Uncategorized Quotes - Page 489

Wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such effort, is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast away.

There was something important being overlooked, they argued, in the mainstreaming of meditation - a central plank in the Buddhist platform: compassion.

Negative feelings weigh you down and can keep you from experiencing healing, as surely as stones might weigh you down if you were trying to swim.

No counsel is more sincere than that given on ships which are in danger.

Valuing names as they do, Realists are sparing with them. They are likely to be known only as Joe or Bill or Plato. And they don't smile much. Nominalists have more fun. They are known as Aristotle or Decimus-et-Ultimus Barziza, or as Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montague, or perhaps by one name in childhood and several others in the course of life. A firm Realist misses out on one of the most satisfying of all human activities -- the assumption of secret identities. A man who has lived and never been someone else has never lived. It is true that occasionally there can be embarrassment in secret identities, but only a Realist will take the whole thing seriously enough to hit you. So have your fun, and avoid Realists.

Mortals cannot perceive me with the physical eye whilst in my pure form unless it is of my choosing, for it would result in fatality, which begs the question of why you are an exception.

And now the thought came to me that I lived much of my life through the pages of books as well. That perhaps I, too, was only a paper figure. A cut-out, or silhouette. Flat.I always thought I knew the shape of my life. Of course I thought I knew about life, thought I knew all I needed - or wanted - to know. And yet, like the opening left when a burning star falls from its perch, now an unexpected hole was left in what was once a solid curtain of understanding... ( )... Sitting under the cold stars, I understood that it was death that made me recognize life, and the existence, or pherhaps the non-existence of my own beeing.

If you encounter the light, you shall never walk in darkness.

...I've discovered why you fascinate - you keep the mystery and as Carlyle noted, Wonder is the basis of worship...

In the nineteenth century, The Romantics viewed Nature as benign, a glowing reflection of God's grace. Now we know better. Nature is brutal and, if it is feminine, she's not the kind of woman you can trust. Human beings may be her finest achievement yet, but when you get right down to brass tacks, we're meat. AIDS and organisms like streptococcus don't give a crap that we subdued the earth or produced a Shakespeare...

Never give up on your aspirations. Sometimes life is funny and can get in the way with simple distractions, but don't let that stop you. If you have a dream, then go for it. You have the power to make it manifest itself into something fantastic, so mesmerizing that it has the possibility to astonish even the most daring of minds. Dream on and make it a reality.

A sense of our inadequacies and failings, a recognition that we could be better people than we usually are, isone of the forces for moral growth and improvement in our society. An appropriate sense of guilt makes people try to be better. But anexcessive sense of guilt, a tendency to blame ourselves for things which are clearly not our fault, robs us of our self-esteem andperhaps of our capacity to grow and to act.

A demon, who serves to a warlock, begins tormenting his master, if he has not enough work. Talent is the demon.

Somewhere in this latest humiliation there was a lesson in self-reliance. He'd failed so completely that he'd become his own man again.

A vast and abandoned world laid out in anonymous grids and quadrants, a view that confirmed you were much more alone than you thought you were, a view that inspired the flickering thoughts of suicide.

Those 10000 days in prison, but this never made Nelson Mandela to leave what he was doing. He loved what he did and he would repeat to again if he had been arrested again and imprisoned again! He has his bigger picture in view!

But then it is easy, too easy, to sermonize about the dangers of paternalism and the need to take responsibility for our own lives, from the comfort of our couch in our safe and sanitary home. Aren't we, those who live in the rich world, the constant beneficiaries of a paternalism now so thoroughly embedded into the system that we hardly notice it?

It’s not the obviousness or the complexity of the things that’s deftly deluding mankind. It’s man himself.

Nightingale"Did I wound you, mutilate. Take away your voice. Did I cut something from you. Leave you locked in silence?This is what you do: you sing. Every part of you. Your locks of hair sing, your eyes, your hands, your smile. If I listen closely I can even hear your blood.Was I the one that took that away?Go down to the water where we used to swim. Stand under the sky at dawn when the sky is streaked with blood. Open your mouth and shout our secret to the waves. The ocean will be your voice. You won't have to carry anything alone. Little Sister, my Spring, April. Little nightingale. Sant at the edge of the water. Your voice will come back to you. Maybe. If I am silent.

When we touch the center of sorrow, when we sit with discomfort without trying to fix it, when we stay present to the pain of disapproval or betrayal and let it soften us, these are times that we connect with bohdichitta.

As long as you write, you'll never be lonely.

I have tried hard - but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds out that one only fits into one hole? One must go back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap - and you don't know what it's like in the rubbish heap!

There is a great fulfillment when you commit your life to lifelong learning.

Positive results will come when you start to replace your negative thoughts and habits with positive ones.

So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties. For convictions and certainties are too often the concomitants of ignorance. Those who like to feel that they are always right and who attach a high importance to their own opinions should stay at home. When one is traveling, convictions are mislaid as easily as spectacles; but unlike spectacles, they are not easily replaced.

...all the disadvantages of good roads: high speed, and almost total lack of that inspiring factor in travel -- the welcoming hand of the interested stranger.

By small and simple sentences, great books come to pass.

Slush is frozen over. People say that winter lasts forever, but it's because they obsess over the thermometer. North in the mountains, the maple syrup is trickling. Brave geese punch through the thin ice left on the lake. Underground, pale seeds roll over in their sleep. Starting to get restless. Starting to dream green.

I’m not afraid of the darkness outside. It’s the darkness inside houses I don’t like.

Desire as a motivator for achievement and even for survival isn't a bad thing. It's when desire drives us to grab more than our share or harm others that issues arise.

Know the one who wants nothing to be the wealthiest.

Sometimes you risk all for a chance at your heart's desire...

Stop bitching about everybody else and what they’ve done to you and start cleaning up your own shit yourself. The only person who can make you a victim is you.

Is it God? Did God set up the dominoes and wait for some human to flick the first one? Or is it the opposite way around? Did humans set them up so God could do the flicking?

I suppose in the end the whole of life becomes an act of letting go. But what always hurts the most is not taking a moment to say goodbye.

People like to say that time heals all wounds, but I don't believe it. I remember once Grandpa took me firewood cutting, and as we looked at the rings of the tree together, he pointed out the years where there was drought and the years where there was fire. So while time allowed for new growth that hid the scars of the past, those scars were still there, inside the tree, and part of the tree. I think about how I am like that tree.

The end is the matter! A step to the end is a factor!

It’s not about getting over things, it’s about making room for them. It’s about painting the picture with contrast.

There is light within your soul. Let it shine.

We can do nothing on our own except by the power of the Holy Spirit.

God can pick sense out of a confused prayer.

There was nothing the matter out there. It was in here, with me.I decided I'd better go to work, maybe that would exorcise me. I fled from the room almost as though it were haunted. It was too late to stop off at a breakfast counter now. I didn't want any, anyway. My stomach kept giving little quivers. In the end I didn't go to work, either. I couldn't, I wouldn't have been any good. I telephoned in that I was too ill to come, and it was no idle excuse, even though I was upright on my two legs.I roamed around the rest of the day in the sunshine. Wherever the sunshine was the brightest, I sought and stayed in that place, and when it moved on I moved with it. I couldn't get it bright enough or strong enough. I avoided the shade, I edged away from it, even the slight shade of an awning or of a tree.And yet the sunshine didn't warm me. Where others mopped their brows and moved out of it, I stayed - and remained cold inside. And the shade was winning the battle as the hours lengthened. It outlasted the sun. The sun weakened and died; the shade deepened and spread. Night was coming on, the time of dreams, the enemy. ("Nightmare")

As a young girl, I allowed my self-esteem to be determined by others’ opinions, and I devoted incredible energy tuning into how everyone else felt.

[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.

I think it's time you got a summer love of your own until lover boy sees he need to ditch Gina.

I'll write while I'm breathing.

When the time comes for the fulfillment of the visions, all resources needed are made available by divine power.

238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.”240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

I am more than good enoughTo accomplish everything I can be,I will wake up todayThe history could have been different.But I am here now.

May God provide food, clothing and shelter for all humankind.

You don't know the art of eating ice cream." I mumbled."And what's that?" He said sarcastically."That is, to enjoy every single spoonful, lick it thrice to completely clean it off, then take another spoonful, and so on. You know what's sweet time? That is called sweet time. Next time, do it and enjoy the heavenly taste of it. It will increase its deliciousness by tenfold." I grinned at him.

There are no coincidences", Silette wrote. "Only mysteries that haven't been solved, clues that haven't been placed. Most are blind to the language of the bird overheard, the leaf in our path, the phonographic record stuck in a groove, the unknown caller on the phone. They don't see the omens. They don't know how to read the signs. To them life is like a book with blank pages. But to the detective, it is an illuminated manuscript of mysteries.

It is in descending in the humble silence of prayer that we are able to ascend to the greatest heights of true human fulfillment in union with God.

In my day the principal concerns of university students were sex, smoking dope, rioting and learning. Learning was something you did only when the first three weren't available.

All great and precious things are lonely.

It was funny how all the useless knowledge you accumulated when you're in love with someone could sit for years gathering dust in the back of your mind, only to spill out at the slightest reminder.

I clung to the dream like a lifeline, the only thing worth keeping going for. That was why I had agreed to come here. I'd always said I would sell my soul for a pony of my own.

O Lord, Thy Word, heals my wounds.

Don't turn a good dude who is loyal to his chick into a bad nigga by throwing yourself at him when he is already committed. Know when to stay the hell away.Good men are rare. If he aint single, don't make him unfaithful. Oh Yes, he might cheat with some other chick. It does not have to be you.

Don’t you believe any man who makes you feel like you were just a one-time thing.” His arms tighten around me and his words tickle my ear, “You could never be any man’s forgettable moment.” He holds me away from him and I feel ridiculously like I could melt in the dark pools of his eyes. “You are a force to be remembered, Dacie Mae.