Lots of Quotes and More to Come
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.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I came ... I saw ... I puttered …
Yaj Ekim (a.k.a. Michael Jay Holshouser)
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Non fui non sum non curo ... I was not, I am not, I care not
Epicurus
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Was not ... Am not ... Don't know ... Don't care ...
Yaj Ekim
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Nullius in verba … See for yourself
Latin Proverb
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Vanitas Vanitatum, Omnia Vanitas ... Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
Ecclesiastes 1:2
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The fool thinks, “I am the body.” The intelligent man thinks, “I am an individual soul united with the body.” But the wise man, in the greatness of his knowledge and spiritual discrimination, sees the Self as the only reality, and thinks, “I am Brahman.”
Adi Shankaracharya
Vivekachudamani
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You are neither earth nor air nor fire nor water nor ether ... To attain liberation know yourself as the witnessing consciousness of all these ... If you separate yourself from the physical body and rest in consciousness then this very moment you will be happy, at peace, and free of bondage.
Bitten by the Black Snake
The Ancient Wisdom of Ashtavakra translated by Manuel Schoch
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A yogi has no particular path;
He simply renounces imagining things.
His mind then ceases of its own accord,
And the perfect state just naturally occurs.
The Song of The Avadhut
Dattatreya’s Song of the Avadhut translated by Swami Abhayananda
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Know, without any doubt, that I’m limitless.
Know, without any doubt, that I’m changeless.
Know, without any doubt, that no stains can touch me.
My nature is Freedom; there’s no maya to me.
The Song of The Avadhut
Dattatreya’s Song of the Avadhut translated by Swami Abhayananda
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He who renouncing all activities, who is free of all the limitations of time, space and direction, worships his own Atman which is present everywhere, which is the destroyer of heat and cold, which is Bliss-Eternal and stainless, becomes All-knowing and All-pervading and attains thereafter Immortality.
Atma Bodha
Written by Adi Sankaracharya and translated by Swami Chinmayananda
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Imagine a big building collapsing. Some rooms are in ruins, some are intact. But can you speak of the space as ruined or intact? It is only the structure that suffered and the people who happened to live in it. Nothing happened to space itself. Similarly, nothing happens to life when forms break down and names are wiped out. The goldsmith melts down old ornaments to make new. Sometimes a good piece goes with the bad. He takes it in his stride, for he knows that no gold is lost.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That
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Pure and impure thoughts are a feature of the mind. There are no wandering thoughts in the Supreme Being. Therefore, abide as That and, free from the pure and impure thoughts of the mind, remain still like a stone or a log of wood. You will then be always happy.
The Ribhu Gita
Translated by Dr. H. Ramamoorthy and Nome
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I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path. This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what I say or not. I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
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It is the mind that frees us or enslaves.
Driven by the senses we become bound;
Master of the senses we become free.
Those who seek freedom must master their senses.
When the mind is detached from the senses
One reaches the summit of consciousness.
Mastery of the mind leads to wisdom.
Practice meditation. Stop all vain talk.
The highest state is beyond reach of thought,
For it lies beyond all duality.
The Amritabindu Upanishad
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The Way of the Samurai is found in death. Meditation on inevitable death should be performed daily. Every day when one's body and mind are at peace, one should meditate upon being ripped apart by arrows, rifles, spears and swords, being carried away by surging waves, being thrown into the midst of a great fire, being struck by lightning, being shaken to death by a great earthquake, falling from thousand-foot cliffs, dying of disease or committing seppuku at the death of one's master. And every day without fail one should consider himself as dead. This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai.
Hagakure
The Way of the Samurai
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The hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing areté. Areté implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency... or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.
On the Nature of Arete
Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is, and yet it is not. It is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. When I cease caring, it dissolves. It has no cause and serves no purpose. It just happens when we are absent-minded. It appears exactly as it looks, but there is no depth in it, nor meaning. Only the onlooker is real, call him Self or Atma. To the Self, the world is but a colourful show, which he enjoys as long as it lasts and forgets when it is over. Whatever happens on the stage makes him shudder in terror or roll with laughter, yet all the time he is aware that it is but a show. Without desire or fear, he enjoys it, as it happens.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
I Am That
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To enjoy this peace and absolute security we do not need any dogma, belief systems, rituals or practices. All that is necessary is to abandon the external search for this. We must stop "seeking for love in all the wrong places"; just recognize, and totally relax into, that pure awareness that we already are.
Colin Drake
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We've all been given a gift, the gift of life. What we do with our lives is our gift back.
Edo
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Man’s inability to live God’s words makes the Avatar’s teaching a mockery. Instead of practicing the compassion he taught, man has waged wars in his name. Instead of living the humility, purity, and truth of his words, man has given way to hatred, greed, and violence. Because man has been deaf to the principles and precepts laid down by God in the past, in this present Avataric form, I observe silence.
Meher Baba
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There is nowhere you can go where I am not, no thought you can think that I am not, no breath you can take that I am not, no word you can speak that I am not, no pain you can suffer that I am not, no distance you can travel that I am not and no sound you can make that I am not. For you are I are one, embracing in the timeless dance of here and now.
Mike Jenkins
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As you learn to observe with no attachment, peace arises. The only thing that can attempt to interfere with this is your identification with thoughts.
Jac O'Keeffe
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The final understanding is the acceptance of what Is as the functioning of totality or god. However, that acceptance is not in your hands. In the final understanding, there is no surrenderer, no accepter, no seeker and no finder. You know you have understood the teaching when questions answer themselves. You know you have understood the teaching when questions don’t matter anymore and they dissolve. The stopping of all questioning is the most powerful understanding. Understanding means there is no need for understanding.
Ramesh S. Balsekar
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Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Language, ideas, even the phrase each other, doesn't make any sense.
Rumi
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You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.
Rumi
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The mystery of life is long no matter how short it is, and short no matter how long.
Yaj Ekim
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The greatest seers, saints, and yogis agree on little. Seeing this, who could not be indifferent to knowledge and become still?
Ashtavakra Gita
A New English Version by Bart Marshall
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God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
Voltaire
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If I am ever put to death on the hook, expect a very human performance.
Bokonon (a.k.a. Kurt Vonnegut)
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So it goes.
Tralfamadorian Proverb (a.k.a. Kurt Vonnegut)
Slaughterhouse-Five
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It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little kinder.'
Aldous Huxley
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And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good --
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
Robert M. Pirsig
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
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Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman
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History! Read it and weep!
Bokonon (a.k.a. Kurt Vonnegut)
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There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Albert Camus
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Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.
Dr. Seuss
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CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary
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RELIGION, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary
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MARRIAGE, n. A household consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary
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FAITH, n. Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary
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Character is fate.
Heraklitos
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Anatomy is destiny.
Sigmund Freud
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All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
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Shoulda, coulda, woulda.
Lee Hoffmann
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Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Albert Einstein
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If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
George Orwell
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It's a dangerous thing to be born.
Yaj Ekim
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My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
Jack Nicholson
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Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you.
Oscar Wilde
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Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King Jr.
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Man plans, God laughs.
Yiddish Proverb
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Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
Seneca
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We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.
Jonathan Swift
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The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.
Galadriel (a.k.a. J.R.R. Tolkien)
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To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth (a.k.a. William Shakespeare)
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Improvise, Adapt, Overcome
An unofficial mantra of the United States Marine Corps
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Live and learn, die anyway.
Yaj Ekim
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It is not the strongest of the species who survive, not the most intelligent, but those who are the most adaptive to change.
Charles Darwin
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Little minds are interested in the extraordinary; great minds in the commonplace.
Elbert Hubbard
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A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
Albert Camus
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They outrageous, them rules. Who live in this cider house? Who grindin' up those apples, pressin' that cider, cleanin' up all this mess? Who just plain live here, just breathin' in that vinegar? Well, someone who don't live here made those rules. Those rules ain't for us. We are supposed to make our own rules. And we do. Every single day.
Arthur Rose
Cider House Rules
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Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill.
Greek Maxim
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Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?
Axel Oxenstierna
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Time never dies. The circle is not round.
Serbian Proverb
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Men go and come, but earth abides.
Ecclesiastes 1:4
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He weeps for he has but one small tongue with which to taste an entire world.
Dr. Mung-Mung
The Tick
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Absurdity, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary
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As a vessel is known by the sound, whether it be cracked or not; so men are proved, by their speeches, whether they be wise or foolish.
Demosthenes
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She's got no training for this.
What? To go to bed with a man and lie to him? She's a woman. She's got all the training she needs.
Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and Swanbeck (Anthony Hopkins),
Mission Impossible II
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Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Jung
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If I was god,
I’d want to be me.
Wait a minute,
I am god,
And I am me.
Yowza, imagine that.
Yaj Ekim
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Life is too important to be taken seriously.
Oscar Wilde
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It is not the strongest of the species who survive, not the most intelligent, but those who are the most adaptive to change.
Charles Darwin
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Meditation is not a means to an end; there is no end, no arrival; it is a movement in time and out of time. Every system, method, binds thought to time, but choiceless awareness of every thought and feeling, understanding of their motives, their mechanism, allowing them to blossom, is the beginning of meditation.
When thought and feeling flourish and die, meditation is the movement beyond time. In this movement there is ecstasy; in complete emptiness there is love, and with love there is destruction and creation.
J. Krishnamurti
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Many of us are slaves to our minds. Our own mind is our worst enemy.
Sakyong Mipham
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No one is useless in the world who lightens the burden of it for anyone else.
Charles Dickens
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Danger, Will Robinson!
Robot, Lost in Space
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My life. My choices. My mistakes. My lessons. Not your business.
Anon
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Ask yourself this question: 'Will this matter a year from now?'
Richard Carlson
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Humility does not mean you think less of yourself. It means you think of yourself less.
Ken Blanchard
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The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
Alvin Toffler
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Stillness is the only thing in this world that has no form. But then, it is not really a thing, and it is not of this world.
Eckhart Tolle
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Start where you are.
Use what you have.
Do what you can.
Arthur Ashe
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12 Symptoms of a Spiritual Awakening
1. An increased tendency to let things happen rather than make them happen.
2. Frequent attacks of smiling.
3. Feelings of being connected with others and nature.
4. Frequent overwhelming episodes of appreciation.
5. A tendency to think and act spontaneously rather than from fears based on past experience.
6. An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment.
7. A loss of ability to worry.
8. A loss of interest in conflict.
9. A loss of interest in interpreting the actions of others.
10. A loss of interest in judging others.
11. A loss of interest in judging self.
12. Gaining the ability to love without expecting anything in return.
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In our daily lives, we must see that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy.
Albert Clarke
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Be nothing. Know nothing. Have nothing. This is the only life worth living, the only happiness worth having.
Nisargadatta
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Does not compute.
Robot
Lost in Space
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I know nothing.
Sargent Schultz
Hogan's Heroes
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Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.
Dr. Seuss
----------
There is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe playing hide-and-seek (off-and-on) with itself.
Alan Watts
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Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.
George Bernard Shaw
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Love one another but make not a bond of love. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Khalil Gibran
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By choosing your thoughts, and by selecting which emotional currents you will release and which you will reinforce, you determine the quality of your Light. You determine the effects that you will have upon others, and the nature of the experiences of your life.
Gary Zukav
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Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Benjamin Franklin
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The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.
Thomas Paine
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2,000 years ... and counting.
Yaj Ekim
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How beautiful life is and how sad! How fleeting, with no past and no future, only a limitless now.
James Clavell
Shogun
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We are all just prisoners here of our own device.
The Eagles
Hotel California
----------
What if this is as good as it gets?
Melvin Udall (a.k.a. Jack Nicholson)
As Good as It Gets
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For over a thousand years Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of triumph, a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeteers, musicians and strange animals from conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conquerors rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children robed in white stood with him in the chariot or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.
George C. Patton
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Curiosity is the very basis of education, and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.
Arnold Edinborough
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A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.
Francis Bacon
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"God," he says, "either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot,
or can but does not want to,
or neither wishes to nor can,
or both wants to and can.
If he wants to and cannot, then he is weak and this does not apply to god.
If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful which is equally foreign to god’'s nature.
If he neither wants to nor can, he is both weak and spiteful, and so not a god.
If he wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where then do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them?"
Epicurus
Lactantius, On the Anger of God, 13.19
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Behind every advance of the human race is a germ of creation growing in the mind of some lone individual. An individual whose dreams waken him in the night while others lie contentedly asleep.
Crawford Greenewalt
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That's what all these cripples down at the VA talk about: Jesus this and Jesus that, have I found Jesus yet? They even had a priest come and talk to me. He said God is listening and if I found Jesus, I'd get to walk beside him in the kingdom of Heaven. Did you hear what I said? WALK beside him in the kingdom of Heaven! Well kiss my crippled ass. God is listening? What a crock of shit.
Lieutenant Daniel Taylor
Forest Gump
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All alone, together.
Yaj Ekim
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A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green.
Francis Bacon
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Be sure to taste your words before you spit them out.
Anon
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The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.
Isaac Asimov
----------
No brag, just fact.
Walter Brennan
The Guns of Will Sonnett
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The dream is about waking up.
Sandra Ma
----------
My momma always said, "Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get."
Forrest Gump (a.k.a. Tom Hanks)
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The Axis of Evil is nepotism, cronyism and favoritism.
Yaj Ekim
----------
When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard," I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"
Sydney J. Harris
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The creative adult is the child who survived.
Anon
----------
You have BRAINS in your HEAD.
You have FEET in your SHOES.
You can STEER yourself in any DIRECTION you CHOOSE.
Dr. Seuss
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Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
Carl Sandburg
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As far as maintaining health of mind and body go, it's wiser to get more disciplined as you get older, not less. Ultimately, you cannot hold onto anything in this manifest reverie, but it won't hurt to take care of what you've been given while you’ve got it.
Yaj Ekim
----------
Don’t speak unless you can improve on the silence.
Spanish Proverb
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It is only when we forget our learning that we begin to know
Henry David Thoreau
----------
There is no self, just the thought that creates the self.
J. Krishnamurti
----------
The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
Mark Twain
----------
The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.
Antisthenes
----------
I'd consider myself a realist, alright? But in philosophical terms I'm what's called a pessimist. I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody's nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction. One last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.
Rustin Cohle
True Detective
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Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary
Steve Jobs
----------
The right man is the one who seizes the moment.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
----------
I've developed a new philosophy … I only dread one day at a time.
Charlie Brown (a.k.a. Charles Schulz)
----------
It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door," he used to say. "You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.
Frodo quoting Bilbo (a.k.a. J.R.R. Tolkien)
Fellowship of the Ring / Lord of the Rings Trilogy
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... since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
Thucydides
----------
Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.
Thomas Merton
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Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience and rebellion that progress has been made
Oscar Wilde
----------
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure.
Thomas Jefferson
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Religious wars are basically people killing each other over who has the better imaginary friend.
Anon
----------
The fruits of Christianity were religious wars, butcheries, crusades, inquisitions, extermination of the natives of America, and the introduction of African slaves in their place.
Arthur Schopenhauer
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Imagination rules the world.
What is history but a fable agreed upon?
A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets.
All religions have been made by men.
There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.
There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.
It requires more courage to suffer than to die.
A true man hates no one.
Napoleon Bonaparte
----------
Lose your mind, use your brain.
Len Howard
----------
Don't ever mistake my silence for ignorance, my calmness for acceptance, and my kindness for weakness.
Anon
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I am not concerned with taking care of anything. The world has been in existence for millions of years. There have been thousands of avatars and great men, and important personalities. Has a single one of them been able to do anything to change the natural course of events in the world?
Nisargadatta
----------
Well, opinions are like assholes, honey. Everybody's got one and everybody thinks everybody else's stinks.
Henry Larson
Home for the Holidays
----------
I think I could turn and live with animals
They are so placid and self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do no lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied,
Not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another,
Nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.
Walt Whitman
The Beasts
----------
I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant.
Robert McCloskey
----------
Everybody gotta die some time, Red.
Sergeant Barnes
Platoon
----------
Karma is the beginning of knowledge. Next is patience. Patience is very important. The strong are the patient ones, Anjin-san. patience means holding back your inclination to the seven emotions: hate, adoration, joy, anxiety, anger, grief, fear. If you don't give way to the seven, you're patient, then you'll soon understand all manner of things and be in harmony with Eternity.
James Clavell
Shogun
----------
Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.
Terry Pratchett
----------
Religion is not a matter of God, church, holy cause, et cetera. These are but accessories. The source of religious preoccupation is in the self, or rather the rejection of the self. Dedication is the obverse side of self-rejection. Man alone is a religious animal because, as Montaigne points out, "it is a malady confined to man, and not seen in any other creature, to hate and despise ourselves."
Eric Hoffer
The True Believer
----------
The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function: without mercy, without compassion, without remorse. All war depends upon it.
Ronald Spiers
Band of Brothers
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Religions are all alike -- founded upon fables and mythologies.
Thomas Jefferson
----------
Mad? You call me mad? Well, my fine friend, that’s no great distinction in an insane asylum.
Yaj Ekim
----------
It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate waiting them on this earth.
Joseph Conrad
----------
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
Socrates
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Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours.
Caesar Chavez
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The hard part about growing old is remembering you were young.
Anon
----------
You are perfect.
Pure gold.
Brighter than the sun.
Dean Evans
----------
scientific method
noun
a method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.
Scientific Method ... 1. Define the question ... 2. Gather information and resources (observe) ... 3. Form hypothesis ... 4. Perform experiment and collect data ... 5. Analyze data ... 6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis ... 7. Publish results ... 8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists)
----------
Do or do not ... there is no try.
Yoda
----------
Jenny Curran: Do you ever dream, Forrest, about who you're gonna be?
Forrest Gump: Who I'm gonna be?
Jenny Curran: Yeah.
Forrest Gump: Aren't-aren't I going to be me?
----------
I always tell younger folk: What you do the first twenty or thirty years of life, you'll pay for with the rest.
Yaj Ekim
----------
Science is but an image of the truth.
Francis Bacon
----------
People who want to share their religious views with you, almost never want you to share yours with them.
Dave Barry
----------
If only closed minds came with closed mouths.
Anon
----------
To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
Thomas Paine
----------
It's freedom of speech, as long as you don't say too much.
Sons and Daughters
Neville Brothers
----------
Truth is a mobile army of metaphors.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
----------
The first to apologize is the bravest. The first to forgive is the strongest. And the first to forget is the happiest.
Anon
----------
I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Thomas Jefferson
----------
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
----------
When anyone publicly abuses another in a loud voice, or writes a poem for the purpose of insulting him, or rendering him infamous, he shall be beaten with a rod until he dies.
The Roman Laws of the Twelve Tables -- Law VIII
----------
Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness.
Epicurus
----------
I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, quality, and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, other-centered men can build up.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
----------
Assumptions can get you killed.
Yaj Ekim
----------
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
Leon Trotsky
----------
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
Tom Stoppard.
----------
My brain is only a receiver, in the Universe there is a core from which we obtain knowledge, strength, inspiration. I have not penetrated into the secrets of this core, but I know it exists.
Nikola Tesla
----------
It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.
Voltaire
----------
Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
Oscar Wilde
----------
If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.
René Descartes
----------
You want the truth? It's hopeless. It's completely hopeless. Civilization is out of control, growing way beyond its resources, and it will destroy itself. Anyone who really thinks we're in charge, that we can honestly change the course we're on....well, they're mistaken.
Yvon Chouinard
----------
I'm old, Gandalf. I know I don't look it, but I'm beginning to feel it in my heart. I feel... thin. Sort of stretched, like... butter scraped over too much bread. I need a holiday. A very long holiday. And I don't expect I shall return. In fact I mean not to.
Bilbo (a.k.a. J.R.R. Tolkien)
Fellowship of the Ring / Lord of the Rings Trilogy
----------
He who knows others is learned.
He who knows himself is wise.
Lao Tzu
Tao Te Ching
----------
Worry is like praying for what we don't want.
Carolyn Myss
----------
Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.
Bill Hicks
----------
A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.
Arthur Schopenhauer
----------
Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute, but they all worship money.
Mark Twain
----------
I love my kids too much to bring them here.
Yaj Ekim
----------
Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not. Miss them do not. Attachment leads to jealously. The shadow of greed, that is.
Yoda
----------
Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession – their ignorance.
Hendrik Van Loon
----------
I wish I had more friends, but people are such jerks. If you can just get most people to leave you alone, you're doing good. If you can find even one person you really like, you're lucky. And if that person can also stand you, you're really lucky.
Calvin (a.k.a. Bill Watterson)
----------
The world is not objective and the sorrow of it is not avoidable. Compassion is but another word for the refusal to suffer for imaginary reasons.
Nisargadatta
----------
Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
Yoda
Star Wars
----------
If all matter is illusion, then does the illusion matter?
Russell Waterman
----------
And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh, oooh, the sky is the limit!"
The Tick
----------
As long as there is the experiencer remembering the experience, truth is not. Truth is not something to be remembered, stored up, recorded, and then brought out. What is accumulated is not truth. The desire to experience creates the experiencer, who then accumulates and remembers. Desire makes for the separation of the thinker from his thought; the desire to become, to experience, to be more or to be less, makes for division between the experiencer and the experience. Awareness of the ways of desire is self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the beginning of meditation.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
----------
Reality is for people who lack imagination.
Anon
----------
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
Three Witches, Macbeth (a.k.a. William Shakespeare)
----------
How on earth can religious people believe in so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash? The acceptance of a creed, any creed, entitles the acceptor to membership in the sort of artificial extended family we call a congregation. It is a way to fight loneliness. Any time I see a person fleeing from reason and into religion, I think to myself, there goes a person who simply cannot stand being so goddamned lonely anymore.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
----------
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth (a.k.a. William Shakespeare)
----------
Didn't ask to be here, ain't prayin’ to be stayin’.
Yaj Ekim
----------
The difference between genius and stupidity is genius has its limits.
Albert Einstein
----------
If you can't convince them, confuse them.
Harry S. Truman
----------
Don’t be unnecessarily burdened by the past. Go on closing the chapters that you have read; there is no need to go back again and again. And never judge anything of the past from the new perspective that is arriving, because the new is new, incomparably new and the old was right in its own context, and the new is right in its own context, and they are incomparable.
Osho
----------
When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
Jimi Marshall Hendrix
----------
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
Henry David Thoreau
----------
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
----------
We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.
Jimmy Carter
----------
And then the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anais Nin
----------
You can tell more about a person by what he says about others, than you can by what others say about him.
Audrey Hepburn
----------
You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.
James D. Miles
----------
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke
----------
I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.
Thomas A. Edison
----------
Each one of us is responsible for the whole of humankind. We need to think of each other really as brothers and sisters and to be concerned for each other’s welfare. Rather than working solely to acquire wealth, we need to do something meaningful, something directed seriously towards the welfare of humanity as a whole.
Dalai Lama
----------
Before you assume, learn the facts. Before you judge, understand why. Before you hurt someone, feel. Before you speak, think.
Timothy R Wheeler
----------
Love is like wealth, or the world food supply. Some people hog it; others get nothing at all.
Copeland.
----------
It has been said 'time heals all wounds'. I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting it's sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.
Rose Kennedy
----------
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.
Edgar Allan Poe
----------
Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.
Eleanor Roosevelt
----------
You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.
Albert Einstein
----------
Partial truths or half-truths are often more insidious than total falsehoods.
Samuel P. Huntington
----------
You must be the change you want to see in the world.
Gandhi
----------
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou
----------
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
----------
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.
Winston Churchill
----------
Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
Eleanor Roosevelt
----------
The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed.
Buddha
----------
What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
Henry David Thoreau
----------
The less people know, the more stubbornly they know it.
Osho
----------
My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style
Maya Angelou
----------
The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Winston Churchill
----------
When you see a man of worth, think of how you may emulate him. When you see one who is unworthy, examine yourself.
Confucius
----------
Do not think that love in order to be genuine has to be extraordinary. What we need is to love without getting tired. Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.
Mother Teresa
----------
An eye for eye only ends up making the whole world blind.
Gandhi
----------
Try not to become a man of success but a man of value.
Albert Einstein
----------
An old Cherokee chief was teaching his grandson about life …
"A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy.
"It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.
"One is evil - he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt, and ego.
"The other is good - he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.
"This same fight is going on inside you - and inside every other person, too."
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"
The old chief simply replied, "The one you feed."
Two Wolves, A Cherokee Parable
----------
To doubt is not pleasant but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire
----------
Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
Buddha
----------
A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead
----------
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen, they are made.
Elizabeth Kubler Ross
----------
I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best.
Marilyn Monroe
----------
I see when men love women. They give them but a little of their lives. But women when they love give everything.
Oscar Wilde
----------
Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
Aristotle
----------
Love is a force more formidable than any other. It is invisible - it cannot be seen or measured, yet it is powerful enough to transform you in a moment, and offer you more joy than any material possession could.
Barbara de Angelis
----------
We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path.
Paulo Coelho
----------
By having you I was rich. By giving you away, I have become richer.
Kalpna Singh-Chitnis
----------
After the game, the king and the pawn go into the same box.
Italian Proverb
----------
Beware of the man of one book.
St. Thomas Aquinas
----------
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy
----------
Even if everyone else is not doing good, I alone must, and even if everyone else is doing wrong, I alone must not.
Buddha.
----------
People of character do the right thing, not because they think it will change the world, but because they refuse to be changed by the world.
Michael Josephson
----------
We deem those happy who from the experience of life have learnt to bear its ills without being overcome by them.
Carl Jung
----------
Loyalty and love can be granted; dignity and respect are always earned.
Kalpna Singh-Chitnis
----------
A friend cannot be considered a friend until he is tested in three occasions: in time of need, behind your back, and after your death.
Anon
----------
Friendship is unnecessary. Like philosophy, like art, it has no survival value. Rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis
----------
One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but it cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered.
Michael J. Fox
----------
Blessings:
If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the million who won't survive the week.
If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation, you are ahead of 20 million people around the world.
If you attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death, you are more blessed than almost three billion people in the world.
If you have food in your refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of this world.
If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace, you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.
If you hold up your head with a smile on your face and are truly thankful, you are blessed because the majority can, but most do not.
If you can read this message, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world that cannot read anything at all.
You are so blessed in ways you may never even know.
Stephen Eardley
----------
It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting in your heart's longing.
It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals, or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit in pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tip of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn't interest me if the story you're telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.
I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every day, and if you can source your life from God's presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of a lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, "Yes!"
It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.
It doesn't interest me who you are, how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer
The Invitation
----------
The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
----------
Too often we underestimate the power of a
touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear,
an honest compliment, or the smallest act of
caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
Leo F. Buscaglia
----------
Wars are fought by teenagers, you realize that. They really ought to be fought by the politicians and old people who start these wars.
James Clavell
(Interview with Don Swaim of CBS Radio-1986)
----------
Always look twice.
Francis Noeller
----------
Nothing like life to teach you a little more.
Anon
----------
Heard the call to greatness ... and ignored it.
Yaj Ekim
----------
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, from spiritual truth to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.
Attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee. Unverified
----------
Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.
Coriolanus (a.k.a. William Shakespeare)
----------
1. Whomever you encounter is the right one.
2. Whatever happened is the only thing that could have happened.
3. Each moment in which something begins is the right moment.
4. What is over, is over
Anthony Hooper
The Four Principles of Spirituality
----------
There is a huge amount of freedom that comes to you when you take nothing personally.
Miguel Ruiz
----------
We have bigger houses, but smaller families; more conveniences, but less time, we have more degrees, but less sense; more knowledge, but less judgments; more experts, but less healthiness. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication. We have become long on quantity, but short on quality. These are times of fast foods but slow digestion; tall man, but short character; steep profits, but shallow relationships. It is a time when there is much in the window, but nothing in the room.
The Dalai Lama
The Paradox Of Our Age
----------
To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality. To assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality. The more you talk and think about it, the further astray you wander from the truth. Stop talking and thinking and there is nothing you will not be able to know.
Sosan Zenji
----------
Be nothing. Know nothing. Have nothing. This is the only life worth living, the only happiness worth having.
Nisargadatta
----------
Silence is the language of the infinite, all is is merely interpretation.
Anon
----------
1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Don't take anything personally.
3. Don't make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.
5. Be skeptical but learn to listen.
Miguel Ruiz
The Five Agreements
----------
Your opinion is not my reality.
Steve Mariboli
----------
It is possible to be different and still be all right. There can be two or more answers to the same question, and all can be right.
Ann Wilson Schaef
----------
Differences challenge assumptions.
Ann Wilson Schaef
----------
Infinite diversity in infinite combinations ... symbolizing the elements that create truth and beauty.
Commander Spock
----------
I often regret that I have spoken, never that I have been silent.
Publicus Syrus
----------
All these years you've been searching and looking and trying to change things, trying to add thing onto yourself, trying to acquire things when you have been the source of everything to begin with. Everything you've been looking for has been within yourself you have been that. You then begin to surrender everything to yourself. You surrender all of your thoughts, all of your feelings, you surrender all of your desires, all of your wants to the Self. You pull it in all inwardly.
Robert Adams
----------
Time is death. Who waits, dies. Life is now only. Do not talk to me about past and future - they exist only in your mind.
Nisargadatta
----------
I really do love everybody. Some I love to be around, some I love to avoid, and others I would love to punch in the face.
Anon
----------
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Anon
----------
Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was.
Jonathan Safran Foer
----------
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding. You don’t ever let go of the thread.
William Stafford
The Way It Is
----------
It's a good day to have a good day.
Anon
----------
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.
Eckhart Tolle
----------
"Excellently observed," answered Candide; “but let us take care of our garden."
Voltaire
----------
There is nothing permanent except change.
Heraclitus
----------
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
----------
If I knew I wasn't going to wake up tomorrow morning, I'd go to bed early.
Yaj Ekim
----------
There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -- a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
Mark Twain
The Mysterious Stranger
----------
Nature is one call you can't put on hold.
The Tick
----------
As long as you take yourself to be a person, a body and a mind, separate from the stream of life, having a will of its own, pursuing its own aims, you are living merely on the surface and whatever you do will be short-lived and of little value, mere straw to feed the flames of vanity.
Nisargadatta
----------
Free will looking forward, fate looking back.
Yaj Ekim
----------
There are two races of people - men and women - no matter what women's libbers would have you pretend. The male is motivated by toys and science because men are born with no purpose in the universe except to procreate. There is lots of time to kill beyond that. They've got to find work. Men have no inherent center to themselves beyond procreating. Women, however, are born with a center. They can create the universe, mother it, teach it, nurture it. Men read science fiction to build the future. Women don't need to read it. They are the future.
Ray Bradbury
Playboy Interview 1996
----------
The goal of civilization is a settled life and the achievement of luxury. But there is a limit that cannot be overstepped. When prosperity and luxury come to a people, they are followed by excessive consumption and extravagance. With that the human soul itself is undermined, both in its worldly wealth and its spiritual life.
Ibn Khaldun
----------
The root of all superstition is that men observe when a thing hits, but not when it misses.
Francis Bacon
----------
A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire
----------
Life: State of functional activity peculiar to organized matter.
Anon
----------
Culture is roughly anything we do and the monkeys don't.
Lord Raglan
----------
Liberation is never of the person, it is from the person.
Nisargardatta
----------
Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills.
Voltaire
----------
We should distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
Henry David Thoreau
----------
Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
Brian Aldiss
----------
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
H.G. Wells
The Outline of History
----------
They civilize what's pretty
By puttin' up a city
Where nothin' that's
Pretty can grow …
They civilize left
They civilize right
Till nothing is left
Till nothing is right
Alan Jay Lerner
The First Thing You Know
Paint Your Wagon
----------
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
Carl Jung
----------
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Albert Einstein
----------
If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend that they are role models.
B. Lester
----------
Mama always said, dying was a part of life. I sure wish it wasn't.
Forrest Gump (a.k.a. Tom Hanks)
----------
Once your eye is completely clean, clean of all the dust, once it becomes a pure mirror, it reflects that which is. And that is truth, and truth liberates, but it has to be your own. My truth cannot liberate you, Buddha's truth cannot liberate you. There is only one possibility of liberation, and that is your own truth. And all you have to do is create a dispassionate eye.
Osho
----------
Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.
Chief Seattle
----------
Only when the last tree has died, and the last river been poisoned, and the last fish been caught, will we realise we cannot eat money.
Cree Indian Proverb
----------
I do not think the measure of a civilization is how tall its buildings of concrete are, but rather how well its people have learned to relate to their environment and fellow man.
Sun Bear of the Chippewa Tribe
----------
it is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.
Benjamin Franklin
----------
For what is it to die, but to stand in the sun and melt into the wind? And when the Earth has claimed our limbs, then we shall truly dance.
Kahlil Gibran
----------
God is too big to fit into one religion.
Anon
----------
Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you're right and you know it, speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.
Mohandas Gandhi
----------
If we make an enemy of the earth, we make an enemy of our own body.
Andre Shellac
Mayan Shaman
----------
Not a good idea to make people do things that you're going to regret.
Yaj Ekim
----------
The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.
Mark Twain
----------
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles 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 dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt
----------
Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
Alexis de Tocqueville
----------
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Albert Einstein
----------
And so. one day you finally wake up to who you really are. What could be more incredible? But in our culture, of course, they will say you're crazy or you are blasphemous, and they'll either put you in jail or in the nut house. But, if you wake up in India and tell your friends and relations, "My goodness, I've just discovered that I am God," they'll laugh and say, "Oh, congratulations, at last you found out."
Alan Watts
----------
To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them … while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.
Eckhart Tolle
----------
MORPHEUS: We are trained in this world to accept only what is rational and logical. Have you ever wondered why?
Neo shakes his head.
MORPHEUS: As children, we do not separate the possible from the impossible which is why the younger a mind is the easier it is to free while a mind like yours can be very difficult.
NEO: Free from what?
MORPHEUS: From the Matrix.
Neo looks at his eyes but only sees a reflection of himself.
MORPHEUS: Do you want to know what it is, Neo?
Neo swallows and nods his head.
MORPHEUS: It's that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. But what is it? The LEATHER CREAKS as he leans back.
MORPHEUS: The Matrix is everywhere, it's all around us, here even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
NEO: What truth?
MORPHEUS: That you are a slave, Neo. That you, like everyone else, was born into bondage … kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind.
Outside, the WIND BATTERS a loose PANE of glass.
MORPHEUS: Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.
----------
All great changes are preceded by chaos.
Anon
----------
Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.
A Course in Miracles
----------
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars
Khalil Gibran
----------
You are the universe, expressing itself as a human for a little while.
Eckhart Tolle
----------
The human being has a soul. The universe has a soul. The soul of all souls is the infinite light of the Creator of all things.
As much as the human soul yearns for the infinite light of its Creator, much more so does the Creator yearn to be found within the human soul.
As much as the soul of this universe yearns to reunite with the infinite light of its Creator, much more so does the Creator yearn for His infinite light to enter within His world.
If so, what force could stand between them? What could hold back the Creator’s infinite light?
Only His desire that this union occur with our consent, that we be the ones to open the door.
“Open for me just as wide as a pinhole,” G‑d beseeches us, “and I will open for you as the entranceway of a great hall.”
The Rebbe via Tzvi Freeman
----------
We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutual weirdness and call it love.
Dr. Seuss
----------
To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large -- this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.
Aldous Huxley
----------
It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.
Aung San Suu Kyi
----------
Mexicans do the jobs we don't want to do, and Asians do the jobs we're not able to do.
Stephen Colbert
----------
If you didn't hear it with your own ears or see it with your own eyes, don't invent it with your small mind and share it with your big mouth.
Anon
----------
When the blood in your veins returns to the sea, and the earth in your bones returns to the ground, perhaps then you will remember that this land does not belong to you, it is you who belongs to this land.
Anon
----------
Never argue with stupid people. They will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.
Mark Twain
----------
There is always, always, always something to be thankful for.
Anon
----------
Not only are we in the universe, the universe is in us. I don't know of any deeper spiritual feeling than what that brings upon me.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
----------
Praying is talking to the universal creator; meditation is listening.
Anon
----------
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
Carl Jung
----------
All things in this creation exist within you, and all things in you exist in creation; there is no border between you and the closest things, and there is no distance between you and the farthest things, and all things, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the smallest to the greatest, are within you as equal things. In one atom are found all the elements of the earth; in one motion of the mind are found the motions of all the laws of existence; in one drop of water are found the secrets of all the endless oceans; in one aspect of you are found all the aspects of existence.
Khalil Gibran
----------
And yet. And yet. This new road will one day be the old road too.
Neil Munro
----------
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
E.E. Cummings
----------
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Douglas Adams
----------
A witty saying proves nothing.
Voltaire
----------
Is it stealing if it's already stolen?
Sylvia Weis
In Time
----------
This mortal thing is not without many moments of a lesser kind.
Yaj Ekim
----------
Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
Anon
----------
There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Albert Camus
----------
Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.
Francis Bacon
----------
It's a big club. And you ain't in it.
George Carlin
----------
All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
----------
God wakes up every night in a cold sweat knowing what's going to happen when I'm done here.
Yaj Ekim
----------
If you can read, write and do arithmetic, you can do anything.
Horace "Holtz" Holshouser
----------
Real strength is not in power, money, or weapons, but in deep, inner peace.
Thich Nhat Hanh
----------
D'endurance, Michael, d'endurance.
John Carter
----------
One of the most important statements you can make as a scientist is: I don't know. One of the most important statements you should be prepared to make as a believer is: I don't know.
Sir John Houghton
----------
Trees are poems that earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
Kahlil Gibran
----------
I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize what you heard is not what I meant.
Alan Greenspan
----------
I was made merely in the image of God, but not resembling Him enough to be mistaken for Him by anyone except a very near-sighted person. I believe our Heavenly Father created man because he was disappointed in the monkey.
Mark Twain
----------
One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.
Henry Miller
----------
Revenge has a long memory.
Yaj Ekim
----------
Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in getting up every time we do.
Confucius
----------
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
----------
I am imagination. I can see what the eyes cannot see. I can hear what the ears cannot hear. I can feel what the heart cannot feel.
Peter Nivio Zarlenga
----------
Isn’t it only through laughter that we become one with the gods and thus can endure life and can overcome all the horror and waste and suffering here on earth? …Isn’t it only through laughter we can stay human?
James Clavell
Shogun
----------
Blood may be thicker than water, but it ain't that much thicker.
Yaj Ekim
----------
All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and single-hearted allegiance.
Eric Hoffer
The True Believer
----------
But relationships aren’t just an ever-changing process of movement; they are also a journey of self-creation. That is, we are always creating and re-creating ourselves, get better or worse, fatter or thinner, more spiritually conscious or more thuddingly unaware through them. It is through our connections with others that we continue to meet ourselves and, over time, develop to our fullest.
Daphane Rose Kingma
----------
Belief is the death of intelligence.
Robert Anton Wilson
----------
We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.
Anais Nin
----------
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes.
Marcel Proust
----------
Trust leads, pain bleeds, fear needs, and love feeds.
Shallah Ray Montaine
----------
If you cannot write well, you cannot think well; if you cannot think well, others will do your thinking for you.
George Orwell
----------
What we are doing here is so important, that we should not take it too seriously.
Suzuki Roshi
----------
I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.
2 Timothy 4:7
----------
There’s no such thing as an enlightened person. It’s a complete misconception. But the difficulty is that being seekers, the energy of seeking pushes us into being attracted to the idea that somebody else has found something that we can find, because we grow up believing that effort brings results
Tony Parsons
----------
Pay attention, you'll live longer.
Yaj Ekim
----------
You cannot be truthful if you are not courageous. You cannot be loving if you are not courageous. You cannot be trusting if you are not courageous. You cannot enter into reality if you are not courageous. Hence, courage comes first ... and everything else follows.
Osho
----------
People wrap themselves in their beliefs. And they do it in such a way that you can't set them free. Not even the truth will set them free.
Michael Specter
----------
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.
Litany Against Fear
An incantation used by the Bene Gesserit in Dune
----------
One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.
The Dark Lord Sauron (a.k.a. J.R.R. Tolkien)
Fellowship of the Ring / Lord of the Rings Trilogy
----------
In order to accomplish the feat of making ourselves miserable we have to work in a most intense fashion. It is absurd most of us have never realized we could work just the same in making ourselves complete and strong. The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
Carlos Castaneda
Don Juan's Teachings
----------
It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense.
Robert G. Ingersoll
----------
Be careful what you assume about yourself.
Yaj Ekim
----------
Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from.
Jodie Foster
----------
I'm not very good at this game called Life ... For I've not learned to see children crying without feeling pain ... For I've not learned to watch animals destroyed without wondering why ... For I've not yet met a king or a celebrity that I would bow down to, or a man so insignificant that I would use for a stepping-stone ... For I've not learned to be a 'yes man' to narrow-minded bosses who quote rules without reason ... And I've not learned to manipulate the feelings of others to be used for my own advantages then cast aside as I see fit ... No, I'm not very good at this game called Life ... And if everything goes well, maybe I never will be.
Javan
----------
Before you judge others or claim any absolute truth, consider that you can see less that 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 kilometers per second across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you”. The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato. The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Anon
----------
The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life.
Leo Tolstoy
----------
A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds.
Saint Basil
----------
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
Albert Einstein
----------
Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.
Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
The Grand Design
----------
Happiness? That's nothing more than a good health and a poor memory.
Albert Schweitzer
----------
Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
Albert Einstein
----------
The State ... has had a vested interest in promoting attitudes that would make us skeptical of or own abilities, fearful of the motives of others, and emotionally dependent upon external authorities for purpose and direction in our lives.
Butler D. Shaffer
----------
You are that vast thing that you see, far, far off with great telescopes.
Alan Watts
----------
There is no Reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for Reality and never let the world within assert itself.
Hermann Hesse
----------
A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.
Wade Davis
----------
It is our most simple, obvious, intimate and ever-present experience that Awareness knows itself by itself, in itself, as itself.
Robert Spira
----------
You don't have to love everyone. Just don't hate anyone.
Ramesh Balsekar
----------
Awareness is like the sun, always in the same ‘place,’ always shining with the same brilliance.
Robert Spira
----------
The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government - lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.
Patrick Henry
----------
DESIDERATA
Go placidly amidst the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labours and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its shams, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.
Max Ehrmann
----------
DO IT ANYWAY
People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies. Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you. Be honest and sincere anyway.
What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight. Create anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous. Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway.
Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway.
In the final analysis, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.
Mother Teresa
----------
Then he [The Star Child] waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.
Arthur C. Clarke
2001: A Space Odyssey
----------
Don't kill him! If you kill him, he won't learn nothin'!
The Riddler
----------
History teaches that revolutions are very dangerous things, more often destructive than benign, and uncontrollable by their very nature.
Henry Hyde
----------
So live your life that the fear of death can never enter your heart. Trouble no one about their religion; respect others in their view, and demand that they respect yours. Love your life, perfect your life, beautify all things in your life. Seek to make your life long and its purpose in the service of your people. Prepare a noble death song for the day when you go over the great divide. Always give a word or a sign of salute when meeting or passing a friend, even a stranger, when in a lonely place. Show respect to all people and grovel to none. When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living. If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself. Abuse no one and no thing, for abuse turns the wise ones to fools and robs the spirit of its vision. When it comes your time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song and die like a hero going home.
Tecumseh (A Disputed Quote)
----------
At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.
Albert Schweitzer
----------
The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.
Gildor (a.k.a. J.R.R. Tolkien)
----------
Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents. Without a prison, there can be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society."
John (Fire) Lame Deer
Sioux Lakota (1903-1976)
----------
Words may lie, but actions will always tell the truth.
Anon
----------
We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight.
John Lennon
----------
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
Ernest Hemingway
----------
We don't meet anyone by accident. Pay attention to happenstance.
Sheila Burke
----------
The future depends on what we do in the present.
Mahatma Gandhi
----------
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
Woody Allen.
----------
The more real you get, the more unreal everything else is.
John Lennon
----------
The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands -- the ownership and control of their livelihoods -- are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.
Helen Keller
----------
I'm not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance.
Jon Stewart
----------
No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
Nelson Mandela
----------
The two women exchanged the kind of glance women use when no knife is handy.
Ellery Queen
----------
A man's face is his autobiography. A woman's face is her work of fiction.
Oscar Wilde
----------
The rarest thing in the world is a woman who is pleased with photographs of herself.
Elizabeth Metcalf
----------
Men look at themselves in mirrors. Women look for themselves.
Elissa Melamed
----------
No matter how good she looks, some other guy is sick and tired of putting up with her crap.
Anon
----------
A highbrow is a man who has found something more interesting than women
Edgar Wallace
----------
The only real mystery about women is how breeding choices made many thousands of years before were born have created penis minds that are so readily deceived by the "sugar and spice" conspiracy.
Yaj Ekim
----------
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself. They come through you, but not from you. And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward, nor tarries with yesterday.
Khalil Gibran
----------
The clock is running. Make the most of today. Time waits for no man. Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That's why it is called the present.
Alice Morse Earle
----------
Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
Calvin (a.k.a. Bill Waterson)
----------
Everybody wants happiness, nobody wants pain. But you can't have a rainbow, without a little rain. Courage is a love affair with the unknown.
Douglas Hoover
----------
A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Winston S. Churchill
----------
Though I've belted you and flayed you,
By the living God that made you,
You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
Colonel Weed (a.k.a. Rudyard Kipling)
----------
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Ray Bradbury
----------
You are the sky. Everything else -- it’s just the weather.
Pema Chodron
----------
DEAD, adj. Done with the work of breathing; done with all the world; the mad race run though to the end; the golden goal attained and found to be a hole!
Squatol Johnes (a.k.a. Ambrose Bierce)
The Devil's Dictionary
----------
It's a god eat god world.
Dean Evans
----------
Life's default setting is on 'forward.'
Aparrna Sharma
----------
Beware anyone who wants to lead you.
Yaj Ekim
----------
I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strangely, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
Anon
----------
One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.
Henry Miller
----------
Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Please, don't forget to pay the debt.
Socrates
----------
Don't you know yet? It is your light that lights the world.
Rumi
----------
The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
Lawrence M. Krauss
----------
If your child needs a role model, and you're not it, you're both fucked.
George Carlin
----------
The greatest happiness is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see those dear to them bathed in tears, to clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.
Genghis Khan
----------
Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways - Chardonnay in one hand - chocolate in the other - body thoroughly used up - totally worn out and screaming "whoo hoo what a ride'!
Anon
----------
One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
----------
Wishing to entice the blind, the Buddha has playfully let words escape his golden mouth; Heaven and earth are ever since filled with entangling briars.
Daito Kokushi
----------
There is no reason to expect the reality of immeasurable and unbounded life to satisfy your puny little thoughts.
Kodo Sawaki
----------
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. As, first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
Jaques (a.k.a. William Shakespeare)
As You Like It
----------
Counting down ... tick ... tick ... tick ...
Yaj Ekim
----------
Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash, and I’m happy to say I have no grasp of it whatsoever.
Baron Munchausen
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen"
----------
Whenever there is a sense of individuality, personality, or a separateness, you have so many wants. You want to see a movie, you want to hear music, you want to play, you want to have sex, you want to eat fancy foods, you want to consume intoxicant, but when that sense of separateness is not there, when you are one with the totality, these things are not desired. Spirituality or what you call 'religion' is mainly to understand this: that you don't require anything.
Nisargadatta
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As long as you take yourself to be a person, a body and a mind, separate from the stream of life, having a will of its own, pursuing its own aims, you are living merely on the surface and whatever you do will be short-lived and of little value, mere straw to feed the flames of vanity.
Nisargadatta
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There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
Albert Camus
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From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all.
Albert Camus
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I think the coexist model is stupid. I would rather see religion wiped out than coexist with it. Asking me to coexist with religion is like asking me to coexist with syphilis. Neither I nor anybody else is obliged to respect the beliefs of anybody no matter how precious they may be to somebody. That said, I thing everybody has the right to practice their religion, but I also have every right to call their religion idiotic. There is a difference between rationalism and religion: only one of them is based on nonsense. Only one of them causes damage to society and represses the rights of entire groups of people. Only one of them stands in the way of legitimate science and reasoning. Which means only one of them deserves hatred, contempt, and dismissal. In short, I permit religion, but I will never tolerate it.
David Liu
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There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man.
Aristotle
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A human being, is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and 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 to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
Albert Einstein
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They say I'm old-fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast!
Dr. Seuss
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Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.
Dr. Seuss
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That's why my belief is
The briefer the brief is,
The greater the sigh
Of the reader's relief is.
Dr. Seuss
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All alone! Whether you like it or not, alone is something you'll be quite a lot!
Dr. Seuss
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And when you're alone there's a very good chance
You'll meet things that scare you right out of your pants.
There are some, down the road between hither and yon,
That can scare you so much you won't want to go on.
Dr. Seuss
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How did it get so late so soon? It's night before it's afternoon. December is here before it's June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?
Dr. Seuss
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You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go ...
Dr. Seuss
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Oh, the things you can find if you don't stay behind!
Dr. Seuss
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Why fit in when you were born to stand out?
Dr. Seuss
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Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.
Dr. Seuss
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A person's a person, no matter how small.
Dr. Seuss
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Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.
Dr. Seuss
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Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.
Dr. Seuss
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Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.
Dr. Seuss
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If things start happening, don't worry, don't stew, just go right along and you'll start happening too.
Dr. Seuss
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The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.
Dr. Seuss
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You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.
Dr. Seuss
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Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.
Dr. Seuss
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Think and wonder, wonder and think.
Dr. Seuss
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Not here not there not anywhere!
Dr. Seuss
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We are all a little weird and life's a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.
Dr. Seuss
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Now it should be clear that eternal life is the realization that the present is the only reality, and that past and future can be distinguished from it in a conventional sense alone. The moment is the 'door of heaven,' the 'straight and narrow way that leadeth unto life,' because there is no room in it for the separate 'I' ... Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between 'I' and 'now' has vanished -- when there is just this 'now' and nothing else.
Alan Watts
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Reincarnation implies a reincarnating self. There is no such thing. The bundle of memories and hopes, called the "I", imagines itself existing everlastingly and creates time to accomadate its false eternity. To be, I need no past or future. All experience is born of imagination. All exists in awareness, and awareness neither dies nor is re-born. It is the changeless reality itself.
Nisargadatta
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It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.
Jorge Luis Borges
El otro, el mismo
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Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent.
Dionysius the Elder
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Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue.
Proverbs 17:28
New International Version
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And I will lead the blind
in a way that they do not know,
in paths that they have not known
I will guide them.
I will turn the darkness before them into light,
the rough places into level ground.
These are the things I do,
and I do not forsake them.
Isaiah 42:16
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Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
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A commonplace of political rhetoric has it that the quality of a civilization may be measured by how it cares for its elderly. Just as surely, the future of a society may be forecast by how it cares for its young.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
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There is only one woman in the world. One woman, with many faces.
Nikos Kazantzakis
The Last Temptation of Christ
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And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Nietzche
----------
Caligula: Do you think I'm mad?
Claudius: Mad?
Caligula: Yes. Sometimes I think that I'm going mad. Do you — be honest with me — has that thought ever crossed your mind?
Claudius: Never. Never. The idea is preposterous. You set the standard of sanity for the whole world.
I, Claudius
----------
Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.
Claudius
I, Claudius
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It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning.
Peter D. Ouspensky
----------
[to Ringo a.k.a. John Travolta] There's this passage I got memorized. Ezekiel 25:17. "The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee." I been saying that shit for years. And if you heard it, that meant your ass. I never gave much thought to what it meant. I just thought it was some cold-blooded shit to say to a motherfucker before I popped a cap in his ass. But I saw some shit this morning made me think twice. See, now I'm thinking, maybe it means you're the evil man, and I'm the righteous man, and Mr. 9 millimeter here, he's the shepherd protecting my righteous ass in the valley of darkness. Or it could mean you're the righteous man and I'm the shepherd and it's the world that's evil and selfish. I'd like that. But that shit ain't the truth. The truth is, you're the weak, and I'm the tyranny of evil men. But I'm trying, Ringo. I'm trying real hard to be the shepherd.
Jules Winnfield (a.k.a. Samuel L. Jackson)
Pulp Fiction
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You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
Alan Watts
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They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.
Kahil Gibran
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As to conforming outwardly and living your own life inwardly, I do not think much of that.
Henry David Thoreau
----------
There is almost a sensual longing for communion with others who have a large vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendship between those engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality impossible to describe.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion, and elimination of ignorance, selfishness, and greed.
Dalai Lama
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I am the police. And I am here to arrest you. You have broken the law. I did not write the law. I may even disagree with the law. But I will enforce it." Through the windshield, oncoming semitrailers are narrowly avoided, but the voice stays even. "I bleed, I think, I love. And, yes, I can be killed. And although I am but one man, I have thousands of brothers and sisters who are the same as me. They will lay down their lives for me, and I them.
Brian Taylor (a.k.a. Jake Gyllenhaal)
End of Watch
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The thoughts that come often unsought, and, as it were, drop into the mind, are commonly the most valuable of any we have.
John Locke
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What worries you, masters you.
John Locke
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I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.
John Locke
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The heart knows nothing whatsoever of silence. In fact, it is not separate from the mind, both the mind and heart are in a constant state of change from moment to moment. Those who are too identified with the heart have enjoyed pretending as though it is the ultimate phenomenon of life, it is not.
What you are calling the heart is just the emotional dimension of man, and to become identified with your emotions is just as blinding and intoxicating as becoming identified with your thoughts. If you want to know of that which is seeing through your eyes and hearing through your ears, you will have to discover that dimension within you which is not of the mind and not of the heart, which cannot be grasped by any name.
Amir Mourad
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It's a dream, a frightful dream... life is...
Commodus
Gladiator
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The one who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The one who walks alone, is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.
Albert Einstein
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This Is It
This Is It. This is all there is – life appearing as an endless display of changing images, with no inherent purpose other than this appearance itself. There is simply life with no one living it.
For no reason at all life is at play with its own imagery, roving as attention, engaging in a mesmerizing game of hide and seek which arises as a sense of separation with an integral urge to wholeness. Life restlessly seeks, yearning for itself. The seeking is the restlessness. This play of worldly existence is imbued with life’s haunted longing for itself, seeking but never finding within the imagery in which it seeks. What is sought all along is this in which the seeking is playing out.
In life’s play as humanity, thought assumes an exaggerated importance as attention spins effortlessly into myriad longings and desires, epitomized by the idea of seeking fulfillment through enlightenment. Reading texts, asking questions, surfing the internet, going on retreat, gurus, teachers, non-teachers, practice, no practice – any or all of it is possible but none of it is necessary as in actuality nothing needs to be discovered, understood, let go of or transcended. Life already is, and recognition of itself in the form of enlightenment, liberation, nirvana, et cetera, is superfluous, merely another happening in the endless now of appearances in the play of life.
Nothing other than the configuration of life as it is now appearing is possible. All is happening exactly as it’s ‘meant’ to. If separation and seeking are the case, then this is it. If recognition and resting are the case, then this is it. Whatever is now – however ordinary or extraordinary – is it.
Nathan Gill
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I said to the wanting-creature inside me:
What is this river you want to cross?
There are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.
Do you see anyone moving about on that bank, or nesting?
There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.
There is no tow rope either, and no one to pull it.
There is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank, no ford!
And there is no body, and no mind!
Do you believe there is some place that will make the
soul less thirsty?
In that great absence you will find nothing.
Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don’t go off somewhere else!
Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of
imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.
Kabir
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These diverse disquisitions – meant to help us reason – have themselves become a painfully distracting thorn that needs to be removed. This thorn at last has been pulled out, from the interior of my heart, by using pincers of discernment seeking knowledge of plain truth.
Janaka
Ashtavakra Gita (Wood)
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Nothing stops you from being a gnani here and now, except fear. You are afraid of being impersonal, of impersonal being. It is all quite simple. Turn away from your desires and fears and from the thoughts they create and you are at once in your natural state.
Nisargadatta
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Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
John Adams
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Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
----------
Fear paints pictures of ghosts and hangs them in the gallery of ignorance.
Robert G. Ingersol
----------
You do not need the Bible to justify love, but no better tool has been invented to justify hate.
Richard A. Weatherwax
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There is no thing in this world that is that important. As long as you believe it is important, you will never awaken. You can't. For you are caught up in Maya. You are playing the game. You are still involved in the Leela. You're feeling things. You're reacting to things. You're arguing about things. You're debating things.
Robert Adams
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If you don't find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further.
Mohandes Gandhi
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You have to understand ... most people are not ready to be unplugged and many of them are so injured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.
Morpheus
----------
A smart man only believes half of what he hears. A wise man knows which half.
Jeff Cooper
----------
That which is impenetrable to us really exists. Behind the secrets of nature remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion.
Albert Einstein
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I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me. My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.
Hermann Hesse
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It's a lucky thing for rulers that most people do not think.
Adolf Hitler
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Enlightenment is ego's ultimate disappointment.
Chögyam Trungpa
----------
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
Voltaire
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I will not permit any man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him.
Booker T. Washington
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Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings.
Bodhidharma
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Ships are safe in harbor but that's not what ships are for.
Dan Millman
----------
The greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated.
Mohandas Gandhi
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It is sometimes thought that this kind of enquiry is intellectual and abstract and seems to bear little relation to our day-to-day experience. However, it is only because our conventional dualistic concepts about the nature of Reality are themselves so densely interwoven with abstract and erroneous ideas that they require some meticulous deconstruction.
Robert Spira
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Seen in clarity, life appears as a great play. You – Consciousness – play all the roles and it is part of the play that You usually play the roles without knowing Your real identity. But sometimes, as part of the show, there is recognition of Your true nature. When there is involvement as a character in the play without recognition of Your true nature the role is taken seriously and all the dramas of life seemingly appear from this. If a role is played where there is recognition of Your true nature, the play is seen for what it is. When Your true nature becomes obvious, the character doesn’t disappear in a flash of light, nor put on ochre robes and have disciples, nor teach ‘spiritual’ truths – although any of these is possible, depending on the pattern of the character’s role in the play. The character will likely appear as he or she did before recognition. The character is likely to continue to lead what is an ordinary life in the play. It is not even necessary for the character to tell anyone or communicate what is now obvious. The whole play has no purpose or point beyond present appearance. It is Your cosmic entertainment. You are Your play. It has no existence separate from You
Nathan Gill
----------
My name is Frank. That's not important. The important question is: who are you? America has become a cruel and vicious place. We reward the shallowest, the dumbest, the meanest and the loudest. We no longer have any common sense of decency. No sense of shame. There is no right and wrong. The worst qualities in people are looked up to and celebrated. Lying and spreading fear is fine as long as you make money doing it. We've become a nation of slogan-saying, bile-spewing hatemongers. We've lost our kindness. We've lost our soul. What have we become? We take the weakest in our society, we hold them up to be ridiculed, laughed at for our sport and entertainment. Laughed at to the point, where they would literally rather kill themselves than live with us anymore.
Frank
God Bless America
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The body will survive as long as it is needed. It is not important that it should live long. A full life is better than a long life.
Nisargadatta Maharaj
----------
The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
----------
Why have a civilization any more if no one is interested in being civilized?
Frank
God Bless America
----------
Busy, busy, busy.
Bokonon
----------
Nothing stops you from being a gnani here and now, except fear. You are afraid of being impersonal, of impersonal being. It is all quite simple. Turn away from your desires and fears and from the thoughts they create and you are at once in your natural state.
Nisargadatta
----------
As political equality is the remedy for political tyranny, so is economic equality the way of putting an end to the economic tyranny exercised by the few over the many through the superiority of wealth.
Edward Bellamy
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People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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Well done is better than well said.
Benjamin Franklin
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Don't judge men's wealth or godliness by their Sunday appearance.
Benjamin Franklin
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Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
Benjamin Franklin
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Keep the eyes wide open before marriage and half shut afterwards.
Benjamin Franklin
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In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
Terry Pratchett
----------
I used to believe that anything was better than nothing. Now I know that sometimes nothing is better.
Glenda Jackson
----------
Only one important thing has happened in the last three days, and that is that nothing has happened.
Arthur Conan Doyle
----------
Science is the key to our future, and if you don't believe in science, then you're holding everybody back.
Bill Nye
----------
No one has ever made himself great by showing how small someone else is.
Irvin Himmel
----------
It is always the last place you look.
Peter Yovu
----------
War is when your government tells you who the enemy is, 'revolution is when you've worked out who the enemy is for yourself.
Anon
----------
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
George Santayana
----------
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
George Santayana
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Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
George Santayana
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Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
George Santayana
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My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
George Santayana
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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
George Santayana
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Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
George Santayana
----------
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
George Santayana
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Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
----------
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.
George Santayana
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The God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men’s minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.
George Santayana
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The Bible is a wonderful source of wisdom for those who don’t understand it.
George Santayana
----------
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
----------
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
George Santayana
----------
Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience deceptive, judgment difficult.
Hippocrates
----------
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Acton
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Ambition,n. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1881 - 1906
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
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The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to candor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper.
George Santayana
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The man who insists on seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
The test of every religious, political, or educational system, is the man which it forms. If a system injures the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is vicious. If it injures the conscience it is criminal.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
Truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
The great artist is the simplifier.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
A man without passion is only a latent force, only a possibility, like a stone waiting for the blow from the iron to give forth sparks.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
Is all my scribbling collected together—my correspondence, these thousands of pages, my lectures, my articles, my verses, my various memodanda -- anything but a collection of dry leaves? To whom and for what have I been of use? And will my name live for even a day after me, and will it have any meaning to anyone? An insignificant, empty life! Vie Nulle!
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
I find myself regarding existence as though from beyond the tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, as it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am depersonalized, detached, cut adrift. Is this madness?
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
The man who has no refuge in himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly a personality at all. He floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions--such a man is a mere article of furniture--a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being--an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air at rest, and the weathercock the humble servant of the air in motion.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
The highest function of the teacher consists not so much in imparting knowledge as in stimulating the pupil in its love and pursuit. To know how to suggest is the art of teaching.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
What we call little things are merely the causes of great things; they are the beginning, the embryo, and it is the point of departure which, generally speaking, decides the whole future of an existence. One single black speck may be the beginning of gangrene, of a storm, of a revolution.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
He who is silent is forgotten; he who abstains is taken at his word; he who does not advance, falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed, distanced, crushed; he who ceases to grow greater becomes smaller; he who leaves off, gives up; the stationary condition is the beginning of the end—it is the terrible symptom which precedes death. To live, is to achieve a perpetual triumph: it is to assert one's self against destruction, against sickness, against the annulling and dispersion of one's physical and moral being. It is to will without ceasing, or rather to refresh one's will day by day.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
Women wish to be loved not because they are pretty, or good, or well bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but because they are themselves.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
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.
Jack London
----------
Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.
Jack London
----------
Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.
Jack London
----------
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
Chang Yen
----------
I suppose the process of acceptance will pass through the usual four stages: i) This is worthless nonsense, ii) This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view, iii) This is true, but quite unimportant, iv) I always said so.
J. B. S. Haldane
----------
The health of nations is more important than the wealth of nations.
Will Durant
----------
I have never yet met a healthy person who worried very much about his health, or a really good person who worried much about his own soul.
J. B. S. Haldane
----------
America's health care system is neither healthy, caring, nor a system.
Walter Cronkite
----------
We should manage our fortune as we do our health: enjoy it when good, be patient when it is bad, and never apply violent remedies except in an extreme necessity.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
----------
Health is like money, we never have a true idea of its value until we lose it.
Josh Billings
----------
In health there is freedom. Health is the first of all liberties.
Henri-Frédéric Amiel
----------
A wise man thinks it more advantageous not to join the battle than to win.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
The reason why so few people are agreeable in conversation is that each is thinking more about what he intends to say than others are saying.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
One must listen if one wishes to be listened to.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
The reason that there are so few good conversationalists is that most people are thinking about what they are going to say and not about what the others are saying.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
How can we expect others to keep our secrets if we cannot keep them ourselves?
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
What makes the vanity of others insufferable to us is that it wounds our own.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
The greatest fault of a penetrating wit is to go beyond the mark.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
We hardly find any persons of good sense save those who agree with us.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
Hardly any man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
It is more difficult to avoid being ruled than to rule others.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
If we are to judge of love by its consequences, it more nearly resembles hatred than friendship.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
When not prompted by vanity, we say little.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
Nothing is given so profusely as advice.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer provide bad examples.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
Sincerity is an openness of heart; we find it in very few people; what we usually see is only an artful dissimulation to win the confidence of others.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
We all have strength enough to endure the misfortunes of others.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
We are never so ridiculous through what we are as through what we pretend to be.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
One forgives to the degree that one loves.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
People's personalities, like buildings, have various facades, some pleasant to view, some not.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
We have no patience with other people's vanity because it is offensive to our own.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
What men have called friendship is only a social arrangement, a mutual adjustment of interests, an interchange of services given and received; it is, in sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
The truest mark of having been born with great qualities is to have been born without envy.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
If we had no faults, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
Jealousy contains more of self-love than of love.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
It is with true love as it is with ghosts; everyone talks about it, but few have seen it.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
----------
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
Albert Einstein
----------
We seldom attribute common sense except to those who agree with us.
François de La Rochefoucauld
----------
Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
----------
If you have an ounce of common sense and one good friend you don't need an analyst.
Joan Crawford
----------
The god of war hates him who hesitates.
Euripides
----------
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.
Bertrand Russell
----------
The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters.
Helen Keller
----------
The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor is that we have a democracy; and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.
Edward Dowling
----------
The medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.
Marshall McLuhan
----------
Power recognizes only power, and all of them who realize this have made gains.
Malcolm X
----------
Between the Pulitzer Prize, the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and the inquisition of earnest literary ladies, every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient and sterile.
Sinclair Lewis
----------
Intelligence is not all that important in the exercise of power, and is often, in point of fact, useless.
Henry Kissinger
----------
I freed thousands of slaves, and could have freed thousands more, if they had known they were slaves.
Harriet Tubman
----------
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
----------
No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.
Margaret Sanger:
----------
In love, there are no conditions; you love for no reason, with no justification. You are free to be what you are, and you allow others to be what they are.
Don Miguel Ruiz
----------
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.
Aldous Huxley
----------
Ancora Imparo (I am always learning)
Michelangelo
----------
Dream as if you live forever; live as if you die today.
James Dean
----------
We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us.
Anonymous
----------
I believe in the cosmos. All of us are linked to the cosmos. Look at the sun. If there is no sun, then we cannot exist. So nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.
Mikhail Gorbachev
----------
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Carl Sagan
----------
Plans should be made by those people who are going to be carrying them out.
General George Patton
----------
Imagine a world in which we are all enlightened by objective truths rather than offended by them.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
----------
We are not free to walk on our neighbor's toes.
Pablo Casals
----------
War is an ill thing, as I surely know. But 'twould be an ill world for weaponless dreamers if evil men were not now and then slain.
Rudyard Kipling
----------
I am, by calling, a dealer in words; and words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
Rudyard Kipling
----------
A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition.
Rudyard Kipling
----------
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
George Bernard Shaw
----------
Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.
Katharine Hepburn
----------
Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God.
Lenny Bruce
----------
There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.
Jean-Paul Sartre
----------
I started with the firm conviction that when I came to the end, I wanted to be regretting the things that I had done, not the things I hadn't.
Michael Caine
----------
Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.
Emil Cioran
----------
Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.
Terry Pratchett
----------
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty s no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!.
Barry Goldwater
----------
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.
Barry Goldwater
----------
Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.
J. R. R. Tolkien
----------
I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.
J. R. R. Tolkien
----------
The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.
J. R. R. Tolkien
----------
Generous deed should not be checked by cold counsel.
J. R. R. Tolkien
----------
It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish.
J. R. R. Tolkien
----------
Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.
J. R. R. Tolkien
----------
The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor's edge, sharper than a hound's tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhaps it is a phantom.
Philip K. Dick
----------
As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.
Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
----------
For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.
Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
----------
It is quite a three-pipe problem, and I beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes.
Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
----------
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
----------
Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot.
Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
----------
The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
John Kenneth Galbraith
----------
Banks are an almost irresistible attraction for that element of our society which seeks unearned money.
J. Edgar Hoover
----------
Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.
Abraham Lincoln
----------
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
Carl Sagan
----------
How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.
Winston S. Churchill, The River War
----------
Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups ... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
Philip K. Dick
----------
The measure of a man is what he does with power.
Plato
----------
Be not the slave of your own past - plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
----------
Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.
Oscar Wilde
----------
I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, 'There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?
Elizabeth Gilbert
----------
Little said is soon amended. There is always time to add a word, never to withdraw one.
Baltasar Gracian
----------
Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.
Baltasar Gracian
----------
Politeness and a sense of honor have this advantage: we bestow them on others without losing a thing.
Baltasar Gracian
----------
Things do not pass for what they are, but for what they seem. Most things are judged by their jackets.
Baltasar Gracian
----------
When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.
Baltasar Gracian
----------
Work is the price which is paid for reputation.
Baltasar Gracian
----------
Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.
Baltasar Gracian
----------
Si vis pacem, para bellum: If you want peace, prepare for war
Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus (Vegetius)
----------
Nemo Me Impune Lacessit: No One Attacks Me With Impunity
Roman Maxim
----------
Amat Victoria Curam: Victory Loves Preparation
Roman Maxim
----------
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
----------
It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.
Joan Baez
----------
Instead of getting hard ourselves and trying to compete, women should try and give their best qualities to men - bring them softness, teach them how to cry.
Joan Baez
----------
If we don't sit down and shut up once in a while we'll lose our minds even earlier than we had expected. Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times.
Joan Baez
----------
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou
----------
Well done is better than well said.
Benjamin Franklin
----------
As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.
Andrew Carnegie
----------
Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold, but so does a hard-boiled egg.
Anon
----------
It's easy when you know how.
Anon
----------
Each day is a new canvas to paint upon. Make sure your picture is full of life and happiness, and at the end of the day you don't look at it and wish you had painted something different.
Anon
----------
If it ain't fun, I ain't doing it.
Anon
----------
When you acknowledge the obstacle, you actually give it power by the acknowledgement of it. I wanna walk through it and over it.
Will Smith
----------
A universal characteristic of genius is humility.
David Hawkins
----------
Happy endings are stories that haven't finished yet.
Jane Smith (Angelina Jolie)
Mr. and Mrs. Smith
----------
If
by Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
----------
For the one stabilized in the Self, nothing is important and significant. Such a one is not concerned with anything.
Nisargadatta
----------
Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.
John McClane (Bruce Willis)
----------
The day you decide that you are more interested in being aware of your thoughts than you are in the thoughts themselves -- that is the day you will find your way out.
Michael Singer
----------
The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously.
Tom Robbins
----------
Now, in reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them to be men of much greater profundity than they really are.
Henry Fielding
----------
I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent.
Mark Twain
----------
There is only one woman in the world. One woman, with many faces.
Nikos Kazantzakis
----------
I give myself very good advice. But I very seldom follow it.
Alice (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
----------
Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
Abraham Lincoln
----------
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
H.P. Lovecraft
----------
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
Kahlil Gibran
----------
You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment.
Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson)
House of Cards (BBC)
----------
No friend ever served me, and no enemy ever wronged me, whom I have not repaid in full.
Sulla
----------
Via, Veritas, Vita: The Way, The Truth, The Life
Latin Proverb
----------
Vires et honestas: Strength and honor
Roman Maxim
----------
If you know the why, you can live any how.
Frederich Nietzsche
----------
Chaos is order yet undeciphered
Enemy (2013)
----------
Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.
Joan Clarke
The Imitation Game
----------
Do you know, this morning I was on a train that went through a city that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for you. I bought a ticket from a man who would likely be dead if it wasn't for you. I read up, on my work, a whole field of scientific inquiry that only exists because of you. Now, if you wish you could have been normal... I can promise you I do not. The world is an infinitely better place precisely because you weren't.
Joan Clarke
The Imitation Game
----------
Do you know why people like violence? It is because it feels good. Humans find violence deeply satisfying. But remove the satisfaction, and the act becomes... hollow.
Alan Turing
The Imitation Game
----------
When people talk to each other, they never say what they mean.
[pause]
They say something else and you're expected to just know what they mean.
Alan Turing
The Imitation Game
----------
I know it's not ordinary. But who ever loved ordinary?
Joan Clarke
The Imitation Game
----------
Faust: Did you come from hell?
Mephistophilis: Is this not hell, and am I not in it?
Christopher Marlowe
Doctor Faustus
or, more accurately:
Mephistopheles: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?
Christopher Marlowe
Doctor Faustus
----------
Hell is just a frame of mind.
Christopher Marlowe
Doctor Faustus
----------
Our country right or wrong is an evil motto - what if your country be in the wrong? It will only compound her injury. I wish to serve the republic with an honest and fearless criticism.
Horace Greeley
----------
The darkest hour in any man's life is when he sits down to plan how to get money without earning it.
Horace Greeley
----------
The best style of writing, as well as the most forcible, is the plainest.
Horace Greeley
----------
Great grief makes sacred those upon whom its hand is laid. Joy may elevate, ambition glorify, but sorrow alone can consecrate.
Horace Greeley
----------
I do not regret having braved public opinion, when I knew it was wrong and was sure it would be merciless.
Horace Greeley
----------
The way we do things is to begin.
Horace Greeley
----------
Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you're at it.
Horace Greeley
----------
Hope is the expectation that something outside of ourselves, something or someone external, is going to come to our rescue and we will live happily ever after.
Robert Anthony
----------
If you drink, don’t drive. Don’t even putt.
Dean Martin
----------
I am an uncompromising opponent of violent methods even to serve the noblest of causes.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
----------
One simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian ... one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend.
J. William Fulbright
----------
Violence sometimes may have cleared away obstructions quickly, but it never has proved itself creative.
Albert Einstein
----------
All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.
Leo Tolstoy
----------
Terrorism is what we call the violence of the weak, and we condemn it; war is what we call the violence of the strong, and we glorify it.
Sydney J. Harris
----------
He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
Thomas Paine
----------
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value.
Thomas Paine
----------
These are the times that try men's souls.
Thomas Paine
----------
I have written more than 1000 songs, most of them never recorded. The timing wasn't right or whatever. The songs that became the hits don't tell the whole story. Most songs disappear without a trace. You never know how people will take to them, what will strike a chord. If you did, you'd always do it. You'd record only hits. No one can do that.
Willie Nelson
----------
It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.
Douglas MacArthur
----------
Rules are mostly made to be broken, and are too often for the lazy to hide behind.
Douglas MacArthur
----------
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
Emil Cioran
----------
No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.
Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth
----------
What is fame? The advantage of being known by people of whom you yourself know nothing, and for whom you care as little.
Lord Byron
----------
And the wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws.
Maurice Sendak
----------
Prohibition is the trigger of crime.
Ian Fleming
Goldfinger
----------
There can be too much truth in relationship.
Violet Crawley
Downton Abbey
----------
It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.
Jerome K. Jerome
----------
Men are attracted to flawed women too of course, but their illusion is that they can fix them. They just want to be entertained. The truth about women is that you can do anything to them except bore them.
Reiner
The Counselor
----------
Yeah, well, I don't mean to sound cold, I just mean that where women are concerned, they've got their own agenda. I always liked smart women, but it's been an expensive hobby.
Reiner
The Counselor
----------
Greed really takes you to the edge, doesn't it?
That's not what greed does. That's what greed is.
Malkina and Reiner
The Counselor
----------
The truth has no temperature.
Malkina
The Counselor
----------
I'm pretty skeptical about the goodness of the good. I think that if you ransacked the archives of the redeemed you would uncover tales of moral squalor quite beyond the merely appalling. I've pretty much seen it all, Counselor, and it's all shit. I could live in a monastery, scrub the steps, wash the pots, maybe do a little gardening. Why not?
You're serious.
Very.
Why don't you?
In a word, women.
Westray and Counselor
The Counselor
----------
I suspect that we are ill-formed for the path we have chosen. Ill-formed and ill-prepared. We would like to draw a veil over all the blood and terror that have brought us to this place. It is our faintness of heart that would close our eyes to all of that, but in so doing it makes of it our destiny... But nothing is crueler than a coward, and the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining.
Malkina
The Counselor
----------
Counselor: Will you help me?
Jefe: I would urge you to see the truth of the situation you're in, Counselor. That is my advice. It is not for me to tell you what you should have done or not done. The world in which you seek to undo the mistakes that you made is different from the world where the mistakes were made. You are now at the crossing. And you want to choose, but there is no choosing there. There's only accepting. The choosing was done a long time ago … Are you there, Counselor?
Counselor: [distraught] Yes.
Jefe: I don't mean to offend you, but reflective men often find themselves at a place removed from the realities of life. In any case, we should all prepare a place where we can accommodate all the tragedies that sooner or later will come to our lives. But this is an economy few people care to practice.
Jefe: When it comes to grief, the normal rules of wealth do not apply. Because grief transcends value. A man would give entire nations to lift grief off his heart and yet, you cannot buy anything with grief, because grief is worthless.
Jefe: Machado would have traded every word, every poem, every verse he ever wrote for one more hour with his beloved. And that is because when it comes to grief, the normal rules of exchange do not apply, because grief transcends value. A man would give entire nations to lift grief off his heart. And yet, you cannot buy anything with grief, because grief is worthless.
Counselor: Why are you telling me this?
Jefe: Because you continue to deny the reality of the world you're in. Do you love your wife so much, so completely, that you would exchange places with her upon the wheel? And I don't mean dying, because dying is easy.
Counselor: Yes! Yes, damn you!
Jefe: Well, that is good to hear, Counselor.
Counselor: What are you saying? Are you saying this is a possibility?
Jefe: No. It's impossible.
Counselor: You said I was that man - at that crossing.
Jefe: Yes. At the understanding that life is not going to take you back. You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist. But for those with the understanding that they're living the last days of the world, death acquires a different meaning. The extinction of all reality is a concept no resignation can encompass. And then, all the grand designs and all the grand plans will be finally exposed and revealed for what they are. And now, Counselor, I have to go, because I have to make other calls. If I have time, I think I'll take a small nap.
[hangs up]
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There are times when I just want to be alone. I have no patience for pointless conversations or any conversation about other people’s lives. I’m tired of hearing about politics, football or the weather. Newspapers sound to me like cheap propaganda and TV looks like a world created to elude or make me feel guilty for everything I could do but don’t. I have no interest in smiling when I don’t feel like it, to be empathic when I’m sad, to drive the car when I want to lay on the beach sand, to talk when I feel better in silence, to fix problems when I just want to forget them. I know that sometimes it may not be the best way, but when I want to be alone, I have some difficulties in not attending this wish of mine. You may call me selfish, but on those days I don’t care if I’m going to upset someone. I deserve my solitude. I have the right to be with myself and no one else. During those times, I just want to live one day at a time, without adding or taking anything from it, without asking or demanding a thing, giving all my time to the one person that deserves it the most.
José Micard Teixeira
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© Michael J. Holshouser 2015
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