re lucky.

 

It doesn’t even matter if we ever fire these missiles or not. They are having their effect upon us because there is a generation growing up now who cannot see past the final exclamation mark of a mushroom cloud. They are a generation who can see no moral values that do not end in a crackling crater somewhere. I’m not saying that nuclear bombs are at the root of all of it, but I think it is very, very naïve to assume that you can expose the entire population of the world to the threat of being turned to cinders without them starting to act, perhaps, a little oddly.

 

I believe in some sort of strange fashion that the presence of the atom bomb might almost be forcing a level of human development that wouldn’t have occurred without the presence of the atom bomb. Maybe this degree of terror will force changes in human attitudes that could not have occurred without the presence of these awful, destructive things. Perhaps we are faced with a race between the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse in one line and the 7th Calvary in the other. We have not got an awful lot of mid ground between Utopia and Apocalypse, and if somehow our children ever see the day in which it is announced that we do not have these weapons any more, and that we can no longer destroy ourselves and that we’ve got to do something else to do with our time than they will have the right to throw up their arms, let down their streamers and let forth a resounding cheer.

– On the issue of nuclear weapons, in England Their England : Monsters, Maniacs and Moore (1987)

 

There are people. There are stories. The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse is often closer to the truth.

— Alan Moore

 

So… all of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will — where do you want to start?

— Steven Moffat

 

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.

― Douglas Adams

 

The danger is not in possessing things, but in being possessed by things.

 

It is not that the person loses, but the fact that he is part of his own loss and in losing, loses himself.

 

So, it is not the fact of renunciation that solves the problem.

 

It is the ability to accept or release with equal gentleness of spirit.

 

Very often it is easy to hold on and difficult to let go.

 

In this case, the two must be perfectly balanced.

 

—Excerpted from Manly P Hall Lecture #114 – Does the Universal Plan for Living Require Personal Suffering? Is Growth Possible Without Pain?

 

We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

– Bukowski

 

To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose is the next best.

– William Makepeace Thackeray

 

Never ignore a person who loves you, cares for you, and misses you. Because one day, you might wake up from your sleep and realize that you lost the moon while counting the stars.

— Nico Lang

 

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

 

Sometimes we say that we met people at the wrong time. But maybe we meet them when we are the wrong person, when we have not yet met and fallen in love with ourselves. We are only half of a thing—even if we can imagine that there is a better version of us out there—and we are hoping that someone else will fill in the missing parts so that we don’t have to.

― Chelsea Fagan

 

For what it’s worth: it’s never too late to be whoever you want to be. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you find you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start over again.

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.

— Stephen King

 

Know the personal,

yet keep to the impersonal:

accept the world as it is.

If you accept the world,

the Tao will be luminous inside you

and you will return to your primal self.

 

The world is formed from the void,

like utensils from a block of wood.

The Master knows the utensils,

yet keeps to the the block:

thus she can use all things.

— Lao Tzu

 

You are a Buddha, and so is everyone else. I didn’t make that up. It was the Buddha himself who said so. He said that all beings had the potential to become awakened. To practice walking meditation is to practice living in mindfulness. Mindfulness and enlightenment are one. Enlightenment leads to mindfulness and mindfulness leads to enlightenment.

— Thich Nhat Hanh

 

If we are demoralized, sad and only complain, we’ll not solve our problems. If we only pray for a solution, we’ll not solve our problems. We need to face them, to deal with them without violence, but with confidence – and never give up. If you adopt a non-violent approach, but are also hesitant within, you’ll not succeed. You have to have confidence and keep up your efforts – in other words, never give up.

— Dalai Lama

 

There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.

― Vincent van Gogh

 

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

― Mark Twain

 

The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist…destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

– Thomas Merton

 

A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.

— Leo Tolstoy

 

Sadness gives depth. Happiness gives height. Sadness gives roots. Happiness gives branches. Happiness is like a tree going into the sky, and sadness is like the roots going down into the womb of the earth. Both are needed, and the higher a tree goes, the deeper it goes, simultaneously. The bigger the tree, the bigger will be its roots. In fact, it is always in proportion. That’s its balance.

― Osho

 

The most important knowledge is that which guides the way you lead your life.

— Leo Tolstoy

 

Expose yourself to aloneness.

When a person is left alone, he starts thinking of higher reality – about death, life, soul, God and the mystery of all.

— Swami Chinmayananda

 

He drew a circle that shut me out —

 

Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.

 

But Love and I had the wit to win:

 

We drew a circle that took him in!

 

— Edwin Markham

 

Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.

— Chuck Close

 

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

 

—Victor Frankl

 

I have to create a circle of reading for myself: Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Lao-Tzu, Buddha, Pascal, The New Testament. This is also necessary for all people.

— Leo Tolstoy

 

The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.

 

If all things are in common among friends, the most precious is Wisdom…

 

Anything we take in the Universe, because it has in itself that which is All in All, includes in its own way, the entire soul of the world, which is entirely in any part of it.

 

Everything that consists in generation, decay, alteration and change is not an entity, but a condition and circumstance of entity and being…

 

This whole which is visible in different ways in bodies, as far as formation, constitution, appearance, colors and other properties and common qualities, is none other than the diverse face of the same substance…

 

What you receive from others is a testimony to their virtue; but all that you do for others is the sign and clear indication of your own.

 

That which others saw from afar, I leave far behind me.

 

Divinity reveals herself in all things… everything has Divinity latent within itself.

 

The fools of the world have been those who have established religions, ceremonies, laws, faith, rule of life…

 

The infinity of All ever bringing forth anew, and even as infinite space is around us, so is infinite potentiality, capacity, reception, malleability, matter.

 

Eternity maintaineth her substance throughout time, immensity throughout space, universal form throughout motion.

 

The single spirit doth simultaneously temper the whole together; this is the single soul of all things; all are filled with God.

– Giordano Bruno

 

This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say. I don’t plan it. When I’m outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

 

Love is the ark appointed for the righteous, Which annuls the danger and provides a way of escape.

 

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.

 

I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

 

Everyone has been made for some particular work, and the desire for that work has been put in every heart.

 

Come even though you have broken your vows a thousand times, Come, and come yet again. Ours is not a caravan of despair.

 

I want a heart which is split, part by part, because of the pain of separation from God, so that I might explain my longing and complaint to it.

 

You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?

 

God turns you from one feeling to another and teaches by means of opposites, so that you will have two wings to fly, not one.

 

The lion who breaks the enemy’s ranks is a minor hero compared to the lion who overcomes himself.

 

Whoever gives reverence receives reverence.

 

If you wish to shine like day, burn up the night of self-existence. Dissolve in the Being who is everything.

 

What is the body? That shadow of a shadow of your love, that somehow contains the entire universe.

 

There is a community of the spirit Join it, and feel the delight of walking in the noisy street, and being the noise.

 

There is no reality but God, says the completely surrendered sheik, who is an ocean for all beings.

 

I can’t stop pointing to the beauty. Every moment and place says, Put this design in your carpet!

 

Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being.

 

Every object and being in the universe is a jar overflowing with wisdom and beauty, a drop of the Tigris that cannot be contained by any skin.

 

Christ is the population of the world, and every object as well.

 

The miracle of Jesus is himself, not what he said or did about the future.

 

Good and bad are mixed. If you don’t have both,you don’t belong with us.

 

Learn from Ali how to fight without your ego participating.

 

God’s lion did nothing that didn’t originate from his deep center.

 

This that we are now … The human body and the universe grew from this, not this from the universe and the human body.

 

Do not grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.

 

Observe the wonders as they occur around you. Don’t claim them. Feel the artistry moving through, and be silent.

 

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.

 

Are you fleeing from Love because of a single humiliation? What do you know of Love except the name? Love has a hundred forms of pride and disdain, and is gained by a hundred means of persuasion.

 

Come, seek, for search is the foundation of fortune: every success depends upon focusing the heart.

 

That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, He said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.

 

To Love is to reach God.

 

Love rests on no foundation. It is an endless ocean, with no beginning or end.

 

My head is bursting with the joy of the unknown.

 

This is a gathering of Lovers. In this gathering there is no high, no low, no smart, no ignorant, no special assembly, no grand discourse, no proper schooling required…

 

Love said to me, there is nothing that is not me. Be silent.

 

Even if you lose yourself in wrath for a hundred thousand years, at the end you will discover, it is me, who is the culmination of your dreams.

 

Didn’t I tell you?They will accuse you of all the wrongdoings, they will call you ugly names, they will make you forget it is me, who is the source of your happiness.

 

The branch might seem like the fruit’s origin: In fact, the branch exists because of the fruit.

— Rumi

 

No other sense can make up for your missing sense of taking part. Even sight heightened to become all-seeing will do you no good without a sense of taking part.

 

Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists…

 

Whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

 

I’m sorry that my voice was hard. Look down on yourselves from the stars, I cried, look down on yourselves from the stars…

 

We, my lord, are your dream, which finds you innocent for now.

 

Everything the dead predicted has turned out completely different. Or a little bit different — which is to say, completely different.

 

My apologies to great questions for small answers.

 

How can we talk of order overall when the very placement of the stars leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?

 

Secret codes resound. Doubts and intentions come to light…

 

We call it a grain of sand but it calls itself neither grain nor sand…

 

The view doesn’t view itself. It exists in this world colorless, shapeless, soundless, odorless, and painless.

 

There’s no life that couldn’t be immortal if only for a moment…

 

Nothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan…

 

For the sake of research, the big picture and definitive conclusions, one would have to transcend time, in which everything scurries and whirls.

 

I’d have to be really quick to describe clouds — a split second’s enough for them to start being something else.

— Wislawa Szymborska

 

Knowing others is intelligence;

knowing yourself is true wisdom.

Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

 

There is a thing inherent and natural,

Which existed before heaven and earth.

Motionless and fathomless,

It stands alone and never changes;

It pervades everywhere and never becomes exhausted.

It may be regarded as the Mother of the Universe.

I do not know its name. If I am forced to give it a name, I call it Tao, and I name it as supreme.

 

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao;

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.

The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.

Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.

These two spring from the same source but differ in name;

this appears as darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gate to all mystery.

 

The Tao is called the Great Mother:

empty yet inexhaustible,

it gives birth to infinite worlds.

 

The Tao is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

filled with infinite possibilities.

 

A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people, They fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, We did this ourselves.

 

Since before time and space were,

the Tao is.

It is beyond is and is not.

How do I know this is true?

I look inside myself and see.

 

A good traveler has no fixed plans

and is not intent upon arriving.

A good artist lets his intuition

lead him wherever it wants.

 

Without the laughter, there would be no Tao.

 

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try, the world is beyond the winning.

 

A journey of a thousand li starts with a single step.

 

The mark of a moderate man

is freedom from his own ideas.

Tolerant like the sky,

all-pervading like sunlight,

firm like a mountain,

supple like a tree in the wind,

he has no destination in view

and makes use of anything

life happens to bring his way.

 

Wise men don’t need to prove their point;

men who need to prove their point aren’t wise.

The Master has no possessions.

The more he does for others, the happier he is.

The more he gives to others, the wealthier he is.

The Tao nourishes by not forcing.

By not dominating, the Master leads.

— Laozi

 

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life, your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

Much of your pain is self-chosen.

It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:

For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,

And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears.

— Kahlil Gibran

 

In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel nothing can befall me in life – no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes) which Nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

There is no enlightenment outside of daily life.

— Thich Nhat Hanh

 

The true hero is one who conquers his own anger and hatred.

— Dalai Lama

 

The wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water molds itself to the pitcher.

— Buddhist Proverb

 

However much fighting there is in the world, however much darkness there is, we must be able to serve as small lamps in that darkness.

— 17th Karmapa

 

A fine quotation is a diamond in the hand of a man of wit and a pebble in the hand of a fool. — Joseph Roux

 

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything …

— George Bernard Shaw

 

Truly, those who are good people are thankful and grateful.

— The Buddha

 

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes. In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And, the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

 

Only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly. … Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.

 

A revolution is coming — a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough — But a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.

— Robert F. Kennedy

 

My life seemed to be a series of events and accidents. Yet when I look back I see a pattern.

 

An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something. It’s an arrogance that some enjoy, and others do not. Now I reach beyond arrogance when I proclaim that fractals had been pictured forever but their true role remained unrecognized and waited for me to be uncovered.

 

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.

— Benoît Mandelbrot

 

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

— Robert F. Kennedy

 

Fame is something which must be won; honor is something which must not be lost.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

 

I think what you ought to do is start by thinking about the simplest things and go from there. For example, you could stand on a street corner somewhere day after day and look at the people who come by there. You’re not in any hurry to decide anything. It may be tough, but sometimes you’ve got to just stop and take time. You ought to train yourself to look at things with your own eyes until something comes clear. And don’t be afraid of putting some time into it. Spending plenty of time on something can be the most sophisticated form of revenge.

— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

 

Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.

― Maya Angelou

 

I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you’re doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can’t play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don’t lead anywhere. One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment

— Joseph Campbell, A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

 

If you are still following your likes

and dislikes,

you have not even begun to practise Dhamma.

— Ajahn Chah

 

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

― Steve Jobs

 

The man of taste will read only what is good; but the statesman will permit both bad and good.

— Voltaire

 

A mind that is fast is sick. A mind that is slow is sound. A mind that is still is divine.

— Meher Baba, quoted by Eknath Easwaran in Words to Live By

 

It’s being here now that’s important. There’s no past and there’s no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.

― George Harrison

 

The one who practices

loving-kindness sleeps and

wakes in comfort and has no

bad dreams; he is dear to both

humans and creatures; no

danger harms him. His mind

can be quickly concentrated,

his expression is happy and

serene. He dies without any

confusion of mind. Loving-

kindness protects him.

— The Buddha

 

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.

― Voltaire

 

Wherever a person goes, his deeds, like a shadow, will follow.

— The Buddha

 

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

― Apple Inc.

 

How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world.

― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

 

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

— Steve Jobs

 

People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.

 

— Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

 

Without sattva you can never reach the Supreme.

Wherever you are, in whatever station, from there you have to reach sattva in varying degrees because tamas will be reduced only when the mind’s agitations, vikshepas are quietened. As agitations quieten, sattva increases slowly.

— Swami Chinmayananda

 

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

— John F. Kennedy

 

Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.

― Albert Einstein

 

It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life.

― Terry Pratchett

 

Hard to hold down,

nimble,

alighting wherever it likes:

the mind.

The mind well-tamed,

brings ease.

So hard to see,

so very, very subtle,

alighting wherever it likes:

the mind.

The wise should guard it.

The mind protected brings ease.

— Dhammapada, Buddha

 

Existence precedes and rules essence.

— Sartre

 

When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That’s the message he is sending.

— Thích Nhất Hạnh

 

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

— Marcus Aurelius

 

You are the universe experiencing itself.

— Alan Watts

 

Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in a long-shot.

— Charlie Chaplin

 

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.

— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

 

Before you talk, listen.

Before you react, think.

Before you spend, earn.

Before you criticize, wait.

Before you pray, forgive.

Before you quit, try.

― Ernest Hemingway

 

Innocence has a single voice that can only say over and over again, I didn’t do it. Guilt has a thousand voices, all of them lies.

― Leonard Peltier, Prison Writings

 

I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.

― Stanley Kubrick

 

Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life…You give them a piece of you. They didn’t ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like ‘maybe we should be just friends’ turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.

― Neil Gaiman

 

If you have no critics you’ll likely have no success.

—Malcolm X

 

Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.

— John F. Kennedy

 

Be the silent watcher of your thoughts and behavior. You are beneath the thinker. You are the stillness beneath the mental noise. You are the love and joy beneath the pain.

— Eckhart Tolle

 

If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on.

— Kant

 

I’d rather be a climbing ape than a falling angel.

— Terry Pratchett

 

O may I join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in minds made better by their presence; live in pulses stirred to generosity, in deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn for miserable aims that end with self, in thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, and with their mild persistence urge men’s search to vaster issues.

— George Eliot

 

The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

― Oscar Wilde

 

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

— George Eliot

 

This is life to come, —

Which martyred men have made more glorious

For us who strive to follow. May I reach

That purest heaven, — be to other souls

The cup of strength in some great agony,

Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,

Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,

Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,

And in diffusion ever more intense!

So shall I join the choir invisible

Whose music is the gladness of the world.

 

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

 

It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.

— George Eliot

 

It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.

— André Gide

 

subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.

— George Eliot

 

It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.

— André Gide

 

It should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America which has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to all concerned the opportunities of our system and society.

— John F. Kennedy

 

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

 

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

 

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

— George Eliot

 

The unexamined life is not worth living.

― Socrates

 

Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.

― Joseph Campbell

 

I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner.

― Aleister Crowley

 

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

― Carl Sagan

 

Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,

Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.

― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

 

Where there is love there is life.

— Mahatma Gandhi

 

Some people care too much. I think it’s called love.

― A.A. Milne

 

Resist much, obey little.

― Walt Whitman

 

A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

— Maya Angelou

 

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

― Frank Herbert

 

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

― John F. Kennedy

 

It hurts to let go. Sometimes it seems the harder you try to hold on to something or someone the more it wants to get away. You feel like some kind of criminal for having felt, for having wanted. For having wanted to be wanted. It confuses you, because you think that your feelings were wrong and it makes you feel so small because it’s so hard to keep it inside when you let it out and it doesn’t come back. You’re left so alone that you can’t explain. Damn, there’s nothing like that, is there? I’ve been there and you have too. You’re nodding your head.

― Henry Rollins

 

I believe that even ‘returning-to-nature’ and anti pollution activities, no matter how commendable, are not moving toward a genuine solution if they are carried out solely in reaction to the overdevelopment of the present age.

― Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution

 

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

— Václav Havel

 

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

 

Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play on the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?

— John Milton in Areopagitica

 

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

― Eleanor Roosevelt

 

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

― Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.

― Albert Camus

 

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

― Albert Einstein

 

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

― Haruki Murakami

 

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

― Albert Einstein

 

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

― Cicero

 

A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.

— Mahatma Gandhi

 

What

Do Sad people have in

Common?

It seems

They have all built a shrine

To the past

And often go there

And do a strange wail and

Worship.

What is the beginning of

Happiness?

It is to stop being

So religious

Like That.

— Hafiz

 

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

— Marcus Aurelius

 

Hatred which is completely vanquished by love passes into love: and love is thereupon greater than if hatred had not preceded it.

 

The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others. No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty.

 

Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner.

 

As men’s habits of mind differ, so that some more readily embrace one form of faith, some another, for what moves one to pray may move another to scoff, I conclude … that everyone should be free to choose for himself the foundations of his creed, and that faith should be judged only by its fruits; each would then obey God freely with his whole heart, while nothing would be publicly honoured save justice and charity.

 

Schisms do not originate in a love of truth, which is a source of courtesy and gentleness, but rather in an inordinate desire for supremacy. From all these considerations it is clearer than the sun at noonday, that the true schismatics are those who condemn other men’s writings, and seditiously stir up the quarrelsome masses against their authors, rather than those authors themselves, who generally write only for the learned, and appeal solely to reason. In fact, the real disturbers of the peace are those who, in a free state, seek to curtail the liberty of judgment which they are unable to tyrannize over.

 

I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate human actions, but to understand them.

— Baruch Spinoza

 

You exist in time, but you belong to eternity. You are a penetration of eternity into the world of time. You are deathless, living in a body of death. Your consciousness knows no death, no birth, it is only your body that is born and dies, but you are not aware of your consciousness. You are not conscious of your consciousness, and that is the whole art of meditation; becoming conscious of consciousness itself.

— Osho

 

Those who know do not talk.

Those who talk do not know.

 

Keep your mouth closed.

Guard your senses.

Temper your sharpness.

Simplify your problems.

Mask your brightness.

Be at one with the dust of the earth.

This is primal union.

 

He who has achieved this state

Is unconcerned with friends and enemies,

With good and harm, with honour and disgrace.

This therefore is the highest state of man.

— Lao Tzu

 

The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.

— Marcus Aurelius

 

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

― Rudyard Kipling

 

Everything in the world is purchased by labor.

— David Hume

 

He’s not a friend,

who’s always wary,

suspecting a split,

focusing just on your weakness.

But him on whom you can depend,

like a child on its parent’s breast,

that’s a true friend,

whom others can’t split from you.- Hiri Sutta

— Buddha

 

The surest defense against evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even eccentricity. Evil is a sucker for solidarity. It always goes for big numbers, for confident granite, for ideological purity, for drilled armies and balance sheets.

— Joseph Brodsky

 

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

— Carl Jung

 

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

 

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

— Arthur C. Clarke

 

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

 

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

— Frank Herbert, Dune Books

 

God has no religion.

― Mahatma Gandhi

 

Screenplay is the toughest form of writing for me, because you need to be in present tense. You need to be describing things as they occur.

— Guillermo del Torro

 

Never memorize what you can look up in books.

— Albert Einstein

 

Pure Consciousness, which is the Heart, includes all, and nothing is outside or apart from it. That is the ultimate Truth.

— Sri Ramana Maharshi

 

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

 

Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.

— Leo Tolstoy

 

True Silence is really endless speech.

— Ramana Maharshi

 

What Do Sad people have in Common? It seems They have all built a shrine … To the past And often go there And do a strange wail and Worship. What is the beginning of Happiness? It is to stop being So religious Like That.

— Hafiz

 

People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that’s bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are disturbing. People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they’re afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they’re wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It’s all in how you carry it. That’s what matters. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain.

― Jim Morrison

 

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

— William Blake

 

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

― Herman Melville

 

Every night, and every morn,

Some to misery are born.

Every morn, and every night,

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to endless night.

— William Blake

 

When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a Communist.

— Dom Helder Camara

 

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

— John Muir

 

The three states come and go, but you are always there. It is like a cinema. The screen is always there but several types of pictures appear on the screen and then disappear. Nothing sticks to the screen, it remains a screen. Similarly, you remain your own Self in all the three states. If you know that, the three states will not trouble you, just as the pictures which appear on the screen do not stick to it. On the screen, you sometimes see a huge ocean with endless waves; that disappears. Another time, you see fire spreading all around; that too disappears. The screen is there on both occasions. Did the screen get wet with the water or did it get burned by the fire? Nothing affected the screen. In the same way, the things that happen during the wakeful, dream and sleep states do not affect you at all; you remain your own Self.

— Ramana Maharshi

 

I never change, I simply become more myself.

― Joyce Carol Oates

 

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

― Mahatma Gandhi

 

I’ve never been lonely. I’ve been in a room — I’ve felt suicidal. I’ve been depressed. I’ve felt awful — awful beyond all — but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me…or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I’ve never been bothered with because I’ve always had this terrible itch for solitude. It’s being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I’ll quote Ibsen, The strongest men are the most alone. I’ve never thought, Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I’ll feel good. No, that won’t help. You know the typical crowd, Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there? Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I’ve never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn’t want to hide in factories. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have. Let’s drink more wine!

― Charles Bukowski

 

Truth in philosophy means that concept and external reality correspond.

— Hegel

 

He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

― Emily Brontë

 

Today, more than ever before, life must be characterized by a sense of Universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human, but also human to other forms of life.

— Dalai Lama

 

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.

― Jimi Hendrix

 

Act without expectation.

— Lao Tzu

 

All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.

― St. Francis of Assisi

 

A painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light.

― Leonardo da Vinci

 

The Present is the womb of the future.

A greater future happiness can be had only by investing in the present correctly.

Look after the present and the future will look after itself.

— Swami Chinmayananda

 

Call it by any name, God, Self, the Heart, or the Seat of Consciousness, it is all the same.

— Sri Ramana Maharshi

 

I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.

― Neil Gaiman

 

Presently we have to train our unconscious to function better. Then we can depend upon our instincts, that will be noble instincts. At this moment, our instincts are very impure.

When we have practiced for a long time, living the higher values of life and following the instructions of great masters or the Scriptures, that is when you have trained your unconscious.

Then when a situation comes, you can to an extent, depend on your inner voice.

— Swami Chinmayananda

 

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

— T. S. Eliot

 

Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision.

 

Listen to the voice of duty, of honor, of nature and of your endangered country. Let us form one body, one heart, and defend to the last warrior our country, our homes, our liberty, and the graves of our fathers.

— Tecumseh

 

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

— John F. Kennedy

 

Home is everything you can walk to.

― Jerry Spinelli

 

Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.

 

A sense of humour is the only divine quality of man.

― Arthur Schopenhauer

 

When we speak of man, we have a conception of humanity as a whole, and before applying scientific methods to the investigation of his movement we must accept this as a physical fact. But can anyone doubt today that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole?

 

For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of ensuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one. Metaphysical proofs are, however, not the only ones which we are able to bring forth in support of this idea. Science, too, recognizes this connectedness of separate individuals, though not quite in the same sense as it admits that the suns, planets, and moons of a constellation are one body, and there can be no doubt that it will be experimentally confirmed in times to come, when our means and methods for investigating psychical and other states and phenomena shall have been brought to great perfection. Still more: this one human being lives on and on. The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains. Therein lies the profound difference between the individual and the whole.

― Nikola Tesla

 

We all have the potential to show others love and affection, but as we progress in our materialistic world, these values tend to remain dormant. We can develop them on the basis of common sense, common experience and scientific findings. The response to the recent tragedy in the Philippines is an example of how such values are awakened; people helped simply because others are suffering and in need of support.

— Dalai Lama

 

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

― Confucius

 

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

― Rainer Maria Rilke

 

If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.

― Meister Eckhart

 

The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.

— Confucius

 

We have found that scientific laws pervade all of nature, that the same rules apply on Earth as in the skies, that we can find a resonance, a harmony, between the way we think and the way the world works…

 

Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don’t have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen…

 

History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power have destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again.

 

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

 

Shouldn’t we consider in every nation major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental restructuring of economic political social and religious institutions. We’ve reached a point where there can be no more special interests or special cases, nuclear arms threaten every person on the Earth. Fundamental changes in society are sometimes labelled impractical or contrary to human nature, as if nuclear war were practical or as if there’s only one human nature. But fundamental changes can clearly be made, we’re surrounded by them. In the last two centuries abject slavery which was with us for thousands of years has almost entirely been eliminated in a stirring worldwide revolution. Women, systematically mistreated for millennia are gradually gaining the political and economic power traditionally denied them and some wars of aggression have recently been stopped or curtailed because of a revulsion felt by the people in the aggressor nations. The old appeals to racial sexual religious chauvinism and to rabid nationalist fervor are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.

— Carl Sagan

 

Maybe, he thought, there aren’t any such things as good friends or bad friends—maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you’re hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they’re always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that’s what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.

― Stephen King

 

Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.

― Henry James

 

The bravest people are the ones who don’t mind looking like cowards.

― T.H. White

 

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

― George Orwell

 

What’s made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.

― Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey

 

Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting

still has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.

When something’s let go of, it circles; and though we are

rarely the center

of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous

curve.

― Rainer Maria Rilke

 

In the moment of crisis, the wise build bridges and the foolish build dams.

― Nigerian Proverb

 

Are the days of winter sunshine just as sad for you, too? When it is misty, in the evenings, and I am out walking by myself, it seems to me that the rain is falling through my heart and causing it to crumble into ruins.

― Gustave Flaubert

 

Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

― Richard P. Feynman

 

You are never too old to be what you might have been.

― George Eliot

 

We have to have a purpose greater than the endless struggle to satisfy personal desires.

― Eknath Easwaran

 

A novel is a commodity that fulfills a certain need; people need to buy daydreams like they need to buy ice cream or aspirin or gin. They even need to buy a pinch of intellectual catnip now and then to liven up their thoughts…

― John Dos Passos

 

Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it.

― Dalai Lama

 

Forgiveness is the remission of sins. For it is by this that what has been lost, and was found, is saved from being lost again.

― Saint Augustine

 

Though we live in the colony of time, we are ultimately responsible to the empire of eternity.

― Martin Luther King Jr.

 

If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.

― Meister Eckhart

 

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes.

— Arthur Schopenhauer

 

“There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in your heart.”

― Chandogya Upanishad