Humor

If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning. Catherine Aird

"What would you do with a brain if you had one?"
Dorothy to the Scarecrow

I've made such a terrible mess of things... and all I wanted to do was rule the universe. Unknown

"Every idiot attracts an equal and opposite idiot." - Anon.

The great thing about television is that if something important happens anywhere in the world, day or night, you can always change the channel. - unkown

People generally have enough faults that picking on race or origin is just plain lazy. -- Unknown

"Do you really want the people who didn't use drugs in the 60's to be running the country?" - Dennis Miller

You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
Steven Wright

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. -
Lily Tomlin

...you can tell people they suck, but do it in the way you'd want to be told you suck -- Unknown

I blame people who blame everyone but themselves. -- Michael C. Lockhart

Man is the only animal that puts a lot of energy into convincing itself it's not an animal. - Unknown

There may be said to be two classes of people in the world: those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not. - Robert Charles Benchley

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar. Edward R. Murrow

Every religion begins in a flash of enlightenment and ends in a flood of bumperstickers. - Unknown

If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And if I can persuade you to laugh at the particular point I make, by laughing at it you acknowledge its truth. - John Cleese

"Who does he calculate he is?" - from the movie Tron

Q: What did one mirror say to the other mirror?
A: It's all done with people.
(unknown)

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.
Shirley Temple

Homer Simpson reads "Fatherhood" by Bill Cosby.
Homer: [reading] Cosby's First Law of Inter-generational Perversity: No matter what you tell your child to do, he will always do the opposite. Huh?
Homer's Brain: Don't you get it!? You gotta use reverse psychology!
Homer: Well, that sounds too complicated.
Brain: Okay, don't use reverse psychology. Homer: All right, I will!

Homer: All right brain, you don't like me, and I don't like you. But let's just get me through this, and I can get back to killing you with beer.
Brain: It's a deal!

"If you do as I say, I'll release some more of those endorphines" -- Homer's brain, to Homer

Imagination and Creativity

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

We are stardust, we are golden,
We are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.
-- Joni Mitchell

"That which does not change will outlive its spirit." - unknown

“It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening, through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth." - Joseph Campbell

"The ego cannot, must not try to hang on to time but let it flow." - unknown

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. -- Mark Twain

The collective dreaming of humankind is a complex adaptive creative device--a sort of mass what's-possible calculator. - unknown

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
Oscar Wilde

"I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him."
Galileo Galilei

"I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty" Kabir.

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

Love is metaphysical gravity.
R. Buckminster Fuller

"I dreamt last night, Oh marvelous error, That there were honeybees in my heart, Making honey out of my old failures." -- Anthony Machado

The new frontiers to be conquered are mainly in the convolutions of the cortex.-- Arthur Koestler

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.
Lao Tzu

"The prickly people are advocates of intellectual porcupinism. They want rigor. They want precise statistics... and they accuse other people of being disgustingly vague, and miasmic, and mystical. But the vague, miasmic and mystical people accuse the prickly people of being mere skeletons with no flesh on their bones. And they say to you, you just rattle, you're not really a human being. You know the words but you don't know the music. And so therefore, if you belong to the prickly type, you hope that the ultimate constituent of matter is particles. If you belong to the gooey type you hope it's waves." - Alan Watts.

"you're not the first person to think that everything has been thought before"
Something For Kate

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. -- Voltaire

Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure. -- Meister Eckhart

"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." - Thomas Alva Edison

"To develop a complete mind: Study the art of science. Study the science of art. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else." by Leonardo Da Vinci

"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

Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.-C.S Lewis

It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves. - William Shakespeare

"Mind describes itself to itself in the process of bifurcation, or choice" - The Silken Tiger

"Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole." -- Derek Walcott

An optimist is a person who sees only the lights in the picture, whereas a pessimist sees only the shadows. An idealist, however, is one who sees the light and the shadows, but in addition, sees something else: the possibility of changing the picture, of making the lights prevail over the shadows. -- Felix Adler

Four fifths of all our troubles in this life would disappear, if we would only sit down and keep still. -- Calvin Coolidge

Rain! whose soft architectural hands have power to cut stones, and chisel to shapes of grandeur the very mountains. -- Henry Ward Beecher

Make happy those who are near, and those who are far will come.
Chinese proverb

"Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found it was ourselves." --Robert Frost

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Be humble, for the worst thing in the world is of the same stuff as you; be confident, for the stars are of the same stuff as you." -- Nicholai Velimirovic

If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.
Charles Lindbergh

TV is chewing gum for the eyes. - Frank Lloyd Wright, architect

"Tell me who I am so that I can be true to myself."
Alexandra Danilovich

"Become more and more acquainted with your body on all its subtle levels, the fine vibrations which are really music, because when we talk of things created, they are only vibrations, nothing else, energy in movement and matter. In poetic language we can say the world is created by music. As we are the world, the universe, all the music of the universe is in our body." ~Jean Klein

I often compare the mind in meditation to a jar of muddy water: the more we leave the water without interfering or stirring it, the more the particles of dirt will sink to the bottom, letting the natural clarity of the water shine through.
Sogyal Rinpoche

"Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry." -- Richard Feynman

Sometimes the subconscious mind manifests a wisdom several steps or even years ahead of the conscious mind, and has its own way of leading us toward our destiny.-- Nathaniel Brande

"We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about." -Albert Einstein

Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with truth." -- Thich Nhat Hanh

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us. -Helen Keller"

It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval. -- Mark Twain

After fifteen minutes nobody looks at a rainbow.-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.
Andy Warhol

Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don’t
realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. It also creates a false mind-made self that casts a shadow of fear and suffering.”~~Eckhart Tolle

Find tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. -- Shakespeare, As You Like It

In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists - Eric Hoffer

"Connections between minds … involve a dyadic form of resonance in which energy and information are free to flow across two brains. When such a process is in full activation, the vital feeling of connection is exhilarating. When interpersonal communication is 'fully engaged' - when the joining of minds is in full force - there is an overwhelming sense of immediacy, clarity, and authenticity." Daniel J. Siegel, The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience

"Comparing is the root of fear" - Upanishads

Langauge is a virus - Laurie Anderson

Slip quietly out of the noose of your habitual anxious self, release all grasping, and relax into your true nature. Sogyal Rinpoche

Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders' spinning, buildings qualified by light, bred by native character to environment, married to the ground. Frank Lloyd Wright

The true person is not anyone in particular; but like the deep blue color of the limitless sky, it is everyone, everywhere in the world. Dogen

When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. John Muir

Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Since my house burned down, I have a better view of the sky. -Zen Saying

"The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with people when you're uncool" - from Almost Famous

Baseball hasn't been the national pastime for many years now - no sport is. The national pastime, like it or not, is watching television. -- Bob Greene

"Television has become the retina of the mind's eye" - Unknown

Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.
Ben Hecht

True insight does not issue from specialized knowledge, from membership in coteries, from doctrines or dogmas. It comes from the preconscious intuitions of one's whole being, from one's own code. Unknown

“The eye is the largest bandwidth pipe into the human brain and we visual communicators are the people who design what goes in. We have a responsibility to not mess withthat power”
-David Berman (society of Canadian Graphic Designers)

“One must be leery of words because words turn into cages.” — Viola Spolin

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug. Helen Keller

Habit is the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware. -- Arthur Koestler

We are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at.
Guy de Maupassant

It's hard for the modern generation to understand Thoreau, who lived beside a pond but didn't own water skis or a snorkel. -- Bill Vaughan

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

~"Your subconscious mind knows everything you need to know."~ -
Milton Erickson

Silence is peopled with voices. - Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz

There are times when silence has the loudest voice.
Leroy Brownlow

Love is space and time measured by the heart.
Marcel Proust

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
Albert Einstein

Social Psychology

"None of us, I suggest, can afford to ignore the condition of our fellow passengers on this little boat. If they are sick, all of us risk infection. And if they are angry, all of us can easily get hurt." Kofi Annan

I'm sure we are all already part of the great consciousness laser...the trick is the tuning. - Ugis Oskars Ziemelis, Riyahd, SA

"In a fast society slow emotions become extinct.." Unknown

One of the ironies is that psyhchologists have been hired in great numbers to help people consume more. Why can't we enlist some of them on the other side of the issue, to speak out in defense of the natural environment? - Theodore Roszak

You always become the thing you fight the most. -- C.G. Jung, in Diagnosing the Dictators.

While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer,
nothing is more difficult than to understand him.
- Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

A little less hypocrisy and a little more tolerance towards oneself can only have good results in respect for our neighbour; for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures. - C.G. Jung

"If you have to hate another in order to define yourself, you are nothing." - Unknown

"Most people do not listen with the intent to understand: they listen with the intent to reply. They’re filtering everything through their own paradigms, reading their autobiography into other people’s lives.” — Steven R. Covey

...it is our oneness that causes us to be insecure enough to defend our separateness... -- Unknown

"Exclusive gender identity is not an expression of natural differences between the sexes but a suppression of natural similarities." Marilyn French

...tradition and custom becomes intertwined and are a strong coercion which directs the society upon fixed lines, and strangles liberty.
-- William Graham Sumner

Treat a person as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat him as he could be, and he will become what he should be. Jimmy Johnson

I will always love the false image I had of you.- Ashleigh Brilliant

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.-- Mark Twain

Fair play with others is primarily the practice of not blaming them for anything that is wrong with us. We tend to rub our guilty conscience against others the way we wipe dirty fingers on a rag. -- Eric Hoffer

Think not of the faults of others, of what they have done or not done. Think of your own faults, of the things you have done or not done. the Dhammapad

If you judge people, you have no time to love them. -- Mother Teresa

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game. R.D. Laing

"Moral indignation is jealosy with a halo" --
H.G. Wells

Others' flaws are before our eyes. Ours are behind our backs." -- Seneca

The several sorts of religion in the world are little more than so many spiritual monopolies. -- Lord Halifa

The majority, oppressing an individual, is guilty of a crime, abuses its strength, and by acting on the law of the strongest breaks up the foundations of society. -- Thomas Jefferson

We just have to open our eyes--and stop becoming this noise and distraction and hardsell, these cars we drive, these glass cages, these machines. Birds aren't crashing into our windshields for nothing. They're speaking to us. We wake up with them--and see again. - Unknown

"A riot is a tantrum with authority." - Michael C. Lockhart

The motives which actuate a crowd are always veiled in darkness and are always perceived and interpreted by the persons who are in the grip of the mass current as solutions of their individual needs and weaknesses. - Alfred Adler

"Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it" G.K. Chesterton

“Society offers demonically convincing justifications for enjoying our affluence and forgetting about over a billion desperately poor neighbors.” - Ron Sider

"Inability to love is the central problem, because that inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive." - James Baldwin

"Treat everybody else as if they were you, only having grown up in different circumstances." - Unknown

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. - Colin Powell

It is written with deep conviction that it is far to late and things are far too bad for pessimism. In times such as these, it is no failure to fall short of realizing all that we might dream -- the failure is to fall short of dreaming all that we might realize. Dee Hock, introduction to Birth of the Chaordic Age

It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Alfred Adler

"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." -- Abraham Maslow

"People are not hungry just for bread, they are hungry for love. People are not naked only for a piece of cloth. They are naked for their human dignity. People are not only homeless for a room made of bricks. But they are homeless being rejected, unwanted, unloved. One of the worst diseases is to be nobody to anyone." Mother Theresa

"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate."
C.G. Jung

"A man has many skins in himself, covering the depths of his heart. Man knows so many things; he does not know himself. Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, just like an ox's or a bear's, so thick and hard, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there. " Meister Eckhart

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It is better to correct your own faults than those of another.
Democritus

The genes load the gun, but the environment pulls the trigger. Unknown

The world does not need tourists who ride by in a bus clucking their tongues. The world as it is needs those who will love it enough to change it, with what they have, where they are. ~ Robert Fulghum ~

It begins very small,
seems like nothing much at all.
Just a germ, just a speck, just a grain.
But the seed has been sown,
it has spread through your life like a stain.
And its power will strangle your love and joy,
and its hunger consumes for it lives to destroy.
Hate is the star, it becomes who you are.
Not the hated, but the hater,
has a torment that´s greater.
- Unknown

The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one's individual distinctness in a compact collective whole. -- Eric Hoffer

We evaluate others with a Godlike justice, but we want them to evaluate us with a Godlike compassion. - Sydney J. Harris

The ego is constantly in search of being a boss - whatsoever the cost, at any cost. You are losing your whole opportunity of life just to fulfill a shadowy, non-substantial notion - the notion of ego: "I am somebody." Nobody is nobody. We are all one; we are not separate. -- Osho

Our quarrel with the world is an echo of the endless quarrel proceeding within us. Eric Hoffer

We are unified both by hating in common and by being hated in common. Eric Hoffer

"People must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we come from, and why we are here." E.O. Wilson

A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves. -- Simone Weil

"Every idiot attracts an equal and opposite idiot." - Anon.

PUNCH AND JUDY TO THEIR AUDIENCE
Our puppets strings are hard to see,
So we perceive ourselves as free,
Convinced that no mere objects could
Behave in terms of bad and good.
To you, we mannequins seem less
than live, because our consciousness
is that of dummies, made to sit
on laps of gods and mouth their wit;
Are you, our transcendental gods,
likewise dangled from your rods,
and need, to show spontaneous charm,
some higher god's inserted arm?
We seem to form a nested set,
With each the next one's marionette,
Who, if you asked him, would insist,
that he's the last ventriloquist.
-- Theodore Melnechuk

"If you're an extremist, your counterparts on the other side are also extremists, and you will be drawn to them and they to you as like attracts like. Two hateful people are doing the same dance, even if they are from different faiths or nations." - Anonymous

Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.-- Eric Hoffer

A person with a healthy sense of self does not see those with different views as traitors, or those from different cultures as inferior/evil. But for someone who feels as if he/she is unreal, without genuine personality traits or bodily boundaries to keep out the poison, the rapist and the demon attacks, other people become not only targets for rage but ugly, evil points of comparison to measure one's purity and goodness against. -- Lloyd DeMause

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. -- James A. Baldwin

A man's hatred is always concentrated upon that which makes him conscious of his bad qualities. -- Carl Gustav Jung

Originally the ego includes everything, later it detaches from itself the external world. Sigmund Freud

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
Charles Mackay

The instinctual exercise of cruelty thrusts non-conforming individuals to the periphery and sometimes expels them entirely, squeezing us into social units as automatically as the discomfort of termites at the sight of scattered feces compels them to turn excreta into architecture. - Howard Bloom

"If you knew what your anger was doing to you, you would shun it like the worst of poisons." - Buddha

Frustration heightens the sense of guilt - Melanie Klein

One way or another, the world is going to be made a single whole entity. But is will be unified either in mutual mass destruction or by means of mutual human consciousness. If a sufficient number of individuals can have the experience of the coming of the Self as an individual, inner experience, we may just possible be spared the worst feature of its external manifestation...What usually happens is that the individual is not able to contain this 'warring' within one's own self, and the conflict of opposites spills out into the outer world by way of projection. And it is then that the constellated opposites live themselves out not in the vessel of the individual psyche, but in the vessel of society as a whole. This is precisely what is happening today. - Edinger: ARCHETYPE OF THE APOCALYPSE

Religion and Spirituality

"Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times." - C.G. Jung

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image, when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." Anne Lamott

"The only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts - that is where the battle should be fought." - Mahatma Gandhi

"Monopolies damage religion. In a free market, people get more interested in the product. It's true for religion just as it's true for cars." - MASSIMO INTROVIGNE

Beware the seduction of the image, mine and others, for the myth of apocalypse seeks to enthrall us into an epic fiction with very real consequences. Beware the fascination with what is larger than life, this vulgar passion play that would crucify the world. - Michael Ortiz Hill

"Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality."--Arthur Schopenhauer

"God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear." - Alan Watts

To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency. - Alan Watts

"Men rarely, if ever, manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child." - R.A. Heinlein

Every religion takes one thread of a tapestry and pulls. - unknown

We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. -- Arcadia by Tom Stoppard

"I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue" -- Einstein

"My calling is to be of service wherever there is suffering. If Hell is place of suffering, then that's where I belong. I'll be happier there, doing what I was called to do." -- Unknown, in response to a fundamentalist preacher's warnings.

Nationalism dismembers the body of Christ.- unknown

"The ego has to acknowledge many gods before it attains the centre where no god helps it any longer against any other god." (C. G. Jung, letter to Pastor Bernet, 13/6/1955)

"He drew a circle that shut me out/heretic, rebel, a thing to flout,/ but love and I had the wit to win./ I drew a circle that took him in." Unknown

"I'm the spirit's janitor. All I do is wipe the windows a little bit so you can see out for yourself." Godfrey Chips, Lakota Medicine Man

There is only one soul and we are all fragments of that soul. And we will come up with any fantasy to avoid perceiving it. Heaven and hell are the same: they are the return of everyone lost, pushed or thrown out of consciousness, and the return of the individual personality to the ocean from which it arose. - Unknown

The religion of future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend a personal God and avoid dogmas and theology, covering both natural, spiritual. It should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers to this description. -- Albert Einstein

Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense.-- Robert Heinlein

There is no need for temples;
no need for complicated philosophy.
Our own brain, our own heart is our temple.
Dalai Lama

"Everyone is God. Some just let it go to their heads." - Unknown

We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience - a new feeling of what it is to be "I". -- Alan Watts

"One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation." - Unknown

A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there. -- Meister Eckhart

"The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and critic of the state, and never its tool." - Martin Luther King Jr.

"You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image, when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." Anne Lamott

"A literal interpretation of Revelation, along with the pulp armageddon fiction so popular now, is a booby trap on the way to christian brotherhood" Unknown

"It worries me when a "Christian nation" (as it describes itself) appears to put ONLY material value on people, their earning potential." - Unknown

"Satan is used as an excuse for God to be brutal, and God is used as an excuse for men to be brutal." Unknown

"I saw a great assembly of gigantic forms all motionless, all in deepest silence,standing forever around a little silver table and looking upon it and on the table were little silver figures like chessmen who went to and fro doing this and that. And I knew that each chessman was the 'idolum' or puppet representative of some one of the great presences that stood by. And the acts and motions of each chessman were a moving portrait, a mimicry or pantomine, which delineated the inmost nature of its gigantic master. And these chessmen are men and women as they appear to themselves and to one another in the world. And the silver table is Time. And those who stand and watch are the immortal souls of those same men and women..Then vertigo and terror seized me..." -- C.S. Lewis

We have completely forgotten who we are, and I am here to tell you that you are the Lord Jesus Christ. He is buried in you, and until the story of Christ repeats itself in you, he remains buried in you. That's the story. Now how do I know? I know from my own personal experience, that's how I know. I'm not theorizing. I am not speculating. When it happens in you, you can pick up a circle that will experience your unfolding. Neville Goddard

“Without me, God is helpless.” Meister Eckhart

"Religion makes the cultural 'other' into a transcendent 'OTHER' which cannot, must not, be reasoned with." - Anonymous

You think that the Fundamentalists will drag us into their little eschatological nightmare? That's what scares me about that group...they WANT the end-times to happen and have the power to create that nightmare for the rest of us -- LadyFractal

Religions are gangs that fight over spiritual "turf". Unknown

God is not a real estate agent. -- Unknown

To have a positive religion is not necessary. To be in harmony with yourself and the universe is what counts, and this is possible without positive and specific formulation in words. -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The only religion that's worth anything is the one that makes you see yourself as a member of a species rather than a tribe, family, church, political party or nation." - Unknown

Jesus might have said, "I became man for you. If you do not become God for me, you wrong me." -- Meister Eckhart

You are a child of The Universe, no less then the trees and the stars; you have the right to be here; and wheather or not if it is clear to you; no doubt The Universe is unfolding as It should; so be at peace with God, whatever you concieve God to be.---Desiderata.

"Silence is the language God speaks and everything else is a bad translation." Thomas Keating

Baal Shem Tov: "Sinners are mirrors. When we see faults in them, we must realise that they only reflect the evil in us."

"Total deafferentation of the left posterior superior parietal lobe results in the obliteration of the self-other dichotomy at almost the same moment that the deafferentation of the right posterior superior parietal lobe generates a sense of absolute transcendent wholeness."-- Eugene d'Aquili and Andrew Newberg

A man often preaches his beliefs precisely when he has lost them and is looking everywhere for them, and, on such occasions, his preaching is by no means at its worst. Melancthon

The Book I would pass to my children would contain no sermons, no shoulds and oughts. Genuine love comes from knowledge, not from a sense of duty or guilt. - Alan Watts

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours. -- Aldous Huxley

"The most preposterous notion that H. Sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of creation, shaper and ruler of all the universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history." - R.A. Heinlein

As Spinoza noted, "If a triangle could speak, it would say . . . that God is eminently triangular."

Now, if the cooperation of some thousands of millions of cells in our brain can produce our consciousness, a true singularity, the idea becomes vastly more plausible that the cooperation of humanity, or some sections of it, may determine what Comte calls a Great Being. - - J.B.S. Haldane

Peace and War

Such beauty in the world. Why oh why can we not stop hurting it? - unknown

"You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake." - Jeannette Rankin

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer,
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."
-- W.B Yeats

'You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.' - Eric Hoffer

Man: "Changing the world! Ha! Kids' stuff!"
Man: "I, too, had such ideas when I was young, and now you see..."
Mafalda: "We're doomed, guys! It turns out, if we don't hurry up and change the world, the world changes us!"

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. --Mahatma Gandhi"

When you're finally up on the moon, looking back at the earth, all these differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you're going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people? Frank Borman, astronaut

"How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read." - Karl Kraus

"In a country where values are collapsing, patriotism becomes the handmaiden to totalitarianism. The country becomes the religion." - Norman Mailer

"And is it nuclear or nucular? You know I've actually heard United States Senators on C-SPAN refer to it as nucular. Now color me reactionary, but I don't think you should vote on this shit till you learn how to pronounce it." - Dennis Miller

Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes. -- Murray Edelman

"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."
-- Steve Biko

War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press. - Einstein

A few years ago there was a shining moment. . . . It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the Poverty Program. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. -- Martin Luther King, Jr

Pick your enemies wisely for you will become them. - unknown

To a surprising extent, the warlords in shining armor, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous. -- George Orwell

"They hate us because we dont know why they hate us" (re americas relationship with developing countriess and others) micheal moore

How have we changed? Not at all. I mean, people act like if you say to them, well, you should drive a car that gets better gas mileage like you're affronting the Bill of Rights. I'm an American and I'll drive whatever I want. I mean, can you imagine in World War II, when we were saving tin and stuff like that, if somebody said, you know what, I'll use all the damn tin I feel like. I'm an American! This is nonsense that we have to be loyal to our flaws. - Bill Maher

Abraham Lincoln said of Polk, his president, our armed forces' commander-in-chief: "Trusting to escape scrutiny by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory, that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood – that serpent's eye, that charms to destroy, he plunged into war."

"You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty." Mahatma Gandhi

There never has been a war yet which, if the facts had been put calmly before the ordinary folk, could not have been prevented ... The common man, I think, is the great protection against war. - Ernest Bevin

There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness.-- Eric Hoffer

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." -- Jimi Hendrix --

The might of the tyrant recoils upon himself when it meets with no response, even as an arm violently waved in the air suffers dislocation. - Gandhi

Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive. - Henry Steele Commager

It is in the nature of walls that walls should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet. - Jeanette Winterson

"Patriotism in a country that's failing has a logical tendency to turn to fascistic" - Norman Mailer

History judges human actions according to the degree of human solidary which is expressed in them. Without exception those deeds and events are regarded as great and valuable which are saturated with the sense of human solidarity, which promote the welfare of the whole. Lack of this sense of solidarity, always due to an increased sense of inferiority, drives the individual into neurosis or crime and groups and nations toward the abyss of self-extermination. - Alfred Adler

Just as weapons have gotten "smarter," so too has the military gotten more sophisticated about how to use the media to meet military objectives.
-- Jerry Broeckert, Lt. Col., public affairs officer in the US Marines Corps.

"The Stupid Party thinks everyone is evil, and the Evil Party thinks everyone is stupid." - Unknown

Jesus said "blessed are the peacemakers" and "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's". American conservative Christians say "Blessed are the soldiers" and "Give me my tax cut!" - Anonymous

...the crimes of violence committed for selfish, personal motives are historically insignificant
compared to those committed ad majorem gloriam Dei, out of a self-sacrificing devotion to the flag,
a leader, a religious faith or political conviction. -- Arthur Koestler

“The nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had.”
—Martin Luther King Jr

Everything that we think God has in his mind necessarily proceeds from our own mind; it is what we imagine to be in God's mind, and it is really difficult for human intelligence to guess at a divine intelligence. What we usually end up with by this sort of reasoning is to make God the color-sergeant of our army and to make Him as chauvinistic as ourselves. -- Lin Yutang

"It is in our lives and not our words that our religion must be read."
Thomas Jefferson

"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery None but ourselves can free our minds."
Bob Marley

We cannot all do great things, but we can do small things with great love.
Mother Teresa

We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more
about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living. General Omar Bradley

We must be prepared to make heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war. There is no task that is more important or closer to my heart. Albert Einstein

When men talk about defense, they always claim to be protecting women and children, but they never ask the women and children what they think. Pat Schroeder, American politician and feminist

"One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory." --Chou En-lai, former Chinese premier

"And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing … a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods." Aldous Huxley, 1959

Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind. - John F. Kennedy

Come gather 'round people Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters Around you have grown
And accept it that soon You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you Is worth savin' Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin'.
- Bob Dylan

Nuclear war is inevitable, says the pessimists;
Nuclear war is impossible, says the optimists;
Nuclear war is inevitable unless we make it
impossible, says the realists. Sydney J. Harris

If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future. -- Winston Churchill

I really see no other solution than to turn inwards and to root out all the rottenness there. I no longer believe that we can change anything in the
world until we first change ourselves. And that seems to me the only lesson to be learned from this war. Etty Hillesum (concentration camp victim)

We have guided missiles and misguided men. Martin Luther King, Jr

"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." - Issac Asimov

The danger to which the success of revolutions is most exposed, is that of attempting them before the principles on which they proceed, and the advantages to result from them, are sufficiently seen and understood. -- Thomas Paine

"reality" is the temporary resultant of continuous struggles between rival
gangs of programmers. - Robert Anton Wilson

"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?" -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. - - Robert Kennedy, Capetown, 1966

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Robert F. Kennedy

There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man, the fighter, who will dare torture and death in order to inflict torture and death, will be appalled, and so abandon war forever. Thomas A. Edison

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history. George Bernard Shaw

The greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness -- each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked -- each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity. - Herbert Butterfield

War is delightful to those who have had no experience of it.
Desiderius Erasmus

The real test of nonviolence lies in its being brought in contact with those who have contempt for it. - Gandhi

Violent disobedience deals with men who can be replaced. It leaves the evil itself untouched and often accentuates it. - Gandhi

Nonviolent energy properly stored up sets free a force that becomes irresistible. - Gandhi

Wherein is courage required--in blowing others to pieces from behind a cannon, or with a smiling face to approach a cannon and be blown to pieces? Who is the true warrior--he who keeps death always as a bosom-friend, or he who controls the death of others? - Gandhi

It is, moreover, this working class alone that has it in its power to establish healthy relations with the Arabs, which is the most important political task of Zionism. Administrations come and go; but it is human relations that finally turn the scale in the lives of nations. - Einstein

The only thing that really matters now is whether man can climb up to a higher moral level, to a higher plane of consciousness, in order to be equal to the superhuman powers which the fallen angels have played into his hands... He can no longer wriggle out of it on the plea of his littleness and nothingness, for the dark God has slipped the atom bomb and chemical weapons into his hands and given him the power to empty out the apocalyptic vials or wrath on his fellow creatures. - C.G.Jung

War, national hatreds and class struggle, these greatest enemies of humankind, root in the desire groups to escape or compensate for the crushing sense of their inferiority. - Alfred Adler

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn. -- John Buchan

Secrecy is the beginning of tyranny. - Robert Heinlein

How is the world ruled and how do wars start? Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read. Karl Kraus

"Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful" -- Nietzsche

People bother me when they clap themselves on the back and say, we're supporting our troops. No, you're not. If you're driving a big gas- guzzling car, you're actually making it more likely that those troops will have to go somewhere in the world to defend that oil, because the guys who are hating us have the oil and we have the Lincoln Navigators. - Bill Maher

"He who angers you conquers you." - Elizabeth Kenny

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. -- Voltaire

Does the whole world have to be crying, For us to know we are one? - - Artist at the Smithsonian reflecting on Sept. 11, 2001

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"IT'S NOT ENOUGH to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to a deep completion." - Don DeLillo

"We are shaping the world faster than we can change ourselves,
and we are applying to the present the habits of the past."
- Winston Churchill

"I believe in compulsory cannibalism. If people were forced to eat what they killed there would be no more war." --Abbie Hoffman

"If I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircles us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake." - Mahatma Gandhi

"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 world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Nationalism is an infantile sickness. It is the measles of the human race. - Albert Einstein

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
Albert Einstein

Sometimes you just have to take a stand against taking a stand. - Unknown

"Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful" -- Nietzsche

"Apathy on the individual level translates into insanity at the mass level."
Douglas Hofstadter

The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.
Tennessee Williams

Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier. - Colin Powell

War, national hatreds and class struggle, these greatest enemies of humankind, root in the desire groups to escape or compensate for the crushing sense of their inferiority. - Alfred Adler

"Assuming the President believes in the Rapture/Tribulation/Armageddon scenario, how can he make peace in the middle east through a treaty without being seen as the Antichrist in his own religious worldview? In that case, peace can only be won through war. Nice semiotic trap he's gotten himself (and us) into. Let's pray for a crusade against extremism rather than a religious Crusade, because a resurrection of Crusades with modern weaponry is something that only belongs in science fiction." - Anonymous

The uncompromising attitude is more indicative of an inner uncertainty than a deep conviction. The implacable stand is directed more against the doubt within than the assailant without. - Eric Hoffer

It is characteristic of all movements and crusades that the psychopathic element rises to the top. -- Robert Lindner

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates." --Ernest Hemingway

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts...
We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience...
Let us then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God...
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions.
The great and general interests of peace
A Mother's Day Proclamation, by Julia Ward Howe, Boston, 1870

Unsorted

"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including thefear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -- C.S. Lewis

Only he who handles his ideas lightly is master of his ideas, and only he who is master of his ideas is not enslaved by them. -- Lin Yutang

An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language.
Martin Buber

"We think the world apart," said educator Parker Palmer. "What would it be like to think the world together?" The philosopher Teilhard de Chardin had a word -- unfurling -- to describe that "infinitely slow, spasmodic movement toward the unity of mankind." He saw education and love as the twin pillars of progress. At this amazing point in history, we have the opportunity to get things right.
- - Mary Pipher

All nature, all growth, all peace, everything that flowers and is beautiful in the world depends on patience, requires time, silence, trust, and faith in long-term processes which far exceed any single lifetime.
-- Hermann Hesse

"The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds."
RD Laing

Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It became beautifully clear that there are many rivulets of conscious intention to effect necessary changes in culture. They are beginning to flow together into streams that may may become a river that will make it to the sea in time. To foster this flow we need to become more compassionate and less self-serving, and we need to laugh together! - Unknown

Whenever masses of people, especially educated people, know something- and when what they know is something they greatly fear because they believe it affects virtually everything they do or want to do- then most likely we stand in the presence of a vast falsehood. -- Thomas Szasz

"In worshiping God we have always been worshiping our own hidden Self. The worst lie that you ever tell yourself is that you were born a sinner or a wicked man. He alone is a sinner who sees a sinner in another man." - Vivekananda

"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed." --- G.K. Chesterton

A human being is part of the whole, called by us "universe," a part limited in time and space. He experiences his thoughts and feeling as something separate 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 decisions and to affection for a few persons nearest 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 of nature in its beauty. - - Albert Einstein

Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.
Oprah Winfrey

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
Tom Robbins

Nature acts without masters.
-- Hippocrates

Dwelling on past mistakes is a waste of time. If the Ego needs to rectify a misdeed, have it do something that creates good in the present, this will certainly spawn good will for the future and create balance in your life. -- Beth Johnson

"There are some people so hungry that God can only come to them in the form of food." --- Gandhi

Conscious and unconscious experiences do not belong to different compartments of the mind; they form a continuous scale of gradations, of degrees of awareness. --
Arthur Koestler

I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend? Robert Redford

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him. Dwight D. Eisenhower

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself. Henry David Thoreau

There is a self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge. Alfred North Whitehead

The meaning of life is not to be discovered only after death in some hidden, mysterious realm; on the contrary, it can be found by eating the succulent fruit of the Tree of Life and by living in the here and now as fully and creatively as we can. -- Paul Kurtz

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.
Timothy Leary

Men are more apt to be mistaken in their generalizations than in their particular observations. -- Niccolo Machiavelli

"We dance around in a ring and suppose, while the secret sits in the middle and knows." -- .Robert Frost

Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Nothing as mundane as mere evidence can be allowed to threaten a vision so deeply satisfying. -- Thomas Sowell

When you realize where you come from, you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused, kindhearted as a grandmother, dignified as a king. Immersed in the wonder of the Tao, you can deal with whatever life brings you, and when death comes, you are ready.-- Lao Tzu

The youth gets together the materials for a bridge to the moon, and at length the middle-aged man decides to make a woodshed with them. -- Henry David Thoreau

There's nothing to understanding people. All you have to do is take a close look at yourself and you will understand everyone else. - Isaac Asimov

It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom. - A. de Saint Exupery

"Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic feature of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." - CG Jung 'The Philosophical Tree'

Make happy those who are near, and those who are far will come.
Chinese proverb

Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts. Nikki Giovanni

Watching is the key of meditation. Watch your mind.
Osho

Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song. - Rachel Carson

"The man who can't dance thinks the band is no good."
Polish proverb.

Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.
Kahlil Gibran

"The ancient precept, 'Know thyself,' and the modern precept, 'Study nature,' become at last one maxim" --Ralph Waldo Emerson

You cannot receive a shock unless you have an electric affinity for that which shocks you. -- Henry David Thoreau

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.--Susan B. Anthony

If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field. -- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat. -- John Morley

"Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment." - Buddha

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view--until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
Atticus, To Kill A Mockingbird: by Harper Lee

"Enjoy life. There's plenty of time to be dead." - Unknown

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are. Anais Nin

Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good. -- Thomas Paine

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. Lyall Watson

The fundamental factor of self-deception is this constant desire to be something in this world. J. Krishamurti

Politicans are like prostitutes......the more you pay them , the more they tell you EXACTLY what you wanna hear.
Unknown

With all this talking, what has been said? The subtle truth can be pointed at with words, but it can't be contained by them. - Hua Hu Jing

"From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth, From the laziness that is content with half-truths, From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, O God of truth, deliver us." ~Ancient Prayer

To speak ill of others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. -- Will Durant

The real religious question has nothing to do with God at all. The authentic question is, "Who am I?" And the only way to know is to be silent, be alert, be aware, watch your thoughts, and let them disappear. Osho

"Master, tell us something about the fear of insecurity." "Don't be worried about that. Death will make everything secure. While alive, enjoy insecurity." Confucius

How many of us are swept away by what I have come to call an 'active laziness'? It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so that there is no time at all to confront the real issues. Sogyal Rinpoche

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails. -- William A. Ward

When the weak want to give an impression of strength they hint menacingly at their capacity for evil. It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak. -- Eric Hoffer

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they might have been.
William Hazlitt

We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. -- Henri Frederic Amiel

Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves. W. Somerset Maugham

If God made us in His image we have certianly returned the compliment. -- Voltaire

There is something terribly wrong with a god who cares more about how much he is worshipped then about how his creations treat one another. - Unknown

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.
Frank Lloyd Wright

If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future. -- Winston Churchill

The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.
-- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Specialization is for insects. -- Robert Heinlein

"Cynicism is what passes for insight to the cowardly mind" - J. Cambell

It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that moral courage has its source in identification through one's own sensitivity with the suffering of one's fellow human beings. -- Rollo May

"If you can simply observe what you are and stay flexible, you will find that you can progress infinitely." -- Krishnamurti

When you do the common things in life in an uncommon way, you will command the attention of the world. -- George Washington Carver

I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in. -- George Washington Carver

The reason people blame things on the previous generations is that there's only one other choice. -- Doug Larson

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent C.G.Jung

"Languages, governments, and religions are formed from the golden dust that rises from both sides of the road on which man's magnificent life proceeds." Kahlil Gibran

Happiness is like a butterfly when you are trying to pursue it. It is just beoynd your reach but if you just sit there still it might alight aupon you. American Indain proverb

One day your life is going to flash before your eyes. Make sure it's worth watching.
Unknown

Can we mass into a productive star without blowing ourselves apart first?
Win Wenger

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. -- William James

It's hardly unusual for groups so similar that no one else can tell the difference to fight in order to assert their individuality. - Unknown

You can't depend on your judgement when your imagination is out of focus.
-- Mark Twain

The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know. -- Arthur Koestler

The instinctive need to be the member of a closely knit group fighting for common ideals may grow so strong that it becomes inessential what these ideals are.
-- Konrad Lorenz

"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it." --Confucius

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
- Arnold Toynbee

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.
Alan Watts

He who cannot forgive others destroys the bridge over which he himself must pass.
George Herbert

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. -- Linus Pauling

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of it opposers. - William Penn

Always forgive your enemies, nothing annoys them quite so much.
Oscar Wilde

Each denying what the other affirms and affirming what the other denies brings us only into confusion. -- Chuang-tzu

No problem can be solved at the level of awareness at which it was created
Deepak Chopra

"You can out-distance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you." -- Rwandan proverb

He who fights with monsters might take care, lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten."
Anthony Robbins

Americans will put up with anything provided it doesn't block traffic.
Dan Rather

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper. --Rod Serling

The solution of every problem is another problem.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Policies are judged by their consequences, but crusades are judged by how good they make the crusaders feel. -- Thomas Sowell

"I may be a worm, but I do believe I'm a glow worm"
Winston Churchill

The part always has a tendency to reunite with its whole in order to escape from its imperfection. -- Leonardo da Vinci

The new frontiers to be conquered are mainly in the convolutions of the cortex.
Arthur Koestler

"I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." -- John Cage

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace.
Albert Schweitzer

The future of a civilization depends on our overcoming the meaninglessness and hopelessness which characterizes the thought of men today.
Albert Schweitzer

It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music. -- Eric Hoffer

Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.
Robert Heinlein

Nothing is more harmful to a new truth than an old error.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. -- Oscar Wilde