Quotations
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 defe