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To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one. -- Jack Kornfield, Seeking the Heart of Wisdom
... not appreciating the weirdness of life is a punishment of its own. --
Farewell we call to hearth and hall! Oh, one world at a time! -- Henry David Thoreau, when asked about afterlife.
When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced...
Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice
But if you ever come to a road where danger
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. --
Close your eyes. Listen closely.
Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself and yourself alone one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is: Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.
Must one choose between a refusal to live and an individualism which makes others suffer? ..... And can the individualist cut himself off to be free, yet live in the rarified air?
La vie humaine commence de l'autre c�t� du d�sespoir.
Life is purgatory at all times, & a swindle & a crime--yesterday it was hell.
All that is gold does not glitter,
Rien n'emp�che le bonheur comme le souvenir du bonheur. Existentialism has not eliminated heaven and hell; it has just internalized them. -- Unknown
How wonderful, O Lord, are the works of your hands, the sun and the stars, the valleys and the hills, the rivers and lakes all disclose your presence. The beasts of the field, the birds of the air bespeak your wondrous will. In your goodness you have made us able to hear the music of the world, a divine voice sings through all creations. Rejection is the greatest aphrodisiac -- Madonna
The difference between sex and death is that with death you can do it alone and no one is going to make fun of you.
The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, USSR, the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall all be. At any rate it ought to cut down travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster.
Time is not a linear flow, as we think it is, into past, present, and
future. Time is an indivisible whole, a great pool in which all events
are eternally embodied and still have their meaningful flash of
supernormal or extra-sensory perception, and glimpse of something
that happened long ago in our linear time. Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war. -- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III:2
There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for awhile. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.
Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing,
Lois de l'imitation; je les appelle: lois de la peur.
I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
God wrote His loveliest poem on the day
Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into the one or the other, according to his needs. In his right pocket are to be the words: "For my sake was the world created," and in his left: "I am dust and ashes."
A shared cigarette and a hidden knife, a too-small suit, probably borrowed from a brother who was expecting it back that evening, and a bloody betrayal. I listened to this tale and heard huge boulders moving somewhere, my centre of gravity shifted and I saw the breath of monsters gathering on the horizon. Terrible things could happen, even to ordinary people like me, and they were always unplanned.
The self-image is like a mirage; it promises us nourishment, but when a problem arises that demands the strength of a clear and self-confident mind, the self-image has nothing to offer; it fails to sustain us when we most need support. Because the self-image is based on how we wish we were, on what we fear we are, or how we would like the world to see us, it prevents us from seeing ourselves clearly. We fail to recognize both our true strengths and many of our faults.
There is the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. When the glamour [of one's marriage] wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. Someone whom they might indeed very profitably have married, if only - . Hence divorce, to provide the 'if only'. And of course they are as a rule quite right: they did make a mistake. Only a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgement concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married! Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the 'real soul-mate' is the one you are actually married to. You really do very little choosing: life and circumstances do most of it (though if there is a God these must be His instruments, or His appearances). It is notorious that in fact happy marriages are more common where the 'choosing' by the young persons is even more limited, by parental or family authority, as long as there is a social ethic of plain unromantic responsibility and conjugal fidelity. But even in countries where the romantic tradition has so far affected social arrangements as to make people believe that the choosing of a mate is solely the concern of the young, only the rarest good fortune brings together the man and woman who are really as it were 'destined' for one another, and capable of a very great and splendid love. The idea still dazzles us, catches us by the throat: poems and stories in multitudes have been written on the theme, more, probably, than the total of such loves in real life (yet the greatest of these tales do not tell of the happy marriage of such great lovers, but of their tragic separation; as if even in this sphere the truly great and splendid in this fallen world is more nearly achieved by 'failure' and suffering). In such great inevitable love, often love at first sight, we catch a vision, I suppose, of marriage as it should have been in an unfallen world. In this fallen world we have as our only guides, prudence, wisdom (rare in youth, too late in age), a clean heart, and fidelity of will..... -- J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter #43
We are so apt, in our engrossing egotism, to consider all those accessories which are drawn around us by prosperity, as pertaining and belonging to our own persons, that the discovery of our unimportance, when left to our own proper resources, becomes inexpressibly mortifying.
The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree, such a hare is madness the youth to skip o'er the meshes of good counsel the cripple.
Let's do something, while we have the chance! It's not every day that someone needs us. Not to say that one precisely needs us. Others could do the job just as well, if not better. The call that we just heard, it addresses all humanity. But in this place, at this moment, humanity: that's us, whether we like it or not. Let's profit by it, before it's too late.
... that of all the propensities which teach mankind to torment themselves, that of causeless fear is the most irritating, busy, painful, and pitiable. Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret. -- Ambrose Bierce
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Envier le bonheur d'autrui, c'est folie; on ne saurait pas s'en servir.
He didn't have to worry about jagged bottle-necks after all, or the microbes which might have been in the cheeseburgers from the Burger Ranch, for that matter. One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred-pound Coke machine, one need worry about nothing else.
It seems to me that the real cop-out is to say that the universe has meaning. Mystery is part of nature's style, that's all. It's the Infinite Goof. It's meaning that has no meaning. That paradox is the key to the meaning of meaning. To look for meaning - or lack of it - in things is a game played by beings of limited consciousness. Behind everything in life is a process that is beyond meaning. Not beyond understanding, mind you, but beyond meaning. The human doesn't see things as they are, but as he is. -- Racter
Aucun n'a su �tre malade. Ils vivent, ont l'air de vivre et de ne pas savoir qu'ils vivent. D'ailleurs, moi-m�me, depuis que je suis aupr�s d'eux, je ne vis plus.
Ce qui me s�parait, me distinguait des autres, importait; ce que personne d'autre que moi ni disait ni ne pouvait dire, c'�tait ce que j'avais � dire. You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. -- Albert Einstein
Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
There is the fear that we shan't prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man - fear that men won't understand us and we shall be cut off from them.
What is joy?
When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.
If the possibility of the spiritual development of all individuals is to be secured, a second kind of outward freedom is necessary. The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit in general requires still another kind of freedom, which may be characterised as inward freedom. It is this freedom of the spirit which consists in the interdependence of thought from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudices as well as from unphilosophical routinizing and habit in general. This inward freedom is an infrequent gift of nature and a worthy object for the individual.
The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself amoung profoundly religious men.
The world was made before the English language, and seemingly upon a different design.
He had seen a great deal about decking a ship and building bulwarks and finishing off the gunwales, but like an artist who rides a horse a hundred times, and never comprehends it until he tries to draw it, or like a novelist who has witnessed a human situation repeatedly but has not really understood it until forced to state in cold words what happened, he had lived in the heart of ships but had not seen them. Art is too serious to be taken seriously -- Ad Reinhardt, US artist
And it's true, is it not? -- incredible, but apparently true -- there are people who feel in life the ease, the self-assurance, the simple and essential affiliation with what is going on, that I used to feel as the center fielder for the Seabees? Because it wasn't, you see, that one was the best center fielder imaginable, only that one knew exactly, and down to the smallest particular, how a center fielder should conduct himself. And there are people like that walking the streets of the U.S. of A.? I ask you, why can't I be one! Why can't I exist now as I existed for the Seabees out there in center field! Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder -- and nothing more!
If I am I because I am I and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you. But if I am I because you are you, and you are you because I am I, then I am not I and you are not you.
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. Odd folk..... -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Americans All the world is a very narrow bridge. The most important thing is not to be afraid. -- Hebrew song A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. -- Edward de Bono
Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.
Two of the greatest gifts we can give our children are roots and wings.
There is clearly a lot of dirty bath water surrounding the reality of God. Holy wars. Inquisitions. Animal sacrifice. Human sacrifice. Superstition. Stultification. Dogmatism. Ignorance. Hypocrisy. Self-righteousness. Rigidity. Cruelty. Book-burning. Witch-burning. Inhibition. Fear. Conformity. Morbid guilt. Insanity. The list is almost endless. But is all this what God has done to humans or what humans have done to God? It is abundantly evident that belief in God is often destructively dogmatic. Is the problem, then, that humans tend to believe in God, or is the problem that humans tend to be dogmatic? Anyone who has known a died-in-the-wool atheist will know that such an individual can be as dogmatic about unbelief as any believer can be about belief. Is it belief in God we need to get rid of, or is it dogmatism?
...he came to the ultimate source of the river. It was a kind of meadow in which nothing happened: no cattle, no mysteriously gushing water, merely the slow accumulation of moisture from many unseen and unimportant sources, the gathering of dew, so to speak, the beginning, the unspectacular congregation of nothingness, the origin of purpose.
Si encore nos m�diocres cerveaux savaient bien embaumer les souvenirs! Mais ceux-ce se conservent mal; les plus d�licats se d�pouillent, les plus voluptueux pourrissent; les plus d�licieux sont les plus dangereux dans la suite. Ce dont on se repent �tait d�licieux d'abord.
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. He who knows not his own genius has none. -- William Blake
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have 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.
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful.
I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
...the world is before you; and it is most probable that as you enter it, so it will receive you. Trust in nothing but in Providence and your own efforts. Never separate the two, like the heathen waggoner. Constancy in love is a good thing, but it means nothing, and is nothing, without constancy in every kind of effort. If you had the abilities of all the great men, past and present, you could do nothing well without sincerely meaning it and setting about it. If you entertain the supposition that any real success, in great things or in small, ever was or could be, ever will or can be, wrested from Fortune by fits and starts, leave that wrong idea here...
What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness. Threat by Denise Levertov
You can live for years next door
There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.
A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules and foregiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!
Il faut laisser les autres avoir raison, puis que cela les console de n'avoir pas autre chose.
A silly man lies awake all night,
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself.
But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to.
That a man is successful who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much, who has gained the respect of the intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.
A ship, like a human being, moves best when it is slightly athwart the wind, when it has to keep its sails tight and attend its course. Ships, like men, do poorly when the wind is directly behind, pushing them sloppily on their way so that no care is required in steering or in the management of sails; the wind seems favorable, for it blows in the direction one is heading, but actually it is destructive because it induces a relaxation in tension and skill. What is needed is a wind slightly opposed to the ship, for then tension can be maintained, and juices can flow and ideas can germinate, for ships, like men, respond to challenge.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying.
If you want to make God laugh tell him about your future plans.
Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin and the bones in the flesh and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the goodness of God and enclosed. Yea, and more homely; for all these may wear and waste away, but the Goodness of God is ever whole.
Work like you don't need the money
Your children are not your children.
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.
I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm, Number of seconds that the average person can wait for an elevator before becoming agitated: 40 -- Otis Elevator Company, Farmington, CT (as reported by Editorial Humor Magazine, Issue 166, Vol. 8
Who is more foolish? The fool who jumps blindly, or the fool who waits to know everything?
For when you come to think of it, the only way to love a person is not, as the stereotyped Christian notion is, to coddle them and bring them soup when they are sick, but by listening to them and seeing and believing in the god, in the poet, in them. The world's best reformers are those who begin on themselves. -- Anonymous
My friends and I
We Americans suffer from a heavy inheritance of German academic ponderousness, acquired in the late 19th century. The English have an ancient distrust of the "over-clever," or "too clever by half," which the Irish and the Scottish do not share, which is one reason the Irish and Scots get on better with the French than the English and Americans.
The first time you say something, people look at you astonished, the second time it seems vaguely familiar and is taken seriously, eventually everybody agrees and forgets there was ever any disagreement. Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. -- William Blake.
Where there is doubt, let me sow faith...
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.
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.
stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone You gotta learn how to play golf in the rain. -- Joseph Cook
The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.
For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life - but there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. Seriousness is stupidity sent to college. -- P. J. O�Rourke (b. 1947), U.S. journalist
My candle burns at both ends;
After the first million, it doesn't matter. You can only eat three meals a day - I tried eating four and I got sick. You can't sleep in more than one bed at night. Maybe I have twenty suits, but I can only wear one at a time, and I can't use more than two shirts a day. Sweet water and light laughter! -- Elvish greeting (Forgotten Realms)
... I remembered the mad dog that had wandered into our communal yard some years ago, whose drunken walk and white-flecked muzzle had sent the mothers screaming for cover, clutching their protesting children to them. I managed to find an airhole in the folds of mama's trousers and had gazed on the object of all this terror, a mottled, scrappy mutt of a dog who seemed proud of his madness, freed by it, whose expression was one of unconcerned, off-the-planet bliss. I really envied him, or rather the effect he was having on the local harpies who, in normal circumstances, would arm-wrestle each other for a parking space. If what that dog had was madness, I wanted some of it. Even then, I felt like I spent most of life saying sorry.
Ambivalence is a bigger nuisance than schizophrenia. When you're schizoid each of your two personalities is blissfully ignorant of the other, but when you're ambivalent each half of you is painfully aware of the conflicting half, and if you aren't careful your whole life can turn into a taffy pull.
Doubt is a thief that makes us fear to tread where we might have won. How wrong Emily Dickinson was. Hope is not the thing with feathers. The thing with feathers turned out to be my nephew. We must take him to a specialist in Zurich. -- Woody Allen
For as rain forests are to the Earth's atmosphere...so are the Tibetan people to the human spirit in this time of its planetary ordeal..."
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
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