bdarcher.plus.com
Quotations
"If you are going through Hell - keep going"
"When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them."
The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.
I've always felt that a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the
number of conflicting points of view he can entertain simultaneously on the
same topic.
No matter how sophisticated you may be, a huge granite mountain cannot be
denied--it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from
the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent
disinclination to do so.
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no
account be allowed to do the job.
A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in
front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the
universe and move bits of it about.
Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity - distance is
incomprehensible and therefore meaningless.
On the planet Earth, Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent
than dolphins because he had achieved so much... the wheel, New York and so
on... conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than
Man for precisely the same reasons.
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up
where I intended to be.
It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'as pretty
as an airport' exist.
It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify
the hunter.
Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?
Answer: I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because
if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we
cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever.
Far away in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them,
but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow
where they lead.
Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the
bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win
when the match is even.
People of mediocre ability sometimes achieve outstanding success because
they don't know when to quit. Most men succeed because they are determined
to.
Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your Vision is
the promise of what you shall one day be: your Ideal is the prophecy of what
you shall at last unveil.
In all human affairs there are efforts, and there are results, and the
strength of effort is the measure of the results.
There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside of you.
Without courage you cannot practice any of the other virtues.
What you're supposed to do when you don't like a thing is change it. If
you can't change it, change the way you think about it. Don't complain.
When we cast our bread upon the waters, we can presume that someone
downstream whose face we will never know will benefit from our actions, as we
who are downstream will profit from the grantor's gift.
When you blame others, you give up your power to change.
Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the trouble makers. 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.
Resolve to find thyself; and to know that he who finds himself, loses his
misery.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought
without accepting it.
We are what we repeatedly do.
The difficult can be done immediately, the impossible takes a little
longer.
Dare to risk public criticism.
From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a
life.
One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to
self-confidence is preparation.
The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd.
The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever
been.
Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know and yet not wise enough
to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy
ourselves?
Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance. It is better to
know even if the knowledge endures only for the moment that comes before
destruction than to gain eternal life at the price of a dull and swinish lack
of comprehension of a universe that swirls unseen before us in all its
wonder. That was the choice of Achilles, and it is mine, too.
Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to
be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.
Property may be destroyed and money may lose its purchasing power; but,
character, health, knowledge and good judgment will always be in demand under
all conditions.
Not being known doesn't stop the truth from being true.
Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If
you're alive, it isn't.
You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it
come true.
Part One: I do not exist to impress the world. I exist to live my life in
a way that will make me happy. Part Two: Everybody else is free to do
whatever they feel like doing, for a living. Part Three: Responsible is Able
to Respond, able to answer for the way we choose to live. There's only one
person we have to answer to, of course, and that is ourselves.
How about I allow the world to live as it chooses, and I allow me to live
as I choose.
Anybody who's ever mattered, anybody who's ever been happy, anybody who's
ever given any gift into the world has been a divinely selfish soul, living
for his own best interest. No exceptions.
There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how
unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever
steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.
Do you know what I learned from you? I learned what is possible, and now I
must hold out for what I thought we had. I want to be very close to someone I
respect and admire and have somebody who feels the same way about me. That or
nothing. I realized that what I'm looking for is not what you're looking for.
You don't want what I want.
Two things I do value a lot, intimacy and the capacity for joy, didn't
seem to be on anyone else's list. I felt like the stranger in a strange land,
and decided I'd better not marry the natives.
From time to time it's fun to close our eyes, and in that dark say to
ourselves, 'I am the sorcerer, and when I open my eyes I shall see a world
that I have created, and for which I and only I am completely responsible.'
Slowly then, eyelids open like curtains lifting stage-center. And sure
enough, there's our world, just the way we've built it.
That's what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how
we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it
that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way,
is winning.
It is by not always thinking of yourself, if you can manage it, that you
might somehow be happy. Until you make room in your life for someone as
important to you as yourself, you will always be searching and lost...
A tiny change today brings us to a dramatically different tomorrow. There
are grand rewards for those who pick the high hard roads, but those rewards
are hidden by years. Every choice is made in the uncaring blind, no
guarantees from the world around us.
The only way to avoid all frightening choices is to leave society and
become a hermit, and that is a frightening choice.
Character comes from following our highest sense of right, from trusting
ideals without being sure they'll work. One challenge of our adventure on
earth is to rise above dead systems -- wars, religions, nations, destructions
-- to refuse to be a part of them, and express instead the highest selves we
know how to be.
No one can solve problems for someone whose problem is that they don't
want problems solved.
No matter how qualified or deserving we are, we will never reach a better
life until we can imagine it for ourselves and allow ourselves to have it.
Commerce is idea and choice expressed. Look about you this moment:
Everything you see and touch was once invisible idea until someone chose to
bring it into being.
We can't give money to a needy alternative us in other beliefs of space
and time, but we can give ideas which they can turn to fortunes of they
choose.
Bad things are not the worst thing that can happen to us. Nothing is the
worst thing that can happen to us!
An easy life doesn't teach us anything. In the end it's the learning that
matters: what we've learned and how we've grown.
We can have excuses, or we can have health, love, longevity,
understanding, adventure, money, happiness. We design our lives through the
power of our choices. We feel most helpless when we've made choices by
default, when we haven't designed our lives on our own.
We are each given a block of marble when we begin a lifetime, and the
tools to shape it into sculpture... We can drag it behind us untouched, we
can pound it into gravel, we can shape it into glory.
We generate our own environment. We get exactly what we deserve. How can
we resent the life we've created for ourselves? Who's to blame, who's to
credit, but us? Who can change it, any time we wish, but us?
Any powerful idea is absolutely fascinating and absolutely useless until
we choose to use it.
There's no disaster that can't become a blessing, and no blessing that
can't become a disaster.
You are creatures of light. From light have you come, to light you shall
go, and surrounding you through every step is the light of your infinite
being.
By your choice dwell you now in the world which you have created. What you
hold in your heart shall be true, and what you most admire, that shall you
become.
Fear not, nor be dismayed at the appearance that is darkness, at the
disguise that is evil, at the empty cloak that is death, for you have picked
these for your challenges. They are the stones on which you choose to whet
the keen edge of your spirit. Know that ever about you stands the reality of
love, and each moment you have the power to transform your world by what you
have learned.
You are life inventing form. No more can you die on sword or years than
can you die on doorways through which you walk, one room into another. Every
room gives its word for you to speak, every passage its song for you to sing.
What a blessed evening! How rarely are we given the chance to save the
world from a new religion!
Life Is
A major rule you forgot, Roles. Every game we play, we slip into a role, a
game identity with which to play. We decide we're rescuer, victim,
leader-with-all-the-answers, follower-without-a-clue, bright, brave,
honorable, crafty, dull, helpless, just-trying-to-get-along, diabolical,
easygoing, pitiable, earnest, careless, salt-of-the-earth, puppet master,
comic, hero... we choose our role by whim and destiny, and we can change it
anytime we want.
Guilt is the tension we feel to change our past, present or future for
someone else's sake.
Some choices we live not once but a thousand times over, remembering for
the rest of our lives.
We know nothing until intuition agrees.
Get this in mind early: We never grow up.
All we see of someone at any moment is a snapshot of their life, there in
riches or poverty, in joy or despair. Snapshots don't show the million
decisions that led to that moment.
Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient, helpful, angry,
rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded, neurotic, careful, rigid,
tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden, gentle, sick, considerate, funny,
stupid, healthy, greedy, beautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing,
pressured, intimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful,
capricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does, however, require us
to live with the consequences of our choices.
If it's never our fault, we can't take responsibility for it. If we can't
take responsibility for it, we'll always be its victim.
Our true country is the land of our values, and our conscience is the
voice of its patriotism.
We don't have rights until we claim them.
We must honor our dragons, encourage them to be worthy destroyers, expect
they'll strive to cut us down. It is their duty to ridicule us, it is their
job to demean us, to force us if they can to stop being different! And when
we walk our way no matter their fire and their fury, our dragons shrug when
we're out of sight, return to their card-games philosophical: 'Ah well, we
can't toast 'em all...'
When we put up with any situation that we don't have to put up with, it's
not because we're dumb. We put up with it because we want the lesson that
only that situation can teach, and we want it more than freedom itself.
Happiness is the reward we get for living to the highest right we know.
Good and evil are not what our parents told us, not what our church tells
us, or our country, not what anybody tells us! All of us decide good and evil
for ourselves, automatically, by choosing what we want to do!
Organized religion is God-in-a-web, the Great Spider at the center of a
thousand doctrines and rituals and mandatory believings. People die in that
web. Please, no organization!
Because a name is a label and as soon as there's a label the ideas
disappear and out comes label-worship and label-bashing and instead of living
by a theme of ideas people begin dying for labels, and the last thing you
think the world needs is a new religion?
We wait all these years to find someone who understands us, I thought,
someone who accepts us as we are, someone with a wizard's power to melt stone
to sunlight, who can bring us happiness in spite of trials, who can face our
dragons in the night, who can transform us into the soul we choose to be.
Just yesterday I found that magical Someone is the face we see in the mirror.
It's us and our homemade masks.
The world's not a sphere... it's a big floating pyramid. At the bottom of
the pyramid is the lowest life-form you can imagine, hateful, vicious,
destroying for destruction's sake, devoid of empathy, one step above
consciousness so savage it self-destructs the instant it's born. There's room
for that kind of consciousness, lots of room, right here on our triangular
third planet - At the top is consciousness so refined it barely recognizes
anything but light. Beings who live for their loves, for their highest right,
creatures of perfect perspective, who die with a loving smile upon whatever
monster would strike them down for the fun of watching someone die. Whales
are like that, I think. Most dolphins. Some people... the human beings among
us.
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
If a man will begin with certainties,
he shall end in doubts;
but if he will be content to begin with doubts,
he shall end in certainties.
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part
of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance
into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.
The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.
Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can
accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be
taken on its own merits.
To think that the ruler of the universe will run to my assistance and bend
the laws of nature for me is the height of arrogance. That implies that
everyone else (such as the opposing football team, driver, student, parent)
is de-selected, unfavored by God, and that I am special, above it all.
Preserve your integrity. It is more precious than diamonds or rubies.
Happiness sneaks through a door you didn't know that you left open.
A study of the Great Malady; horror of home.
Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages
to its present state of civilization.
Imagination led Columbus to discover America.
Imagination led Franklin to discover electricity.
Imagination has given us the steam engine,
the telephone the talking-machine, and the automobile,
for these things had to be dreamed of before they became realities.
Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on,
deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.
To become an able and successful person in any profession, three things
are necessary, nature, study and practice.
A man's character is the reality of himself; his reputation, the opinion
others have formed about him; character resides in him, reputation in other
people; that is the substance, this is the shadow.
When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so
regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for
us.
What this power is, I cannot say. All I know is that it exists... and it
becomes available only when you are in that state of mind in which you know
exactly what you want... and are fully determined not to quit until you get
it.
The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result
of steady accretion... It is the man who carefully advances step by step,
with his mind becoming wider and wider - and progressively better able to
grasp any theme or situation - persevering in what he knows to be practical,
and concentrating his thought upon it, who is bound to succeed in the
greatest degree.
What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it
becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows
exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it.
We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.
The worst sorrows in life are not in its losses and misfortune, but its
fears.
In science as in love, too much concentration on technique can often lead
to impotence.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Why anybody would want to do drugs when there are computers available is a
mystery to me.
Faith, noun. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks
without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Scriptures, noun. The sacred books of our holy religion, as distinguished
from the false and profane writings on which all other faiths are based.
Idiot, noun. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in
human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.
Consider the postage stamp, my son. It secures success through its ability
to stick to one thing till it gets there.
It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future,
and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man
as it is, infinite.
Much of human perception is based not on information flowing into the
brain from the outside world but what the brain, based on previous
experience, expects to happen next.
The willow knows what the storm does not: that the power to endure harm
outlives the power to inflict it.
That you may retain your self-respect, it is better to displease the
people by doing what you know is right, than to temporarily please them by
doing what you know is wrong.
Things are never so bad they can't be made worse.
When we hold back on life, life holds us back.
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of
a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
I think that today, in many ways, we've become confused about what real
abundance is. In reducing it to something that can be measured in abstract
economic terms, we've substituted a concept of abundance for the experience
of it.
Society has always been the free man's greatest enemy. And the free man
has always been society's greatest friend. How did society treat Jesus, or
Socrates, Galileo or Martin Luther King? Yet look what they have left
mankind.
The word impossible is not in my dictionary.
Imagination rules the world.
Here's to the future! The only limits are the limits of our imagination.
Dream up the kind of world you want to live in, dream out loud, at high
volume.
If I could through myself
Set your spirit free
I'd lead your heart away
See you break, break away
Into the light
And to the day.
And I must be an acrobat
To talk like this
And act like that
And you can dream
So dream out loud
And you can find
Your own way out
You can build
And I can will
And you can call
I can't wait until
You can stash
And you can seize
In dreams begin
Responsibilities
And I can love
And I can love
And I know that the tide is turning 'round
... don't let the bastards grind you down
And I have no compass
And I have no map
And I have no reasons
No reasons to get back
And I have no religion
And I don't know what's what
And I don't know the limit
The limit of what we got.
My father is a rich man
He wears a rich man's cloak
Gave me the keys to his kingdom (coming)
Gave me a cup of gold
He said 'I have many mansions
and I have many rooms to see'
But I left by the back door
and I threw away the key...
For the first time
For the first time
For the first time
I feel love.
Lookin' for to save my, save my soul
Lookin' in the places where no flowers grow
Lookin' for to fill that God shaped hole.
You wanted to get somewhere so badly
You had to lose yourself along the way
You change a name but that's okay... it's necessary
And what you leave behind you don't miss anyway.
Your Catholic blues
Your convent shoes
Your stick on tattoos
Now they're making the news
Your holy war
Your northern star
Your sermon on the mount
From the boot of your car
Please... please... please get up off your knees...
Please... please... leave me out of this please.
See the thing that groups won't admit is that when people are screaming
and calling their names... they're not really screaming for them, they're
screaming for themselves. The thing about music is your lives get all mixed
up in the music, this is true for me. So when I hear somebody playing a
tune... I'm not screaming for him, I'm screaming for what that song means to
me. Rock n' roll shouldn't be boring, shouldn't be retro, shouldn't be
nostalgia, we've got to kick it into the next century a little bit.
... I have great respect for atheists. Though, I feel that God would have
more time for them than for most who are part of a religion, who seem so odd
to me, or doped. I think atheists have a certain rigour.
Religion is what happens when God has left the building.
Organized religion is in demise, and I personally won't miss it. I don't
think religion has anything to do with God anymore or very rarely has.
What can I tell ya... you get big ideas late at night.
Work like you don't need the money; love like you've never been hurt; and
dance like no one is watching.
Without a real commitment to do something about the dire circumstances of
a third of the population of the world, all New Year's Eve 1999 will amount
to is... a fancy dress ball.
To be united is a great thing, but to respect difference is even a greater
thing.
Don't fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest
summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and
should have.
If you wait to do everything until you're sure it's right, you'll probably
never do much of anything.
Laughter is the shortest distance between two people.
If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would
not be much point in moving from one place to another.
The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to
discover new ways of thinking about them.
The Bible God I deny; the Christian God I disbelieve in; but I am not rash
enough to say there is no God as long as you tell me you are unprepared to
define God to me.
There is no happiness for the man who does not travel. Living in the
society of men, the best man becomes a sinner. For Indra is the friend of the
traveler. Therefore wander!
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of
zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.
The highest compliment one can be paid by another human being is to be
told: 'Because of what you are, you are essential to my happiness.'
Doing more of what doesn't work doesn't work.
If we are a legislator who sponsors programs that not only fail to solve
the problem addressed but result in a worsening of that problem, the solution
is not to spend more money or pass more laws.
Whoever continually strives to achieve a clearer and clearer vision of
reality and our place in it -- whoever is pulled forward by a passion for
such clarity -- is, to that extent leading a spiritual life.
Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures.
Don't be afraid of death so much as an inadequate life.
I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent.
It's the constant and determined effort that breaks down all resistance,
sweeps away all obstacles.
Bite off more than you can chew and then chew like hell.
Preachers and pop psychologists who attempt to shame us into sacrificing
our lives for others, even our children, are working to create a world of
misery raising its next generation of sufferers. How much more compassionate
to realize that each of us must put our own life first and trust that we may
make our contribution to others within that context.
If you're only contributing to others out of fear or guilt, I would
suggest reorienting toward selfish fulfillment until you are feeling good
enough to spill over.
Telling the future by looking at the past assumes that conditions remain
constant. This is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.
Most look up and admire the stars. A champion climbs a mountain and grabs
one.
The average person does average things.
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you will land among the stars.
Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad
judgment.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?
Destiny is not a matter of chance, but of choice. Not something to wish
for, but to attain.
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is boring without it.
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not
believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not
believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious
books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers
and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down
for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that
anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one
and all, then accept it and live up to it.
Your body is precious. It is our vehicle for awakening. Treat it with
care.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought.
In some village, city, market town, country district, province, kingdom,
or capital there lived a householder, old, advanced in years, decrepit, weak
in health and strength, but rich, wealthy, and well-to-do. His house was a
large one, both extensive and high, and it was old, having been built a long
time ago. It was inhabited by many living beings, some two, three, four, or
five hundred. It had one single door only. It was thatched with straw, its
terraces had fallen down, its foundations were rotten, its walls,
matting-screens, and plaster were in an advanced state of decay. Suddenly a
great blaze of fire broke out, and the house started to burn on all sides.
And that man had many young sons, five, or ten, or twenty, and he himself got
out of the house.
When that man saw his own house ablaze all around with that great mass of
fire, he became afraid and trembled, his mind became agitated, and he thought
to himself: `I, it is true, have been competent enough to run out of the
door, and to escape from my burning house, quickly and safely, without being
touched or scorched by that great mass of fire. But what about my sons, my
young boys, my little sons? There, in this burning house, they play, sport,
and amuse themselves with all sorts of games. They do not know that this
dwelling is afire, and so they feel no agitation. Though threatened by this
great [fire] , though in such close contact with so much ill, they pay no
attention to their danger, and make no effort to get out.'
Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart give
yourself to it.
The endless wonder of science is that the more we know, the more we know
there is to know.
Life moves pretty fast. You don't stop and look around once in a while and
you could miss it.
For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But
for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers
don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We
are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God.
We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our
educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We
are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will
tremble to take us.
There is something precious in our being mysteries to ourselves, in our
being unable ever to see through even the person who is closest to our heart
and to reckon with him as though he were a logical proposition or a problem
in accounting.
Haze hung over the valley--light as gossamer--and clouds partially dimmed
the higher cliffs and mountains. This obscurity of vision but increased the
awe with which I beheld it, and as I looked, a peculiar exalted sensation
seemed to fill my whole being, and I found my eyes in tears with emotion.
If in the last few years you haven't discarded a major opinion or acquired
a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead.
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could
only do a little.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do
nothing.
Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.
Patience will achieve more than force.
Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.
A U2 concert is what church should be.
If the Internet is, in truth, a grand bazaar of ideas and spirit, it is
also now becoming a bazaar in the original sense as well -- an organized
oasis where products and services can be bought and sold and where new and
mutually beneficial trading relationships can be formed. Even the smallest
sampling of cyberspace enterprises suggests that the Internet is sprouting
all sorts of new commerce and new models of business.
One of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon
a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the
fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and
the slavery of home, man feels once more happy.
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument
as one goes on.
Life is not an exact science, it is an art.
A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
You're either getting better, or you're getting worse... you never stay
the same.
Don't go through life, grow through life.
The longer I live, the more I am certain that the great difference between
the great and the insignificant, is energy - invincible determination - a
purpose once fixed, and then death or victory.
A barrier is of ideas, not of things.
Follow your bliss.
People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't
think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an
experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely
physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and
reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes
of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have
only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find
an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay
another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we
will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be
alone, we will be with all the world.
One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes
the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message
of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has
been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be
living is the one you are living. Wherever you are--if you are following your
bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.
The image of myth are reflections of the spiritual potentialities of every
one of us. Through contemplating these, we evoke their powers in our own
lives.
The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
The goal of the hero trip down to the jewel point is to find those levels
in the psyche that open, open, open, and finally open to the mystery of your
Self being Buddha consciousness or the Christ. That´s the journey!
The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience.
In loving the spiritual, you cannot despise the earthly.
Awe is what moves us forward.
Life, in both its knowing and its doing, has become today a "free fall,"
so to say, into the next minute, into the future. So that, whereas, formerly,
those not wishing to hazard the adventure of an individual life could rest
within the pale of a comfortably guaranteed social order, today all the walls
have burst. It is not left to us to choose to hazard the adventure of an
unprecedented life: adventure is upon us, like a tidal wave.
You cannot acquire experience by making experiments. You cannot create
experience. You must undergo it.
Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow; don't walk behind me, I may
not lead; walk beside me, and just be my friend.
Integrity has no need of rules.
A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real.
Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality.
Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
The greatest of all faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.
Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.
Our grand business is undoubtedly not to see what lies dimly at a
distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.
Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do
what lies clearly at hand.
Men do less than they ought, unless they do all that they can.
Be more concerned with your character than with your reputation. Your
character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others
think you are.
Don't be afraid to give your best to what seemingly are small jobs. Every
time you conquer one it makes you that much stronger. If you do the little
jobs well, the big ones will tend to take care of themselves.
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people
who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no help at all.
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other
people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in
you.
You have it easily in your power to increase the sum total of this world's
happiness now. How? By giving a few words of sincere appreciation to someone
who is lonely or discouraged. Perhaps you will forget tomorrow the kind words
you say today, but the recipient may cherish them over a lifetime.
My success just evolved from working hard at the business at hand each
day.
There are two lasting bequests we can give our children. One is roots. The
other is wings.
You can do what you have to do, and sometimes you can do it even better
than you think you can.
How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young,
compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of
the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of
these.
Without the help of selfishness, the human animal would never have
developed. Egoism is the vine by which man hoisted himself out of the swamp
and escaped from the jungle.
I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and
windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara,
I understood Muhammed's dictum, 'A journey is a fragment of Hell.'
Truth is the highest thing that man may keep.
The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at
last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
Generosity and perfection are your everlasting goals.
Don't be hasty; prosperity will knock on your door soon.
You have an active mind and a keen imagination.
Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
Man who say it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it.
If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will avoid one hundred days
of sorrow.
Acquire the courage to believe in yourself. Many of the things that you
have been taught were at one time the radical ideas of individuals who had
the courage to believe what their own hearts and minds told them was true,
rather than accept the common beliefs of their day.
If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no
hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, there are
opportunities to change things, there's a chance you may contribute to making
a better world. That's your choice.
While they were asleep, they did not realize they were dreaming... but
when they awoke, they knew. Some day will come a great awakening, when we
will know this life was like a dream.
One night I dreamed I was a butterfly...
...Who am I in reality?
A butterfly dreaming that I am Chuang-tzu or
Chuang-tzu imagining he was a butterfly?
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves
up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right
sometimes.
No idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered with a searching
but at the same time steady eye.
A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get
its pants on.
A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the
opportunity in every difficulty.
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
Never, Never, Never Quit!
Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.
An American diplomat is sometimes like a bull who carries his own china
shop around with him.
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so
few.
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them
into the impossible.
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe. Sometimes I think we're
not. In both cases the thought is equally shocking.
I would defend the liberty of consenting adult creationists to practice
whatever intellectual perversions they like in the privacy of their own
homes; but it is also necessary to protect the young and innocent.
Jet lag is for amateurs.
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your
envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
Failure is the line of least persistence.
The inclination to accept unverified opinion simply because of currency or
familiarity is a dangerous human weakness that is instrumental in
self-deception and easily exploited for the deception of others.
Rarely have Americans lived through so much change in so short a time in
so many ways. Quietly, but with gathering force, the ground has shifted
beneath our feet as we move into an information age, a global economy, a
truly new world.
The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the
imagination.
When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to
achieve it.
When each day is the same as the next, it's because people fail to
recognize the good things that happen in their lives every day that the sun
rises.
There was a language in the world that everyone understood... the language
of enthusiasm, of things accomplished with love and purpose, and as part of a
search for something believed in and desired.
There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear
of failure.
When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes
better, too.
The most powerful gift of redemption you can offer a world that is sick
with deception is to live in the dignity of your truth.
I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past
and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried
heart.
The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a
lot of the time.
You can do anything you think you can. This knowledge is literally the
gift of the gods, for through it you can solve every human problem. It should
make of you an incurable optimist. It is the open door.
The mere fact that you have obstacles to overcome is in your favor...?
Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it,
anything but live for it.
When you have nothing to say, say nothing.
Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own
country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new
meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return
home with traveled bodies, but untraveled minds.
Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.
There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a
tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling
south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.
He who asks a question may be a fool for five minutes, but he who never
asks a question remains a fool forever.
He who learns but does not think, is lost! He who thinks but does not
learn is in great danger.
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not
know, that is true knowledge.
It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always
been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and
endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me. Were I
to list them all, I would fill up a book the size of the Manhattan yellow
pages, and that would merely be the prologue.
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not;
nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not;
unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full
of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
To win without risk is to triumph without glory.
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to
please everybody.
The important thing in life is not the victory but the contest; the
essential thing is not to have won but to have fought well.
You are wasting your youth, your time, and your money, because you won't
acknowledge your short comings.
As we look back and survey the terrain to determine where we've been and
where we are in relationship to where we're going, we clearly see that we
could not have gotten where we are without coming the way we came.
The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
If we keep doing what we're doing, we're going to keep getting what we're
getting.
Live out of your imagination, not your history.
An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge,
skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to
collective organizational success.
Creation is an act of sheer will.
Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines,
your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes - with all this
taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience
inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's
not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and
day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any
human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
The only thing that the world will not have enough of is exaggeration.
Your mind is like a parachute. It only works if it is open.
Promise a lot and give even more.
As more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must...
be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same
species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical
condition of life.
[The traveler] may feel assured, he will meet with no difficulties or
dangers, excepting in rare cases, nearly so bad as he beforehand anticipates.
In a moral point of view, the effect ought to be, to teach him good-humored
patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of
making the best of every occurrence. . . Traveling ought also to teach him
distrust; but at the same time he will discover, how many truly kind-hearted
people there are, with whom he never before had, or ever again will have any
further communication, who yet are ready to offer him the most disinterested
assistance.
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful,
is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
Motivation is like food for the brain. You cannot get enough in one
sitting. It needs continual and regular top ups.
What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and
penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in
the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a
superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about
existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the
next. The 'everlasting arms' hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies
which, like a doctor's placebo, is none the less effective for being
imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so
readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only
in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the
environment provided by human culture.
But what, after all, is faith? It is a state of mind that leads people to
believe something -- it doesn't matter what -- in the total absence of
supporting evidence. If there were good supporting evidence then faith would
be superfluous, for the evidence would compel us to believe it anyway. It is
this that makes the often-parroted claim that 'evolution itself is a matter
of faith' so silly. People believe in evolution not because they arbitrarily
want to believe it but because of overwhelming, publicly available evidence.
Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly
told the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to
such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental
illness. It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in
extreme cases they are prepared to kill and to die for it without the need
for further justification.
Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today.
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself
my home, my fatherland, or my church... And I am not afraid to make a
mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as
eternity too.
A man of character finds a special attractiveness in difficulty, since it
is only by coming to grips with difficulty that he can realize his
potentialities.
If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than
religion.
Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The
moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely
knows, We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
You'll have time to rest when you're dead.
Would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?
Love is not just looking at each other, it's looking in the same
direction.
A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates
it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.
It is not enough to have a good mind. The main thing is to use it well.
I think; therefore I am.
Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve
other problems.
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices, as well as the
greatest virtues.
Good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for
everybody thinks he is so well supplied with it, that even those most
difficult to please in all other matters never desire more of it than they
already possess.
A problem well-defined is half-solved.
Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, travel
alone.
Do not speak harshly to any one; those who are spoken to will answer thee
in the same way. Angry speech is painful: blows for blows will touch thee.
I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it.
Character--the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life--is
the source from which self-respect springs.
I have brought myself, by long meditation, to the conviction that a human
being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist
a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.
Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember; and I remember
more than I have seen.
It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order
to save us.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.
The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this:
that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a
thing created is loved before it exists.
One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind.
It's kind of fun to do the impossible.
All our dreams can come true -- if we have the courage to pursue them.
Somehow I can't believe that there are any heights that can't be scaled by
a man who knows the secrets of making dreams come true. This special secret,
it seems to me, can be summarized in four C's. They are curiosity,
confidence, courage, and constancy, and the greatest of all is confidence.
When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and
unquestionable.
Rowing is a sport for dreamers. As long as you put in the work, you can
own the dream. When the work stops, the dream disappears.
I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a
career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything
sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair
anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to
do that.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor
freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing
- [and] rain without thunder and lightning.
You can construct the character of a man and his age not only from what he
does and says, but from what he fails to say and do.
The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more
intensely for the reading of it.
Travel, instead of broadening the mind, often merely lengthens the
conversation.
There is a pleasure sure in being mad which none but madmen know.
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing
circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the
will-whatever we may think.
Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. The soul that
knows it not, knows no release from little things; knows not the livid
loneliness of fear.
If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.
As usual, we're out of step with what everyone else is doing. If you ever
want to find out what's going on, look at what we're doing and it's going to
be the opposite of it. In the middle of the materialistic '80s, here was this
ascetic bunch standing in the desert singing songs,and now, when America is
in the middle of a conservative, grim phase, we're sailing on a 40-foot lemon
through the middle of it all.
If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally
astound ourselves.
I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another
step forward.
Genius is one percent inspiration, and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
One might think that the money value of an invention constitutes its
reward to the man who loves his work. But speaking for myself, I can honestly
say this is not so...I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my
reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.
The eye sees a great many things, but the average brain records very few
of them.
I have not failed. I just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
Thoughts lead on to purposes;
Purposes go forth in action;
Actions form habits;
Habits decide character;
And character fixes our destiny.
In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the
limb on which it is perched.
Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the
source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a
stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good
as dead: his eyes are closed.
A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part
limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings,
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 us. Our task
must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of
compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its
beauty.
A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy,
education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would
indeeded be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment
and hope of reward after death.
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain
it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the
fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving
after rational knowledge.
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The
latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to
hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense
that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise
and of good will.
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
The mere formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its
solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.
To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new
angle requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination
is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles
the world.
In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts
can be counted.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm
not sure about the former.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our
humanity.
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a
miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of
instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.
Out of clutter, find simplicity.
From discord, find harmony.
In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity.
When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion
that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing
positive knowledge.
No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment
can prove me wrong.
We still do not know one-thousandth of one percent of what nature has
revealed to us.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research,
would it?
The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in
work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to
the community.
The splitting of the atom has changed everything except our way of
thinking and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.
Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes,
where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we
enter the realm of Art and Science.
If A equal success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y and Z, with X
being work, Y play, and Z keeping your mouth shut.
Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.
God does not play dice with the universe.
The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied
to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the
authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
I think and think for months and years. Ninety-nine times, the conclusion
is false. The hundredth time I am right.
Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of
value.
The years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot
express, the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving,
until one breaks through to clarity and understanding, are only known to him
who has himself experienced them.
It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more
violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the
opposite direction.
What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight-it's the
size of the fight in the dog.
We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the
disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual
wealth of the world.
What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each
other?
It is never to late to be what you might have been.
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will
be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one
can go.
The journey not the arrival matters.
A problem is your chance to do your best.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
People only see what they are prepared to see.
To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the
affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure
the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in
others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden
patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed
easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!
The greatest homage to truth is to use it.
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he
reads.
Do the thing we fear, and death of fear is certain.
Who you are speaks so loudly I can't hear what you're saying.
Life is to short to waste
In critic peep or cynic bark,
Quarrel or reprimand:
'Twill soon be dark;
Up! mind thine own aim, and
God speed the mark!
Who so would be a man, must be a non-conformist. Nothing is at last sacred
but the integrity of your own mind.
A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; -- read it forward,
backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.
We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
Common sense is genius dressed in working clothes.
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
Give me Truths; For I am weary of the surfaces.
Every spirit build itself a house, and beyond it's house a world, and
beyond it's world a heaven. Know then that the world exists for you, build
therefore your own world.
Every moment of your life you are offered the opportunity to choose love
or fear, to tread the earth of to soar to the heavens.
You were not meant to understand your life. You were meant to live it.
The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the
embarrassment he can tolerate.
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory.
First learn the meaning of what you say and then speak.
The greater the difficulty the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful
pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.
Wealth stays with us a little moment if at all: only our characters are
steadfast, not our gold.
There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who
face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.
Nothing is so embarrassing as watching someone do something that you said
couldn't be done.
For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to
get themselves filed.
When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make
you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.
That's more-or-less what Freud said: civilization is based on control of
the basic drives, and in particular, the need of the older men to safeguard
their own position by controlling the drives of the younger ones. Thus laws,
etc. which are easily justified by citing the need to protect the weak from
the strong, but are really motivated by the need to protect the politically
powerful but individually weak older men from the politically weak but
individually strong younger men.
Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.
Try to be better than yourself.
[Travel]. . .that gregarious passion which destroys the object of its
love.
If you don't leap, you'll never know what it's like to fly.
The central ideology of ?mainstream culture,? the belief system that most
of us share, is liberal consumerism--a secular, individualist creed that
essentially adds more shopping hours to the old exaltation of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness. Our children are being raised in this tepid
faith with what amounts to fanatic zeal: the average American child, by the
time he or she leaves high school, has been subjected to more than 380,000 TV
commercials. The role of advertising in our daily lives has grown so immense
that it has become difficult to remember what it was like before the
subliminal flood of ?brand synergies? came to fill every corner of public
space. Billions of dollars and fantastic amounts of energy are, after all,
devoted annually to the creation ex nihilo of new desires--anxieties that, by
design, only more consumption can console.
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.
Strange is it not? That of the myriads who before us pass'd the Door of
darkness through, not one returns to tell us of the Road, which to discover,
we must travel to.
Great work is done by people who are not afraid to be great.
Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet
nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another
continent.
If money is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only
real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge,
experience, and ability.
Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who
keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind
young.
Whether you believe you can, or whether you believe you can't, you're
absolutely right.
The best we can do is size up the chances, calculate the risks involved,
estimate our ability to deal with them, and then make our plans with
confidence.
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are
ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we
have yet gone ourselves.
The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst.
If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
When a thing has been said and said well, have no scruple. Take it and
copy it.
To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only
plan but also believe.
Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between
man and the universe.
Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.
I keep my ideals, because inspite of everything I still believe people are
good at heart.
I wish it (Christianity) were more productive of good works... I mean real
good works... not holy-day keeping, sermon-hearing... or making long prayers,
filled with flatteries and compliments despised by wise men, and much less
capable of pleasing the Deity.
There is no such thing as a good war and there is no such thing as a bad
peace.
Well done is better than well said.
You may delay, but time will not.
Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears, while the used key is
always bright.
A little neglect may breed great mischief...for want of a nail the shoe
was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for want of a horse the
rider was lost.
The key to your universe is that you have choice.
Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis.
Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into
unbelief.
... in the small matters trust the mind, in the large ones the heart...
What we must decide is how we are valuable rather than how valuable we
are.
There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives to his life by
the unfolding of his powers.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for
further development.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
We dance round in a ring and suppose, but the Secret sits in the middle
and knows.
I had a lovers quarrel with the world.
I travel light; as light, that is, as a man can travel who will still
carry his body around because of its sentimental value.
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think
about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is
not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
In order to be able to understand the great complexity of life and to
understand what the universe is doing the first word to learn is synergy.
Care and diligence bring luck.
Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers
. . . seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their
minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious
persons and clowns.
All the pathos and irony of leaving one's youth behind is thus implicit in
every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be
recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new
places all the time.
And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He
is also moved by a powerful will to teach. Inside every good travel writer
there is a pedagogue - often a highly moral pedagogue - struggling to get
out.
Anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, ... for if a traveler
doesn't visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one
will want to hear it.
The real contest is always between what you've done and what you're
capable of doing. You measure yourself against yourself and nobody else.
The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of
thinking.
Facts that at first seem improbable will, even on scant explanation, drop
the cloak that has hidden them and stand forth in naked and simple beauty.
I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from
him.
But where the senses fail us, reason must step in.
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with
sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is
proved.
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the
humble reasoning of a single individual.
It vexes me when they would constrain science by the authority of the
Scriptures, and yet do not consider themselves bound to answer reason and
experiment.
He found lies detestable, perhaps because, preoccupying himself with
mathematical science, he knew the beauty of truth.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
We are constantly being astonished these days at the amazing discoveries
in the field of violence. But I maintain that far more undreamt of and
seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence.
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
If you are in a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.
Strength does not come from physical capacities. It comes from an
indomitable will.
I think it would be a good idea.
Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you
do it.
Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.
Anyone who spends their life on a computer is pretty unusual.
I shut my eyes in order to see.
We will discover the nature of our own particular genius when we stop
trying to conform to our own or to other people's models, learn to be
ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.
Work and play are the same. When you're following your
energy and doing what you want all the time, the
distinction between work and play dissolves.
The only aspect of our travels that is interesting to others is disaster.
He should be endowed with an active, indefatigable vigor of mind and body,
which can. . . support, with a careless smile, every hardship of the road,
the weather, or the inn.
I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant,
and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.
To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has
already achieved, but at what he aspires to.
The reality of the other person lies not in what he reveals to you but in
what he cannot reveal to you. Therefore, if you would understand him, listen
not to what he says but rather to what he does not say.
You give little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of
yourself that you truly give.
Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.
[W]e artists can only go so far as the people can follow us. We are not
alone, we are part of the system. We can take risks, but if you want to go to
the peak of your consciousness, you may very well find yourself alone. Even
if you know how to translate what you saw, maybe only ten people will be able
to understand what you tell. But, if you have faith in your vision, and
retell it again and again, you will start noticing that, after a time, more
people will begin to catch up with you.
It's dark over there in the world of real violence, hopelessness, drugs,
and guns. There is little political will for a war on poverty, guns, or
family breakdown. Here, under the light, we are offered instead a crusade
against media violence. This is largely a feel-good exercise, a moral panic
substituting for practicality. But in the language of media consultants, the
panic "resonates." The obsession offers frissons of horror while denying that
the moralist is also attracted.
In any non-trivial axiomatic system, there are true theorems which cannot
be proven.
Only learn to seize good fortune, for good fortune is always here.
Life is the childhood of eternity.
Nothing is worth more than this day.
Knowing is not enough;
We must Apply.
Willing is not enough;
We must Do.
One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem,
see a fine picture and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius,
power, and magic in it.
A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent.
First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.
We are equal beings and the Universe is our relations with each other. The
universe is made of one kind of entity: each one is alive, each determines
the course of his or her own existence.
Remember that happiness is a way of travel - not a destination.
What is a minority? The chosen heroes of this Earth have been a minority.
There is not a social, political, or religious priviledge that you enjoy
today that was not brought for you by the blood and tears and patient
suffering of the minority.
It is the minority that have... achieved all that is noble in the history
of the world.
You can commit no greater folly than to sit by the road side until someone
comes along and invites you to ride with him to wealth or influence.
I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by
practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles
are the same. In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of
acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a
sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some area an
athlete of God.
The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.
He won't fly on the Balinese airline, Garuda, because he won't fly on any
airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation.
There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without
the help of other argument.
The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with
a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to
be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped.
All the above is, of course, a gross simplification. There are deeper
reasons to travel - itches and tickles on the underbelly of the unconscious
mind. We go where we need to go, and then try to figure out what we're doing
there.
Back home in the Wild West, time whips by with the relentless and terrible
purpose of a stranglevine vine filmed in fast motion. A week, two months, ten
years snap past like amnesia, a continual barrage of workdays, appointments,
dinner dates and laundromats, television shows and video cassettes, parking
meters, paydays and phone calls.
You can watch it from Asia. You read the newspapers, you think about your
friends back home - marching along in the parade of events - and you know
it's still happening. It's happening there. On the other side. Yesterdays,
todays and tomorrows are tumbling after each other like Sambo and the tiger,
blending into an opaque and viscous ooze. There is no such thing as now; only
a continual succession of laters, whipping their tendrils around the
calendar. The clutches of the vine...
In Nepal, the phenomenon is reversed. Time is a stick of incense that
burns without being consumed. One day can seem like a week; a week, like
months. Mornings stretch out and crack their spines with the yogic
impassivity of house cats. Afternoons bulge with a succulent ripeness, like
fat peaches. There is time enough to do everything - write a letter, eat
breakfast, read the paper, visit a shrine or two, listen to the birds,
bicycle downtown to change money, buy postcards, shop for Buddhas - and
arrive home in time for lunch.
Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to
increase activity can result in just the opposite.
Real achievement, which augments the sum of human worth and knowledge, is
seldom born of a conventional understanding; it is always a shock to the
competent who, usually middle-aged, defensive and unprepared for new
exertions, depend upon the status quo and have come to accept it as
representing the limits of the known universe.
To sit down at your desk in the morning and know that you are taking up
the work of a thousand mornings, to write knowing that tomorrow's work can
redeem any imperfection in today's -- these realizations produce cheer and
confidence in and of themselves.
Nothing shocks me more in the men of religion and their flocks than
their... pretensions to be the only religious people.
Conscious faith is freedom. Emotional faith is slavery. Mechanical faith
is foolishness.
Truth is not determined by majority vote.
Lack of money is no obstacle. Lack of an idea is an obstacle.
...That was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the
hardest I've ever learned about anything -- that she is her own, and what she
gives me is of her choosing, and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a
butterfly will come to sit in your open palm, but if you close your hand, one
way or the other, it -- and its choice to be there -- are gone.
It is one of the strange ironies of this strange life that those who work
the hardest, who subject themselves to the strictest discipline, who give up
certain pleasurable things in order to achieve a goal, are the happiest men.
When you see 20 or 30 men line up for a distance race in some meet, don't
pity them, don't feel sorry for them. Better envy them instead.
Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with truth.
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 the earth.
No one is ever competent enough, nor is any technique ever effective
enough. It is only the continuing growth of the practitioner that can
guarantee competence and effectiveness.
Destination is merely a byproduct of the journey.
Why don't we teach astrology in the schools? Astrology holds that the
course of each human life is determined to a considerable degree by the
position of the stars in the sky at the exact moment of the individual's
birth. Belief in it, in one variant or another, has probably been held by
most of the people on earth. Even today, some universities in India offer
degrees in the subject. Yet American believers do not pressure boards of
education to add their subject to the curriculum. If believers in astrology
became as well organized as the creationists, it is hard to see how their
demands could be withstood.
Better far off to leave half the ruins and nine-tenths of the churches
unseen and to see well the rest; to see them not once, but again and often
again; to watch them, to learn them, to live with them, to love them, till
they have become a part of life and life's recollections.
Fundamentally, we work to create, and only incidentally do we work to eat.
Those who are lifting the world upward and onward,
Are those who encourage more than criticize.
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning
of the universe. This was first pointed out by St. Augustine. When asked:
What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn't reply: He
was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that
time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not
exist before the beginning of the universe.
The quantum theory of gravity has opened up a new possibility, in which
there would be no boundary to space-time and so there would be no need to
specify the behavior at the boundary. There would be no singularities at
which the laws of science broke down and no edge of space-time at which one
would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions
for space-time. One could say: 'The boundary condition of the universe is
that it has no boundary.' The universe would be completely self-contained and
not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor
destroyed. It would just BE.
The idea that space and time may form a closed surface without boundary
also has profound implications for the role of God in the affairs of the
universe. With the success of scientific theories in describing events, most
people have come to believe that God allows the universe to evolve according
to a set of laws and does not intervene in the universe to break these laws.
However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like
when it started -- it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and
choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could
suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely
self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning
nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?
If you rest, you rust.
Jingshen is the Mandarin word for spirit and vivacity. It is an important
word for those who would lead, because above all things, spirit and vivacity
set effective organizations apart from those that will decline and die.
If we are going to teach 'creation science' as an alternative to
evolution, then we should also teach the stork theory as an alternative to
biological reproduction.
Mere longevity is a good thing for those who watch Life from the side
lines. For those who play the game, an hour may be a year, a single day's
work an achievement for eternity.
I never learned from a man who agreed with me.
Never mistake motion for action.
Fear of death increases in exact proportion to increase in wealth.
We cannot depend on governments to heal our wounds. We have to help each
other.
Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of
chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others
may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!
The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without
having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.
Cat: a pygmy lion who loves mice, hates dogs, and patronizes human beings.
Ah, if I had known this was my last time here I would have stayed a little
longer - savored it a little more.
On the need to travel: After living a long time in one place and in the
same rut, I feel that for a certain time it is enough, that I must refresh
myself with other horizons and other faces... and at the same time must
retire into myself, strange as that sounds. The superficial distractions of
the journey do not interfere. There are people who prefer to get away
inwardly, some with the help of a powerful imagination and an ability to
abstract themselves from their surroundings (for this a special endowment is
needed, bordering on genius and insanity), some with the help of opium or
alcohol. Russians, for instance, will have a drinking bout for a week or two,
and then go back to their homes and duties. I prefer shifting my whole body
to shifting my brain, and going around the world to letting my head go round.
Perhaps it is because I have a bad head after too much to drink.
He reflected deeply, until this feeling completely overwhelmed him and he
reached a point where he recognized causes; for to recognize causes, it
seemed to him, is to think, and through thought alone feelings become
knowledge and are not lost, but become real and begin to mature.
Few people nowadays know what man is. Many sense this ignorance and die
the more easily because of it....I do not consider myself less ignorant than
most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question
stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to
me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as
invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and
dreams -- like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.
Don't trust anyone over thirty.
The best job goes to the person who can get it done without passing the
buck or coming back with excuses.
Success in its highest and noblest form calls for peace of mind and
enjoyment and happiness which come only to the person who has found the work
that he/she likes best.
Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary
defeat.
Cherish your visions and your dreams,
As they are the children of your soul;
The blue-prints of your ultimate achievements.
No man is free until he learns to do his own thinking and gains the
courage to act on his own personal initiative.
It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
You defeated me! But you won't defeat me again! Because you have grown all
you can grow... but I am still growing!
If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it
is the thought that is hurting you now.
It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns
obstacles into opportunities.
It sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own
opportunities, but its own talents.
Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a
nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique
who does not conform with nonconformity.
There is no royal road to anything. One thing at a time, all things in
succession. That which grows fast, withers as rapidly. That which grows
slowly, endures.
If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without
too much assistance.
Man's mind stretched to a new idea never goes back to its original
dimensions.
I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in
what direction we are moving -- we must sail sometimes with the wind and
sometimes against it -- but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to
what lies within us.
Nothing worthwhile comes easily. Work, continuous work and hard work, is
the only way to accomplish results that last.
A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to
sea and do new things.
He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.
U2: the world's best bad-weather band.
Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath's aware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey's over there'll be time enough to sleep.
At the height of laughter, the universe is flung into a kaleidoscope of
new possibilities.
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the
work of one extraordinary man.
To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
He has achieved success who has worked well, laughed often, and loved
much.
An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.
In each age men of genius undertake the ascent. From below, the world
follows them with their eyes. These men go up the mountain, enter the clouds,
disappear, reappear, People watch them, mark them. They walk by the side of
precipices. They daringly pursue their road. See them aloft, see them in the
distance; they are but black specks. On they go. The road is uneven, its
difficulties constant. At each step a wall, at each step a trap. As they rise
the cold increases. They must make their ladder, cut the ice and walk on it.,
hewing the steps in haste. A storm is raging. Nevertheless they go forward in
their madness. The air becomes difficult to breath. The abyss yawns below
them. Some fall. Others stop and retrace their steps; there is a sad
weariness. The bold ones continue. They are eyed by the eagles; the lightning
plays about them: the hurricane is furious. No matter, they persevere.
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has
come!
There is nothing like a dream to create the future.
No deity will save us, we must save ourselves. Promises of immortal
salvation or fear of eternal damnation are both illusory and harmful.
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in
philosophy only ridiculous.
It is not what they take away from you that counts. It's what you do with
what you have left.
I once thought about exercising, but then I layed down and the thought
went away.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means
for going backwards.
Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has
first experienced their desolations.
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what
happens to him.
Maybe this world is another planet's hell.
The only completely consistent people are the dead.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices,
it is imperious, demanding its victim's time, money, energy and the sacrifice
of comfort.
Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the
symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it
comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every
preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and whatever abysses nature
leads, or you will learn nothing.
It is better to die on your feet than to live on you knees.
Before the beginning of great brilliance, there must be chaos. Before a
brilliant person begins something great, they must look foolish in the crowd.
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves:
The prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to
enslave a philosophy.
I have lived to thank God that all my prayers have not been answered.
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments - there are only
consequences.
This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of
defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves.
Infidels in all ages have battled for the rights of man, and have at all
times been the fearless advocates of liberty and justice.
I combat those only who, knowing nothing of the future, prophesy an
eternity of pain- those who sow the seeds of fear in the hearts of men- those
only who poison all the springs of life, and seat a skeleton at every feast.
The Declaration of Independence was a denial, and the first denial of a
nation, of the infamous dogma that God confers the right upon one man to
govern others.
There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse;
as I have found in travelling in a stage-coach, that it is often a comfort to
shift one's position and be bruised in a new place.
Great minds have purposes, others have wishes.
Innovation takes an unreasonable man.
Awards are the badge of mediocrity.
One man with courage makes it a majority.
Live all you can; it´s a mistake not to.
Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is
what brings us the void.
Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the
fact.
The God whom science recognizes must be a God of universal laws
exclusively, a God who does a wholesale, not a retail business. He cannot
accommodate his processes to the convenience of individuals.
Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've
got a second. Give your dreams all you've got and you'll be amazed at the
energy that comes out of you.
Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain
poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which
the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole our hearts and
thrilled them.
Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.
The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of one
hour.
Do not fear your enemies. The worst they can do is kill you. Do not fear
friends. At worst, they may betray you. Fear those who do not care; they
neither kill nor betray, but betrayal and murder exists because of their
silent consent.
I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world,
and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming
feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.
What has been the effect of religious coercion? To make half the world
fools, and the other half hypocrites.
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one
will do.
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude from achieving his
goal; nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as
necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
There are no speed limits on the road to excellence.
The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra.
Treat a person as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat him as he
could be, and he will become what he should be.
It is a most mortifying reflection for a man to consider what he has done,
compared to what he might have done.
As gold which he cannot spend will make no man rich, so knowledge which he
cannot apply will make no man wise.
Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be
overcome.
The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of
thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
So it is in traveling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would
bring home knowledge.
All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries,
he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may
learn to enjoy it.
We found in the course of our journey the convenience of having
disencumbered ourselves, by laying aside whatever we could spare; for it is
not to be imagined without experience, how in climbing crags and treading
bogs, and winding through narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will
hinder, and a little weight will burden; or how often a man that has pleased
himself at home with his own resolution, will, in the hour of darkness and
fatigue, be content to leave behind him everything but himself.
He that travels in theory has no inconveniences; he has shade and sunshine
at his disposal, and wherever he alights finds tables of plenty and looks of
gaiety. These ideas are indulged till the day of departure arrives, the
chaise is called, and the progress of happiness begins. A few miles teach him
the fallacies of imagination. The road is dusty, the air is sultry, the
horses are sluggish, and the postilion brutal. He longs for the time of
dinner that he may eat and rest. The inn is crowded, his orders are
neglected, and nothing remains but that he devour in haste what the cook has
spoiled, and drive on in quest of better entertainment. He finds at night a
more commodious house, but the best is always worse than he expected.
The men who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those
who try to do nothing and succeed.
Don't compromise yourself. You're all you've got.
Never let inexperience get in the way of ambition.
No matter where you go or what you do, you live your entire life within
the confines of your head.
Stop thinking in terms of limitations and start thinking in terms of
possibilities.
I am not God, but I am my creator.
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.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical
substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.
Internal burning ... wandering fever ...
Some people are always grumbling because roses have thorns. I am thankful
that thorns have roses.
More and more, we had drifted into the baby boomer habit of defining
ourselves by our children, rather than by the things we ourselves were doing.
Sometimes, I thought, I could almost see the people around me disappear into
their children's lives, their expectations and identities swallowed almost
whole by the experience of having children.
For me, faith isn't necessarily about religion. It's about dreams--daring
to have them and to risk pursuing them.
Covering the true causes of urban violence would mean taking on some of
the most difficult and sensitive issues in American life -- race, poverty,
welfare systems, law enforcement. Many journalists, like academics, have come
to fear such issues; probing them inevitably brings accusations of racism or
some other form of bigotry. Blaming violence on media and culture is easier
and safer, both for journalists and for opportunistic politicians.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint you can on
it.
Yesterday's the past and tomorrow's the future. Today is a gift - which is
why they call it the present.
I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and
the truth of imagination.
My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.
Always frame conflict as a clash of ideas, not persons.
Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience
the world in the way they have been told to.
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature... Life is
either a daring adventure or nothing.
The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of
rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour
would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse.
No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an
uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even
touched. They must be felt with the heart.
Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to
smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.
We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities.
The time to reapir the roof is when the sun is shining.
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
The most powerful single force in the world today is neither Communism nor
capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile - it is man's eternal
desire to be free and independent.
There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long
range risks of comfortable inaction.
The great enemy of truth is not the lie--deliberate, contrived, and
dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive, and realistic. Too often we
hold fast to the cliches of our forebearers.
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled
after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because
the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to
talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who
never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous
yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the
middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'
Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer
ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
There will always be a frontier where there is an open mind.
People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought
which they avoid.
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
Don't forget to love yourself.
To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose
oneself.
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past
it.
One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.
If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as
Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry.
He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will
pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of
our time; the need for men to overcome oppression and violence without
resorting to oppression and violence.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase,
just take the first step.
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow
confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all
humanity.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation
where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content
of their character.
There are two keys to being creatively productive. One is not being
daunted by fear of failure. The other is sheer perseverance.
Get busy living, or get busy dying.
The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.
I have higher expectations of you, than you have of yourself.
"My belief is that personal freedom cannot grow beyond personal responsibility. The more people that learn to be fully accountable for their lives, the more freedom each of us can enjoy and the more fulfilling all of our lives will be."
Reed Konsler
There are two way to slice easily through life; to believe everything or
to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking.
The map is not the territory.
So successful were the drafters of the Constitution in defining government
in secular terms that one of the most powerful criticisms of the Constitution
when ratified and for succeeding decades was that it was indifferent to
Christianity and God. It was denounced by many as a godless document, which
is precisely what it is.
Charity is always help that is offered too late, just as revolution is
help that is offered too soon.
Competition was brisk; a survival of the weakest.
Meditation is not a means to an end. It is both the means and the end.
Using another as a means of satisfaction and security is not love. Love is
never security; love is a state in which there is no desire to be secure; it
is a state of vulnerability.
I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for a position
(political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than
searching it for an effort to know; to understand, to grasp this or that
aspect of reality.
It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot
at all realize how strange it will be.
Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.
Underlying all Western modes of analysis is a very strong rationalistic
tendency - an assumption that everything can be accounted for...
Some say opportunity knocks only once, that is not true. Opportunity
knocks all the time, but you have to be ready for it. If the chance comes,
you must have the equipment to take advantage of it.
Too often. . .I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely
of what they had seen.
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him
absolutely no good.
Even the weakest disputant is made so conceited by what he calls religion,
as to think himself wiser than the wisest who thinks differently from him.
The difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a person's
determination.
If there is no wind, row.
Who makes quick use of the moment is a genius of prudence.
The human soul needs actual beauty more that bread.
When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the
squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we
shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we
don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in ...
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty
recesses of their minds wake in the day to find out it was vanity: but the
dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with
open eyes, to make it possible.
It may be that those who do most, dream most.
A desk is a dangerouse place from which to view the world.
He who as never failed, has never tried.
When common sense and compassion are in such violent conflict with the
law, then the LAW is wrong and must be changed.
All my writing has always been for laughs or fun or whatever you call it.
I do it for that first. Whatever people make of it afterwards is valid but it
doesn't necessarily have to correspond to my thoughts about it. OK? This goes
for any books, creations, art, poetry, songs, etc. The mystery and shit that
is built around all forms of art needs smashing, anyway.
Life is what happens while you are making other plans.
Imagine
I began to understand that 'America' in reality belonged to the whole
world and not just to Americans. The idea of America had already been
invented by the philosophers, the vagabonds, the dispersed of this earth,
long before the Spanish ships got there. Those whom we call Americans have
only rented it for a time. If they behave badly, we can discover another
'America'. The contract can be cancelled at any time.
Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember.
Consumers are unpredeictable, varied, fickle, stupid, shortsighted,
stubborn, and generally bothersome.
Scientists have proven that it's impossible to long-jump 30 feet, but I
don't listen to that kind of talk. Thoughts like that have a way of sinking
into your feet.
The bravest thing I ever did was continuing to live when I wanted to die.
He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has
seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an
hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's
character, give him power.
And in the end it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life
in your years.
I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday.
People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.
The best thing about the future is that it only comes one day at a time.
Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you're off,
that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the
feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock.
It is surprising what a man can do when he has to, and how little most men
will do when they don't have to.
It is far easier to travel than to write about it.
I thank God that I live in a country where dreams can come true, where
failure sometimes is the first step to success and where success is only
another form of failure if we forget what our priorities should be.
Man's rights do not depend on his ability to feel pain; they depend on his
ability to think.
The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment
to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.
The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the
determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of
ourselves to the task at hand.
The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.
I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that spark should burn
out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stilled by dry rot. I would rather
be a superb meteor, every atom of me in a significant glow, than a sleepy and
permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I
shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
Getting ahead in a difficult profession requires avid faith in yourself.
That is why some people with mediocre talent, but with great inner drive, go
much further than people with vastly superior talent.
Reputation is only a...candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily
blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.
What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
There was a cinematic innovation in the first Star Wars film that made
people say 'Gee, I'd never seen that before'. I have to opportunity to do
that again with the prequels. The fun part for me is to say, 'You want to me
to come back and do that for you? I can do that. I'll do it. Here.'
Courage is the ladder on which all other virtues mount.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still
plant my apple tree.
Our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is
whimsical, sentimental irresponsibility and when it is a valid expression of
our deepest desires and values.
Yesterday is a canceled check;
Tomorrow is a promissory note;
Today is the only cash you have;
So spend it wisely.
There is no security on this earth, there is only opportunity.
There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct
or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of
a new order of things.
Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between
them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.
The end of life would be much less frightening if it were not called death
any more. The fear of death is the source of all religions.
As we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our
presence automatically liberates others.
The victory of success will be half won when you learn the secret of
putting out more than is expected in all that you do. Make yourself so
valuable in your work that eventually you will become indispensable.
The only certain means of success is to render more and better service
than is expected of you, no matter what your task may be.
One of the great undiscovered joys of life comes from doing everything one
attempts to the best of one's ability. There is a special sense of
satisfaction, a pride in surveying such a work, a work which is rounded,
full, exact, complete in its parts, which the superficial person who leaves
his or her work in a slovenly, slipshod, half-finished condition, can never
know. It is this conscientious completeness which turns any work into art.
The smallest task, well done, becomes a miracle of achievement.
What you plant now, you will harvest later.
I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the
darkness for it shows me the stars.
Duty is heavier than a mountain, death lighter than a feather.
What happens to a man is less significant than what happens within him.
Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I
never return, all is in order.
It is those who have this imperative demand for the best in their natures,
and who will accept nothing short of it, that holds the banners of progress,
that set the standards, the ideals, for others.
People who have accomplished work worthwhile have had a very high sense of
the way to do things. They have not been content with mediocrity. They have
not confined themselves to the beaten tracks; they have never been satisfied
to do things just as others so them, but always a little better. They always
pushed things that came to their hands a little higher up, this little
farther on, that counts in the quality of life's work. It is constant effort
to be first-class in everything one attempts that conquers the heights of
excellence.
Opportunities? They are all around us... There is power lying latent
everywhere waiting for the observant eye to discover it.
Our destiny changes with our thought; we shall become what we wish to
become, do what we wish to do, when our habitual thought corresponds with our
desire.
When we are sure that we are on the right road there is no need to plan
our journey too far ahead. No need to burden ourselves with doubts and fears
as to the obstacles that may bar our progress. We cannot take more than one
step at a time.
Don't wait for extraordinary opportunities. Seize common occasions and
make them great. Weak men wait for opportunities; strong men make them.
Success is not measured by what you accomplish, but by the opposition you
have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle
against overwhelming odds...
The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your
environment; it is not in luck or chance, or the help of others; it is in
yourself alone.
Success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. It cannot be coaxed or
bribed; pay the price and it is yours.
A single idea, if it is right, saves us an infinity of experiences.
Open your eyes,
and look within.
Are you satisfied
With the life you're livin'?
Good timber does not grow with ease. The stronger the wind the stronger
the trees.
If you look up 'atheism' in a dictionary, you will probably find it
defined as the belief that there is no God. Certainly many people understand
atheism in this way. Yet many atheists do not, and this is not what the term
means if one consider it from the point of view of its Greek roots. In Greek
'a' means 'without' or 'not' and 'theos' means 'god.' From this standpoint an
atheist would simply be someone without a belief in God, not necessarily
someone who believes that God does not exist. According to its Greek roots,
then, atheism is a negative view, characterized by the absence of belief in
God.
Religious experiences are like those induced by drugs, alcohol, mental
illness, and sleep deprivation: They tell no uniform or coherent story, and
there is no plausible theory to account for discrepancies among them.
C.S. Lewis is certainly right to suppose that in considering the question
of whether miracles exist there is a danger that one will appear to a priori
arguments and assumptions. But the solution to this problem is not to decide
on naturalism or supernaturalism beforehand. Rather, one must attempt to
reject the a priori arguments and instead base one's position on inductive
considerations. Lewis has not shown that this is impossible. Thus he has not
shown that one must choose between naturalism and supernaturalism before
investigating the possibility of miracles.
Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a
heartless world, and the soul of soul-less conditions. It is the opium of the
people.
Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more
beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it
that this safe return brings such regret?
Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He
lives by makebelieve.
It's a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the
best, you very often get it.
There is nothing like a comfortable adventure to put people in a good
humor. . .
Worry affects the circulation, the heart, The glands, the whole nervous
system, And profoundly affects the health. I have never known a man who died
from overwork, But many who have died from doubt.
The quality of an organization can never exceed the quality of the minds
that make it up.
Commit yourself to quality from day one ... it's better to do nothing at
all than to do something badly.
We are so much the victims of abstraction that with the Earth in flames we
can barely rouse ourselves to wander across the room and look at the
thermostat.
Everything is a blessing, and everything comes as a gift. And I don't
regret anything about the situation I find myself in. If psychedelics don't
ready you for the great beyond, then I don't know what really does. And we're
all under sentence of 'moving up' at some point in our lives. I have an
absolute faith that the universe prefers joy and distills us with joy and
this what religion is trying to download to us, and this is what every moment
of life is trying to do - if we can open to it. And we psychedelic people, if
we could secure that death has no sting, we would have done the greatest
service to suffering intelligence that can be done. And I feel that it's
close, and I feel strong. I feel strong because of this (psychedelic)
Community and these people and the plants that it rests on, and the ancient
practices that it rests on, and I am full of hope, not only for my own small
problems, but for humanity in general.
Never believe that a few caring people can't change the world. For indeed,
that's all who ever have.
It is not down in any map; true places never are.
For every problem there is a solution which is simple, clean and wrong.
What we learn with pleasure we never forget.
Our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is
whimsical, sentimental irresponsibility and when it is a valid expression of
our deepest desires and values.
If you love the truth, be a lover of silence. Silence like the sunlight
will illuminate you in God and will deliver you from the phantoms of
ignorance. Silence will unite you to God.
The contemplative waits in silence and when he is 'answered' it is not so
much by a word that bursts into his silence. It is by this silence itself
suddenly, inexplicably, revealing itself to him as a word of great power.
Are cats lazy? Well, more power to them if they are. Which one of us has
not entertained the dream of doing just as he likes, when and how he likes,
and as much as he likes?
Construct your determination with sustained effort, controlled attention,
and concentrated energy. Opportunities never come to those who wait...they
are captured by those who dare to attack.
Determine what specific goal you want to achieve. Then dedicate yourself
to its attainment with unswerving singleness of purpose, the trenchant zeal
of a crusader.
Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and
where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire
in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.
If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid
the people, you might better stay at home.
Every moment is a golden one for those who have the vision to recognize it
as such.
If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are
eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way
of looking at things.
Travel is the realm of the improbable adventure, the quick fix, the ship
passing in the night. It entitles you to meet interesting people, whom you
would never meet, even if you laid traps or advertised for them. Not only do
you meet them, but also unmeet them, all in the space of, it often seems, a
mere compacted evening. As there is so little time, bodies in motion drop
their guard and immediately get on with their stories. Then the proverbial
ships part, each to its destination, never again to brush each other's wake.
Who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe.
It's not what happens to you; it's what you do about it that makes the
difference.
I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
The scientific attitude implies...the postulate of objectivity-that is to
say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan; that there is no
intention in the universe.
Ever notice that 'what the hell' is always the right decision?
Nothing can be said in favor of tobacco.
The majority of people believe in incredible things which are absolutely
false. The majority of people daily act in a manner prejudicial to their
general well-being.
Science has proof without any certainty. Creationists have certainty
without any proof.
The moral idea of Christian love is like a pillar of flaming light
extending from earth to heaven, but the supernatural religion of freedom,
solace, and joy that should have evolved from it was choked and poisoned. The
successors of Christ, from St. Paul down to the censors, obscurantists, and
tyrants of today have done their conscientious worst to hide the light from
men.
But the fruit that can fall without shaking
Indeed is too mellow for me.
We travelers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what
has been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell
anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic.
You have to study a great deal to know a little.
... the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can
lose himself.
What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do especially
in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right
there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No
yesterdays on the road.
A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to
find it.
He who does not travel does not know the value of men.
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off
the goal.
There is only one success-to be able to spend your life in your own way.
When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink
and glue -- you sell him a whole new life.
Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe
to be beautiful.
Quitters never win, Winners never quit, but those who never win and never
quit are idiots.
Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into
the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and
baggage and chatter.
Trust in Allah, but tie your camel.
Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the
reality has more to do with losing your luggage.
The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be
compassionate and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of
integrity.
When you have confidence, you can have a lot of fun. And when you have
fun, you can do amazing things.
We protest against unjust criticism, but we accept unearned applause.
A traveler must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the
tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before
him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing.
We do not inherit the land, we borrow it from our children.
I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses
satisfied to live in hunger, filth and ignorance.
People will listen a great deal more patiently while you explain your
mistakes than when you explain your successes.
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the
shoulders of giants.
Genius is perseverance in disguise.
Religion indeed enlightens, terrifies, subdues; it gives faith, it
inflicts remorse, it inspires resolutions, it draws tears, it inflames
devotion, but only for the occasion.
In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak
up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I
didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the
Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came
for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
In heaven all the interesting people are missing.
Which is it, is man one of God's blunders or is God one of man's?
After coming in contact with a religious man, I always feel that I must
wash my hands.
On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will
reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that
you will be able to climb higher tomorrow.
That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
We should consider every day lost in which we do not Dance at least once.
A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds; it
seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities
that were somehow absent before the change.
People are where they are because that's exactly where they really want to
be...whether they'll admit that or not.
We can let circumstances rule us, or we can take charge and rule our lives
from within.
Your world is a living expression of how you are using and have used your
mind.
Am I motivated by what I really want out of life - or am I mass-motivated?
All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to
your destination.
Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal.
Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with repetition and
emotion will one day become a reality.
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go
through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in
it. This is a kind of death.
It's a great big world out there, and there's only one of me.
Whatever the reasons, we do not pursue emotional development with the same
intensity with which we pursue physical and intellectual development. This is
all the more unfortunate because full emotional development offers the
greatest degree of leverage in attaining our full potential.
When you see bands like The Verve and, to a lesser degree, Radiohead
complaining about stardom, when you see one of those fools from Oasis
behaving like a graceless, charmless thug, when you have to restrain yourself
from putting your foot through the telly screen when Puff Daddy commits
necrophilia on some old hit, be thankful for U2.
Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what
I have done with where I have been that should be of interest.
Making your unknown known is the important thing.
Perhaps, on the whole, embarrassment and perplexity are a kind of natural
accompaniment to life and movement...
Let use risk the wildest places, lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under
his feet.
Discovery follows discovery; each both raising and answering questions;
each ending a long search, and each providing the new instruments for a new
search.
It is not necessary to have hope in order to undertake an enterprise, nor
to be successful in order to persevere.
Even very young children need to be informed about dying. Explain the
concept of death very carefully to your child. This will make threatening him
with it much more effective.
Our firmest convictions are apt to be the most suspect, they mark our
limitations and our bounds. Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the
indomitable urge to extend its boundaries.
Life is a petty thing unless it is moved by the indomitable urge to extend
its boundaries.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human
face--for ever.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what
they do not want to hear.
Never let the odds keep you from pursuing what you know in your heart you
were meant to do.
Enlarge your consciousness. If your consciousness is small, you will
experience smallness in every department of your life.
A word to the wise is sufficient.
He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from
oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will
reach to himself.
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or
Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and
enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman
church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church,
nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.
Character is much easier kept than recovered.
We become manipulators when our knowledge leaves the inner self
unexamined, for it is there that the drive for dominance arises. If our
knowledge made us aware of the heart of darkness within, we would see our
domineering instinct for the destructive passion it is. Then we would wish
not to subdue the world but to have our own destructive impulses subdued by
truth.
We want to know in ways that allow us to convert the world--but we do not
want to be known in ways that require us to change as well. To learn is to
face transformation.
The culture of scarcity thrives on dissatisfaction, and breeds it as well.
Our refusal to believe that we have enough is one cause of the competition
that has resulted in such an inequitable distribution of resources at home
and around the world. But a culture of abundance both arises from and creates
a sense of satisfaction. In such a culture, enough is enough, and the very
fact that people are willing to share scarcity in community produces a
satisfaction that leads to more sharing, more abundance.
At every level of our lives, the assumption of scarcity, not abundance,
threatens to deform our attitudes and our actions.
If a man does his best, what else is there?
Always do more than is required of you.
Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose
sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly
off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep,
dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we
imagine of it.
Excellence is in the details. Give attention to the details and excellence
will come.
There is real magic in enthusiasm. It spells the difference between
mediocrity and accomplishment.
Start each day by affirming peaceful, contented and happy attitudes and
your days will tend to be pleasant and successful.
Those who assume success tend already to have success. Those who assume
failure tend to have failure.
Whatever you are doing, give it all you've got...life cannot deny itself
to the person who gives life his all.
You can get where you want to go only if you know what your goal is. Your
expectation must have a clearly defined objective. Lots of people get nowhere
simply because they do not know where they want to go.
Conditions are created by thoughts for more powerfully than conditions
create thoughts...This great law briefly and simply stated is that if you
think in negative terms you will get negative results. If you think in
positive terms you will achieve positive results. That is the simple fact
which is at the basis of an astonishing law of prosperity and success. In
three words: Believe and succeed.
Many people suffer poor health not because of what they eat, but because
of what is eating them.
Nothing on earth is greater than the human mind in potential power. The
average individual is capable of much greater achievement than he or she has
ever realized.
Every achievement in this world is first projected as a creative idea.
First the idea, then faith in it, then the means of implementing the idea.
That is the way success proceeds.
[Heroism] is about leaping off the edge of the known to confront the
unknown, and trusting what when the time comes, we will have what we need to
face our dragons, discover our treasures, and return to transform our
kingdom.
Our Nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.
The only difference between a wise man and a fool is that the wise man
knows he's playing.
There is a great market for religious experience in our world; but there
is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue...
How difficult it is to save the bark of reputation from the rocks of
ignorance.
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.
The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to
grow sharper.
The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We
work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanity.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he
grows up.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how
to do it.
Everything you can imagine is real.
When I was a child, my mother said to me, `If you become a soldier you'll
be a general. If you become a monk you'll end up as the pope.' Instead I
became a painter and wound up as Picasso.
Art is a lie which tells us the truth.
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a
bird?
Success is a choice.
The greatest wealth is to live content with little.
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of
conversation.
Life must be lived as play.
The measure of a man is the way he bears up under misfortune.
The idea of God stands for the possible attempt at an impossible
conception. We know nothing about the nature of God.
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who
dream only by night.
If we ought not to fear moral truth, still less should we dread scientific
truth. In the first place it cannot conflict with ethics.... But if science
is feared, it is above all because it can not give us happiness.... Man,
then, can not be happy through science but today he can much less be happy
without it. Science is facts. Just as houses are made of stones, so is
science made of facts. But a pile of stones is not a house and a collection
of facts is not necessarily science.
He who laughs, lasts.
Be silent always when you doubt your sense.
You must be resolutely determined that whatever you do shall always be the
best of which you are capable.
The successful man is prosperous, because he has developed ninety-five
percent of his ability. The failure is poor, because only five percent of his
natural talents have been utilized.
I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and walked with the
best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't
last out the year.
There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard
work, learning from failure.
We are rightfully outraged when anyone attacks or desecrates our flag. Few
Americans do such things and when they do they are subject to the rightful
condemnation of their fellow citizens. They may be destroying a piece of
cloth, but they do no damage to our system of freedom which tolerates such
desecration... I would not amend that great shield of democracy to hammer a
few miscreants. The flag will still be flying proudly long after they have
slunk away.
The fastest way to travel is to be there already.
A lot of people run a race to see who's the fastest. I run to see who has
the most guts.
One can believe God capable of anything without believing that he did
everything anybody may say he did. One can believe in the possibility of
miracles without believing that every reported miracle must in fact have
happened.
A good holiday is one that is spent among people whose notions of time are
vaguer than yours.
I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try,
one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the
morning.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in
having new eyes.
This is the exploration that awaits you: Not mapping stars and studying
nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existance.
Don't make it your goal to control effects, make it your goal to control
causes. If you control causes, you don't have to control effects.
Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel,
they go out and buy more tunnel.
Achieving life is not the equivalent of avoding death. Joy is not the
absence of pain.
Contradictions do not exist.
Money will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it
will not provide you with desires.
There are no evil thoughts ... except the refusal to think.
Only a man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desires is capable of
the depravity of a desire devoid of love.
If you want to defeat any kind of vicious fraud--comply with it literally,
adding nothing of your own to disguise its nature.
If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public,
that their good requires victims, then I say: 'The public good be damned, I
will have no part of it!'
The man who is proudly certain of his own value does not seek to gain his
value, he seeks to express it. There is no conflict between the standards of
his mind and his body.
Love is our response to our highest values--and can be nothing else.
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, whith
his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive
achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
In order to live, man must act; in order to act, he must make choices; in
order to make choices, he must define a code of values.
By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man--every man--is an end
in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own
happiness is his highest moral purpose.
Man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
The glory of great men should always be measured by the means they have
used to acquire it.
Man's only duty is to respect other's rights and man's only right over
others is to enforce that duty.
Who is John Galt?
I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake
of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Practice principled acts of self-interest and ruthless logic.
As we gain knowledge, we do not become more certain, we become certain of
more.
Compromise does not satisfy, but dissatisfies everybody; it does not lead
to general fulfillment, but to general frustration; those who try to become
all things to all men, end up by not being anything to anyone.
I am the man whom you did not want either to live or to die. You did not
want me to live, because you were afraid of knowing that I carried the
responsibility you dropped and that your lives depended upon me; you did not
want me to die, because you knew it.
There can be no conflict of interests between rational men.
I love you, my dearest, with that blindest passion of my body which comes
from the clearest perception of my mind.
The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to
enjoy yourself and live.
Life is the reward of virtue--and happiness is the goal and reward of
life.
You have been using fear as your weapon and have been bringing death to
man as his punishment for rejecting your morality. We offer him life as his
reward for accepting ours.
You seek escape from pain. We seek the achievement of happiness. You exist
for the sake of avoiding punishment. We exist for the sake of earning
rewards. Threats will not make us function; fear is not our incentive. It is
not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.
To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of
morality.
Those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe
in existence without consciousness--both demand the surrender of your mind,
one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes.
There is no honest revolt against reason.
I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when
his own consent is needed for evil to win--and no manner of injury done to
him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent.
They had known that theirs was the power. I taught them that theirs was
the glory.
The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who
declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes
responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now being
spilled in the world.
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is
wrong, but in the middle is always evil.
In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win.
In any compromise between good and evil it is only evil that can profit.
A man who has no right to his life, has no right to values and will not
keep them.
No man can survive the moment of pronouncing himself irredeemably evil;
should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide.
An error made on your won is safer than ten truths accepted on faith,
because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys
your capacity to distinguish truth from error.
Any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and
that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality,
his glory.
I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about do not
exist. That this book has been written--and published--is my proof that they
do.
Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the
creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to
swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the
current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the
creator is the man who stands alone. Men have been taught that the ego is the
synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the
egoist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not
think, feel, judge, or act. These are functions of the self.
In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those
who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let
your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in
those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that
man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step
that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by
irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the
not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul
perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been
able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you
desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.
After centuries of being pounded with the doctrine that altruism is the
ultimate ideal, men have accepted it in the only way it could be accepted. By
seeking self-esteem through others. By living second-hand. And it has opened
the way for every kind of horror. It has become the dreadful form of
selfishness which a truly selfish man couldn't have conceived. And now, to
cure a world perishing from selflessness, we're asked to destroy the self.
Listen to what is being preached today. Look at everyone around us. You've
wondered why they suffer, why they seek happiness and never find it. If any
man stopped and asked himself whether he's ever held a truly personal desire,
he'd find the answer. He'd see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams,
his ambitions are motivated by other men. He's not really struggling even for
material wealth, but for the second-hander's delusion -- prestige. A stamp of
approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he
has succeeded. He can't say about a single thing: 'This is what I wanted
because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me.' Then he
wonders why he's unhappy. Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest
moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched. The things which are
sacred or precious to us are the things we withdraw from promiscuous sharing.
But now we are taught to throw everything within us into public light and
common pawing. To seek joy in meeting halls. We haven't even got a word for
the quality I mean -- for the self-sufficiency of man's spirit. It's
difficult to call it selfishness or egoism, the words have been perverted,
they've come to mean Peter Keating. Gail, I think the only cardinal evil on
earth is that of placing your prime concern within other men. I''ve always
demanded a certain quality in the people I liked. I've always recognized it
at once -- and it's the only quality I respect in men. I choose my friends by
that. Now I know what it is. A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters.
'Mr. Rearden,' said Francisco, his voice suddenly calm, 'if you saw Atlas,
the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood,
blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but
still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the
greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders--what
would you tell him to do?'
'I ... don't know. What ... could he do? What would you tell him?'
'To shrug.'
...if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no
greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who
assumes the responsibility of thinking.... the alleged short-cut to
knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit destroying the mind.
Ask youself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting
for us in our graves--or whether it should be ours here and now and on this
earth.
In that world, you'll be able to rise in the morning with the spirit you
had known in your childhood: that spirit of eagerness, adventure and
certainty which comes from dealing with a rational universe.
The leader must know, must know that he knows, and must be able to make it
abundantly clear to those around him that he know.
Life is short and the world is wide.
The name of Christ has caused more persecutions, wars, and miseries than
any other name has caused.
We must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of
life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration; to breathe with
them, mobile and soft in the limberness of our bodies, in our agility, our
ability, as it were, to dance, and yet to stand upright...
A year to go around the world! A whole twelve months of scenes and curious
happenings in far-off foreign lands! You have thought of doing this, almost
promised yourself that when you got old enough, and rich enough, and could
?spare the time,? you too would go around the world. Most of us get old
enough; some of us get rich enough; but the time! the time! - to spare the
time, to cut loose from goods and lands, from stocks and dreary desks, quit
clients, patients, readers, home and friends - ay, and our enemies whom we so
dearly love! Full many a promise must be broken and few the voyagers round
the world.
A series of failures may culminate in the best possible result.
The four cornerstones of character on which the structure of this nation
was built are: Initiative, Imagination, Individuality and Independence.
When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away
at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it.
Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not
that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.
I don't have a lot of respect for talent. Talent is genetic. It's what you
do with it that counts.
If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.
The most fruitful actions are those we undertake when we are centered in
our essence, when we are focused by our passion, when our actions are guided
by a sense of spiritual direction.
Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and
business.
Laughter can be more satisfying than honor;
More precious than money;
More heart-cleansing than prayer.
It requires a better type of mind to seek out and to support or to create
the new than to follow the worn paths of accepting success...
Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.
Every man is ignorant - just on different subjects.
Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit
there.
What we need is more people who specialize in the impossible.
Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight.
Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day.
Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.
Either you run the day or the day runs you.
The book you don't read can't help.
Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every
day.
We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which
we really stop to look fear in the face... we must do that which we think we
cannot.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Sometimes you must do the thing you cannot do.
It's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted in the air.
When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own mind.
Keep your eyes on the stars and your feet on the ground
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong
man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit
belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the
dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short
again and again . . . who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions
and spends himself in a worthy course; who at the best knows in the end the
triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails
while daring greatly; so that this place shall never be with those cold and
timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.
Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work
hard at work worth doing.
Moving to any new place in life literally involves deliberately putting
one's self out of balance in the direction of the intended destination, and
then trusting your creative mechanism to create the necessary points of
support.
Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Imagine that the Earth - 4.6 billions years old -was a 46-year-old
woman... The Earth Woman was 11 years old when the first single-celled
organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish,
appeared only when she was 40. She was over 45 -- just eight months ago -
when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know
it began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman's life.
I tried to find Him on the Christian cross, but He was not there; I went
to the Temple of the Hindus and to the old pagodas, but I could not find a
trace of Him anywhere.
I searched on the mountains and in the valleys but neither in the heights nor
in the depths was I able to find Him. I went to the Caaba in Mecca, but He
was not there either.
I questioned the scholars and philosophers but He was beyond their
understanding.
I then looked into my heart and it was there where He dwellend that I saw
Him; He was nowhere else to be found.
When you are everywhere, you are nowhere.
When you are somewhere, you are everywhere.
When you're traveling, ask the traveler for advice, not someone whose
lameness keeps him in one place.
Muhammad says, 'Love of one's country is a part of the faith.' But don't
take that literally! Your real 'country' is where you're heading, not where
you are. Don't misread that hadith.
It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that
when I've gone and come back, I'll find it at home.
"A lover may banker after this or that love, but at the last he is drawn
to the King of love. However much we describe and explain love, when we fall
in love we are ashamed of our words. Explanation by the tongue makes most
things clear, but love unexplained is clearer."
Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.
People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of
people they ignore at home.
Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so.
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more
even than death... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and
terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and
comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.
Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief
glory of man.
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life:
the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the
suffering of mankind.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so
certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.
I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its
churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the
world.
The conquering of fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and
millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing
better than the Ku Klux Klan, the Fascisti. and Mr. Winston Churchill? Really
I am not much impressed with the people who say: 'Look at me: I am such a
splendid product that there must have been design in the universe.' I am not
very impressed by the splendor of those people. Therefore I think that this
argument of design is really a very poor argument indeed. Moreover, if you
accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and
life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is merely a
flash in the pan; it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a
certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so
forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in
the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to
which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.
The fact that a belief has a good moral effect upon a man is no evidence
whatsoever in favor of its truth.
There is an artist imprisoned in each one of us. Let him loose to spread
joy everywhere.
The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the
greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don't play
together, the club won't be worth a dime.
Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.
At a few hundred kilometers altitude, the Earth fills half your sky, and
the band of blue that stretches from Mindanao to Bombay, which your eye
encompasses in a single glance, can break your heart with its beauty. Home
you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I
know, everyone I ever heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and
exquisite blue.
He who would travel happily must travel light.
Do not wish to be anything but what you are, and try to be that perfectly.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your
aim.
I wouldn't dream of wiping the religious myths from humanity. I do,
however, seek a healthier way to believe in them than the dogmatic
literalizing that seems so common. I also look forward to the emergence of
newer exciting mythologies that will guide and propel humanity onward.
Success, in a generally accepted sense of the term, means the opportunity
to experience and to realize to the maximum the forces that are within us.
Everything has been figured out, except how to live.
One day I wiped out all the notions from my mind. I gave up all desire. I
discarded all the words with which I thought and stayed in quietude. I felt a
little queer-as if I were being carried into something, or as if I were
touching some power unknown to me... and Ztt! I entered. I lost the boundary
of my physical body. I had my skin, or course, but I felt I was standing in
the center of the cosmos. I spoke, but my words had lost their meaning. I saw
people coming towards me, but all were the same man. All were myself! I had
never known this world. I had believed that I was created, but now I must
change my opinion: I was never created; I was the cosmos; no individual Mr.
Sasaki existed.
The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by
the present, but a place that is created--created first in the mind and will,
created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but
one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the
activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination.
...anything can be used addictively, whether it be a substance (like
alcohol) or a process (like work). This is because the purpose or function of
an addiction is to put a buffer between ourselves and our awareness of our
feelings. An addiction serves to numb us so that we are out of touch with
what we know and what we feel.
Inspired minds make all the difference.
Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains
people as to how they shall think.
I'd rather try something great and fail, then try nothing at all and
succeed.
The man who trims himself to suit everybody will soon whittle himself
away.
Don't assume that it's too late to get involved.
Not one of us knows what effect his life produces, and what he gives to
others; that is hidden from us and must remain so, though we are often
allowed to see some little fraction of it, so that we may not lose courage.
The way in which power works is a mystery.
There's a time for laughing and there's a time for not laughing - and this
is not one of them!
No man lives happily who regards himself alone, who turns everything to
his own advantage. You must live for others if you wish to live for yourself.
Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.
Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because
we do not dare that they are difficult.
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living,
It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.
Which is what I do,
And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.
If you lose money, you lose a little, If you lose honor, you lose a lot,
If you lose courage, you've lost everything, and if you lose friendship,
you've lost the world.
Get away to the mountains, the deserts And the deepest recesses of the earth.
In this way and no other will you gain A truer knowledge of things and Of
their properties.
Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
in the real world.
What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!
in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in
apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!
To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou
canst not then be false to any man.
We cannot all be masters, nor all masters
Cannot be truly follow'd.
There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Go to your bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.
That our planet is the one and only planet where life has emerged would be
a ridiculous assumption.... Even if only one in a hundred of the ten billion
suitable planets has actually got life under way, there would be more than
100 million such planets. No, it is presumptuous to think that we are alone.
Which animal types will be here 10,000 years from now; which will be more
likely to fall victim to fate or folly? The answer of course is too obvious,
too painfully obvious. The fish has been here several hundred million years;
man, but a few hundred thousand.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who
have not got it.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.
Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that
never were and ask why not.
I am a sort of collector of religions: and the curious thing is that I
find I can believe in all of them.
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
One man that has a mind and knows it, can always beat ten men who haven't
and don't.
I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad
for me do not tempt me.
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares
that it is his duty.
You're not a man, you're a machine.
He who has never hoped can never despair.
A man of great common sense and good taste, - meaning thereby a man
without originality or moral courage.
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
Democracy: The substitution of election by the incompetent many for
appointment by the corrupt few.
Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their
minds, cannot change anything.
No sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul
boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus.
The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and
that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only
wasted my time.
Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have
got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as
possible before handing it on to future generations.
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't
believe in circumstances. The people who get on in the world are the people
who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find
them, make them.
Religion is always right. Religion solves every problem and thereby
abolishes problems from the universe. Science is the opposite. Science is
always wrong. It never solves a problem without raising ten more problems.
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to
consume wealth without producing it.
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful
than a life spent doing nothing.
I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is
writing well.
Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose,
a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
Listen to the mustn'ts, child
Listen to the don'ts
Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts
Listen to the never haves,
then listen close to me...
Anything can happen, child
Anything can be.
An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the
most disturbing of all journeys.
No way of life is inevitable. Examine your own closely.
If you do not like it, change it.
But do not try to change it through political action. Even if you succeed in
gaining power, you will not be able to use it any more wisely than your
predecessors.
Ask only to be left alone to solve your problems in your own way.
Simplify your needs. Learn how to be happy with fewer possessions.
Build a way of life in which people live together without quarreling, in a
social climate of trust rather than suspicion, of love rather than jealousy,
of cooperation rather than competition.
Maintain that world with gentle but pervasive ethical sanctions rather than a
police or military force.
Transmit the culture effectively to new members through expert child care and
a powerful educational technology.
Reduce compulsive labor to a minimum by arranging the kinds of incentives
under which people enjoy working.
Regard no practice as immutable. Change and be ready to change again. Accept
no eternal verity. Experiment.
He who resolves upon doing a thing, by that very resolution often scales
the barriers to it, and secures its achievement. To think we are able, is
almost to be so -- to determine upon attainment is frequently attainment
itself.
There is perhaps no station in life in which difficulties do not have to
be encountered and overcome before any decided means of success can be
achieved.
(Those) who are resolved to find a way for themselves will always find
opportunities enough; and if they do not find them, they will make them.
Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.
The true secret of giving advice is, after you have honestly given it, to
be perfectly indifferent whether it is taken or not and never persist in
trying to set people right.
The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in
reality what we would appear to be; all human virtues increase and strengthen
themselves by the practice and experience of them.
Let him that would move the world first move himself.
I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy and nothing can stop him.
Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know
people. Let your memory be your travel bag.
You only have power over people as long as you don't take everything away
from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything he's no longer in your
power -- he's free again.
The best answers are those that destroy the question.
I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.
Look and you will find it-what is unsought will go undetected.
On a long journey even a straw weighs heavy.
Welcome every problem as an opportunity. Each moment is the great
challenge, the best thing that ever happened to you. The more difficult the
problem, the greater the challenge in working it out.
Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.
Illusions make you weak; dreams and possibilities make you strong.
Dreams don't mean nothing unless your strong enough to fight for em' and
make them come true.
Tonight I'm gonna get birth naked, bury my old soul, and dance on it's
grave.
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We do not let our enemies have guns,
why should we let them have ideas.
A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest
sensations in the world.
Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing
it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic
qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that
everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.
Reach high, for the stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every
dream precedes the goal.
Traveling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and
love you, but I have to go; this is my station.'
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was
assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years
described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I
was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am
fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked... In other
words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the
disease is incurable.
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you
control it.
People don't take trips--trips take people.
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of
the few.
It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually
there must be a moral and historic interest.
Freedom rings where opinions clash.
A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular.
We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can
find in our travels is an honest friend.
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the
only end of life.
Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first
sun-rise, the first South Sea Island, are memories apart, and touched a
virginity of sense.
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's
sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life
more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the
globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world
tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
Since things with limits cannot satisfy, people will forever try to push
things to the limit.
I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.
Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not
understanding, understanding is not wisdom.
Every exit is an entry somewhere else.
The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us.
And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible
inbetween. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment. To
choose something better, to make a difference, as you say. And I intend to do
just that.
Three years. For three years I warned you this day was coming. But you
would not listen. Pride, you said, presumption. And now the Shadows are on
the move. The Centauri and the younger worlds are at war, the Narns have
fallen. Even the Humans are fighting one another. The pride was yours, the
presumption was yours. For a thousand years we have been awaiting for
fulfilment of prophecy, and when it finally happens, you scorn it, you reject
it. Because you no longer believe it yourselves. 'We stand between the candle
and the star, between the darkness and the light.' You say the words, but
your hearts are empty, your ears closed to the truth. You stand for nothing
but your own petty interests. 'Problems of others are not our concern.' I do
not blame you for standing silent in your shame. You, who knew what was
coming, but refused to take up the burden of this war. If the warrior caste
will not fight, then the rest of us will. If the Council has lost its way, if
it will not lead, if we have abandoned our covenant with Valen, the Council
should be broken, as was prophesied. We must stand with the others now,
before it's too late. Between the worker caste and the religious caste we
control two thirds of our forces. Do you, I say, listen to the voice of your
conscience? Break the Council, and come with me. Our time of isolation is
over. We move now, together, or not at all.
I've made a decision and now I must face the consequences.
It might be helpful for you to know that you are not alone. And that in
the long, twilight struggle, which lies ahead of us, there is the possibility
of hope.
No dictator, no invader, can hold an imprisoned population by the force of
arms forever. There is no greater power in the Universe than the need for
freedom. Against that power governments, and tyrants, and armies cannot
stand. The Centauri learnt this lesson once. We will teach it to them again.
Though it take a thousand years, we will be free.
G'Quon wrote: There is a greater darkness than the one we fight. It is the
darkness of the soul that has lost its way. The war we fight is not against
powers and principalities, it is against chaos and despair. Greater than the
death of flesh is the death of hope, the death of dreams. Against this peril
we can never surrender. The future is all around us, waiting in moments of
transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No-one knows the shape of
that future, or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in
pain.
Who are you? What do you want? Who are you? What do you want? Who are you?
Who are you?
No. We have to stay here and there's a simple reason why. Ask ten
different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and
you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on
the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand
years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When
that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu,
Einstein, Morobuto, Buddy Holly, Aristophanes .. and all of this .. all of
this was for nothing unless we go to the stars.
The avalanche has started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote.
The Universe is driven by the complex interaction between three
ingredients: matter, energy, and enlightened self-interest.
Then I will tell you a great secret, Captain. Perhaps the greatest of all
time. The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this
station and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are
star stuff, we are the Universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out.
As we have both learned, sometimes the Universe requires a change of
perspective.
There is always choice. We say there is no choice only to comfort
ourselves with the decision we have already made. If you understand that,
there's hope. If not ...
You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I
thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible
things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I
take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe.
If you love, love without reservation. If you fight, fight without fear.
From the stars we came, and to the stars we return, from now until the end
of time.
Maybe it would be easier on everybody if I resigned and moved on.
Probably. The universe doesn't give you any points for doing things that are
easy.
There are things in the Universe billions of years older than either of
our faces. They are vast and timeless, and if they're aware of us at all, it
is as little more than ants, and we have as much chance of communicating with
them, as an ant has with us. We know, we've tried. We've learned that we can
either stay out from under foot, or be stepped on... They are a mystery, and
I am both terrified and reassured to know that there are still wonders in the
Universe, that have not yet explained everything.
I'm delirious with joy. It proves that if you confront the universe with
good intentions in your heart, it will reflect that and reward your intent.
Usually. It just doesn't always do it in the way you expect.
The job of Babylon 5 is not to enforce the peace, it's to create the
peace. This place was built on the assumption that we could work out our
problems and build a better future, and that, to me, is the key issue. See in
the last few years we've stumbled. We stumbled at the death of the President,
the war, and on and on. And when you stumble a lot you start looking at your
feet. We have to make people lift their eyes back to the horizon and see the
line of ancestors behind us saying `make my life have meaning.' And to our
inheritors before us saying 'create the world we will live in.' We're not
just holding jobs and having dinner, we are the process of building the
future. That's what Babylon 5 is all about. Only by making people understand
that can we hope to create a better world for ourselves and our posterity.
What does the candle represent??
Life.
Whose life??
All life, every life. We're all born as molecules in the hearts of a billion
stars, molecules that do not understand politics, policies and differences.
In a billion years we, foolish molecules forget who we are and where we came
from. Desperate acts of ego. We give ourselves names, fight over lines on
maps. And pretend our light is better than everyone else's. The flame reminds
us of the piece of those stars that live inside us. A spark that tells us:
you should know better. The flame also reminds us that life is precious, as
each flame is unique. When it goes out, it's gone forever. And there will
never be another quite like it. So many candles will go out tonight. I wonder
some days if we can see anything at all.
I realized it's simplier to make a statue to someone who you believe
embodies all your better qualities than it is to actually improve yourself...
For the last year I've tried to point my people toward the simple truth that
we are one, reguardless of race. Somehow that message has gotten twisted so
that I have become their idea of the truth personified. Once you turn into
this you can no longer be who you are. You can only be what they want you to
be, what they expect you to be.
In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the
Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of
comically little worth, such as [brazilwood and pepper, which] added a new
range of sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own
insipidity. . .[From] these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back
the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is
conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the
form of photographs, books, and travelers tales.
I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my
mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of
wisdom and knowledge.
The wind howls because it knows it has to race me.
We do not walk on our legs, but on our Will.
If you seek Him you shall never find Him. If you do not seek Him, He will
never reveal Himself to you.
More men fail through lack of purpose rather than lack of talent.
When you can't have what you want, it's time to start wanting what you
have.
When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign,
that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us
love one another.
Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and
hornets break through.
You cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself
into in the first place.
Many receive advice, only the wise profit from it.
Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what
no one else has thought.
The roots of true achievement lie in the will to become the best that you
can become.
... We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
I am part of all I know.
To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.
Salvation, whatever that may be, will not be found amidst the external; it
awaits within.
The grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.
Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're
going.
It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical
places.
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors
to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success
unexpected in common hours.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are
for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay
in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where
he will.
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical
aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us
in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the
unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor...
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is
tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of
his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such
paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this
might be done.
If you build castles in the air;
your work need not be lost;
that is where they should be.
Now build foundations under them.
Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.
When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy
things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty
pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.
I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man
to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.
We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.
To be awake is to be alive.
Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the
fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
It takes two to speak the truth: one to speak, and another to hear.
This world is but canvas to our imaginations.
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another
must wait till that other is ready.
You might as well fall flat on you face as lean over too far backwards.
In democracies, nothing is more great or more brilliant than commerce; it
attracts the attention of the public, and fills the imagination of the
multitude; all energetic passions are directed toward it.
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and
write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost.
The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
If you want to be happy, be.
Without knowing why I am and why I am here, life is impossible.
There is only one time that is important - NOW! It is the most important
time because it is the only time that we have any power.
Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away
from it all that is not gold.
If you want to be happy, be.
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain.
We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.
Your decision to be, have and do something out of ordinary entails facing
difficulties that are out of the ordinary as well. Sometimes your greatest
asset is simply your ability to stay with it longer than anyone else.
A revolution is not the same as inviting people to dinner ... A revolution
is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.
I share no man's opinions; I have my own.
Dreams are renewable. No matter what our age or condition, there are still
untapped possibilities within us and new beauty waiting to be born.
Let us endeavour to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will
be sorry.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you
didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away
from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.
Discover.
It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and
remove all doubt.
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is
sure.
Courage is the mastery of fear, not the absence of fear.
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
The man with a new idea is a crank, until the idea succeeds.
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not
deserve them.
The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can
become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that
the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a
consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him
the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother.
I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you
like people or hate them than to travel with them.
Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign
countries I want to except heaven & hell & I have only a vague
curiosity about one of those.
There is no such thing as 'the Queen's English'. The property has gone
into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no
distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
Each moment is fragile and fleeting.
The moment of the past cannot be kept, however beautiful.
The moment of the present cannon be held, however enjoyable.
The moment of the future cannot be caught, however desirable.
A good traveler has no fixed plan and is not intent on arriving.
Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by
deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm
wrinkles the soul.
Can't means... Won't
Creativity can never be explained by appeal to reason alone. Like a child,
creativity compels us not to explanation but to wonder and awe.
Cats are smarter than dogs. You can not get eight cats to pull a sled
through snow.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in
practice, there is.
Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds
sang except those that sang best.
If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at
the same time, insight into and understanding of many things.
Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the
slave of your model.
Conscience is man's compass.
Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the
black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself,
shouldn't the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on
the map of France?
What Is, Is Wrong.
If you have the courage to begin, you have the courage to succeed.
At the peak of tremendous and victorious effort, while the blood is
pounding in your head, all suddenly comes quiet within you. Everything seems
clearer and whiter than ever before, as if great spotlights had been turned
on. At that moment, you have the conviction that you contain all the power in
the world, that you are capable of everything, that you have wings. There is
no more precise moment in life than this, the WHITE MOMENT, and you will work
hard for years, just to taste it again.
Man is free at the moment he wishes to be.
I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right
to say it.
Work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice and poverty.
If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.
Unusual travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
First ponder, then dare.
Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what
nobody has thought.
We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.
Never stop.
Never let a sense of social ethics get in the way of doing what's right.
When one eye is fixed upon you destination, there is only one eye left
with which to see the way there.
Ego is a powerful drug.
A good Active never stops being a good pledge.
Life is fair.
Those who can, do; those who can't, say they could.
If you crush everything in your path to the top, what will there be left
for you to rule over?
I like stress; stress is my friend.
Happiness is not self-indulgence.
The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and
in a thousand things well.
The most wonderful of all things in life, I believe, is the discovery of
another human being with whom one's relationship has a glowing depth, beauty,
and joy as the years increase. This inner progressiveness of love between two
human beings is a most marvelous thing, it cannot be found by looking for it
or by passionately wishing for it. It is a sort of Divine accident.
Happiness is an attitude of mind, born of the simple determination to be
happy under all outward circumstances.
Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of
genius.
Flatter me, and I may not believe you
Criticize me, and I may not like you
Ignore me, and I may not forgive you
Encourage me, and I may not forget you.
The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior
teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.
The greatest failure is the failure to try.
When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best
in ourselves.
I'd prefer to remain a mystery.
You are better off putting all your energy into your work. Sex takes up
too much time.
I do not always have to be me to be me.
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached
in life as by the obstacles which one has overcome while trying to succeed.
I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! It is a
dangerous servent and a terrible master.
I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting
there, with divine patience and laughter.
If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.
You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the
ocean. You are not a stranger here.
Do not hover always on the surface of things, nor take up suddenly with
mere appearances; but penetrate into the depth of matters, as far as your
time and circumstances allow, especially in those things which relate to your
profession.
[The tourist] debauches the great monuments of antiquity, a comic figure,
always inapt in his comments, incongruous in his appearance; . . .avarice and
deceit attack him at every step; the shops that he patronizes are full of
forgeries... But we need feel no scruple or twinge of uncertainty; 'we' are
travelers and cosmopolitans; the tourist is the other fellow.
The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like the condemned
man who is proud of his large cell.
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and
catastrophe.
Only a man who cannot conquer his own deficiencies feels the need to
convince others that he has none.
We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don't, it is easier
to ignore the facts than to change the preconceptions.
Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the
travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in
Hong-Kong.
There are two ways of spreading light; to be the candle or the mirror that
reflects it.
If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat
does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.
Find out what you like doing best and get someone to pay you for doing it.
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: 'It might
have been.'
Everest for me, and I believe the rest of the world, is the physical and
symbolic manifestation of overcoming odds to achieve a dream.
Life doesn't happen to us, it happens from us.
There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can circumvent or hinder or
control the firm resolve of a determined soul.
The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world
its own shame.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
Yes, I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can find his way by
moonlight, and see the dawn before the rest of the world.
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something
sensational to read in the train.
We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters
will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the
Internet, we know this is not true.
The future has a way of arriving unannounced.
We tell lies when we are afraid, ... afraid of what we don't know, afraid
of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But
every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the
concept of God as a senile delinquent.
We're afraid of intimacy, of wildness, of love; afraid of the very things
we desire, because if we acknowledged them we would have to acknowledge the
possibility of losing them. If we fail in this century, it won't be because
of arrogance, it'll be because of fear.
If organized religion is the opium of the masses then disorganized
religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe.
You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable
the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of
hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish
yourself if you forget the errand.
Your brain can only absorb what your ass can endure.
Smell the flowers while you can.
The kind of people who call themselves realists because they are besotted
with one particular unreality will deny that a book can live. But then living
books have never been for them.
A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest man.
Things turn out best for people who make the best of the way things turn
out.
Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.
The music in my heart I bore,
long after it was heard no more
One time the power went out in my house, I had no lights. Fortunately my
camera had a flash. I went to make a peanut butter sandwich and took 60
pictures of my kitchen. My neighbors called the police. They thought it was
lightning in my house.
Since light travels faster than sound, isn't that why some people appear
bright until you hear them speak?
Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing,
but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so
'safe' and, therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so
many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to
failure.
Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
The intellect of man is forced to choose perfection of life, or of the
work, and if it take the second must refuse a heavenly mansion, raging in the
dark.
God guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone; He that
sings a lasting song thinks in a marrow bone.
Too low they build who build below the skies.
It is better to be prepared for an opportunity and not have one than to
have an opportunity and not be prepared.
Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it's dark.
Be master of mind rather than mastered by mind.
No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.
Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the
doing, not the getting - in the trying, not the triumph, Success is a
personal standard - reaching for the highest that is in us - becoming all
that we can be. If we do our best, we are a success. Success is the maximum
utilization of the ability that you have.