Just don't pollute it.
What is pollution?
As long as you have a fluctuating mind,
Creating artificialities and pursuing inclinations,
All is pollution.
If you want to understand the Way directly,
The normal mind is the Way.
What is normal mind?
It has no artificial contrivance,
No right or wrong, no grasping or rejection,
No ordinariness and no sanctity.
Ancestor Ma (709–788)
The empty door of truth as it really is
Cannot be tarried in.
Pai-chang (720-814)
The ultimate Truth is beyond words.
Doctrines are words. They're not the Way.
The Way is wordless.
Words are illusions... Don't cling to appearances, and you'll break through all barriers...
Bodhidharma
When all things return to the One, even gold loses its value.
But when the One returns to all things, even the pebles sparkle
John Wu
To understand things we must have been once in them and then have come out of them; so that first there must be captivity and then deliverance, illusion followed by disillusion, enthusiasm by disappointment. He who is still under the spell, and he who has never felt the spell, are equally incompetent. We only know well what we have first believed, then judged. To understand we must be free, yet not have been always free. The same truth holds, whether it is a question of love, of art, of religion, or of patriotism. Sympathy is a first condition of criticism; reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion.
Amiel
Deborah Solomon of the New York Times interviewed Karen Armstrong, former nun turned religious scholar, and the interview was printed on April 4, 2004.
DS: Do you believe in the afterlife?
KA: I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.
Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.
Who can keep us from recreating our life as we would like it to be-as it could, and should be? No one but ourselves can keep us from being artists, rather than marching forward like mere consumers, corporate robots, sheep. No one but ourselves can keep us from dancing with life instead of goose-stepping. In every
moment recognizing our own creative imagination, the living picture we paint on the canvas of our lives. Everything is imagination. And imagination is freedom, but it can also be conditioning, bondage.
Lama Surya Das (in Tikkun Magazine Vol 19 No 2)
Q: What do you think Hasidism has to teach us today?
A: There is far too much to say for one brief conversation, but let me make one basic point:
Of all the lessons of Hasidism, the most important one to me is the imperative to remain on the growing edge of the Jewish tradition. In its early days, Hasidism was a radical movement attempting to revitalize its relationship with God and with Yiddishkeit [the Jewish tradition]. The Ba'al Shem Tov [Israel b. Eliezer, d. 1760, the first great Hasidic master] modeled this passion for revitalization in his introduction into Jewish life of the quality of "mamash" (truly). While prior Jewish thinkers preached about God, he actually went out and showed people that God's glory mamash fills the whole earth [Isaiah 6:3], and that people of all walks of life can experience the Divine. Conservatives want to be in the center where things are safe; but as with a tree, the center is dead matter. The Hasidim didn't abandon the tradition, but they lived on the edge, seeking to renew it. We must do the same.
Renewal requires a careful look back into the past so that we know where we have come from, where we now stand, and where we might go in the future. But this exploration is not without risk - there is always a danger of being trapped and tyrannized by the past. People sometimes fall into the assumption that whatever was done back then was the "real thing"; if it was good enough for them, it's good enough for us. Give me that old time religion! These are the sentiments of fundamentalists. When we look back at our ancestors, our aim is not to be locked into the past. We want to use their experience and wisdom as reference points, as sources of guidance. Judaism is alive, and we are responsible for continuing to animate it.
Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi (Interviewed in Tikkun Magazine, Vol 19, No. 4, July/Aug 2004)
My doctrine is to think the thought that is unthinkable,
to practice the deed that is non-doing,
to speak the speech that is inexpressible,
and to be trained in the discipline that is beyond discipline.
- Sutra of Forty Two Chapters
Wisdom is a living stream, not an icon preserved in a museum. Only when we find the spring of wisdom in our own life can it flow to future generations.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Life is not a Problem to be solved
but Reality to be experienced
Kierkegaard
One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time
André Gide
Besides the noble art of getting things done,
there is the noble art of leaving things undone.
The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
Lin Yutang
There are more things to do than we ever shall get done.
There are more books to read than we can ever look at.
There are more avenues to enjoyment than we ever shall find
time to travel.
Life appeals to us from innumerable directions, crying Attend to me here!
In consequence, we litter-up our lives with indiscriminate pre-occupation.
We let first-come be first-served, forgetting that the finest things do not crowd.
We let the loudest voices fill our ears, forgetting that asses bray, but gentlemen speak low.
Multitudes of people are living -- not bad, but -- frittered lives: split, scattered, uncoordinated.
They are like pictures into which a would-be artist has put -- in messy disarray -- everything that he has chanced to see;
like music, into which has been hurled helter-skelter every vagrant melody that strayed into the composer's mind.
Pre-occupation is the most common form of failure.
Harry Emerson Fosdick
It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur.
Wallace Stevens
A man must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere.
Charles Kettering
We have enough people
who tell it like it is --
Now we could use a few
who tell it like it can be.
Robert Orben
There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
Beverly Sills
It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or the courage to pay the price. One has to abandon altogether the search for security and reach out to the risk of living with both arms open. One has to embrace the world like a lover. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.
Morris West
Although you rarely hear the term "thought style," no variable is more important if you are trying to understand human beings. It refers to the way a person strings thoughts together (like beads on a necklace) into a thought stream, or "train of thought," or "stream of consciousness." Thinking is the process of successively choosing, on purpose or subliminally, a next thought to follow your current one. The first fact you might casually pick up off the beach, a fact everyone knows but most cognitive scientists ignore, is that a person's thought style tends to change in broadly predictable ways over a day and a lifetime. Most adults, furthermore, have a characteristic thought-style, the one in which they are most comfortable, a "cognitive gait" — and different people have different gaits. One person notices a loose bolt on the driveway and thinks, "I'll bet that's why the lawnmower's handle looks askew"; another sees the same bolt and thinks about the glint of morning sun on shiny metal and a certain pond at sunrise. How do we account for these differences and what do they mean? How do we account for the variations in cognitive gait over a day and a lifetime?
David Gelernter (in The Logic of Dreams, in Beyond Calculation ed. Denning & Metcalfe)
The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
Eric Fromm
When the disciples of Rav Ammi concluded their study, they took leave with this blessing:
May your cherished hopes be fulfilled in your lifetime;
May you be worthy of life eternal;
And may your ideals persist throughout the generations.
May your heart be filled with understanding;
May your mouth speak wisdom;
And may your tongue give expression to song.
May your eyes direct you straight forward;
May they shine with the light of the Torah;
And may your countenance be as radiant as the bright firmament.
May your lips speak knowledge and righteousness;
And may your feet swiftly take you
To places where the words of God are heard.
Based on Talmud, Berakhot 17a
Death destroys the body, as the scaffolding is destroyed after the building is up and finished. And
he whose building is up rejoices at the destruction of the scaffolding and of the body.
Leo Tolstoy
To be a warrior is to learn to be genuine in every moment of your life.
Chugyam Trungpa
Wishing to be known only for what one really is is like putting on an old, easy, comfortable garment. You are no longer afraid of anybody or anything. You say to yourself, "Here I am -- just so ugly, dull, poor, beautiful, rich, interesting, amusing, ridiculous. Take me or leave me..." It is like a great burden rolled off a man's back when he comes to want to appear nothing that he is not, to take out of life only what is truly his own, and to wait for something strong and deep within him or behind him to work through him.
David Grayson
Ethical progress is the only cure for the damage done by scientific progress.
Freeman Dyson
For several years, I've been studying social movements that have transformed the cultural landscape. And I've discovered that they've often started when individuals who felt isolated and alone in the midst of an alien culture, individuals who were in touch with something life-giving in the midst of a death-dealing situation, decided to stop living a divided life, to stop acting differently on the outside from what they know to be true inside. I call it the Rosa Parks decision. ... I've often asked myself how people find the courage to make such decisions. The answer I've found in the lives of Parks, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Dorothy Day, and others is a simple one. These people understood that no punishment could be worse than the one we inflict on ourselves by living a divided life.
Parker J. Palmer (in Shambhala Sun)
Out beyond the ideas of
wrongdoing and rightdoing
There is a field
I will meet you there.
When the soul lies does in that grass
The world is too full to talk about.
Rumi
[In Communication and Persuasion] Calm and precision are the true mark of influentials.
Bob Jacobson (Senior Consultant, SRI Consulting, in Fast Company Oct:Nov 1997)
"We are only at the dawn of pharmacological exuberance," the University of Michigan's Randolph Neese says. "New medications that are being developed may likely make it quick, easy, cheap, and safe to block many unwanted emotions. We should be there within the next generation. And I predict we'll go for it, because if people can make themselves feel better they usually do. I could imagine the word in a few decades being a pharmacological utopia, controlling viciousness, fear, and pain. I can equally imagine people so mellowed out that they neglected all their social and personal responsibilities." Robert Klitzman says, "Not since Copernicus have we faced so dramatic a transformation. In centuries to come, there may be new societies that look back at us as creatures that were slaves to and crippled by uncontrolled emotions."
Reported by Andrew Solomon in his New Yorker article "Anatomy of Melancholy" Jan 12, 1998
The market does have value as a computing platform, but in effect it is running the wrong software.
Hardin Tibbs
The technological imagination touches upon the same psychic domain as nostalgia; they both involve fantasies of infantilism. The memory of being unconscious, fully immersed in the world, and completely taken care of is the same as the hope for a future world in which technology will provide these same benefits. That is to say, technology, when enacted without conscious knowledge of what is involved, is not progress but regression. Finding the soul of technology requires that this confusion be clarified, this false hope abandoned, in order to diminish an inflated view of what technology is about and to locate its own limited domain.
Robert Sardello (from Facing the World with Soul, Lindisfarne, 1992)
Where the light is brightest, the shadows are darkest.
Goethe
Life has no meaning until one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.
Paul Gauguin
Israel needs to look the Palestinian tragedy right in the eye and say, "We will do everything we can, short of commiting suicide, to cure this tragedy." ... Israel and Palestine may live forever with different narratives of what really happened in 1948. But when I see a car accident, I don't ask who caused the accident, but who is bleeding most heavily; it is they who deserve the most urgent attention. Today it is those [Palestinian] refugees living in the camps, they and the victims of terrorism in the streets of Israel and the victims of oppression in the West Bank, who need our attention. This, not the blame, is urgent. There is enough blame for everyone."
Amos Oz
The Internet is the most important peacetime invention of the 20th Century.
Labour Party MP Derek Wyatt (March 18, 1998)
In reality, we don't need to teach children anything; we need only to be loving, active parents and let the imitation of example take over .... The young child really is like a sponge that absorbs nearly everything. Of greatest interest are grown-ups. A child wants to be parented so as to grow up and become fully human. Children look to parents, teachers and other adults to see how to go about living on this earth and how to make it their own. Children want to imitate everything they see grown-ups doing. The power of imitation of example goes very deep. A child can slip inside our skins and imitate our moods and our thoughts about life. Parenting, in large part, is trying to be worthy of the child's imitation of our example. Fortunately, children do not expect us to be perfect; they do long, though, for us to be inwardly growing so that they can imitate this striving.
Joan Almon (in the article "Minds at Play")
It's disgraceful and embarrassing that the highest technology in a typical city high school in this country is the metal detector the students pass through at the front door.
Bran Ferren
A wisdom deficit -- fewer elders and even fewer people who listen to them.
Jonas Salk
Our values are defined by what we will tolerate when it is done to others.
Everyone's sense of virtue is degraded by the present reality.
A revolutionary principle is embedded in the global economic system, awaiting broader recognition: Human dignity is indivisible.
Across the distances of culture and nations, across vast gulfs of wealth and poverty, even the least among us are entitled to dignity, and no justification exists or brutalizing them in the pursuit of commerce.
William Grieder
The invasion of play by the rhetoric of achievement --
Christopher Lasch
Every intelligent being enjoys complexity.
Brenda Laurel
It should be possible to say that there really is such as thing as "genius" and that what it is, is precisely a surprising and unexpected movement away from collective patterns of behavior and received wisdom.
William Irwin Thompson
The important things in life cannot be gotten in advance. They must be gathered fresh every day.
George Regas
I make a distinction between obstacles and traps.
It's important to identify both. Sometimes I look at my practice life as a searching for
just the right balance between "Surrender" and "Will." The will is expressed through our
commitment to rigor, regularity, moving through difficult places, expending effort,
not giving up.
Each of us faces obstacles to the emergence of Will, whether it be laziness, apathy, confusion, loneliness, despair, or cynicism.
The trap of the Will is in feeling that we are in perfect control and all spiritual attainments are within the grasp of our effort.
When we get so caught up in the power of the will, that our egos take over, we are in danger of inflation, a serious and destructive malady that eventually excludes the flow of Divine Grace and separates us from each other.
The main obstacle to Surrender is fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of letting go, fear of not being "in control," fear of opening up to an insight that will compel us to change.
The trap of Surrender comes in not being able to discern inner voices, of following blindly,
and of rejecting the responsibility of becoming a partner with God rather than merely Her subject.
All spiritual practice brings us face to face with our particular resistance.
In the facing, we come to know ourselves, and in that knowledge comes the growth of compassion and spiritual power.
It's important to remember that resistance isn't what keeps us from the work.
It is the work.
Sometimes what we yearn for the most is also what we are the most afraid of.
Rabbi Shefa Gold (New Menorah, Fall 1997; to appear in an anthology on
Jewish Meditation edited by Avram Davis forthcoming from Jewish Lights publishers).
We hunger for nobility: the rare words and acts that harmonize simplicity and truth.
J. Robert Oppenheimer
In plain words, no dialogue about the emerging world order can make headway unless it involves genuine efforts to arrest and then gradually reduce the concentration of wealth, privilege and authority both at the level of nations and, within nations, at the level of social groups, minorities and regions. Authentic devolution of power alone can redress social imbalances, including those that affect children and women. Once these moral and social imperatives are agreed upon, the political and economic management of societies will become a matter of give-and-take that is the characteristic of all civilized conduct. This is admittedly a tall order. But the alternative to it is relentless mayhem.
Dileep Padgaonkar (Editor of Biblio, India's leading review of books)
Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.
Thomas Huxley
As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.
Henry David Thoreau
The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss, but that our aim is
too low and we reach it.
(Author unknown)
By conforming to the norm, you perpetuate the norm.
Alex Vasquez
What have we got here in America that we believe we cannot live without? We have the most varied and imaginative bathrooms in the world, we have kitchens with the most gimmicks, we have houses with every possible electrical gadget to save ourselves all kinds of trouble -- all so that we can have leisure. Leisure, leisure, leisure! So that we don't go mad in the leisure, we have color TV. So that there will never, never, be a moment of silence, we have radio and Muzak. We can't stand silence, because silence includes thinking. And if we thought, we would have to face ourselves.
Agnes De Mille
Hope is believing in spite of the Evidence and then watching the evidence change.
The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. What men need is as much knowledge as they can organize for action; give them more and it may become injurious. Some men are heavy and stupid from undigested learning.
Thomas Henry Huxley
If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.
Joseph Campbell
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
Helen Keller
Happiness is nothing more than health and a poor memory.
Albert Schweitzer
Don't worry about the world wants from you, worry about what makes you come alive. Because what the world really needs are people who are more alive.
Lawrence Le Shan
Unlike personal beliefs, held privately by individuals, belief systems are interlocking sets of belief held by large groups of citizens and representated by organizations designed to promote their particular ideology.
Belief systems are to beliefs what security systems are to security. When one needs the former, it means that the latter has been lost. Just as we need a security system when we no longer feel safe in our own homes, so do we need a belief system when we no longer feel secure with our own beliefs. While beliefs explain something, belief systems claim to explain everything. Unlike a belief, which leads us to learning, belief systems are turnkey operations. They come prefabricated and preassembled. They are ready-made systems that in effect do our thinking for us.
Mark Gerzon (in A House Divided)
Seek the company of those who are searching for the truth, and avoid those who have found it.
Vaclav Havel
Wherever we are, it is but a stage to somewhere else; and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.
Robert Louis Stevenson
A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it.
Lewis Lapham
Most of the great spiritual commandments, precepts, and teachings throughout history have merely been guidelines for what we should quit. Most of the Ten Commandments start with "Thou shalt not." The Buddhist precepts and Hindu Yamas and Niyamas start with "non-," as in "non-killing," "non-stealing," "non-lying," and so on. Many contemporary people have complained about such overwhelmingly negative wording in the ancient teachings. But the reason they're phrased that way is that there really isn't anything to do in order to realize the Divine Presence, the natural holiness life offers. We merely have to quit thinking and acting in ways that are harmful or selfish.
The great teachings unanimously emphasize that all the peace, wisdom, and joy in the universe are already within us; we don't have to gain, develop, or attain them. We're like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight. We don't need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we really are--as soon as we quit pretending we're small or unholy. My practice of quitting has already led me to experience the truth of this, so I've become a more and more devoted quitter.
I could characterize nearly any spiritual practice as simply this: identify and quit, identify and quit, identify and quit. Identify the myriad forms of limitation and delusion we place upon ourselves, and muster the courage to quit each one. Little by little, deep inside us, the diamond shines, the eyes open, the dawn rises, we become what we already are.
Bo Lozoff
(Notice a linguistic paradox:)
We always talk about new technology using old vocabulary. 'Electronic publishing', 'digital library', 'information highway': to our grandchildren these terms will probably sound as peculiar as 'horseless carriage'.
Peter Lyman (Librarian, UC-Berkeley)
We use media technology to share an experience rather than create a shared experience. The difference is not subtle. It's the difference between passivity and participation, talking and conversation. It's also the reason so many people feel so lonely despite their technical links to so many media networks. The ability to express oneself is not enough.
Michael Schrage (in No More Teams! page 21)
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, geogeous, talented, and fabulous?
you.
Marianne Williamson (in A Return to Love, HarperCollins, 1993)
It is easier and less costly to change the way people think about reality than it is to change reality.
Morris Wolfe (NY Times, 20 March 1994, Viewpoints)
Psychologists such as Kenneth Gergen focus on postmodern experience on how it feels to live amid such a rich, often contradictory barrage of cultural stimuli; what it does to us and what kind of people we become. They say the postmodern individual is a member of many communities and networks, a participant in many discourses, an audience to messages from everybody and everywhere messages that present conflicting ideals and norms and images of the world. Gergen believes that this condition (he calls it multiphrenia) is the major psychological problem of our time but also possibly the birth-pangs of a new kind of human being.
Walter Truett Anderson
I reached an insight which has been particularly helpful. I realized that although it's likely that I will not live long enough to see the end of patterned pain and suffering, working to make that future is what I do. I choose to do this because it's the only way to live that makes any sense. I hope and intend to make my actions count, but I'm not demanding that the universe promise me success before I'll take a risk. I've decided to live.
Carla Kiiskila (in Present Time, January 1996, p69)
That is the trouble, everybody is giving everything in the world a piece of their minds. Whereas what we want is not a piece of somebody's mind, even the best mind, so much as an open heart and an open spirit.
Laurens van der Post (speaking at the Royal Geographic Society in London in 1995)
Everywhere we are told by politicians, by corporations, and by financial institutions that we have fewer and fewer options that the market won't tolerate this or that reform. Today money has the power to divert the debate. Like the old anarchists who dominated mass meetings by staying later than anyone else and taking over the proceedings, today a rich nomenklatura of international nomads have the economic means to stay later' than the rest of us.
Jacob Von Uxekull (Utne Reader Mar-Apr 96)
We are in an unusual predicament as a global civilization. The maximum that is politically feasible, even the maximum that is politically imaginable right now, still falls short of the minimum that is scientifically and ecologically necessary.
Al Gore
No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, if one has not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one may remain entirely unaffected for the better.
William James
What is a friend? I will tell you...it is someone with whom you dare to be yourself.
Frank Crane
In any free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty - all are responsible.
Abraham Heschel
Great minds discuss ideas, mediocre minds discuss events, small minds discuss personalities.
Author unknown
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
(Biologist) Paul Ehrlich
The never-ending conflict between the existent and not-yet-existent is at the root of man's whole inner struggle.
In fact, it is in the nature of inward, as opposed to outward, political or economic struggle, that it knows no termination, no clear-cut end point at which victory or defeat can be pronounced. There may be brief pauses for rest or changes of pace along the way, alternations between stretches of acute, violent exertion and stretches of slower, more measured progress, but there is no real conclusion. Not only are the goals of spiritual struggle loftier and more difficult to attain than other kinds of goals, they are enlarged by the very process of achieving them, by the inward growth of the struggler himself.
Thus, when quiet overtakes the spiritual struggle, it is in itself a sign of backsliding and descent. There can be no greater danger to one laboring to reach a higher spiritual and moral plane than the feeling that he has achieved it. Such feelings of self-satisfaction generally indicate a blurring of the vision of the goal itself.
Adin Steinsaltz in The Strife of the Spirit
Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves - to break our own records, to outstrip our yesterday by our today.
Stewart B. Johnson
Man is born to live, not to prepare to live.
Boris Pasternak
Out of every crisis comes the chance to be reborn.
Nena O'Neill
If your ship doesn't come in, swim out to it.
Jonathan Winters
Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more
intelligently.
Henry Ford
How glorious it is and how painful also to be an exception.
Alfred de Musset
In our society, to be obsessed with a vision about how to make a better automobile makes you a genius, but to be obsessed with a vision about the nature of reality makes you a nut.
Rodger Kamenetz
Effective support means getting so close to somebody that the only way they can move is forward.
Tova Green
Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose.
D.H. Lawrence
In orbiting the sun, the earth departs from a straight line by one-ninth of an inch every eighteen miles a very straight line in human terms. If the orbit changed by one-tenth of an inch every eighteen miles, our orbit would be vastly larger and we would all freeze to death. One-eight of an inch? We would all be incinerated.
- Science Digest
Popularity has become its own justification.
Jonathan Franzen (in The New Yorker magazine 3/6/1995)
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
Oscar Wilde
Joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness.
Leo Tolstoy
A man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.
Henry David Thoreau
Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit
which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.
Henry David Thoreau
Remember that half of humanity has never made a telephone call.
South African Deputy President Thabo Mbeki to the G7 Information
Superhighway meeting, Brussels Feb 24, 1995
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best,
night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the
hardest battle which any human can fight, and never stop fighting.
E. Cummings
They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.
Antonio Porchia
Fear is a perceived lack of options.
Roger Firestien
If we cannot focus, we will have not vision.
Sam Harris
We, all of us, are being called to do something unprecedented. We are being called to think about "everything that is," for we now know that everything is interrelated and that the well-being of each is connected to the well-being of the whole. This suggests a "planetary agenda" for all the religions, all the various fields of expertise.
Sallie McFague
From time to time, life as a leader can look hopeless. To help you, consider a man who lived through this:...
- Failed in business in 31
- Defeated for the legislature in 32
- Again failed in business in 34
- Sweetheart died in 35
- Had a nervous breakdown in 36
- Defeated in election in 38
- Defeated for Congress in 43
- Defeated for Congress in 46
- Defeated for Congress in 48
- Defeated for Senate in 55
- Defeated for Vice President in 56
- Defeated for Senate in 58
- Elected President in 60...
This man was Abraham Lincoln.
Kenneth & Linda Schatz
How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something, but to be someone.
Coco Chanel
The worst pain we can have is to know much and be impotent to act.
Herodotus
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
George Orwell
The well of Providence is deep. It's the buckets we bring to it that are small.
Mary Webb
Only slaves love being powerful.
Hans Erich Nossack
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
M Gandhi
If everybody contemplates the infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera.
John Rich
One side of service is serving, but the other side is creating the space in oneself where the possibilities of giving one's best become feasible. If you let go of your own compulsion and greed the things you are conditioned into by your culture then the more archetypal, more universally valid, more human, more compassionate, wiser activities and thoughts can come to your mind and you can dedicate yourself to them more fully.
Rafe Martin
As soon as you abandon your will power and anxiousness and tune
your mind to the inner self, you will gain a wonderful bullshit detector.
(from The Autobiography of Willie Nelson)
Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are
any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.
Howard Aiken
The world is so complex that people must simplify it in order to deal with it. There is no other choice. But all models are "wrong" by definition. They can only be simplifications of reality, not reality itself. There is nothing wrong with this. Where we go astray is when we confuse our models with reality and become sure that they are "right." The important question, however, is not whether something is right or wrong, but is it helpful for the purpose at hand.
Kendall Murphy
(in Generative Coaching article in Learning Organizations edited
by Sarita Chawla and John Renesch)
The market is like the police: of course you need it, but if it becomes the central organizing principle of your culture then you're in deep trouble.
Phil Agre
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
Flannery O'Connor
We need to give ourselves permission to act out our dreams and visions, not look for more sensations, more phenomena, but live our strongest dreams even if it takes a lifetime.
Vijali Hamilton
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Anais Nin
The sense of this word (enthusiasm) among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it; enthusiasm signifies "God in us."
Madame De Stael
We must all face the fact that in a single lifetime we lead several simultaneous lives; our intention should be to make them reinforce one another instead of colliding.
Brendan Gill
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Scientific and humanist approaches are not competitive but supportive, and both are ultimately necessary.
Robert C. Wood
All great discoveries are made by men whose feelings run ahead of their thinking.
C. H. Parkhurst
If the shoe fits, you're not allowing for growth.
Robert N. Coons
The man who has ceased to learn ought not to be allowed to wander around loose
in these dangerous days.
M. M. Coady
An old error is always more popular than a new truth.
German proverb
The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.
Bishop W. C. Magee
Historical reminder: always put Horace before Descartes.
Donald O. Rickter
The finest steel has to go through the hottest fire.
Richard Nixon
Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
Mignon McLaughlin
The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.
Tacitus
Anxiety is the essential condition of intellectual and artistic creation . . .
and everything that is finest in human history.
C. Frankel
Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.
Eugene V. Debs
Perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterize our age.
Albert Einstein
It is not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.
Moliere
Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.
Louis Brandeis
Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must be first overcome.
Samuel Johnson
Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors... Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.
Albert Einstein
One man with courage is a majority.
Thomas Jefferson
The salvation of mankind lies only in making everything the concern of all.
Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn
The lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes a wrong one.
Nay, it is obvious that the more active and swift the latter is the further he will go astray.
Francis Bacon
Every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself.
Marcus Aurelius
The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds can change the outer aspects of their lives.
William James
Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake.
We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources.
William James
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set I go into the other room and read a book.
Groucho Marx
The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.
John F. Kennedy
Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.
Michelangelo
Giving up is the ultimate tragedy.
Robert J. Donovan
The great thing is to... write when there is something that you know; and not before;
and not too damned much after.
Ernest Hemingway
[The impact of Television is like] carpet-bombing North America with Valium...daily.
Ferenc Maté (in A Reasonable Life Albatross Publishing 1993)
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There is still a long road ahead of us, in order to finish what we began to do.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We began to speak a great word once --
among ourselves and in the ears of the entire world; but we have not yet completed it.
We stand in the middle of our speech. All ears strain for us to finish; we cannot stop it nor do we want to stop it.
The truth within us is so rich and overpowering that we cannot express it in clear and simple language.
But we will say what we can, as much as our power of understanding and speaking will permit, even as generations before us have done.
And we know that in the course of time, others will say that which we try and are unable to say.
But we shall not stop until it has all been said,
for our sake and for the sake of the world.
Rav Kook
Man needs love indeed;
even more he needs justice;
but he mainly demands significance.
P. Ricoeur
We must treat time as a tool, not as a couch.
John F. Kennedy
No matter how cynical you are, it's hard to keep up.
Lily Tomlin
In judging others, folks will work overtime for no pay.
Charles Carruthers
As Colin Wilson has written, "modern civilisation, with its mechanised rigidity is producing more outsiders than ever before--people who are too intelligent to do some repetitive job, but not intelligent enough to make their own terms with society." Those "intelligent enough" to make their own terms with society are what
we will later refer to as artists of life. The outsider views himself as a product of a culture he rejects--the artist views himself as a culture-builder.
Laurence G. Boldt (Zen and the Art of Making a Living p xxxvi)
Life and work are not things apart. Work is more than gaining privileges and possessions;
it is ongoing, ecstatic, LIVING experience. When we tap into living experience,
we no longer feel as though we must be king. We can just
be ALIVE at work! When we live in the bliss, there is no difficulty which is insurmountable.
If we miss the bliss, there is no compensation which is adequate.
Laurence G. Boldt (Zen and the Art of Making a Living p xli)
Here we must distinguish between society and culture. A society can be interested in a man
or woman only as a political or economic entity; a culture is interested in more.
Culture means literally "to cultivate" or "to care for."
Cultures care for their peoples as natural, spiritual beings and not simply as workers or consumers.
Laurence G. Boldt (Zen and the Art of Making a Living p xliv)
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.
Thomas Pynchon
The only reason to predict the future is to prepare for its coming or to change its direction or pace... In the end, the future will become what the present people want. Really want. Want badly enough to change their minds and habits for. Want badly enough to work and save for. Want badly enough to pay the price for.
L. Curtin
As a culture, we turn away from people just when they are in times of change.
That's when most communities used to embrace people, so the individual and the culture both benefited.
Michael Meade (speaking to Sy Safransky in The Sun #217)
Safransky: As your children have grown older, how has your role as a father changed?To ask for overt renunciation of a cherished doctrine is to expect too much of human nature.
Meade: I think as a father I've become more prayerful. It's difficult to let children go.
They, too, feel the anguish of the times, the huge weight of a culture that is rattling seriously, where all of the institutions are shaking and there are cracks in the cement. There are cracks between men and women, between races, between rich and poor. Young people are stepping over those cracks, and they know it. I sit at home at night not knowing where my children are.
I try to imagine what they're doing. I begin with an awareness of not knowing and with my concern. If I stay with it, that's the beginning of a prayer. I don't mean a formulaic prayer. I mean my prayerful attention that they get through that night OK. Not that they have constant comfort -- they're not looking for that anyway -- but that they find meaningful dangers and awakenings and that they find some beauty. I pray that my children will find mentors, teachers who can love them or love something in them. I have to pray for that because there are so many things I cannot do for them anymore.
(from The Sun #217)
Men do not repudiate the doctrines and dogmas to which they have sworn their loyalty. Instead they rationalize, revise, and re-interpret them to meet new needs and new circumstances, all the while protesting that their heresy is the purest orthodoxy.
J. William Fulbright
The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely
of lost airline luggage.
Mark Russell
Sports do not build character. They reveal it.
Heywood Hale Broun (1976)
You gotta say this for the white race--its self-confidence knows no bounds.
Who else could go to a small island in the South Pacific where there's no poverty, no crime, no unemployment, no war and no worry-- and call it a "primitive society"?
Dick Gregory
He dares to be a fool, and that is the first step in the direction of wisdom.
James G. Huneker
In all recorded history there has not been one economist who had to worry about where
the next meal was coming from.
Peter F. Drucker
Service is the rent each of us pays for living---the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time or after you have reach your personal goals.
Marian Wright Edelman
It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing,
really doing nothing.
Gertrude Stein
Genius seems to be the faculty of having faith in everything, and especially oneself.
Arthur Stringer
In a democracy, complex or entirely novel ideas can rarely be supported; ... 'There are too many people...and too little time...to create a shared perception of a complex structure,' (Moore and Gerstein 1981).
Jerome H. Jaffe discussing policy-making
Life is under no obligation to give us what we expect.
Margaret Mitchell
I like nonsense; it wakes up the brain cells.
Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss
