"The world is too much with us" -- Wordsworth "We are too much with the world" -- Thoreau % I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make to dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star. -- Thoreau % Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate... Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity. -- Thoreau % The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. -- Thoreau % It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What every body echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do you try and find that you can. Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new. -- Thoreau % The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of any thing, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well? You may say the wisest thing you can, old man - you who have lived seventy years, not without honor of a kind, - I hear an irresistible voice which invites me away from all that. One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels. -- Thoreau % I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness as to our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a well nigh incurable form of disease. We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us! or, what if we had been taken sick? How vigilant we are! determined not to live by faith if we can avoid it; all the day long on the alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties. So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one center. All change is a miracle to contemplate, but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant. -- Thoreau % Confucius said, "To know that we know what we know, and that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge." When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis. -- Thoreau % Unless all existence is a medium of revelation, no particular revelation is possible. -- William Temple % Man must have light. He must live in the fierce full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal: the shadow of his own singular rectitude or baseness. All human evils have to come out of obscurity and darkness, where there is nothing to dog man constantly with the shape of his own deformity. -- William Faulkner % What you want to do is not to own Helen, but [just] own the right and privilege of looking at her. The worst thing that can happen to you is for her to notice you enough to stop and look back. -- William Faulkner % Meditation is not the repetition of the word, nor the experiencing of a vision, nor the cultivating of silence. The bead and the word do quiet the chattering mind, but this is a form of self-hypnosis. You might as well take a pill. -- Krishnamurti % Learning is a movement not anchored in knowledge. If it is anchored it is not a movement. The machine, the computer, IS anchored. That is the basic difference between man and the machine. Learning is watching, seeing. If you see from accumulated knowledge then the seeing is limited and there is no new thing in the seeing. -- Krishnamurti % When anything becomes a problem we are caught in the solution of it, and then the problem becomes a cage, a barrier to further exploration and understanding. So don't let us reduce all life to a vast and complex problem. -- Krishnamurti % Practice gives duration to problems. Practice is total inattention. Never practice: you can only practice mistakes. Learning is always new. -- Krishnamurti % Thought can perceive only its own projection, and the recognition of it is its own frontier. -- Krishnamurti % The lark and the eagle in their flight leave no mark; the scientist leaves a mark, as do all specialists. You can follow them step by step and add more steps to what they have found and accumulated; and you know, more or less, where their accumulation is leading. But truth is not like that; it is really a pathless land; it may be at the next curve of the next road, or a thousand miles away. You have to keep going and then you will find it beside you. But if you stop and trace out a way for another to follow, or a design for your own way of life, it will never come near you. -- Krishnamurti % The ending is the beginning, and the beginning is the first step, and the first step is the only step. -- Krishnamurti % Time is a field of circumstances and forces meeting and working out a resultant progression whose course it measures. To the ego it is a tyrant or a resistance, to the Divine an instrument. Therefore, while our effort is personal, Time appears as a resistance, for it presents to us all the obstruction of the forces that conflict with our own. When the divine working and the personal are combined in our consciousness, it appears as a medium condition. When the two become one, it appears as a servant and instrument. -- Sri Aurobindo Ghose % Truth comes as conqueror only to those who have lost the art of receiving it as friend. -- Rabindranath Tagore % Science makes major contributions to minor needs. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. % There are persons who are religiously blind just as there are those who can see nothing in painting. -- Huston Smith % And when eternity says, "Thou shalt love," then it assumes the responsibility for guaranteeing that it can be done. -- Kierkegaard % It is not so with the knight of infinite resignation: he does not give up his love, not for all the glory of the world. ...if the love becomes an unhappy love, he will never be able to tear himself loose from it. He feels a blissful rapture in letting love tingle through every nerve, and yet his soul is as solemn as that of the man who has drained the poisoned goblet and feels how the juice permeates every drop of blood - for this instant is life and death. -- Kierkegaard % Fools and young men prate about everything being possible for a man. -- Kierkegaard % The man who feels no impulse toward the study of woman may, as far as I am concerned, be what he will; one thing only he certainly is not, he is no aesthetician. -- Kierkegaard % It is a self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists if they believe that they are extricating themselves from decadence when they merely wage war against it. -- Nietzsche % It is a distinction to have many virtues, but a hard lot; and many have gone into the desert and taken their lives because they had wearied of being the battle and battlefield of virtues. -- Nietzsche % If you have a suffering friend, be a resting place for his suffering, but a hard bed as it were, a field cot: thus will you profit him best. -- Nietzsche % Spirit is the life that itself cuts into life: with its own agony it increases its own knowledge. Did you know that? -- Nietzsche % A woman is like a puzzle shacking up with a clue, but every piece you get is another piece you lose. -- the Roches % At the moment of our death... as we lie there, helpless, beyond distraction, electricity stealing out of our brains like a con man stealing out of a sucker's neighborhood, it will occur to many of us that everything we ever did, we did for money. And at that instant, right before the stars blink off, we will, according to what else we may have learned in life, burn with an unendurable regret - or have us a good silent laugh at our own expense. -- Tom Robbins, Skinny Legs and All % Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is. -- Sir Francis Bacon % The only way to keep a dream intact is never to fulfill it. This is true of an initial vision for a novel, for a family, for a sexual encounter, or for planting a garden. Certainly it is true for building a nation. -- Amos Oz % Whenever we are going to squeeze money out of every request to our server, whenever we are going to design a page for use with one particular browser implementation only, and whenever we consider any kind of censorship we should appreciate the fact that, had such thoughts prevailed from the beginning, the Web wouldn't exist at all. -- Michael Niksch % To believe in synchronicity is to believe in the ability of the universe, on rare occasions, to spontaneously generate goodness, beauty, and joy. -- nsb % All bits live forever, and all bits eventually become public. -- nsb % If I believed in God, I would admire His wisdom in making us mortal, and thus placing an upper bound on our destructiveness. -- nsb % According the name 'investors' to institutions that trade actively is like calling someone who repeatedly engages in one-night stands a romantic. -- Warren Buffett % Everything is surprisingly difficult. -- Lucy Suchman % What are people willing to pay for anonymous electronic transactions? The answer is not very much. As a privacy advocate, I'm sort of disheartened by that. But life is life. -- Bruce Schneier % The software industry is a service industry with delusions of being a manufacturing industry. -- Eric Raymond % I slept, and I dreamt that life was all joy. I woke, and saw that life was but service. I served and discovered that service was joy. -- Rabindranath Tagore % [Open Source] programming is like sex, one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. -- M. Sinz, CBM Inc. % I think of laughter as a rare gift from God, to help us through our brief, baffling, sometimes terrible time here on this small Earth. -- Herman Wouk % Significant problems can't be solved using the same level of thinking that created them. -- Albert Einstein % The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution. -- Albert Einstein % Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. -- Albert Einstein % You really don't understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. -- Albert Einstein % God does not care about our mathematical difficulties; He integrates empirically. -- Albert Einstein % Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem. -- Alan McKay % It's important in business to be able to say no when you feel like saying yes would mean losing your soul. -- Lionel Poilane % Only invest in companies that any moron can run, because eventually one will! -- Warren Buffett % A computer without a Microsoft operating system is like a dog without a bag of bricks tied to its head -- Unknown % The fruit of silence is tranquility. -- Saudi Arabian Proverb % In a forest a fox bumps into a little rabbit, and says, "Hi, Junior, what are you up to?" "I'm writing a dissertation on how rabbits eat foxes," said the rabbit. "Come now, friend rabbit, you know that's impossible! No on ewill publish such rubbish!" "Well, follow me and I'll show you." They both go into the rabbit's dwelling and after a while the rabbit emerges with a satisfied expression on his face. Comes along a wolf. "Hello, little buddy, what are we doing these days?" "I'm writing the 2'nd chapter of my thesis, on how rabbits devour wolves." "Are you crazy? Where's your academic honesty?" "Come with me and I'll show you." As before, the rabbit comes out with a satisfied look on his face and a diploma in his paw. Finally, the camera pans into the rabbit's cave and, as everybody should have guessed by now, we see a mean-looking, huge lion, sitting, picking his teeth and belching, next to some furry, bloody remnants of the wolf and the fox. The moral: It's not the contents of your thesis that are important - it's your PhD advisor that really counts. % America often goes wrong, but it seldom falls for grand schemes and pompous-sounding declarations. If America lost something by not paying more attention to John Dewey, then it is equally true that Germany lost something by paying serious attention to Martin Heidegger. -- Ted Cohen % Confront the difficult while it is still easy; accomplish the great task by a series of small acts. -Lao-Tzu % He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head. -- G. K. Chesterton % Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. -- Mark Twain % Failure is the foundation of truth. It teaches us what isn't true, and that is a great beginning. To fear failure is to fear the possibility of truth. -- Joan Chittister % To me, success can be achieved only through repeated failure and introspection. In fact, success represents the one percent of your work that results from the ninety-nine percent that is called failure. -- Soichiro Honda % He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose. -- Jim Elliot % Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, To all the people you can, As long as ever you can. -- John Wesley % A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence. -- Jim Watkins % I am not discouraged because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward. -- Thomas A. Edison % I would rather have lofty dreams that are never fulfilled than lowly goals that are easily accomplished. -- Jim Watkins % The truth will set you free but first it will make you miserable. -- Jamie Buckingham % The things we pray for, good Lord, give us grace to labor for. -- Thomas More % Ambition is the path to success. Persistence is the vehicle you arrive in. -- Bill Bradley % You will only be remembered for two things: the problems you solve or the ones you create. -- Mike Murdock % If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base. -- Dave Barry % I've always been struck by the use of camouflage in urban settings. Real camouflage at an airport would be a rumpled business suit and a beat-up computer bag. -- Karen Coyle % Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes. -- Buddha % The advantage of being celibate is that when one sees a pretty girl one does not need to grieve over having an ugly one back home. -- Paul Leautaud, "Propos d'un jour" % Whatever you do, it has likely brought delight to fewer people than either contract bridge or the Red Sox. -- Annie Dillard % % A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea. -- John Ciardi % A prudent question is one half of wisdom. -- Sir Francis Bacon % Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. -- Vint Cerf % Whatever decision we think we are making is actually being made for us, because the decision is the end result of a thought and we have no control over the arising of the thought. -Ramesh Balsekar % If your mind becomes firm like a rock And no longer shakes In a world where everything is shaking, Your mind will be your greatest friend And suffering will not come your way. -- Theragatha % Liberation is only being rid of the idea that there is anyone who needs liberation. -- Ramesh Balsekar % When a father gives to his son, both laugh. When a son gives to his father, both cry. -- Yiddish proverb % If you want to raise a man from mud and filth, do not think it is enough to keep standing on top and reaching down to him a helping hand. You must go all the way down yourself, down into mud and filth. Then take hold of him with strong hands and pull him and yourself into the light. -- Solomon ben Meir ha-Levi of Karlin % It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are. -- e.e. cummings % In the same way that someone in the midst of a rough crowd guards a wound with great care, so in the midst of bad company should one always guard the wound that is the mind. -- Santideva % Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy. -- Thich Nhat Hanh % Defiled by passion, the mind is not released. Defiled by ignorance, discernment does not develop. Thus from the fading of passion is there release of awareness. From the fading of ignorance is there release of discernment. -- Anguttara Nikaya % One cannot see God as long as one feels "I am the doer." Fully awakened souls are beyond virtue and vice. They realize that it is God who does everything. -- Ramakrishna % He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he who loses his courage loses all. -- Miguel de Cervantes % Subhuti asked the Buddha: "The highest, most awakened mind that you have attained - is that mind the unattainable?" "Yes, Subhuti. With regard to that highest and most awakened mind, I have not attained anything. That mind is everywhere equally. It cannot be attained or grasped, but it can be realized. It is realized through the practice of all good actions when they are done in the spirit of no self and no object of self." -- Prajnaparamita % Do not despise any person, and do not consider anything impossible, for there is no person who does not have an hour and no thing that does not have its place. -- Pirke Avot % Conquer your foe by force, you increase his enmity; conquer by love, and you will reap no after-sorrow. -- Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King % The individual "I" exists for as long as there is desire for pleasure. -- Maharamayana % People were given two ears and one tongue so that they may listen more than speak. -- Jewish proverb % Whether you and I and a few others will renew the world some day remains to be seen. But within ourselves we must renew it each day. -- Hermann Hesse % Meditation is running into reality. It does not insulate you from the pain of life. It allows you to delve so deeply into life and all its aspects that you pierce the pain barrier and go beyond suffering. -- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana % As rain penetrates an improperly shingled roof, so passion overwhelms a confused mind. -- Buddha % As rain seeps into an ill-thatched hut, so passion, the undeveloped mind. As rain doesn't seep into a well-thatched hut, so passion does not, the well-developed mind. -- Dhammapada % Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards. -- Kierkegaard % When all the myriad streams that flow in different places, each with its own color and taste, enter the great ocean, they blend and become just one taste, with one name. In the same way, stupidity and wisdom both become one in the awakened mind. When one first starts along the path, there seems to be a distinction that this is stupidity and that is wisdom. But later, when one penetrates more deeply, one finds there is no difference between stupidity and wisdom. -- Visuddhi Magga % It should not be believed that all the beings exist for the sake of the existence of humanity. On the contrary, all the other beings too have been intended for their own sakes, and not for the sake of something else. -- Maimonides % A monk can be very gentle, very peaceful, while there are no hard words to assail him. But when hard words are directed at him, it is then that he must be really gentle and peaceful. -- Majjhima Nikaya % Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai...used to say: If you have a sapling in your hand, and someone should say to you that the Messiah has come, stay and complete the planting, and then go to greet the Messiah. -- Avot de Rabbi Nathan, 31b % Self-trust is the first secret of success. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson % The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. -- Mahatma Gandhi % People's good deeds are used by G-d as seeds for planting trees in the Garden of Eden: thus, each of us creates our own Paradise. -- The Mezeritzer Rebbe % A small trouble is like a pebble. Hold it too close to your eye and it fills the whole world and puts everything out of focus. Hold it at a proper distance and it can be examined and properly classified. Throw it at your feet and it can be seen in its true setting, just one more tiny bump on the pathway to life. -- Celia Luce % Don't be afraid of doing good. It's another name for happiness, for all that is dear and delightful - this phrase "doing good." Whoever would live well, Long lasting, bringing bliss - Let him be generous, be calm, and cultivate the doing of good. By practicing these three, These three bliss-bringing things, The wise one lives without regret His world infused with happiness. -- Itivuttaka Sutta % A person should be more concerned with spiritual than with material matters, but another person's material welfare is his own spiritual concern. -- Rabbi Israel Salanter % The mind is often compared to a horseman and the breath to the horse. A wild and untamed horse is difficult for the rider; a very good and well-trained horse is quite useful. If both rider and horse are extremely well trained and skilled, an excellent combination has been made. -- Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, "Union of Mahamudra and Dzogchen" % When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace. -- Jimi Hendrix % You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it. -- G. K. Chesterton % When you are thinking about an object, it sometimes occurs that evil, unwholesome thoughts connected with hate and delusion come into your mind. The way to get rid of them is to concentrate on another object that is wholesome and good. Just as a skilled carpenter knocks out a coarse peg with a fine one, so the evil thoughts will disappear. With their departure, the mind will become calm, unified, and concentrated once more. -- Majjhima Nikaya % First improve yourself, then improve others. -- Talmud % What is the skilled approach of someone seriously interested in realizing his or her highest potential? Stated simply it is to keep the mind continuously in as happy and peaceful a condition as possible. -- Lama Thubten Yeshe % Love the moment, and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all boundaries. -- Corita Kent % What is a friend? A single soul shared by two people. -- Aristotle % When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us. -- Alexander Graham Bell % The question for the child is not "Do I want to be good?" but "Whom do I want to be like?" -- Bruno Bettelheim % So much fear and desire come from that commitment to 'I am' - to being somebody. Eventually they take us to anxiety and despair; life seems much more difficult and painful than it really is. But when we just observe life for what it is, then it's all right: the delights, the beauty, the pleasures are just that. -- n Sumedho, "Seeing the Way" % Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for. -Epicurus % Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action. -- Mahatma Gandhi % People must realize that even with all these comforts, all this money and a GNP that increases every year, they are still not happy. They need to understand that the real culrpits are our unceasing desires. Our wants have no end. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Take the first step in faith. You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. % To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. -- Robert M. Pirsig % Who wrote this play in which we have to laugh, cry, and exit according to the script? No god can write it, nor can Buddha. Only your own mind can write it. -- Jae Woong Kim % Let a man always strive to be one of the persecuted rather than one of the persecutors. -- Talmud % Woe to authority, which buries its possessor, for there is not a single prophet who did not outlive four kings. -- Talmud % Depression does tremendous damage. Use every ploy you can think of to bring yourself to joy. -- Rabbi Nachman of Breslov % Find a friend to be with and stay in that relationship, avoiding the dangers of hurting others. Stay with your friend and become mindful and joyful. If you can find no friend, then go on by yourself. Better to carry on alone than live with the foolish. Journey on alone, unconcerned, working no evil, like the bull elephant in the jungle. -- Sunnata Vagga % Humility does not mean you think less of yourself. It means you think of yourself less. -- Ken Blanchard % When I was young I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people. -- Abraham Joshua Heschel % A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle. -- Erin Majors % To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. -- Simone Weil % Be here now. Be some place else later. Is that so complicated? -- David M. Bader % Accept misfortune as a blessing. Do not wish for perfect health or a life without problems. What would you talk about? -- David M. Bader % The Torah says, "Love they neighbor as thyself." The Buddha says there is no "self." So maybe you are off the hook. -- David M. Bader % If there is no self, whose arthritis is this? -- David M. Bader % Life consists not in holding good cards, but in playing those you hold well. -- Josh Billings % Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value. -- Albert Einstein % Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best. -- Henry Van Dyke % Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. % To please all is an impossible aim, and to escape some criticism is an unattainable goal. -- M. Ibn Ezra % Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. -- Bill Gates % Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever does. -- Margaret Mead % Risk! Risk anything! ... Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth. -- Katherine Mansfield % It is hard to be born as a human being and hard to live the life of one. It is even harder to hear of the path and harder still to awake, to rise, and to follow. Yet the teaching is simple: "Cease to do evil, learn to do good. And purify your mind." -- Dhammapada % When subjective feelings arrange your effort, and activity is obsessed with objects, the matter of your self is neglected; not believing in true universal knowledge in oneself, you'll never attain true awakening. -- Chen-ching % In the eating hall, a stuffed parrot hung from the ceiling, and from its golden beak dangled a card that read, "We are in training to be nobody special." I had often repeated this to myself, working against my need for achievement and recognition, and the discontent that could engender. "I am in training to be nobody special." Saying the words in my mind, I felt how they redirected me from a certain seductive struggle and excitement and disease, into a more stable focus: forget what others think of you, forget the future goal of achievement; arrive instead in this body/mind, attending to this present moment. This is is the whole of practice. -- Sandy Boucher % If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause and say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. % My teaching does not require anyone to become homeless or resign the world unless he wants to, but it does require everyone to free himself from the illusion that he is a permanent self and to act with integrity while giving up his craving for pleasure. -- Majjhima Nikaya % The whole world we travel with our thoughts, Finding nowhere anyone as precious as one's own self. Since each and every person is so precious to themselves Let the self-respecting harm no other being. -- Samyutta Nikaya % There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope. -- Baruch Spinoza % Whatever is not yours, abandon it. When you have abandoned it, that will lead to your welfare and happinesss. -- Buddha % You should roam in places that are your own, that arise in accordance with your own true nature. And what is the place that is your own? It's the pasture of ardent clearness and mindfulness, where discontent and greed are put aside for the sake of the world. That is your own place, your natural range. -- Samyutta Nikaya % The results of karma cannot be known by thought, and so should not be speculated about. Thus, thinking, one would come to distraction and distress. Therefore, Ananda, do not be the judge of people; do not make assumptions about others. A person is destroyed by holding judgments about others. -- Anguttara Nikaya % I'd rather be a failure at something I enjoy than a success at something I hate. -- George Burns % I think there are only three things that America will be known for 2,000 years from now when they study this civilization: the Constitution, jazz music and baseball. They're the three most beautifully designed things this culture has ever produced. -- Gerald Early % A Religion is as much a progressive unlearning of false ideas concerning God as it is the learning of the true ideas concerning God. -- Mordecai Kaplan % Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. -- Carl Jung % We often add to our pain and suffering by being overly sensitive, over-reacting to minor things, and sometimes taking things too personally. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Courage does not always roar. Sometimes, it is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, "I will try again tomorrow". -- Anonymous % Why not go out on a limb? That's where the fruit is. -- Will Rogers % Don't cling to anything and don't reject anything. Let come what comes, and accomodate yourself to that, whatever it is. If good mental images arise, that is fine. If bad mental images arise, that is fine, too. Look on all of it as equal, and make yourself comfortable with whatever happens. Don't fight with what you experience, just observe it all mindfully. -- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana % Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. -- Winston Churchill % Wars arise from a failure to understand one another's humanness. Instead of summit meetings, why not have families meet for a picnic and get to know each other while the children play together? -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % The secret to success in any human endeavor is total concentration. -- Kurt Vonnegut % A Western Buddhist woman was in India, studying with her teacher. She was riding with another woman friend in a rickshaw-like carriage, when they were attacked by a man on the street. In the end, the attacker only succeeded in frightening the women, but the Buddhist woman was quite upset by the event and told her teacher so. She asked him what she should have done - what would have been the appropriate, Buddhist response. The teacher said very simply, "You should have very mindfully and with great compassion whacked the attacker over the head with your umbrella." -- source unknown % A baby enters the world with hands clenched, as if to say, "The world is mine; I shall grab it." A man leaves with hands open, as if to say, "I can take nothing with me." -- Ecclesiastes % We must constantly build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. % The one who wanders independent in the world, free from opinions and viewpoints, does not grasp them and enter into disputations and arguments. As the lotus rises on its stalk unsoiled by the mud and the water, so the wise one speaks of peace and is unstained by the opinions of the world. -- Sutta Nipata % Do not say, "When I have leisure, I will study." Perhaps you will have no leisure. -- Pirke Avot % Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald % Within the framework of the Buddhist Path, reflecting on suffering has tremendous importance because by realizing the nature of suffering, you will develop greater resolve to put an end to the causes of suffering and the unwholesome deeds which lead to suffering. And it will increase your enthusiasm for engaging in the wholesome actions and deeds which lead to happiness and joy. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % The right attitude for studying the way is just complete spontaneous acquiescence. Who cares wither it takes twenty or thirty years - you'll be naturally at peace, without the slightest bit of doubt or confusion. How can there be any obstruction again after spontaneous acquiescence? How can anyone arrive by way of externals? -- Ming-pen % Real Love is not based on attachment, but on altruism. In this case, your compassion will remain as a humane response to suffering as long as beings continue to suffer. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Do you want to understand? The whole world is one of your eyes, the body produced by your parents is a cataract. All ordinary people ignore the indestructible, marvelously clear, unfailingly mirroring eye, and cling fast to the dust cataract produced by the relationship of their father and mother. Therefore they take illusions for realities, and grasp at reflections as the physical forms themselves. -- P'u-an % Abandoning harsh speech, he abstains from harsh speech, he speaks such words as are gentle, pleasing to the ear, and lovable, as go to the heart, are courteous, desired by many and agreeable to many. -- Majjhima Nikaya % Human fallibility being what it is, victory and truth do not always go together. Therefore, if you have to always win, you can't always be true. -- Rabbi Nachman of Breslov % Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances. -- Thomas Jefferson % Now, there are many, many people in the world, but relatively few with whom we interact, and even fewer who cause us problems. So, when you come across such a chance for practicing patience and tolerance, you should treat it with gratitude. It is rare. Just as having unexpectedly found a treasure in your own house, you should be happy and grateful to your enemy for providing that precious opportunity. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Heroism consists in hanging on one minute longer. -- Norwegian proverb % From what's loved is born grief, from what's loved is born fear. For one freed from what's loved there's no grief - so how fear? -- Dhammapada % Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai used to say: If you have a sapling in your hand, and someone should say to you that the Messiah has come, stay and complete the planting, and then go to greet the Messiah. -- Avot de Rabbi Nathan, 31b % 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 % I am a steadfast follower of the doctrine of non-violence which was first preached by Lord Buddha, whose divine wisdom is absolute and infallible and was practiced in our own time by the Indian saint and leader, Mahatma Gandhi. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % People were given two ears and one tongue so that they may listen more than speak. -- Jewish proverb % Don't try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night. -- Philip K. Dick % When Buddhists say, "A bodhisattva fears not the result, but only the cause," they mean that we must expend the bulk of our energy planting good roots today, rather than fretting about the plants that are already growing from the roots we planted in the past. -- Master Hsing Yun, "Describing the Indescribable" % Irrespective of different philosophies, the most important thing is to have a tamed and disciplined mind and a warm heart. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being. -- Goethe % Any plan formulated in a hurry is foolish. -- Rashi % Fight for your opinions, but do not believe that they contain the whole truth, or the only truth. -- Charles A. Dana % The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. -- Elbert Hubbard % If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all. -- Anna Quindlen % It is said that there are only two tragedies in life: not getting what one wants, and getting it. -- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana % Having done what men could, they suffered as men must. -- Thucydides % We meet only to part, Coming and going like white clouds, Leaving traces so faint Hardly a soul notices. -- Ryokan % Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. -- Mahatma Gandhi % You can't ever get everything you want. It is impossible. Luckily, there is another option: You can learn to control your mind, to step outside of this endless cycle of desire and aversion. You can learn not to want what you want, to recognize desires but not be controlled by them. -- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana % If the world is cold make it your business to build fires. -- Horace Traubel % One of the major aims and purposes of religious practice for the individual is an inner transformation from an undisciplined, untamed, and unfocused state of mind towards one that is disciplined, tamed and balanced. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % If we were to walk in the woods and a spring appeared just when we became thirsty, we would call it a miracle. And if on a second walk, if we became thirsty at just that point again, and again the spring appeared, we would remark on the coincidence. But if that spring were there always, we would take it for granted and cease to notice it. Yet is that not more miraculous still? -- Baal Shem Tov % One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful. -- Sigmund Freud % Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst. -- Marcus Valerius Martial % Happiness and suffering come from your own mind, not from outside. Your own mind is the cause of happiness; your own mind is the cause of suffering. To obtain happiness and pacify suffering, you have to work within your own mind. -- Lama Zopa Rinpoche % One who imitates what is bad always goes beyond his model; while one who imitates what is good always comes up short of it. -- Francesco Guicciardin % If one is lonely neither in a crowd nor in the deep mountains, one is an able person who knows how to enjoy absolute freedom. -- Jae Woong Kim % The man who regards life...as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life. -- Albert Einstein % If you're not using your smile, you're like a man with a million dollars in the bank and no checkbook. -- Les Giblin % The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. -- Carl Jung % You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it. -- Robin Williams % The world is not yet exhausted; let me see something tomorrow which I never saw before. -- Samuel Johnson % There appears an essential difference between the state and religion. The state dictates and coerces; religion teaches and persuades. The state enacts laws; religion gives commandments. The state is armed with physical force, and makes use of it if need be; the force of religion is love and benevolence. -- Moses Mendelssohn % As a mother watches over her child, willing to risk her own life to protect her only child, so with a boundless heart should one cherish all living beings, suffusing the whole world with unobstructed loving kindness. -- Metta Sutta % A man was rowing his boat upstream on a very misty morning. Suddenly, he saw another boat coming downstream, not trying to avoid him. It was coming straight at him. He shouted, "Be careful! Be careful!" but the boat came right into him, and his boat was almost sunk. The man became very angry, and began to shout at the other person, to give him a piece of his mind. But when he looked closely, he saw that there was no one in the other boat. It turned out that the boat just got loose and went downstream. All his angel vanished, and he laughed and he laughed. -- Thich Nhat Hanh % The brief elation we experience appeasing sensual impulses is very close to what the drug addict feels when indulging his or her habit. Temporary relief is soon followed by a craving for more. And in just the same way that taking drugs in the end only causes trouble, so too does much of what we undertake to fulfill our immediate sensory desires. We must acknowledge that there can be no hope of gratifying the senses permanently. At best, the happiness we derive from eating a good meal can only last until the next time we are hungry. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Criticism has few terrors for a man with a great purpose. -- Benjamin Disraeli % The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool. -- George Santayana % One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say. -- Will Durant % Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it. -- Rabindranath Tagore % When the community is in trouble, a person should not say, "I will go to my house and I will eat and drink and be at peace with myself." -- Talmud % Leap, and the net will appear. -- Julie Cameron % According to Buddhist psychology, most of our troubles are due to our passionate desire for, attachment to things that we misapprehend as enduring entities. The pursuit of the objects of our desire and attachment involves the use of aggression and competitiveness... These mental processes easily translate into actions, breeding belligerence. Such processes have been going on in the human mind since time immemorial, but their execution has become more effective under modern conditions. What can we do to control and regulate these "poisons" - delusion, greed and aggression? For it is these poisons that are behind almost every trouble in the world. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? -- T.S. Eliot % To be able to look back upon one's past life with satisfaction is to live twice. -- Marcus Valerius Martial % Spirituality I take to be concerned with those qualities of the human spirit - such as love and compassion, patience, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony, which bring happiness to both self and others. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % The beaten path is the safest, but the traffic's terrible. -- Jeff Taylor % There's no fire like passion, no seizure like anger, no snare like delusion, no river like craving. -- Dhammapada % In seeking wisdom the first step is silence, the second: listening, the third: remembering, the fourth: practicing, the fifth: teaching others. -- Solomon Ibn Gabirol % Enthusiasm is everything. It must be taut and vibrating like a guitar string. -- Pele % You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson % The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment. -- Doug Larson % I believe in justice and truth, without which there would be no basis for human hope. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % The height of the intellect is distinguishing between the real and the impossible, and submission to what is beyond one's power. -- Solomon Ibn Gabirol % The best way to cheer yourself up is to cheer up somebody else. -- Mark Twain % Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all. -- Dale Carnegie % Just as one is commanded to say that which will be heeded, so is one commanded not to say that which will not be heeded. -- Talmud % Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open. -- John Barrymore % Though a man live a thousand years, yet at his demise it seems to him as though he had lived but an hour. -- Zohar % Never give up, no matter what is going on Never give up; develop the heart Too much energy in your country is spent Developing the mind instead of the heart. Be compassionate not just to your friends but to everyone Be compassionate. Work for peace in your heart and in the world. Work for peace and I say again, never give up. No matter what is happening, No matter what is going on around you, Never give up. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Winning gives birth to hostility. Losing, one lies down in pain. The calmed lie down with ease, having set winning and losing aside. -- Dhammapada % Wisdom does not mean knowledge but experiential understanding. Wisdom helps you to change radically your habits and perceptions, as you discover the constantly changing, interconnected nature of the whole of existence. -- -Martine Batchelor % We are not compelled to meditate by some outside agent, by other people, or by God. Rather, just as we are responsible for our own suffering, so are we solely responsible for our own cure. We have created the situation in which we find ourselves, and it is up to us to create the circumstances for our release. -- Lama Thubten Yeshe % So don't be in a hurry and try to push or rush your practice. Do your meditation gently and gradually step by step. In regard to peacefulness, if you become peaceful, then accept it; if you don't become peaceful, then accept that also. That's the nature of the mind. We must find our own practice and persistently keep at it. -- Ajahn Chah % When a person lives heedlessly, his craving grows like a creeping vine. He runs now here and now there, as if looking for fruit: a monkey in the forest. If this sticky, uncouth craving overcomes you in the world, your sorrows grow like wild grass after rain. If, in the world, you overcome this uncouth craving, hard to escape, sorrows roll off you, like water beads off a lotus. -- Dhammapada % The impulse "I want" and the impulse "I'll have" - lose them! That is where most people get stuck - without those, you can use your eyes to guide you through this suffering state. -- Sutta Nipata % The wanderer Bhaggava accused the Buddha of saying that the universe was caused merely by chance. The Buddha replied: "I have heard others of your sect, Bhaggava, say that when I awoke and found the truth, which was beautiful, I remained in that bliss and then regarded the universe as ugly and meaningless in comparison. "But I never taught that, Bhaggava. This is what I do say: 'Whenever one awakes and finds the beautiful, then one knows indeed what beauty is.'" -- Majjhima Nikaya % Since your mind is not physical, No one else can destroy it. But because of its attachments to the body, It is harmed by physical suffering. -- Bodhicharyavatara % It has taken me all my life to understand it is not necessary to understand everything. -- Rene Coty % Better than worshiping gods is following the ways of goodness. -- Buddha % Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. -- Dale Carnegie % View all problems as challenges. Look upon negativities that arise as opportunities to learn and to grow. Don't run from them, condemn yourself, or bury your burden in saintly silence. You have a problem? Great. More grist for the mill. Rejoice, dive in, and investigate. -- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana % Man is a little world and the world is a large man. -- Philo % Some people live closely guarded lives, fearful of encountering someone or something that might shatter their insecure spiritual foundation. This attitude, however, is not the fault of religion but of their own limited understanding. True Dharma leads in exactly the opposite direction. It enables one to integrate all the many diverse experiences of life into a meaningful and coherent whole, thereby banishing fear and insecurity completely. -- Lama Thubten Yeshe % Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom? -- Thich Nhat Hanh % There are aspects to reality in this too often confused and confusing artificial-world of our species that really are in truth what we call "wealth." For a man to have a loving wife and companion and visa versa; and for them to raise their children; and to create and have a hearth and home and family together and for them to continue to reinvest themselves with each other in a loving relationship amid and through all the multitude of difficulties and challenges they may face individually and together in this world is truly real "wealth." -- Rick Strunk % It is crucial to know when it is appropriate to withdraw our attention from things that disturb our mind. However, if the only way we know how to deal with certain objects is to avoid them, there will be a severe limit as to how far our spiritual practice can take us. -- Lama Thubten Yeshe % Not by harming life does one become noble. One is termed noble for being gentle to all living things. -- Dhammapada % There must be more to life than having everything. -- Maurice Sendak % There is pleasure when a sore is scratched, But to be without sores is more pleasurable still. Just so, there are pleasures in worldly desires, But to be without desires is more pleasurable still. -- Nagarjuna % When you cannot make up your mind between two evenly balanced courses of action, choose the bolder. -- W.J. Slim % The TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side. -- Hunter S. Thompson % It is precisely because our present life is so inseparably linked with desire that we must make use of desire's tremendous energy if we wish to transform our life into something transcendental. -- Lama Thubten Yeshe % The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one. -- Russell Lynes % You can have it all. You just can't have it all at one time. -- Oprah Winfrey % There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who know binary and those who do not. -- Unknown % Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. -- Pablo Picasso % I never think of the future. It comes soon enough. -- Albert Einstein % The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. -- Max De Pree (former CEO, Herman Miller Furniture) % We probably wouldn't worry about what people think of us if we could know how seldom they do. -- Olin Miller % To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage. -- Henri Matisse % You can confront the prospect of your own death and try to analyze it and, in so doing, try to minimize some of the inevitable sufferings it causes. Neither way can you actually overcome it. However, as a Buddhist, I view death as a normal process of life... Knowing that I cannot escape it, I see no point in worrying about it. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Pain is inevitable, suffering is not. -- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana % People are like stained glass windows: they sparkle and shine when the sun's out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is light within. -- Elizabeth Kubler-Ross % Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending. -- Carl Bard % Even in the case of individuals, there is no possibility to feel happiness through anger. If in a difficult situation one becomes disturbed internally, overwhelmed by mental discomfort, then external things will not help at all. However, if despite external difficulties or problems, internally one's attitude is of love, warmth, and kindheartedness, then problems can be faced and accepted. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % The miracle is this--the more we share, the more we have.-- Leonard Nimoy % If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a month, get married. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help others. -- Chinese proverb % Remember the clear light, the pure clear white light from which everything in the universe comes, to which everything in the universe returns; the original nature of your own mind. The natural state of the universe unmanifest. Let go into the clear light, trust it, merge with it. It is your own true nature, it is home. -- Tibetan Book of the Dead % The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet. -- James Oppenheim % The test of humility is your attitude to subordinates. -- Orhot Tzaddikim % People get so in the habit of worry that if you save them from drowning and put them on a bank to dry in the sun with hot chocolate and muffins, they wonder whether they are catching cold. -- John Jay Chapman % Life is a roller-coaster. Try to eat a light lunch. -- David Schmaltz % This body... is perishable, consciousness is of a nature to dissolve, and all objects of clinging are impermanent, suffering and subject to change. -- Itivuttaka % Live in joy, in love, even among those who hate. Live in joy, in health, even among the afflicted. Live in joy, in peace, even among the troubled. Look within. Be still. Free from fear and attachment, Know the sweet joy of the way. -- Dhammapada % Not to do any evil, to cultivate good, to purify one's mind - This is the advice of the Buddhas. -- Dhammapada % Love and time - those are the only two things in all the world and all of life that cannot be bought, but only spent. -- Gary Jennings % A loyal friend laughs at your jokes when they're not so good, and sympathizes with your problems when they're not so bad. -- Arnold Glasgow % Today's troubles make us forget yesterday's. -- Ahad Ha'am % Our only security is our ability to change.-- John Lilly % Abandon wrongdoing. It can be done. If there were no likelihood, I would not ask you to do it. But since it is possible and since it brings blessing and happiness, I do ask of you: abandon wrongdoing. Cultivate doing good. It can be done. If it brought deprivation and sorrow, I would not ask you to do it. But since it brings blessing and happiness, I do ask of you: cultivate doing good. -- Anguttara Nikaya % Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either. -- Golda Meir % Those of superior faculties and great wisdom get the point right off the bat - guidance doesn't mean gum-beating and lip-flapping. Truly awakened people with clear eyes would just laugh. The great masters of India and China only met mind to mind - from the first, there was never any "mind" to attain. But if you make a rationale of mindlessness, that is the same as having a certain mentality. -- Ying-an % Ideas are a dime a dozen. People who implement them are priceless. -- Mary Kay Ash % Neither from itself nor from another, Nor from both, Nor without a cause, Does anything whatever, anywhere arise. -- Nagarjuna % The person who is willing to say yes to experience is the person who discovers new frontiers. -- John Marks Templeton % Few cross over the river. Most are stranded on this side. On the riverbank they run up and down. But the wise person, following the way, Crosses over, beyond the reach of death. Free from desire, Free from possessions, Free from attachment and appetite, Following the seven lights of awakening, And rejoicing greatly in his freedom, In this world the wise person Becomes themselves a light, Pure, shining, free. -- Dhammapada % The threshold between right and wrong is pain. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair. -- Chinese proverb % A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. -- Patton % The purpose of all the major religious traditions is not to construct big temples on the outside, but to create temples of goodness and compassion inside, in our hearts. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % There is no fire like greed, No crime like hatred, No sorrow like separation, No sickness like hunger of heart, And no joy like the joy of freedom. Health, contentment and trust Are your greatest possessions, And freedom your greatest joy. Look within. Be still. Free from fear and attachment, Know the sweet joy of living in the way. -- Dhammapada % Let a person be a light to himself and learn wisdom. When he is free from delusion, he will go beyond birth and death. No one whose thoughts are only of this world can be a follower of the awakened. All things in this world are changing, but enlightenment remains forever. -- Dhammapada % When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other. -- Chinese proverb % All the faults of our mind - our selfishness, ignorance, anger, attachment, guilt, and other disturbing thoughts - are temporary, not permanent and everlasting. And since the cause of our suffering - our disturbing thoughts and obscurations - is temporary, our suffering is also temporary. -- Lama Zopa Rinpoche % Tell me whom you love, and I will tell you who you are. -- Houssaye % To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it. -- G. K. Chesterton % There are two kinds of people: those who do the work, and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there. -- Indira Gandhi % The most beautiful thing man can do is to forgive. -- Eleazar ben Judah % Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has. -- Margaret Mead % More people would learn from their mistakes if they weren't so busy denying them. -- Harold J. Smith % Better to lease one garden and cultivate it than to lease many and neglect them. -- Eccclesiastes Rabbah % Teach your tongue to say, "I do not know," lest you be led to lie. -- Talmud % A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. -- Herm Albright % Half an hour's meditation each day is essential, except when you are busy. Then a full hour is needed. -- St. Francis de Sales % Give me a fruitful error anytime, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. -- Vilfredo Pareto % When you learn not to want things so badly, life comes to you. -- Jessica Lange % We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give. -- Winston Churchill % It happened that a fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to inform the public. They thought it was just a jest and applauded. He repeated his warning, they shouted even louder. So I think the world will come to an end amid general applause from all the wits, who believe that it is a joke. -- Soren Kierkegaard % The only people to get even with are those who have helped you. -- Anonymous % "Information wants to be free." -- Stewart Brand (?) "Code wants to be wrong." -- Bob Blakley % When you ride in a boat and watch the shore, you might assume that the shore is moving. But when you keep your eyes closely on the boat, you can see that the boat moves. Similarly, if you examine myriad things with a confused body and mind you might suppose that your mind and nature are permanent. When you practice intimately and return to where you are, it will be clear that nothing at all has unchanging self. -- Zen Master Dogen % A man should not act as a judge either for someone he loves or for someone he hates. For no man can see the guilt of someone he loves or the good qualities in someone he hates. -- Talmud % There are too many things in this world to be learned, and life is too short to learn everything, so we should complete that which we have begun rather than dabbling in many things. -- Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey % Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. -- Aristotle % Follow the sage who rebukes you for your faults, as you would follow a guide to some buried treasure. If you stay with this sort of sage, things get better, not worse. -- Dhammapada % The path to material gain goes one way, the way to Unbinding, another. Realizing this, the monk, a disciple to the Awakened One, should not relish offerings, should cultivate seclusion instead. -- Dhammapada % We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world. -- Helen Keller % Anger or hatred is like a fisherman's hook. It is very important for us to ensure that we are not caught by it. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % When there are too many policemen, there can be no liberty; When there are too many soldiers, there can be no peace; When there are too many lawyers, there can be no justice. -- Lin Yutang % With a free mind, in no debt, enjoy what has been given to you. -- Therigatha % You are now like a yellowed leaf. Already Yama's minions stand near. You stand at the door to departure but have yet to provide for the journey. Make an island for yourself! Work quickly! Be wise! With impurities all blown away, unblemished, you'll reach the divine realm of the noble ones. -- Dhammapada % If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. -- Thomas A. Edison % First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Mahatma Gandhi % The very purpose of our life is happiness, the very motion of our lives is toward happiness. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. -- William Faulkner % We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. -- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin % Learn as if you were going to live forever. Live as if you were going to die tomorrow. -- Mahatma Gandhi % Get into the habit of dancing. It will displace depression and dispel hardship. -- Rabbi Nachman of Breslov % The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, "What are you going through?" -- Simone Weil % Say little but do much. -- Pirke Avot % Once in a century a man may be ruined or made insufferable by praise. But surely once in a minute something generous dies for want of it. -- John Masefield % Old age, to the unlearned, is winter; to the learned, it's harvest time. -- Yiddish proverb % To cling to oneself as Buddha, oneself as Zen or the way, making that an understanding, is called clinging to the inward view. Attainment by causes and conditions, practice and realization, is called the outward view. Master Pao-chih said, "The inward view and the outward view are both mistaken." -- Pai-chang % Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. -- Scott Adams % To have your mind set on calmness, you must take power over sleepiness, drowsiness and lethargy. There is no place for laziness and no recourse for pride. -- Sutta-nipata % Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better. -- Albert Camus % Everything comes to pass, nothing comes to stay. -- Matthew Flickstein % Wonder, rather than doubt, is the root of knowledge. -- Abraham Joshua Heschel % A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do. -- Bob Dylan % If you yourself are at peace, then there is at least some peace in the world. -- Thomas Merton % We can do no great things...only small things with great love. -- Mother Teresa % Laughter is an instant vacation.-- Milton Berle % One of the secrets of a long and fruitful life is to forgive everybody, everything, every night before you go to bed. -- Bernard M. Baruch % The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others -- Vincent Van Gogh % There's a difference between a philosophy and a bumper sticker. -Charles Schulz % A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time. -George Iles % The multitude of books is making us ignorant. -- Voltaire % A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave. -- Mahatma Gandhi % The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands. -- Robert M. Pirsig % Experience is what we call the accumulation of our mistakes. -- Yiddish proverb % Don't let the fear of striking out hold you back. -- Babe Ruth % Indulge in lust a little, and like the child it grows apace. The wise man hates it therefore; who would take poison for food? Every sorrow is increased and cherished by the offices of lust. If there is no lustful desire, the risings of sorrow are not produced, the wise man seeing the bitterness of sorrow, stamps out and destroys the risings of desire. -- Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King % He who, for the sake of learning, lowers himself by exposing his ignorance, will ultimately be elevated. -- Talmud % There are no shortcuts to any place worth going. -- Beverly Sills % Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. % As from a large heap of flowers many garlands and wreaths are made, so by a mortal in this life there is much good work to be done. -- Buddha % Regard as trifling the great good you did to others, and as enormous the little good others did to you. -- Talmud % Overcome your uncertainties and free yourself from dwelling on sorrow. If you delight in existence, you will become a guide to those who need you, revealing the path to many. -- Sutta Nipata % Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn't. -- Erica Jong % If the words "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" don't include the right to experiment with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't worth the hemp it was written on. -- Terence McKenna % It really puzzles me to see marijuana connected with narcotics dope and all of that stuff. It is a thousand times better than whiskey. It is an assistant and a friend. -- Louis Armstrong % Worldly desires are like sunbeams in a dark room. They seem solid until you try to grasp one. -- Rabbi Nachman of Breslov % There is no true justice unless mercy is part of it. -- Zohar % Hearing is one of the body's five senses. But listening is an art. -Frank Tyger % To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it. -- Confucius % He who forgives ends the quarrel. -- African proverb % A man is only as good as what he loves. -- Saul Bellow % Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it. -- Maimonides % The one who is very attached to the cave of the body, that one finds detachment very difficult. Those who constantly crave for pleasure are hard to liberate and certainly cannot be liberated by others, only by themselves. Sometimes it is only death that brings a realization of endings, and then the sensual person, deeply immersed in the body, will shout: "What will happen to me after death?" The way toward liberation is to train yourself to live in the present without any wanting to become anything. Give up becoming this or that, live without cravings, and experience this present moment with full attention. Then you will not cringe at death nor seek for repeated birth. -- Sutta Nipata % There are two ways to look at life. One is as though nothing is a miracle; the other is as though everything is. -- Albert Einstein % The ultimate result of your knowledge of God should be the conviction that of His real essence you are completely ignorant. -- Bahya % To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end in life. -- Baruch Spinoza % Whatever happiness is in the world has arisen from a wish for the welfare of others; whatever misery there is has arisen from indulging selfishness. -- Buddhist Proverb % There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. -- Aldous Huxley % I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. % Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is like expecting the bull not to charge you because you are a vegetarian. -- Rabbi Harold Kushner % Observe the wonders as they occur around you. Don't claim them. Feel the artistry moving through and be silent. -- Rumi % Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature. Life is either a daring adventure, or it is nothing. -- Helen Keller % Those who want much, are always much in need. -- Horace % Reality as it is becomes the right view of the meditator. Thinking of it as it is becomes the right thought. Awareness of it as it is becomes the right awareness. Concentration on it as it is becomes the right concentration. Actions of the body and speech are then aligned to reality as it is. In this way the meditator develops and is fulfilled. -- Majjhima Nikaya % Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward. -- Vernon Law % To be a person of truth, be swayed neither by approval nor disapproval. Work at not needing approval from anyone and you will be free to be who you really are. -- Rabbi Nachman of Breslov % He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have. -- Socrates % Who is rich? One who is happy with what he has. -- Pirke Avot % Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty. -- Socrates % True contentment is a real, even an active virtue-not only affirmative but creative. It is the power of getting out of any situation all there is in it. -- G. K. Chesterton % Contentment makes poor men rich; discontentment makes rich men poor. -- Ben Franklin % Riches are not from abundance of worldly goods, but from a contented mind. -- Mohammed % Contentment that derives from knowing when to be content is eternal contentment. ` -- Lao Tzu % If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning. -- Catherine Aird % There are four bases of sympathy: charity, kind speech, doing a good turn, and treating all alike. -- Buddha % Love wholeheartedly, be surprised, give thanks and praise - then you will discover the fullness of your life. -- Brother David Steindl-Rast % A person should be more concerned with spiritual than with material matters, but another person's material welfare is his own spiritual concern. -- Rabbi Israel Salanter % Man improves himself as he follows his path; if he stands still, waiting to improve before he makes a decision, he'll never move. -- Paulo Coelho % Just as from a heap of flowers many garland strands can be made, even so one born and mortal should do - with what's born and is mortal -- many a skillful thing. -- Dhammapada % To please all is an impossible aim, and to escape some criticism is an unattainable goal. -- M. Ibn Ezra % Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson % Before you speak, ask yourself, is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence? -- Sai Baba % First of all, do not predefine understanding, and do not make a principle of non-understanding. -- Ying-an % Putting down all barriers, let your mind be full of love. Let it pervade all the quarters of the world so that the whole wide world, above, below, and around, is pervaded with love. Let it be sublime and beyond measure so that it abounds everywhere. -- Digha Nikaya % Every exit is an entry somewhere else. -- Tom Stoppard % It's the things in common that make relationships enjoyable, but it's the little differences that make them interesting. -- Todd Ruthman % The ultimate source of peace in the family, the country, and the world is altruism. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. -- Philo % Growth in wisdom may be exactly measured by decrease in bitterness. -- Nietzsche % Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever. -- Albert Einstein % It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. -- Voltaire % How rare and wonderful is that flash of a moment when we realize we have discovered a friend. -- William Rostler % "He insulted me, he hurt me, he defeated me, he robbed me." Those who think such things will not be free from hate. -- Buddha % Seek the good in everyone, and reveal it, bring it forth. -- Rabbi Nachman of Breslov % He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses. -- Horace % It is by attempting to reach the top at a single leap that so much misery is caused in the world. -- William Cobbett % The Buddha was asked: "To what extent can a person be a speaker of the way?" He answered: "If a person teaches the way in order to transcend the tyranny of material things and to teach how to transcend feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness - teaching nonattachment with regard to these - then that person can be called a speaker of the way. If he is himself trying to transcend the pull of the material world and to feel nonattachment toward it, then it is fitting to say he is living in accordance with the way. If he is liberated by this transcendence and nonattachment, then you can say he has found nirvana here and now. -- Samyutta Nikaya % "Here I'll stay for the rains. Here, for the summer and winter." So imagines the fool, unaware of obstructions. That drunk-on-his-sons-and-cattle man, all tangled up in the mind: death sweeps him away - as a great flood, a village asleep. -- Dhammapada % The first step towards the solution of any problem is optimism. -- John Baines % Rest is a state of peace between man and nature....Work is a symbol of conflict and discord; rest is an expression of dignity, peace, and freedom. -- Erich Fromm % It isn't hard to be good from time to time. What's tough is being good every day. -- Willie Mays % It is often though that the Buddha's doctrine teaches us that suffering will disappear if one has meditated long enough, or if one sees everything differently. It is not that at all. Suffering isn't going to go away; the one who suffers is going to go away. -- Ayya Khema % Hope is like a road in the country; there wasn't ever a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence. -- Lin Yutang % When we say, "I take refuge in the Buddha," we should also understand that "The Buddha takes refuge in me," because without the second part the first part is not complete. The Buddha needs us for awakening, understanding, and love to be real things and not just concepts. They must be real things that have real effects on life. Whenever I say, "I take refuge in the Buddha," I hear "the Buddha takes refuge in me." -- Thich Nhat Hanh % Even as a great rock is not shaken by the wind, the wise man is not shaken by praise or blame. -- Buddha % Vision looks inward and becomes duty. Vision looks outward and becomes aspiration. Vision looks upward and becomes faith. -- Rabbi Stephen S. Wise % If happiness hasn't been recognized when alone, a group of people will be a cause of distraction. -- Adept Godrakpa % What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson % Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage. -- Anais Nin % The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook. -- William James % When desires go, joy comes. -- Buddha % The world is a great book; he who never stirs from home, reads only a page. -- Saint Augustine % In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior. -- Sir Francis Bacon % Desires must be purified and idealized, not exterminated. -- Rav Eliyahu of Vilna (The Vilma Gaon) % Fortune and love befriend the bold. -- Ovid % Living in forests far away from other people is not true seclusion. True seclusion is to be free from the power of likes and dislikes. It is also to be free from the mental attitude that one must be special because one is treading the path. Those who remove themselves to far forests often feel superior to others. They think that because they are solitary they are being guided in a special way and that those who live an ordinary life can never have that experience. But that is conceit and is not help to others. The true recluse is one who is available to others, helping them with affectionate speech and personal example. -Prajnaparamita % A father's love is for his children; the children's love is for their children. -- Talmud % False ideals cannot be shattered by criticism. Right ideals must take up the battle against them. -- Franz Werfel % The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. -- Joseph Campbell % The non-doing of evil things is a blessing. -- Dhammapada % The more a man knows, the more he forgives. -- Confucius % Our first priority should be to prepare a long-term strategy for improving the state of the world that focuses on the coming generations. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % For fast acting relief, try slowing down. -- Lily Tomlin % To fight fear, act. To increase fear - wait, put off, postpone. -- David J. Schwartz % The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it. -- Chinese proverb % A shortcoming of desire is that it leads to so much that is undesirable. -- Lama Zopa Rinpoche % Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and of true progress. -- Nicholas Murray Butler % Even a poor man who himself survives on charity should give charity. -- Talmud % There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it. -- Edith Wharton % Adopting an attitude of universal responsibility is essentially a personal matter. The real test of compassion is not what we say in abstract discussions but how we conduct ourselves in daily life. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Forget mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day. -- Will Durant % In pursuit of happiness, the difficulty lies in knowing when you have caught up. -- R.H. Grenville % It is good to make a habit of inspiring yourself with a melody, for the loftiness of melody is beyond all measure. -- Rabbi Nachman of Breslov % When you take things it is because of a thirst, a clinging, and a grasping. You should lose that and lose it altogether, above, below, around, and within. It makes no difference what it is you are grasping. When you grasp, you are losing your freedom. Realize this and grasp at nothing. Then you will cease being a creature of attachment, tied to the powers of death. -- Buddha % If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine. -- Morris West % A name is imposed on what is thought to be a thing or a state and this divides it from other things and other states. But when you pursue what lies behind the name, you find a greater and greater subtlety that has no divisions. Atoms of dust are not really atoms of dust but are merely called that. In the same way, a world is not a world but is merely called that. -- Visuddhi Magga % It is better for my enemy to see good in me than for me to see evil in him. -- Yiddish proverb % Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling. -- Margaret Lee Runbeck % Abandoning malicious speech, he abstains from malicious speech; he does not repeat elsewhere what he has heard here in order to divide (those people) from these, nor does he repeat to these people what he has heard elsewhere in order to divide (these people) from those; thus he is one who reunites those who are divided, a promoter of friendships, who enjoys concord, rejoices in concord, delights in concord, a speaker of words that promote concord. -- Majjhima Nikaya % Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy. -- Thich Nhat Hanh % Cheerfulness and contentment are great beautifiers and are famous preservers of youthful looks. -- Charles Dickens % All tremble when there is a weapon, Everyone fears death; Feeling for others as for oneself, one should neither kill nor cause to kill. -- Dhammapada % The ideal of man is to be a revelation himself, clearly to recognize himself as a manifestation of God. -- Baal Shem Tov % Forgiveness means giving up all hope of a better past. -- Landrum Bolling % As in a pile of rubbish cast by the side of a highway a lotus might grow clean-smelling pleasing the heart, So in the midst of the rubbish-like people, run-of-the-mill and blind, there dazzles with discernment the disciple of the Rightly Self Awakened One. -- Dhammapada % I have no particular taste for post-mortem immortality. I am immortal now, while I am gloriously alive. -- Rabbi Joel Blau % The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise. -- Aiden Nowlan % It is the lot of man to suffer, it is also his fortune to forget. -- Benjamin Disraeli % All the delightful things of the world - sweet sounds, lovely forms, all the pleasant tastes and touches and thoughts - these are all agreed to bring happiness if they are not grasped and possessed. But if you regard them merely as pleasures for your own use and satisfaction and do not see them as passing wonders, they will bring suffering. -- Sutta Nipata % There is no reason why the profoundest thoughts should not make easy and exciting reading. A profound thought is an exciting thing - as exciting as a detective's deductions or hunches. The simpler the words in which a thought is expressed, the more stimulating its effect. -- Eric Hoffer % Perhaps people throw themselves into heated polemics to give content to their lives, to warm their hearts. What Luther said of hatred is true of all quarreling. There is nothing like a feud to make life seem full and interesting. -- Eric Hoffer % It is not good for our efforts at self-realization to know the opinions other people have of us. It is difficult or perhaps impossible to be ourselves if we are known. -- Eric Hoffer % To think of one's self the first thing in the morning and last thing before falling asleep constitutes a most dejecting routine. There is a felling of lowness about it all. Our preoccupation with thought and with problems, of whatever nature, is a climb up a steep incline. When we slip and hit bottom we are left with the sole preoccupation with the self. -- Eric Hoffer % What a rich year it could be if every day precipitated even a mere crumb's worth of keeping. -- Eric Hoffer % To expect others to help me think seems to me almost like expecting them to help me digest my food. -- Eric Hoffer % We deal with the truth as the cook deals with meat and vegetables. -- Eric Hoffer % A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought. There is no thought, however momentous, that cannot be expressed lucidly in 200 words. -- Eric Hoffer % There is hardly a single instance of cultural vigor marked by moderation in expression. -- Eric Hoffer % Our doubts about ourselves cannot be banished except by working at that which is the one and only thing we know we ought to do. Other people's assertions cannot silence the howling dirge within us. It is our talents rusting unusued within us that secrete the poison of self-doubt into our bloodstream. -- Eric Hoffer % We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact; indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion. -- Eric Hoffer % The man of words feels better when the man of action comes to grief. There is not the least doubt that depressions have been good for the intellectual's soul. -- Eric Hoffer % To overestimate the originality of one's thoughts is perhaps a less serious defect than being unaware of their newness. There is a more pronounced lack of sensitivity in underestimating (ourselves and others) than in overestimating. -- Eric Hoffer % The only key in deciphering others is our self, and considering how obscure this self is and how dim our awareness of it, the use of it as a key in deciphering others is like using hieroglyphs to decipher hieroglyphs. -- Eric Hoffer % How quickly does anything we understand become stale. Perhaps this is a malady of a certain season of life. -- Eric Hoffer % Total innovation is a flight from comparison and also from imitation. Those who discover things for themselves and express them in their own way are not overly bothered by the fact that others have already discovered these things - have even discovered them over and over again - and have expressed what they found in all manner of ways. -- Eric Hoffer % What counts most is holding on. The growth of a train of thought is not a direct forward flow. There is a succession of spurts separated by intervals of stagnation, frustration, and discouragement. If you hold on, there is bound to come a certain clarification. The unessential components drop off and a coherenet, lucid whole begins to take shape. -- Eric Hoffer % A good sentence is a key. It unlocks the mind of the reader. -- Eric Hoffer % Some people have no original ideas because they do not think well enough of themselves to consider their ideas worth noticing and developing. -- Eric Hoffer % The thing that matters is not what you bear, but how you bear it. -- Seneca % Theology: that madness gone systematic which tries to crowd God's fulness into a formula and a system! -- Rabbi Joel Blau % God will pardon: that's His business. -- Heinrich Heine, dying (1856) % This body is not yours, nor does it belong to others. It should be seen as the product of the whole of history. In regard to it the wise person will reflect on the nature of conditioning, saying: If this comes into being, that will arise; if this does not come into being, that will not arise. -- Samyutta Nikaya % If you are doing your best, you will not have time to worry about failure. -- Robert Hillyer % If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change. -- Buddha % Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree. -- Marian Wright Edelman % Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them? -- Abraham Lincoln % All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. -- Martin Buber % In the pursuit of happiness, the difficulty lies in knowing when you have caught up. -- R.H. Grenville % Inbox-clogging e-mailed commercial come-ons about presumed need aside, the premature ejaculation online society most requires help with is of written nature - it's a mail problem, not a male problem. -- Barbara Mikkelson % Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly. -- Langston Hughes % The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good. -- Samuel Johnson % Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor. -- Sholom Aleichem % Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald % All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. % By amending our mistakes, we get wisdom. By defending our faults, we betray an unsound mind. -- The Sutra of Hui Neng % An act of meditation is actually an act of faith - of faith in your spirit, in your own potential. Faith is the basis of meditation. Not of faith in something outside you - a metaphysical buddha, an unattainable ideal, or someone else's words. The faith is in yourself, in your own "buddha-nature." You too can be a buddha, an awakened being that lives and responds in a wise, creative, and compassionate way. -- Martine Batchelor % Whatever your problem, define it clearly in writing before attempting to solve it. -- Brian Tracy % When you know clearly what you want, you'll wake up every morning excited about life. -- Mark Victor Hansen % Communication starts with intention... as your intentions will be felt long before your message is heard... -- Doug Firebaugh % The substance of your communication is the response it generates. -- Tony Jeary % Lose your greed for pleasure. See how letting go of the world brings deep tranquility. There is nothing you need hold on to and nothing you need push away. Live in the present but do not cling to it and then you can go from place to place in peace. There is a state of greed that enters and dominates the individual. But when that greed has gone, it is like poison leaving a body and death will have no more terror for you. -- Buddha % There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win. -- Elie Wiesel % That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest. -- Thoreau % If your mind becomes firm like a rock, And no longer shakes In a world where everything is shaking, Your mind will be your greatest friend And suffering will not come your way. -- Theragatha % When tranquility is developed, what purpose does it serve? The mind is developed. And when the mind is developed, what purpose does it serve? Passion is abandoned. When insight is developed, what purpose does it serve? Discernment is developed. And when discernment is developed, what purpose does it serve? Ignorance is abandoned. -- Anguttara Nikaya % Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment - the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is. -- Jorge Luis Borges % The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desire brings weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat. -- Napoleon Hill % In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer. -- Albert Camus % Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion. -- Jim Rohn % The only competition you will ever have is the competition between your disciplined and undisciplined mind. -- James A. Ray % Those who are powerless and under the control of karma and delusion are unable to benefit themselves or attain their own purposes. Worldly people are completely unable to make their lives meaningful. Therefore, I shall practice what is wholesome for the benefit of all sentient beings. While others are engaged in inferior and menial tasks in which they encounter many difficulties, how can I sit here at peace and do nothing? I must and shall benefit them, but without ever succumbing to the poison of self-importance. -- Santideva % I always give much away, and so gather happiness instead of pleasure. -- Rahel Levin Varnhagen % Anybody can become angry - that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy. -- Aristotle % Calmness is the cradle of power. -- Josiah Gilbert Holland % It is the first duty of friendship to preserve a friend's illusions. -- Arthur Schnitzler % Don't be afraid of doing good. It's another name for happiness, for all that is dear and delightful - this phrase "doing good." -- Itivuttaka Sutta % Desires achieved increase thirst like salt water. -- Milarepa % It is necessary to cultivate some discipline of mind, for an undisciplined mind always finds excuses to act selfishly and thoughtlessly. When the mind is undisciplined, the body is also undisciplined, and so is speech and action. -- Anguttara Nikaya % Living with a fool, one grieves a long time. Painful is communion with fools, as with an enemy - always. Happy is communion with the enlightened, as with a gathering of kin. -- Dhammapada % Do not think of studying Buddhism in order to gain some advantage as a reward for practicing Buddhism. -- Dogen % You don't have to see the whole staircase; just that the first step. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. % Realize that life is a situation comedy that will never be canceled. A laugh track has been provided, and the reason why we are put in the material world is to get more material. -- "Swami Beyondananda" % See it as a bubble, See it as a mirage; One who regards the world this way, the King of Death doesn't see. Come, look at this world, all decked out like a royal chariot, where fools plunge in, while those who know don't cling. -- Dhammapada % Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn't learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn't learn a little, at least we didn't get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn't die; so, let us be thankful. -- Buddha % A hundred times a day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving. -- Albert Einstein % The teaching about the way things are is not a way to enlightenment for someone who is still filled with desires or who still longs to be this or that. But those who do understand it will become beings of distinction, dispersing all the forces of confusion. -- Sutta Nipata % There simply is nothing to which we can attach ourselves, no matter how hard we try. In time, things will change and the conditions that produced our current desires will be gone. Why then cling to them now? -- Master Hsing Yun % How very happily we live, free from busyness among those who are busy. Among busy people, free from busyness we dwell. -- Dhammapada % Without love we could not survive. Human beings are social creatures, and a concern for each other is the very basis of our life together. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Words which come from the heart enter the heart. -- Moses Ibn Ezra % Wealth is affliction disguised as a good. -- Bahya % Discontent is the source of trouble, but also of progress. -- Berthold Auerbach % You will become as small as your controlling desire, or as great as your dominant aspiration. -- James Allen % I think that fortune watcheth o'er our lives, surer than we. But well said: he who strives will find his goals strive for him equally. -- Euripides % Emphasize everything and you emphasize nothing. -- Herschell Gordon Lewis % Everything depends upon execution; having just a vision is no solution. -- Stephen Sondheim % Some people plant in the spring and leave in the summer. If you've signed up for a season, see it through. You don't have to stay forever, but at least stay until you see it through. -- Jim Rohn % Man is wise only while in search of wisdom; when he imagines he has attained it, he is a fool. -- Solomon Ibn Gabirol % What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. -- T.S. Eliot % All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small. -- Lao Tzu % He that waits upon fortune, is never sure of a dinner. -- Benjamin Franklin % People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball. I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring. -- Rogers Hornsby % I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure--which is: Try to please everybody. -- Herbert Swope % Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. -- Melody Beattie % The more you recognize and express gratitude for the things you have, the more things you will have to express gratitude for. -- Zig Ziglar % Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues but the parent of all others. -- Marcus Cicero % There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt % Maturity is the capacity to endure uncertainty. -- John Finley % We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be. -- May Sarton % Let a person rejoice when he is confronted with obstacles, for it means that he has reached the end of some particular line of indifference or folly, and is now called upon to summon up all his energy and intelligence in order to extricate himself, and to find a better way; that the powers within him are crying out for greater freedom, for enlarged exercise and scope. -- James Allen % Hostilities aren't stilled through hostility, regardless. Hostilities are stilled through non-hostility: this, an unending truth. -- Dhammapada % Cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual serenity. -- Joseph Addison % Happiness is essentially a state of going somewhere, whole-heartedly, one-directionally, without regret or reservation. -- William H. Sheldon % The days that make us happy make us wise. -- John Masefield % Always be happy, never be satisfied. -- Mark McKeon % Just as a monkey roaming through the forest grabs hold of one branch, lets that go and grabs another, then lets go and grabs still another, so too that which is called "mind" and "mentality" and "consciousness" arises as one thing and ceases as another by day and by night. -- Buddha % Take heed that when effort is too strenuous it leads to strain and when too slack to laziness. So make a firm determination that you will adopt the middle way, not allowing yourself to struggle or to slacken, but recognizing that faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom are the fruits of a calm and equable way. -- Theragatha % All human wisdom is summed up in two words - wait and hope. -- Alexander Dumas % Whenever hope and illusion become the source of the will to live, all knowledge of reality becomes highly threatening, since at any time a new piece of information might remove the grounds for this hope. When life is motivated by hope for improvement, denial of reality is necessarily renewed and fortified. -- Christina Thurmer-Rohr % If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace. -- John Lennon % You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit. -- Harry S. Truman % Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact. -- George Eliot % The more you practice the three trainings of ethics, meditation, and wisdom, the more difficult it will become for you to act in a way that is contrary to an ethical, compassionate attitude. Ethics arise naturally out of contemplating the three trainings. -- Martine Batchelor % Someone asked T'ou-tzu, "How is it when there is no mistake moment to moment?" T'ou-tzu said, "Bragging." -- "The Pocket Zen Reader," ed. Thomas Cleary % I have learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but they will never forget how 'You' made them Feel -- Maya Angelou % The truly successful person inspires others to do more than they have thought possible for themselves. -- Denis Waitley % Surround yourself with people most like the person you want to become. Stay away from anyone who can or will bring you down. -- Tom Hopkins % All beings are by nature Buddha, as ice by nature is water. Apart from water there is no ice; apart from beings, no Buddha. -- Hakuin Zenji % Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. -- George S. Patton % There is no reward for following the commandments in this world. -- Talmud % If you think, "I breathe," the "I" is extra. There is no you to say "I." What we call "I" is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves; that is all. When your mind is pure and calm enough to follow this movement, there is nothing: no "I," no world, no mind nor body; just a swinging door. -- Shunryu Suzuki % Hunger: the foremost illness. Fabrications: the foremost pain. For one knowing this truth as it actually is, unbinding is the foremost ease. Freedom from illness: the foremost good fortune. Contentment: the foremost wealth. Trust: the foremost kinship. Unbinding: the foremost ease. -- Dhammapada % The amount of satisfaction you get from life depends largely on your own ingenuity, self-sufficiency, and resourcefulness. People who wait around for life to supply their satisfaction usually find boredom instead. -- Dr. William Menninger % The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson % In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. -- Abraham Lincoln % Resistance does not mean walls and fences, nonresistance does not mean open space. If you can understand in this way, mind and matter are fundamentally the same. -- Tsu-hsin % Use what talents you possess. The woods would be very silent if no birds ang there except those that sang best. -- Henry Van Dyke % Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain cool and unruffled under all circumstances. -- Thomas Jefferson % With more success, comes greater problems along with greater ability to solve them. -- Mark Victor Hansen % You can't think your way into acting positively, but you can act your way into thinking positively. -- Nido Qubein % Love is a better master than duty. -- Albert Einstein % Just think how happy you'd be if you lost everything and everyone you have right now, and then, somehow got everything back again. -- Kobi Yamada % Some day people will learn that material things do not bring happiness and are of little use in making people creative and powerful. -- Charles Steinmetz % All those who suffer in the world do so because of their desire for their own happiness. All those happy in the world are so because of their desire for the happiness of others. -- Bodhicaryavatara % Better than if there were thousands of meaningless words is one meaningful word that on hearing brings peace. -- Dhammapada % What looks like a loss may be the every event which is subsequently responsible for helping to produce the major achievement of your life. -- Srully D. Blotnick % I never see failure as failure, but only as the game I must play to win. -- Tom Hopkins % Meditate on that which is beyond words and symbols. Forsake the demands of the self. By such forsaking you will live serenely. -- Sutta Nipata % Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it. -- Helen Keller % Monks, we who look at the whole and not just the part, know that we too are systems of interdependence, of feelings, perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness all interconnected. Investigating in this way, we come to realize that there is no me or mine in any one part, just as a sound does not belong to any one part of the lute. -- Samyutta Nikaya % The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions. -- Alfred Lord Tennyson % Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, "This is the real me," and when you have found that attitude, follow it. -- William James % Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson % Contrary to what some people might believe, there is nothing wrong with having pleasures and enjoyments. What is wrong is the confused way we grasp onto these pleasures, turning them from a source of happiness into a source of pain and dissatisfaction. -- Lama Thubten Yeshe % The mistake we make is when we seek to be loved, instead of loving. -- Charlotte Yonge % When you are behaving as if you love someone, you will presently come to love him. -- C. S. Lewis % Compassion is characterized as promoting the aspect of allaying suffering. Its function resides in not [enduring] others' suffering. It is manifested as non-cruelty. Its proximate cause is to see helplessness in those overwhelmed by suffering. It succeeds when it makes cruelty subside, and it fails when it produces sorrow. -- Buddhaghosa % Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. -- Susan Ertz % In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few. -- Shunryu Suzuki % It is far more delightful to be fond of the world because it has thousands of aspects and is different everywhere...for every divergence deserves to be cherished, simply because it widens the bounds of life. -- Karel Capek % Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will. -- Mahatma Gandhi % Power is so characteristically calm, that calmness in itself has the aspect of strength. -- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton % The power of one is above all things the power to believe in yourself. Often well beyond any latent ability previously demonstrated. The mind is the athlete, the body is simply the means it uses. -- Bryce Courtenay % Although wishing to be rid of misery, they run toward misery itself. Although wishing to have happiness, like an enemy they ignorantly destroy it. -- Santideva % A monk can be very gentle, very peaceful, while there are no hard words to assail him. But when hard words are directed at him, it is then that he must be really gentle and peaceful. -- Majjhima Nikaya % As a cowherd with a rod drives cows to the field, So aging and death drive the life of living beings. -- Dhammapada % Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius. -- Isaac D'Israeli (father of Benjamin Disraeli) % Try to be reasonable in the way you grow, and don't ever think it is too late. It is never too late. Even if you are going to die tomorrow, keep yourself straight and clear and be a happy human being today. If you keep your situation happy day by day, you will eventually reach the greatest happiness of enlightenment. -- Lama Thubten Yeshe % If we are peaceful, if we are happy, we can smile and blossom like a flower, and everyone in our family, our entire society, will benefit from our peace. -- Thich Nhat Hanh % If you want to know the past, to know what has caused you, look at yourself in the present, for that is the past's effect. If you want to know your future, then look at yourself in the present, for that is the cause of the future. -- Majjhima Nikaya % In my own experience, the period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period in one's life. ...Through a difficult period, you can learn, you can develop inner strength, determination, and courage to face the problem. Who gives you this chance? Your enemy. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Fulfillment of desire is an illusion; desire leads to more desire, not satisfaction. -- Kathleen McDonald % But I say and I protest - don't stop your quest while anything further remains to be discovered or done. What further needs to be done? You must train yourselves, saying: "We will become unsullied in our conduct, brilliant and pure. We will neither exalt ourselves nor look down on anyone else." -- Digha Nikaya % By self alone is evil done, by self alone does one suffer. By self alone is evil left undone, by self alone does one obtain Salvation. Salvation and Perdition depend upon self; no man can save another. -- Dhammapada % Management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much. -- Matthew Stewart % Money doesn't talk, it swears. -- Bob Dylan % Money and women. They're two of the strongest things in the world. The things you do for a woman you wouldn't do for anything else. Same with money. -- Satchel Paige % The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on unreasonable men. -- George Bernard Shaw % Leave the mind in its natural, undisturbed state. Don't follow thoughts of "This is a problem, that is a problem!" Without labeling difficulties as problems, leave your mind in its natural state. In this way, you will stop seeing miserable conditions as problems. -- Lama Zopa Rinpoche % Whatsoever a man has renounced, from the sorrow born of that he has freed himself. After a man has renounced, he enjoys the many true things in this World. Let men desiring that renounce in time. -- Tirukkural % Just understand that birth-and-death is itself nirvana. There is nothing such as birth and death to be avoided; there is nothing such as nirvana to be sought. Only when you realize this are you free from birth and death. -- Dogen % If we single-pointedly practice great compassion, then, with little effort, we will be able to gain all other virtues. -- Geshe Namgyal Wangchen % What good is a man's knowledge unless it prompts him to Prevent the pain of others as if it were his own pain? -Tirukkural % Any actions which a man knows would harm himself He should not inflict on others. -Tirukkural % The supreme principle is this: Never knowingly Harm anyone at any time in any way. -Tirukkural % Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. -- Baruch Spinoza % One's little miseries make one realize the more the greater miseries of others. -- Leo Stein % Life is swept along, next-to-nothing its span. For one swept to old age no shelters exist. Perceiving this danger in death, one should drop the world's bait and look for peace. -- Samyutta Nikaya % The best security for old age: respect your children. -- Sholem Asch % Irrigators guide the water. Fletchers shape the arrow shaft. Carpenters shape the wood. The wise control themselves. -- Dhammapada % The ego is like a thin patch of cloud that prevents the sun being seen. If, by the guru's grace, it disperses, then one can see God. -- Ramakrishna % If there were no freedom, beings could never disentangle themselves from the world. But since there is freedom to transcend the world, beings are able to become disentangled. -- Anguttara Nikaya % Half the spiritual life consists in remembering what we are up against and where we are going. -- Ayya Khema % The moon is one, but on agitated water it produces many reflections. Similarly ultimate reality is one, yet it appears to be many in a mind agitated by thoughts. -- Maharamayana % When we are firmly established in nonviolence, all beings around us cease to feel hostility. When we are firmly established in truthfulness, action accomplishes its desired end. When we are firmly established in integrity, all riches present themselves freely. When we are firmly established in chastity, subtle potency is generated. When we are established in nonattachment, the nature and purpose of existence is understood. -- The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali % Enlightenment is a way of saying that all things are seen in their intrinsic empty nature, their Suchness, their ungraspable wonder. Names or words are merely incidental, but that state which sees no division, no duality, is enlightenment. -- Prajnaparamita % Laugh when troubles come your way. There is nothing better to conquer calamity. A flood of troubles will vanish the moment The mind of a wise man collects itself to face them. -- Tirukkural % There are two successive teachings of the Tathagata: See evil as evil, and having seen evil as evil, be rid of it, be detached from it, be freed from it. -- Itivuttaka % The non-doing of any evil, the performance of what's skillful, the cleansing of one's own mind: this is the teaching of the Awakened. -- Dhammapada % There is no fire like greed and no crime like hatred. There is no sorrow like being bound to this world; there is no happiness like freedom. -- Dhammapada % You have to decide at the outset whether you are trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive. -- R. Buckminster Fuller % Without love in the heart, Life is like a sapless tree in a barren desert. What good is a body perfect in outer ways, If inwardly it is impaired by lack of love? With love enshrined in the heart, one lives. Without it, the body is but bone encased in skin. -Tirukkural % The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice. They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith. They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom. -- Rav Abraham Isaac Kook % To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly. -- Dogen % The eradication of the craving for personal separateness is Liberation. -- Sankara % Worthless are those who injure others vengefully, While those who stoically endure are like stored gold. The gratification of the vengeful lasts only for a day, But the glory of the forbearing lasts until the end of time. Though unjustly aggrieved, it is best to suffer the suffering And refrain from unrighteous retaliation. -- Tirukkural % The spiritual perfection of man consists in his becoming an intelligent being -- one who knows all that he is capable of learning. -- Maimonides % Happy is one who knows samsara and nirvana are not two. -- Milarepa % Religions are different roads converging on the same point. What does it matter that we take different roads so long as we reach the same goal? I believe that all religions of the world are true more or less. I say "more or less" because I believe that everything the human hand touches, by reason of the very fact that human beings are imperfect, becomes imperfect. -- Mahatma Gandhi % In becoming an enlightened being, this does not destroy the living being, or take it away, or lose it; nevertheless, it does mean having shed it. -- Dogen % The test of good manners: to bear patiently with bad ones. -- Solomon Ibn Gabirol % Having slain anger, one sleeps soundly; Having slain anger, one does not sorrow; The killing of anger, With its poisoned root and honeyed tip: This is the killing the noble ones praise, For having slain that, one does not sorrow. -- Buddha % Seek the good in everyone, and reveal it, bring it forth. -- Rabbi Nachman of Breslov % Penance is that goodness which refrains from killing. Perfection is that goodness which refuses to tell others' faults. Humility is the strength of the strong and the weapon With which the wise conquer their foes. -- Tirukkural % Prepare for the worst. Hope for the best. Take what comes. -- Hannah Arendt % Love truth, but pardon error. -- Voltaire % When a man's wealth has disappeared, his kinsmen alone Will maintain their customary kindness. If a man's kindred cleave to him with unfailing love, His fortunes will never fail to flourish. -- Tirukkural % It is vital that people "count their blessings" to appreciate what they possess without having to undergo its actual loss. -- Abraham Maslow % To everyone of us there must come a time when the whole universe will be found to have been a dream, when we find the soul is infinitely better than the surroundings. It is only a question of time, and time is nothing in the infinite. -- Sai Baba % Judge the nature of your listeners and speak accordingly. There is nothing more virtuous or valuable than this. -- Tirukkural % When subjective feelings arrange your effort, and activity is obsessed with objects, the matter of your self is neglected; not believing in true universal knowledge in oneself, you'll never attain true awakening. -- Chen-ching % Real peace will arise spontaneously when your mind becomes free of attachments, When you know that the objects of the world can never give you what you really want. -- Theragatha % There's no trail in space, no outside contemplative. People are smitten with complications, but devoid of complication are the Tathagatas. There's no trail in space,no outside contemplative, no eternal fabrications, no wavering in the Awakened. -- Dhammapada % You are pure awareness. The world is an illusion, nothing more. When you understand this fully, desire falls away. You find peace. For indeed! There is nothing. -- Ashtavakra Gita 15:17 % Under the hypnotic spell of pleasure And pain, we live for ourselves and are bound. Though master of ourselves, we roam about From birth to birth, driven by our own deeds. -- Shvetashvatara Upanishad % A learned man's learning shines the brightest among luminaries capable of critiquing his language. Speaking to an audience of thinking men is like watering a bed of growing plants. -- Tirukkural % Keep on pondering, and suddenly the flower of mind will bloom with enlightenment, illuminating the whole universe. This can be called getting it in the mind, responding to it in action. Thereupon you can turn the earth into gold and churn the rivers into cream. Wouldn't that make life exhilarating? -- Chien-ju % We cannot learn from general principles: there may be exceptions. -- Talmud % When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself. -- Shunryu Suzuki % The greatest gift which humanity has received is free choice. It is true that we are limited in our use of free choice. But the little free choice we have is such a great gift and is potentially worth so much that for this itself, life is worthwhile living -- Isaac Bashevis Singer % Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play. -- Heraclitus % First you're an unknown, then you write one book and you move up to obscurity. -- Martin Myers % By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher. -- Socrates % I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure. -- John D. Rockefeller % Invention is the mother of necessity. -- Thorstein Veblen % A king asked a sage to explain the Truth. In response the sage asked the king how he would convey the taste of a mango to someone who had never eaten anything sweet. No matter how hard the king tried, he could not adequately describe the flavor of the fruit, and, in frustration, he demanded of the sage, "Tell me then, how would you describe it?" The sage picked up a mango and handed it to the king saying, "This is very sweet. Try eating it!" -- Hindu story % We do what we must, and call it by the best names. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson % To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. -- Oscar Wilde % We used to quip that "password" is the most common password. Now it's "password1." Who said users haven't learned anything about security? -- Bruce Schneier % You should roam in places that are your own, that arise in accordance with your own true nature. And what is the place that is your own? It's the pasture of ardent clearness and mindfulness, where discontent and greed are put aside for the sake of the world. That is your own place, your natural range. -- Samyutta Nikaya % A person of wisdom should be truthful, without arrogance, without deceit, not slanderous and not hateful. The wise person should go beyond the evil of greed and miserliness. Do not get excited by what is old, do not be contented with what is new. Do not grieve for what is lost or be controlled by desire. -- Sutta-nipata % Before you can find God, you must lose yourself. -- Baal Shem Tov % Charity is equal in importance to all the other commandments combined. -- Talmud % All tremble at the rod, all are fearful of death. Drawing the parallel to yourself, neither kill nor get others to kill. -- Dhammapada % Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction. -- EF Schumacher % Knowing that I cannot escape it, I see no point in worrying about it. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows. -- David T. Wolf % There is really nothing you must be and there is nothing you must do. There is really nothing you must have and there is nothing you must know. There is really nothing you must become. However, it helps to understand that fire burns, and when it rains, the earth gets wet. -- Zen proverb % A human being must either climb up or climb down. -- Talmud % Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. -- Peter Drucker % The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. -- Robert Benchley % As a single slab of rock won't budge in the wind, So the wise are not moved by praise or blame. -- Dhammapada % Wisdom is what's left after we've run out of personal opinions. -- Cullen Hightower % The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget. -- Thomas Szasz % Silence is the virtue of fools. -- Sir Francis Bacon % Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower % Don't let the moment pass by. Those for whom the moment is past grieve, consigned to hell. -- Dhammapada % Ours is the age that is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to. -- H. Mumford Jones % Gloom obstructs our comprehension of the divine mysteries. -- Moses Hasi % A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. % Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing. -- Werner von Braun % It is bad luck to be superstitious. -- Andrew W. Mathis % The friend who holds your hand and says the wrong thing is made of dearer stuff than the one who stays away. -- Barbara Kingsolver % A man born in the world, by proper thought comes to delight in goodness, he recognizes the impermanence of wealth and beauty; and looks upon religion as his best ornament. -- Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King % The beginning of all participation in good things is hope. -- Philo % I learned much from my teachers, more from my books, and most from my troubles. -- Kaminer, Baraitot de Rabbi Yitzhak % Lose with truth and right rather than gain with falsehood and wrong. -- Maimonides % Happiness is a perfume which you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself. -- Louis Mann % When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. -- Mark Twain % In love is found the secret of divine unity. -- Zohar % The good die young that they may not degenerate; the wicked live on that they may have a chance to repent, or to produce a virtuous progeny. -- Zohar % Never answer a critic, unless he's right. -- Bernard M. Baruch % Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane. -- Philip K. Dick % Attention is living; inattention is dying. The attentive never stop; the inattentive are dead already. -- Dhammapada % No one can earn a million dollars honestly. -- William Jennings Bryan % Don't cling to your own understanding. Even if you do understand something, you should ask yourself if there might be something you have not fully resolved, or if there may be some higher meaning yet. -- Dogen % Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted. -- Aldous Huxley % One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. -- AA Milne % The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that carries any reward. -- John Maynard Keynes % Buddha is no longer Buddha when you enclose him in your mind; Buddha becomes only your mind's discriminative notion. -- Jae Woong Kim % Only the mediocre are always at their best. -- Jean Giraudoux % Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything. -- Henri Poincare % Men have become the tools of their tools. --Thoreau % Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest Hemingway % The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do. The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be. -- Walter Bagehot % What is trust? Tranquility of soul in the one who trusts. -- Bahya % To smile at your neighbor is more important than to treat him to a drink. -- Johanan b. Nappaha % The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work. -- Robert Frost % You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you want to live to be a hundred. -- Woody Allen % What is yours is not yours, then how can you regard what is not yours as yours? -- Talmud % The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. -- Niels Bohr % Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless. -- Thomas A. Edison % I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it. -- Rita Mae Bronwthe only reason to be alive is to enjoy it. -- Rita Mae Bronw % Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. -- Bertrand Russell % Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy. -- Edgar Bergen % Whenever you hear that someone else has been successful, rejoice. Always practice rejoicing for others - whether your friend or your enemy. If you cannot practice rejoicing, no matter how long you live, you will not be happy. -- Lama Zopa Rinpoche % You should do the work yourself, for buddhas only teach the way. -- Dhammapada % Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history. -- George Bernard Shaw % When you are deluded, you are used by your body. When you are enlightened, you use your body. -- Bunan % When you are annoyed by something you could not avoid, don't aggravate it by useless worry. -- Mendel Lefin % I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting. -- Mark Twain % All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. -- Aristotle % If only we'd stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time. -- Edith Wharton % Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so. -- John Stuart Mill % Every hero becomes a bore at last. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson % To be honest in business is to fulfill the whole Torah. -- Midrash Mekilta % Anything too stupid to be said is sung. -- Voltaire % A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper cannot be understood. -- Mark Ardis % One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork. -- Edward Abbey % If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. -- Rene Descartes % Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim. -- Bertrand Russell % To work out ends of righteousness and love are you called; not merely to enjoy or suffer. -- S.R. Hirsch % Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest. -- Isaac Asimov % Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons. -- R. Buckminster Fuller % The height of cleverness is to be able to conceal it. -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld % Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others. -- Groucho Marx % The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved - loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. -- Victor Hugo % Love's a fire, but whether it's going to warm your heart or burn down your house, you never can tell. -- Joan Crawford % That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great. -- Willa Cather % By all means marry: if you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher. -- Socraates % One regret, dear world, that I am determined not to have when I am lying on my deathbed is that I did not kiss you enough. -- Hafiz % We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be. -- Kurt Vonnegut % There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science. -- Louis Pasteur % Any event, once it has occurred, can be made to appear inevitable by a competent historian. -- Lee Simonson % On the basis of the belief that all human beings share the same divine nature, we have a very strong ground, a very powerful reason, to believe that it is possible for each of us to develop a genuine sense of equanimity toward all beings. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations. -- Charles de Montesquieu % Middle age is when your broad mind and narrow waist begin to change places. -- E. Joseph Crossman % An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it. -- Paul Valery % A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out. -- Saul Bellow % He who pelts you with stones, you pelt with bread. -- Yiddish proverb % Calmed in body, calmed in speech, well-centered and calm, having disgorged the baits of the world, a monk is called thoroughly calmed. -- Dhammapada % "Know thyself" means: devote time each day to studying yourself.... ferreting out your weakness, working at self-improvement, purifying your immortal soul. -- Rabbi Yisrael Lipkin % As long as there is life, there is hope. -- Talmud % Ashamed of what's not shameful, not ashamed of what is, beings adopting wrong views go to a bad destination. Seeing danger where there is none, and no danger where there is, beings adopting wrong views, go to a bad destination. -- Dhammapada % At a time when people are so conscious of maintaining their physical health by controlling their diets, exercising and so forth, it makes sense to try to cultivate the corresponding positive mental attitudes too. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life. -- Baruch Spinoza % As a tree with strong uninjured roots, though cut down, grows up again, so, when deep craving is not rooted out, suffering arises again and again. -- Dhammapada % At the heart of Buddhist meditation are concentration and inquiry. When you cultivate these two qualities in meditation, you develop your ability to be quiet and clear, to offer understanding and love. -- Martine Bachelor % At the time for initiative he takes no initiative. Young, strong, but lethargic, the resolves of his heart exhausted, the lazy, lethargic one loses the path to discernment. -- Dhammapada % Don't say mindlessness is itself Zen; there is an even more recondite road herein. After you have overturned the donkey-tethering stake, as you hit the south you move the north. -- Huai-shan % A sage does not speak in terms of being equal, lower or higher. Calmed and without selfishness he neither grasps nor rejects. -- Sutta Nipata % Better than a hundred years lived apathetic and unenergetic, is one day lived energetic and firm. -- Dhammapada % A man is what he is, not what he used to be. -- Yiddish proverb % "He insulted me, he hurt me, he defeated me, he robbed me." Those who think such things will not be free from hate. -- Buddha % By him who speaks only to help beings, it was said that all beings Have arisen from the conception of I, and are enveloped with the conception of mine. -- Nagarjuna % A Religion is as much a progressive unlearning of false ideas concerning God as it is the learning of the true ideas concerning God. -- Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan % All beginnings require that you unlock a new door. -- Rabbi Nachman of Breslov % O let us live in joy, although having nothing! In joy let us live like spirits of light! -- Buddha % I believe that to meet the challenges of our times, human beings will have to develop a greater sense of universal responsibility. Each of us must learn to work not just for oneself, one's own family or nation, but for the benefit of all humankind. Universal responsibility is the key to human survival. It is the best foundation for world peace. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Words are the shell, meditation the kernel. Words are the body of the prayer, and meditation its spirit. -- Bahya % Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember. -- Oscar Levant % Right meditation is not escapism; it is not meant to provide hiding-places for temporary oblivion. Realistic meditation has the purpose of training the mind to face, to understand and to conquer this very world in which we live. -- Nyanaponika Thera % The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority. -- Ralph W. Sockman % Circumstances are beyond the control of man; but his conduct is in his own power. -- Benjamin Disraeli % The problem isn't materialism as such. Rather it is the underlying assumption that full satisfaction can arise from gratifying the senses alone. Unlike animals whose quest for happiness is restricted to survival and to the immediate gratification of sensory desires, we human beings have the capacity to experience happiness at a deeper level which, when achieved, can overwhelm unhappy experiences. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Common sense is strengthened by joy. -- Rabbi Nachman of Breslov % Winning gives birth to hostility. Losing, one lies down in pain. The calmed lie down with ease, having set winning and losing aside. -- Dhammapada % Enlightenment - that magnificent escape from anguish and ignorance - never happens by accident. It results from the brave and sometimes lonely battle of one person against his own weaknesses. -- Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano % Days are scrolls: write on them what you want to be remembered. -- Bahya % He who for himself or others craves not for sons or power or wealth, who puts not his own success before the success of righteousness, he is virtuous, and righteous and wise. -- Buddha % Criticism has few terrors for a man with a great purpose. -- Benjamin Disraeli % Death is experienced only once, but he who fears it dies each minute. -- Solomon Rubin % Our mind is like an onion, and each day and month of practice progressively peels away the layers of delusion. -- Geshe Ngawang Dhargyey % Desires must be purified and idealized, not exterminated. -- Rav Eliyahu of Vilna % The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking. -- AA Milne % Every time a problem arises, the essential thing is to immediately become aware that the problem comes from our selfish mind, that it is created by self-cherishing thoughts. As long as you put the blame outside yourself, there can be no happiness. -- Lama Zopa Rinpoche % Do not be wise in words -- be wise in deeds. -- Jewish proverb % War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. -- Thomas Mann % You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance. -- Ray Bradbury % It is not your obligation to complete the task. But neither are you free to desist from it. -- Pirke Avot % We don't need hackers to break the systems because they're falling apart by themselves. -- Peter G. Neumann % Every person should believe they are reborn each day. -- Baal Shem Tov % The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men. -- George Eliot % As a tree with strong uninjured roots, though cut down, grows up again, so,when deep craving is not rooted out, suffering arises again and again. -- Dhammapada % Empty and calm and devoid of self is the nature of all things. No individual being In reality exists. There is no end or beginning, nor any middle course. All is an illusion, as in a vision or a dream. All beings in the world are beyond the realm of words. Their ultimate nature, pure and true, Is like the infinity of space. -Prajnaparamita % Each night, before retiring, forgive whomever offended you. -- Asher b. Yehiel, "Hanhaga" % Those who have spent ten or twenty years brushing aside the weeds looking for the way and yet have not see the buddha nature often say they are trapped by oblivion and excitement. What they don't realize is that the substance of this very oblivion and excitement is itself buddha nature. -- Kao-feng % Even if you be otherwise perfect, you fail without humility. -- Talmud % Even the poorest heart has some jewel on which it hangs. -- Karl Emil Franzos % The one who returns from a distance is greater than the one who was always close. What matters is not so much where you stand, but with what force you are moving in which direction. -- Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn % We believe we own our thoughts and have to do something about them, especially if they are negative. This is bound to create suffering. -- Ayya Khema % The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything - or nothing. -- Nancy Astor % Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length. -- Robert Frost % By charity, goodness, restraint, and self-control men and woman alike can store up a well-hidden treasure - a treasure which cannot be given to others and which robbers cannot steal. A wise person should do good - that is the treasure which will not leave one. -- Khuddhaka Patha % Abandon wrongdoing. It can be done. If there were no likelihood, I would not ask you to do it. But since it is possible and since it brings blessing and happiness, I do ask of you: abandon wrongdoing. Cultivate doing good. It can be done. If it brought deprivation and sorrow, I would not ask you to do it. But since it brings blessing and happiness, I do ask of you: cultivate doing good. -- Anguttara Nikaya % It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it. -- Henry Allen % The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt. -- Bertrand Russell % When you die you go alone, and the only light to accompany you derives from the spiritual practice or positive acts you have done. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter. -- Aleister Crowley % In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death. -- Joan D. Vinge % Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it. -- Laurence J. Peter % The world is round; it has no point. -- Adrienne E. Gusoff % Forming a new world religion is difficult and not particularly desirable. However, in that love is essential to all religions, one could speak of the universal religion of love. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Every dispute that is for a heavenly cause will ultimately endure. -- Pirke Avot % Facts are the enemy of truth. -- Miguel de Cervantes % Everywhere, truly, those of integrity stand apart. They, the good, don't chatter in hopes of favor or gains. When touched now by pleasure, now pain, the wise give no sign of high or low. -- Dhammapada % Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be. -- William Hazlitt % There are lots of ways of being miserable, but there's only one way of being comfortable, and that is to stop running round after happiness. If you make up your mind not to be happy there's no reason why you shouldn't have a fairly good time. -- Edith Wharton % For the sake of one true penitent, the whole world is pardoned. -- Talmud % It is critical to serve others, to contribute actively to others' well-being. I often tell practitioners that they should adopt the following principle: regarding one's own personal needs, there should be as little involvement or obligation as possible. But regarding service to others, there should be as many possible involvements and obligations as possible. This should be the ideal of a spiritual person. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % For there is suffering, but none who suffers; Doing exists although there is no doer; Extinction is but no extinguished person; Although there is a path, there is no goer. -- Buddhaghosa % If we single-pointedly practice great compassion, then, with little effort, we will be able to gain all other virtues. -- Geshe Namgyal Wangchen % Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind. -- Marston Bates % Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago. -- Bernard Berenson % We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. -- Aesop % Happy is he who controls his inclination. -- Talmud % Before enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water. After enlightenment, I chopped wood and carried water. -- Zen proverb % Everything is as it is. It has no name other than the name we give it. It is we who call it something; we give it a value. We say this thing is good or it's bad, but in itself, the thing is only as it is. It's not absolute; it's just as it is. People are just as they are. -- Ajahn Sumedho % Hey you, expecting results without effort! So sensitive! So long-suffering! You, in the clutches of death, acting like an immortal! Hey sufferer, you are destroying yourself! -- Santideva % As soon as you get some sense of contact, you want to be teachers of others. This is a big mistake. -- Ta-sui % I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out. -- Anne Frank % If a person closes his eyes to avoid giving [any] charity, it is as if he committed idolatry. -- Talmud % Compassion is the willingness to play in the field of dreams even though you are awake. -- Matthew Flickstein % If you must, sin privately, but profane not the Name publicly. -- Talmud % Develop the mind of equilibrium. You will always be getting praise and blame, but do not let either affect the poise of the mind: follow the calmness, the absence of pride. -- Sutta Nipata % It is not a virtue to refrain from hurting others, but it is a virtue to bear a hurt patiently. -- Solomon Ibn Gabirol % Do you want to understand? The whole world is one of your eyes, the body produced by your parents is a cataract. All ordinary people ignore the indestructible, marvelously clear, unfailingly mirroring eye, and cling fast to the dust cataract produced by the relationship of their father and mother. Therefore they take illusions for realities, and grasp at reflections as the physical forms themselves. -- P'u-an % Considering the harm others do to you As created by your former deeds, do not anger. Act such that further suffering will not be created And your own faults will disappear. -- Nagarjuna % From passion arises sorrow and from passion arises fear. If a man is free from passion, he is free from fear and sorrow. -- Buddha % The creatures that inhabit this earth - be they human beings or animals - are here to contribute, each in its own particular way, to the beauty and prosperity of the world. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Wisdom, properly used, is a remedy for every ill; but when misdirected, becomes an incurable disease. -- Bahya % The results of karma cannot be known by thought, and so should not be speculated about. Thus, thinking, one would come to distraction and distress. Therefore... do not be the judge of people; do not make assumptions about others. A person is destroyed by holding judgments about others. -- Anguttara Nikaya % Deep doubts, deep wisdom; small doubts, little wisdom. -- Chinese proverb % Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves. -- Thoreau % Erroneous views keep us in defilement, while right views remove us from it. But when we are in a position to discard both of them, we are then absolutely pure. -- The Sutra of Hui Neng % Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. -- Thoreau % The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything. -- Goethe % What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul. -- Yiddish proverb % Anger is the real destroyer of our good human qualities; an enemy with a weapon cannot destroy these qualities, but anger can. Anger is our real enemy. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Conquer your foe by force, you increase his enmity. Conquer by love, and you will reap no after-sorrow. -- Fo-Sho-Hing-Tsan-King % The whole world is a very narrow bridge. And the most important thing is to not be afraid. -- Rabbi Nachman of Breslov % Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example, starts within each one of us. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. -- Paul Bowles % Live as if you were living a second time, and as though you had acted wrongly the first time. -- Viktor Frankl % It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between. -- Diane Ackerman % Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles. -- George Jean Nathan % Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. -- Andre Gide % Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Sitting peacefully on a cushion day and night seeking to attain Buddhahood, rejecting life and death in hopes of realizing enlightenment, is all like a monkey grasping at the moon reflected in the water. -- Shoitsu % In the same way that someone in the midst of a rough crowd guards a wound with great care, so in the midst of bad company should one always guard the wound that is the mind. -- Santideva % Just as a cow with a young calf keeps an eye on it even when it is eating the grass, so it's proper for a person to keep an eye on all that can be done for others who are following the path. -- Majjhima Nikaya % In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson % Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else. -- James M. Barrie % Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything. -- Sydney Smith % Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him. -- Thoreau % We learn something every day, and lots of times it's that what we learned the day before was wrong. -- Bill Vaughan % Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. -- John Kenneth Galbraith % One who seeks delight in form seeks delight in suffering. One who seeks delight in suffering, I say, is not freed from suffering. -- Buddha % The entire purpose of our existence is to overcome our negative habits. -- Rabbi Eliyahu, the Gaon of Vilna % There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence. -- Henry Adams % To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost. -- Gustave Flaubert % Since your mind is not physical, No one else can destroy it. But because of its attachments to the body, It is harmed by physical suffering. -- Bodhicharyavatara % The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. -- Anne Frank % Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. -- Thoreau % The beginning of wisdom is to desire it. -- Solomon Ibn Gabirol % Intention is the core of all conscious life. It is our intentions that create karma, our intentions that help others, our intentions that lead us away from the delusions of individuality toward the immutable verities of enlightened awareness. Conscious intention colors and moves everything. -- Master Hsing Yun % The artist is one to whom all experience is revelation. -- Lewisohn % People must realize that even with all these comforts, all this money and a GNP that increases every year, they are still not happy. They need to understand that the real culprits are our unceasing desires. Our wants have no end. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. -- Thoreau % A bit of fragrance clings to the hand that gives flowers. -- Chinese proverb % There is an extremely easy way to become Buddha. Refraining from all evil, not clinging to birth and death, working in deep compassion for all sentient beings, respecting those over you and pitying those below you, without any detesting or desiring, worrying or lamentation - this is what is called Buddha. Do not search beyond it. -- Zen Master Dogen % Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory. -- Albert Schweitzer % Respect is not the root from which love grows, but the elm on which it creeps up and brings forth its precious blossoms. -- Monty Jacobs % Remember the virtues you lack and the faults you have; forget the good you did and the wrong you received. -- Orhot Tzaddikim % When other beings, especially those who hold a grudge against you, abuse and harm you out of envy, you should not abandon them, but hold them as objects of your greatest compassion and take care of them. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow. -- Chinese proverb % Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul. -- Thoreau % Brute force, no matter how strongly applied, can never subdue the basic human desire for freedom and dignity. It is not enough, as communist systems have assumed, merely to provide people with food, shelter and clothing. Human nature needs to breathe the precious air of liberty. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action. -- Benjamin Disraeli % Generosity begins with our recognition of our debt to others. -- Master Hsing Yun % Flow with whatever may happen, and let your mind be free; Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate. -- Chuang Tsu % Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them. -- Thoreau % Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward. -- Kurt Vonnegut % One may not rely on a miracle. -- Talmud % View all problems as challenges. Look upon negativities that arise as opportunities to learn and to grow. Don't run from them, condemn yourself, or bury your burden in saintly silence. You have a problem? Great. More grist for the mill. Rejoice, dive in, and investigate. -- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana % It is easier to meditate than to actually do something for others. I feel that merely to meditate on compassion is to take the passive option. Our meditation should form the basis for action, for seizing the opportunity to do something. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Perhaps a human being does not die until he no longer sees anything but the past and the present moment. -- Leo Baeck % Life can be pulled by goals just as surely as it can be pushed by drives. -- Viktor Frankl % Life continues to create itself and fall away, and suffering returns, and delight arrives, if even for a moment--agony, peace, rapture. -- Sandy Boucher % Men have a respect for scholarship and learning greatly out of proportion to the use they commonly serve. -- Thoreau % Feelings, whether of compassion or irritation, should be welcomed, recognized, and treated on an absolutely equal basis; because both are ourselves. The tangerine I am eating is me. The mustard greens I am planting are me. I plant with all my heart and mind. I clean this teapot with the kind of attention I would have were I giving the baby Buddha or Jesus a bath. Nothing should be treated more carefully than anything else. In mindfulness, compassion, irritation, mustard green plant, and teapot are all sacred. -- Thich Nhat Hanh % Knowledge and action are twins, each glorifying the other. -- Joseph Kimhi % Having drunk the sweetness of solitude and also the sweetness of tranquility, one becomes free from fear and wrongdoing while drinking the sweetness of the joy of truth. -- Sutta Nipata % Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them. -- Thoreau % People ask for criticism, but they only want praise. -- W. Somerset Maugham % That people are unknowing does not mean that they are unknowing like cows or goats. Even ignorant people look for a pathway to reality. But, searching for it, they often misunderstand what they encounter. They pursue names and categories instead of going beyond that name to that which is real. -- Digha Nikaya % When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about. -- Albert Einstein % No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar. -- Donald Foster % No man ever listened himself out of a job. -- Calvin Coolidge % The only foundation stone of practice is renunciation. The only gateway of practice is faith. The only approach to practice is compassion. -- Jamgon Kontrul % Hatred makes the straight crooked. -- Hebrew proverb % Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are. -- Thoreau % The mighty ocean has but one taste, the taste of salt. Even so, the true way has but one savor, the savor of freedom. -- Majjhima Nikaya % What people expect to happen is always different from what actually happens. From this comes great disappointment; this is the way the world works. -Sutta Nipata % Unless we practice loving feelings toward everyone we meet, day in, day out, we're missing out on the most joyous part of life. If we can actually open our hearts, there's no difficulty in being happy. -- Ayya Khema % Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God. It is a gift only we can give one another. -- Elie Wiesel % Materialistic knowledge can only provide a type of happiness that is dependent upon physical conditions. It cannot provide happiness that springs from inner development. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born. -- Fyodor Dostoevsky % There are risks and costs to a program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction. -- John F. Kennedy % One person can make a difference and every person should try. -- John F. Kennedy % A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair. -- Abraham Joshua Heschel % Loss of mindfulness is why people engage in useless pursuits, do not care for their own interests, and remain unalarmed in the presence of things which actually menace their welfare. -- Buddha % As the eye needs light to see, so the soul needs labor to comprehend. -- Philo % The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. -- B. F. Skinner % Better to lease one garden and cultivate it than to lease many and neglect them. As the proverb goes: who leases a garden eats birds; who leases gardens is eaten by birds. -- Ecclesiastes % O monks, even if you have insight that is pure and clear but you cling to it, fondle it and treasure it, depend on it and are attached to it, then you do not understand that the teaching is like a raft that carries you across the water to the farther shore but is then to be put down and not clung to. -- Majjhima Nikaya % The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time. -- George Bernard Shaw % Not only have individual financial institutions become less vulnerable to shocks from underlying risk factors, but also the financial system as a whole has become more resilient. -- Alan Greenspan in 2004 % ...In humanity there [is] nothing to dislike, but infinitely much to pity... -- Thomas Hardy % If only truth and justice were the rule, there would be no need for mercy. -- Mendele % Ease destroys bravery, trouble...creates strength. -- Maimonides % Overcome your uncertainties and free yourself from dwelling on sorrow. If you delight in existence, you will become a guide to those who need you, revealing the path to many. -- Sutta Nipata % A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort. -- Herm Albright % Never face facts; if you do, you'll never get up in the morning. - Marlo Thomas % The average man, who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever. -- Anatole France % The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. -- Anatole France % My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world. -- George Bernard Shaw % Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. -- Martin Luther King Jr. % There are some who wish to perfect themselves and who train themselves in this way: "One single self we shall tame, one single self we shall pacify, one single self we shall lead to final nirvana." But those with compassion should not train themselves in such a way. On the contrary, they should say this: "My own self I will place into Suchness, and so that all the world may be helped, I will place all beings into Suchness, and I will lead to nirvana the whole immeasurable world of beings." -- Diamond Sutra % Only through labor is one at home in the world. -- Berthold Auerbach % Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. -- Berthold Auerbach % Of all afflictions, the worst is self-contempt. -- Berthold Auerbach % The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying, "This is mine," and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not anyone have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." -- Jean Jacques Rousseau % The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised. -- George F. Will % You must not think me necessarily foolish because I am facetious, nor will I consider you necessarily wise because you are grave. -- Sydney Smith % I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestioned ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. -- Thoreau % If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. -- Thoreau % It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument. -- William McAdoo % Describe things as better than they are and you'll be called a romantic; describe them as worse than they are and they'll call you a realist; describe them exactly as they are and you'll be thought of as a satirist. -- Quentin Crisp % The only kinds of fights worth fighting are those you're going to lose, because somebody has to fight them and lose and lose and lose until someday somebody who believes as you do wins. -- I. F. Stone % The one who thinks himself equal or inferior or superior to others is, by that very reason, involved in argument. But such thoughts as equal, inferior, and superior are not there in the one who is not moved by such measurements. Why should a wise person argue with another, saying: "This is a truth" and "This is a lie"? If such a one never entertains a thought about equal, inferior, or superior, with whom is he going to argue? The sage who has freed himself from dependence on others and from dependence on words and is no longer attached to knowledge does not risk the smothering of truth by engaging in disputes with people. -- Sutta Nipata % In the beginning mindfulness takes away worries and fears about past and future and keeps us anchored in the present. In the end it points to the right view of the self. -- Ayya Khema % Life's easy to live for someone unscrupulous, cunning as a crow, corrupt, back-biting, forward, and brash; But for someone who's constantly scrupulous, cautious, observant, sincere, pure in his livelihood, clean in his pursuits, it's hard. -- Dhammapada % See everyone as Buddha. This purifies the mind of ignorance and arrogance. -- Master Baek % I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it. -- Voltaire % If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to. -- Dorothy Parker % Fields are spoiled by weeds; people, by passion. So what's given to those free of passion bears great fruit. Fields are spoiled by weeds; people, by aversion. So what's given to those free of aversion bears great fruit. -- Dhammapada % He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave. -- Sir William Drummond % If you cling to an idea as the inalterable truth, then when the truth does come in person and knock at your door, you will not be able to open the door and accept it. -- Udana Sutta % To study the Buddha is to study oneself. To study oneself is to forget oneself. To forget oneself is to be enlightened by the myriad dharmas. Then be enlightened by the myriad dharmas is to bring about the dropping away of body and mind of both oneself and others. The traces of enlightenment come to an end, and this traceless enlightenment is continued endlessly. -- Dogen % We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys. -- Eric Hoffer % A university is what a college becomes when the faculty loses interest in students. -- John Ciardi % If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. -- John Kenneth Galbraith % To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as if nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with one another, we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for unlimited possibility. -- James Carse % I don't think that the comic and the serious can be separated in talking about human reality, any more than you can separate hydrogen and oxygen and still be talking about water. -- Peter De Vries % Comedy is when you accidentally fall off a cliff and die. Tragedy is when I have a hangnail. -- Mel Brooks % Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. -- William James % You should be an island to yourself, a refuge to yourself, not dependent on any other but taking refuge in the truth and none other than the truth. And how do you become an island and a refuge to yourself? In this way. You see and contemplate your body as composed of all the forces of the universe. Ardently and mindfully you steer your body-self by restraining your discontent with the world about you. In the same way, observe and contemplate your feelings and use that same ardent restraint and self-possession against enslavement by greed or desire. By seeing attachment to your body and feelings as blocking the truth, you dwell in self-possession and ardent liberation from those ties. This is how you live as an island to yourself and a refuge to yourself. Whoever dwells in this contemplation, islanded by the truth and taking refuge in the truth--that one will come out of the darkness and into the light. -- Digha Nikaya % Suffering chastens us and makes us remember. We are like the child who tries to pick up fire and is unlikely to do it again, once she has seen the consequences. With material things, seeing is easy; but when it comes to picking up the fires of greed, aversion, and delusion, most of us aren't even aware we're holding fires at all. On the contrary, we misguidedly believe them to be lovable and desirable, and so we are never chastened. We never learn our lesson. -- Buddhadhasa Bhikku % Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. -- Ernest Hemingway % If you would convince a man that he does wrong, do right. But do not care to convince him. Men will believe what they see. Let them see. -- Thoreau % Having enjoyed a sweet delicious taste, And having sometimes tasted what is bitter, Do not greedily enjoy the sweet taste, Do not feel aversion toward the bitter. When touched by pleasant contact, do not be enthralled, Do not tremble when touched by pain. Look evenly on both the pleasant and painful, Not drawn or repelled by anything. -- Buddha % Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. -- Jane Austen % Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble. -- Samuel Johnson % It is not that anger and desire are inherently evil or that we should feel ashamed when they arise. It is a matter of seeing them as the delusions that they are: distorted conceptions that paint a false picture of reality. They are negative because they lead to unhappiness and confusion. -- Kathleen McDonald % The United States is a nation of laws; poorly written and randomly enforced. -- Frank Zappa % I do not know which makes a man more conservative -- to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past. -- John Maynard Keynes % Imagination is more important than knowledge because knowledge is limited but imagination embraces the universe. -- Albert Einstein % Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create. -- Albert Einstein % Apathy can be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, with takes the imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for carrying that ideal into practice. -- Arnold Toynbee % They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea. -- Sir Francis Bacon % Whatever an enemy might do to an enemy, or a foe to a foe, the ill-directed mind can do to you even worse. Whatever a mother, father, or other kinsman might do for you, the well-directed mind can do for you even better. -- Dhammapada % Conceit is God's gift to little men. -- Bruce Barton % What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes % Two of my favorite things are sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of sweet hemp, and playing my Hohner harmonica. -- Abraham Lincoln % Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth and protection of the country. -- Thomas Jefferson % Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere. -- George Washington % We shall, by and by, want a world of hemp more for our own consumption. -- John Adams % Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself. -- Jimmy Carter % Why use up the forests which were centuries in the making and the mines which required ages to lay down, if we can get the equivalent of forest and mineral products in the annual growth of the hemp fields? -- Henry Ford % The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this. -- Albert Einstein on Hemp % The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think. -- Horace Walpole % Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson % Don't be afraid of doing good. It's another name for happiness, for all that is dear and delightful--this phrase "doing good." Whoever would live well, long lasting, bringing bliss -- Let him be generous, be calm, and cultivate the doing of good. By practicing these three bliss-bringing things, The wise one lives without regret, his world infused with happiness. -- Itivuttaka Sutta % It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great. -- Havelock Ellis % The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened. -- Saki % 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 % When you get to the end of your rope, tie a know and hang on. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt % Failure is only the opportunity to more intelligently begin again. -- Henry Ford % No one gossips about other people's secret virtues. -- Bertrand Russell % If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer. -- Alfred North Whitehead % The pain, the discomfort, the sickness are what they are. We can always cope with the way life moves and changes. The mind of an enlightened human being is flexible and adaptable. The mind of the ignorant person is conditioned and fixed. -- Ajahn Sumedho % If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style. -- Quentin Crisp % Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind. -- Samuel Johnson % To be intelligent is to be open-minded, active-memoried, and persistently experimental. -- Leo Stein % We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others. -- Blaise Pascal % In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught. -- Baba Dioum % The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything. -- Walter Bagehot % To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state. -- Goethe % Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. -- Iris Murdoch % The truth is rarely pure and never simple. -- Oscar Wilde % Even as a great rock is not shaken by the wind, the wise man is not shaken by praise or blame. -- Buddha % Whatever living beings there may be--feeble or strong, small or large, seen or unseen, those who live far or those near, those who are born and those who are yet to be born--may all beings, without exception, experience a happy mind. Let one not deceive another nor despise any person whatever in any place. In anger or ill will let one not wish any harm to another. Let one's thoughts of boundless love pervade the whole world without any obstruction, without any hatred, without any enmity. -- Samyutta Nikaya % Rather suffer an injustice than commit one. -- Yiddish proverb % Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power. -- Eric Hoffer % The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously. -- Hubert H. Humphrey % Better one ounce of luck than a pound of gold. -- Yiddish proverb % There are four bases of sympathy: charity, kind speech, doing a good turn, and treating all alike. -- Buddha % The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past. -- Robertson Davies % Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe. -- Alan Watts % The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. -- Paul Valery % Rather the bite of a friend than the kiss of an enemy.-- Sholom Aleichem % A motion to adjourn is always in order. -- Robert Heinlein % Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge. -- Paul Gauguin % The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. -- Bertrand Russell % Focus, not on the rudenesses of others, not on what they've done or left undone, but on what you have and haven't done yourself. -- Dhammapada % I don't know if God exists, but it would be better for His reputation if He didn't. -- Jules Renard % When dealing with the insane, the best method is to pretend to be sane. -- Hermann Hesse % In the end, everything is a gag. -- Charlie Chaplin % Nothing changes your opinion of a friend so surely as success - yours or his. -- Franklin P. Jones % When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. -- R. Buckminster Fuller % For most men life is a search for the proper manila envelope in which to get themselves filed. -- Clifton Fadiman % I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. -- Thomas Jefferson % The world only goes round by misunderstanding. -- Charles Baudelaire % The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -- and therefore never scrutinize or question. -- Stephen Jay Gould % There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children, children love hamsters. -- Alice Thomas Ellis % Maturity is only a short break in adolescence. -- Jules Feiffer % The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities. -- Sophocles % The only way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him. -- Henry Stimson % The world is new to us every morning--this is the Holy One's gift and every person should believe he is reborn each day. -- Baal Shem Tov % If you think you see both destruction and becoming, Then you see destruction and becoming through impaired vision. -- Nagarjuna % How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. -- Thoreau % There is nothing so absurd but some philosopher has said it. -- Cicero % Pity the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. -- Don Marquis % History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon. -- Napoleon Bonaparte % All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why. -- James Thurber % Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it. -- Thoreau % No limit to trials, but the wise learns thereby. -- Ibn Gabirol % I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognized wiser than oneself. -- Marlene Dietrich % The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action. -- Frank Herbert % Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free; Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate. -- Chuang Tsu % All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance. -- Edward Gibbon % In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world. -- Thoreau % When you're through changing, you're through. -- Bruce Barton % Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content. -- Louis L'Amour % I hate quotations. Tell me what you know. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson % There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. -- Peter Drucker % Q: I can observe anger and work with greed, but how does one observe delusion? A: You're riding a horse and asking "Where's the horse?" Pay attention. -- Ajahn Chah % Man is by nature a mystic. -- Rav Kook % Seeing ourselves plainly, we can change, and as we do so, it brings a feeling of great relief, as if we had dropped a heavy load. -- Ayya Khema % There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. -- Elie Wiesel % A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt % If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way. -- Bertrand Russell % Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself. -- A. H. Weiler % Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something. -- Robert Heinlein % Humor is just another defense against the universe. -- Mel Brooks % When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong -- or absolutely right. -- Albert GuinonB % All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed. -- Sean O'Casey % The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you'll never find it. -- C. P. Snow % It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative. -- John Burroughs % Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in. -- Leonardo da Vinci % The fault with charity --too little; with speech --too much. -- Judah Al-Harizi % A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. -- Thoreau % Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes. -- Edgar Varese % To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the biggest mistake of all. -- Peter McWilliams % You should make your observations yourself, You should not be the man of someone else, Not in the dependence on another should you live, Nor go about making a trade out of holiness. -- Udana Sutta % Whoever ceases to be a student has never been a student. -- George Iles % The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it. -- Laurence J. Peter % Be true to your work, your word, and your friend. -- Henry David Thoreau % The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. - George Orwell % Virtue is its own punishment. -- Aneurin Bevan % No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself. -- Thomas Mann % There is always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher. -- Victor Hugo % Rogues are preferable to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest. -- Alexander Dumas % I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. -- Bill Cosby % It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it. -- Arnold Toynbee % Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one. -- Malcolm Forbes % Speech is conveniently located midway between thought and action, where it often substitutes for both. -- John Andrew Holmes % We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on. -- Richard Feynman % We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action. -- Frank Tibolt % Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery % Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day. -- Bertrand Russell % False ideals cannot be shattered by criticism. Right ideals must take up the battle against them. -- Franz Werfel % Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped. -- Elbert Hubbard % A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run. -- Elbert Hubbard % A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience. -- Elbert Hubbard % A pessimist? That's a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist. -- Elbert Hubbard % An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy to be called an idea at all. -- Elbert Hubbard % You want to know how to overcome despair? I will tell you. By helping others overcome despair. -- Elie Wiesel % To see what is right, and not do it, is want of courage, or of principle. -- Confucius % You are a puppet, but in the hands of the infinite, which may be your own. -- Antonio Porchia % In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure. -- Bill Cosby % You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand. -- Woodrow Wilson % History would be an excellent thing, if only it were true. -- Leo Tolstoy % When we fall on the ground it hurts us, but we also need to rely on the ground to get back up. -- Kathleen McDonald % The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven? -- Khalil Gibran % Sorrow fully accepted brings its own gifts. For there is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness. -- Pearl S. Buck % Hoping to live days of greater happiness, I forget that days of less happiness are passing by. -- Elizabeth Bishop % My creed is this: Happiness is the only good. The place to be happy is here. The time to be happy is now. The way to be happy is to make others so. -- Robert Ingersoll % Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent among them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. -- Oscar Wilde % When we are violent to our enemies, we do violence to ourselves. When we brutalize otheres, we brutalize ourselves. And eventualy we run the risk of becoming our oppressors. -- Arundhati Roy % War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. -- John F. Kennedy % For every one torturer, there are a thousand people ready to risk their lives to save another. For every soldier who shoots in a neighborhood, there are a thousand companeros who help and protect each other. -- Isabel Allende % Soft is stronger than hard, water stronger than rock, love stronger than violence. -- Hermann Hesse % Don't do nothing because you can't do everything. Do something. Anything. -- Colleen Patrick-Goudreau % Live each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. -- Henry David Thoreau % The impulse "I want" and the impulse "I'll have"--lose them! That is where most people get stuck--without those, you can use your eyes to guide you through this suffering state. -- Sutta Nipata % We confuse attachment with love. Attachment is concerned with my needs, my happiness, while love is an unselfish attitude, concerned with the needs and happiness of others.... A relationship free of unrealistic grasping is free of disappointment, conflict, jealousy, and other problems, and is fertile ground for the growth of love and wisdom. -- Kathleen McDonald % A Jewish ecology [ais] not based on the assumption that we are no different from other living creatures. It [begins] with the opposite idea: We have a special responsibility precisely because we are different, because we know what we are doing. -- Rabbi Harold Kushner % Meetings should never be more than an hour long. -- Lee Stein % The sword comes into the world because of justice delayed and because of justice perverted. -- Pirke Avot % No matter what side of an argument you're on, you always find some people on your side that you wish were on the other side. -- Jascha Heifetz % A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life. -- Charles Darwin % Life's easy to live for someone unscrupulous, cunning as a crow, corrupt, back-biting, forward, and brash; But for someone who's constantly scrupulous, cautious, observant, sincere, pure in his livelihood, clean in his pursuits, it's hard. -- Dhammapada % All of the animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it. -- Samuel Butler % Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor. - Truman Capote % A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading. -- Leszek Kolakowski % Good things, when short, are twice as good. -- Baltasar Gracian % Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. -- Carl Jung % When you see a truck bearing down on you, by all means jump out of the way. But spend some time in meditation, too. Learning to deal with discomfort is the only way you'll be ready to handle the truck you didn't see. -- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana % All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual. -- Albert Einstein % Don't sacrifice your own welfare for that of another, no matter how great. Realizing your own true welfare, be intent on just that. -- Dhammapada % Keep in mind that the essence of your prayers is the faith you have in them that they will be answered. -- Rabbi Nachman of Breslov % It is better to suffer wrong than to do it, and happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust. -- Samuel Johnson % All youth is bound to be 'misspent'; there is something in its very nature that makes it so, and that is why all men regret it. -- Thomas Wolfe % Silent gratitude isn't very much use to anyone. -- Gertrude Stein % To have no occasion for lying does not yet mean to be honest. -- Arthur Schnitzler % Someone asked T'ou-tzu, "How is it when there is no mistake moment to moment?" T'ou-tzu said, "Bragging." % Simple pleasures are the last refuge of the complex. -- Off The Wall % We can never rely on inspiration. When we most want it, it does not come. -- George Gershwin % Woe to him who is alone and falls with no companion to raise him. -- Ecclesiastes % Pray for the welfare of the government, for were it not for the fear of it, people would swallow each other alive. -- Pirke Avot % The essential truth of suffering is that neither individual nor social problems are due chiefly to external conditions. -- B. Alan Wallace % Such human qualities as morality, compassion, decency, wisdom and so forth have been the foundations of all civilizations. These qualities must be cultivated and sustained through systematic moral education in a conductive social environment, so that a more humane world may emerge. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % It is better to have less if it is with peace of mind than to have abundant wealth but with a tormented spirit. -- Ecclesiastes % Many people are afraid to empty their minds lest they may plunge into the Void. They do not know that their own Mind is the Void. The ignorant eschew phenomena but not thought; the wise eschew thought but not phenomena. -- Huang Po % The aim of life is to live, and to live, means to be aware, joyously, serenely, divinely aware. -- Henry Miller % Bad taste is simply saying the truth before it should be said. -- Mel Brooks % Compassion is characterized as promoting the aspect of allaying suffering. Its function resides in not [enduring] others' suffering. It is manifested as non-cruelty. Its proximate cause is to see helplessness in those overwhelmed by suffering. It succeeds when it makes cruelty subside, and it fails when it produces sorrow. -- Buddhaghosa, "Visuddhimagga" % As long as there is a lack of the inner discipline that brings calmness of mind, no matter what external facilities or conditions you have, they will never give you the feeling of joy and happiness that you are seeking. On the other hand, if you possess this inner quality of calmness of mind, a degree of stability within then even if you lack various external facilities that you would normally consider necessary for happiness, it is still possible to live a happy and joyful life. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Unless there is loving-kindness in our speech, it's going to come out wrong. -- Ayyan Khema % There is no true justice unless mercy is part of it. -- Zohar % Your own practice can show you the truth. Your own experience is all that counts. -- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana % They are happy indeed who own nothing at all; Those with highest knowledge own nothing at all. See how people who own things are afflicted, Bound to others by their obligations. -- Udana 2.6 % The body in which one can see the truth will die out, like a fan palm, without any future. But that which is the truth, that which is existence itself, is there although it is deep and infinitely hard to understand. Like the great ocean, one cannot fathom it. -- Digha Nikaya % Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination. -- Mark Twain % Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we often might win, by fearing to attempt. -- Jane Addams % He who spares a tree is apt to spare a man. -- Joel Blau % In finances, be strict with yourself, generous with others. -- Maimonides % Wealth is affliction disguised as a good. -- Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda % The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes % Eventually we will find (mostly in retrospect, of course) that we can be very grateful to those people who have made life most difficult for us. -- Ayya Khema % Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something. -- Henry David Thoreau % Wise men think out their thoughts; fools proclaim them. -- Heinrich Heine % Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats. --Voltaire % By telling the truth; by not growing angry; by giving, when asked, no matter how little you have: by these three things you enter the presence of devas. -- Dhammapada % Old age is like climbing a mountain. The higher you get, the more tired and breathless you become, but your view becomes much more extensive. -- Ingmar Bergman % Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he has learned in school. -- Albert Einstein % If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. -- ? Mark Twain ? Thomas Jefferson ? % Q: I can observe anger and work with greed, but how does one observe delusion? A: You're riding a horse and asking "Where's the horse?" Pay attention. -- Ajahn Chah % Don't let your brain interfere with your heart. -- Albert Einstein % Make sure to be in with your equals if you're going to fall out with your superiors. -- Jewish Proverb % The highest peace is the peace between opposites. -- Rabbi Nachman of Breslov % Modern technology owes ecology an apology. -~ Alan M. Eddison % Information technology and manure have a symbiotic relationship. -- Chandrakant D. Patel % There is more to security than throwing cryptography at packets. -- Phillip Hallam-Baker % Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity. -- Michael Cunningham, paraphrasing Gustave Flaubert % Human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity. -- Gustave Flaubert % Time robs us and robs us and when we beg for mercy, it robs us some more. -- Michael Cunningham % How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live. -- Henry David Thoreau % I have no problem acknowledging that there was an eternity of not-me before I was born. Why is it so hard to imagine an eternity of not-me after I die? -- Sy Safransky % For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken % A genius is someone who takes a complex thing and makes it look simple. An academic does the opposite. -- Robert Fanney % If you knew how much work went into it, you wouldn't call it genius. -- Michelangelo Buonarroti % It's is not, it isn't ain't, and it's it's, not its, if you mean it is. If you don't, it's its. Then too, it's hers. It isn't her's. It isn't our's either. It's ours, and likewise yours and theirs. -- Oxford University Press, Edpress News % The internet is, in most ways, worse than the real world. -- Lea Grover % Integrity is like beauty: too little and nobody will look at you, too much and everybody wants to fuck you. -- The Onion http://tinyurl.com/6gokqs9 % You may wonder...why a person like me, who felt himself to be idealistic and a bit of a rebel, and who actually was both, could lend himself to the distasteful work of patent chicanery. In the first place there was nothing much else that I could do and still stay in my profession... Then too, I was the descendant of my ancestors. The trading instinct is very strong in my people. I myself felt an exhilaration in a deal well put over, such as a devotee of chess feels in a hard-played game. It was the game and not the stakes which appealed to me. -- Norbert Weiner, "The Tempter" % Creativity is rooted in doubt and so if you fall in love with an idea, then you're not pursuing the next idea. -- David Kord Murray % If I had my finger on the switch, I'd keep the juice flowing to the Internet even if I had to turn off everything else. The net is the one solvent we can still afford; jet travel can't be our salvation in an age of climate shock and dwindling oil, so the kind of trip you can take with the click of a mouse will have to substitute.-- Bill McKibben, EAARTH % History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives. - Abba Eban % Try a thing you haven't done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time, to figure out whether you like it or not. - Virgil Garnett Thomson % We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. -- Steve Jobs % A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. -- Thomas Mann % % I want to live other lives. I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Writing is my way of making other chances. -- Anne Tyler % Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig. -- Stephen Greenblatt % All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald % Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up. -- John Edgar Wideman % In certain ways writing is a form of prayer. -- Denise Levertov % Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. -- E.L. Doctorow % Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. -- E.L. Doctorow % Let's face it, writing is hell. -- William Styron % Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. -- Paul Rudnick % Writing is a failure. Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper. -- Padget Powell % I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it. -- William Carlos Williams % Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck. -- Iris Murdoch % The less conscious one is of being 'a writer,' the better the writing. -- Pico Iyer % Writing is... that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger. -- Pico Iyer % Writing is my dharma. -- Raja Rao % Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work. -- Anthony Powell % I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act. -- Michael Cunningham % We're here to put a dent in the universe. - Steve Jobs % Humor is an affirmation of dignity, a declaration of man's superiority to all that befalls him. -- Romain Gary % Sci-fi stories are business plans in disguise. -- Walter De Brouwer % It is better to live rich than to die rich. -- Samuel Johnson % Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering. -- R. Buckminster Fuller % I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out. - Denis Diderot % It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning. -- Bill Watterson % Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. --Winston Churchill % I have not failed, I've just found ten thousand ways that won't work. -- Thomas Edison % Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life. -- Sophia Loren % It's never too late - never too late to start over, never too late to be happy. --Jane Fonda % My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness. -- His Holiness the Dalai Lama % Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. -- Wendell Berry % Expecting email to land in a welcoming inbox just because it's legal is like turning up to a Viennese ball in underpants: you might not get in and you can expect mixed reactions if you do. -- Mark Brownlow % I'd rather be a rising ape than a fallen angel. -- Terry Pratchett % My schedule is complex. Free time is the imaginary part. -- net.humor % You can love an organization, but it won't love you back. -- Larry Wilson % Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low. -- Wallace Sayre % No one knows where home is until it's too late to escape it. -- Gregory Maguire % Hell is the inability to love. -- Dostoevsky % "Security is a rumor" -- Marzanne Fullerton % Is there anything more vain than an autobiography? -- Isabel Allende (Ines of My Soul) % I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. -- Mark Twain % Crying is one of the highest devotional songs. One who knows crying knows spiritual practice. If you can cry with a pure heart, nothing else compares to such a prayer. Crying includes all the principles of yoga. -- Swami Kripalvanandji % Bless your uneasiness as a sign that there is still life in you. -- Dag Hammarskjold % Love all, so that you may not wish to kill any. -- Buddha % The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity. -- Marcel Proust % Capitalists talk of private ownership, but nothing is merely ours. Our posessions are our adopted chidlren, most of unknown birth parents. Reclining under roofs we did not raise, driving cars whose seat belts we have not tested, we every day proclaim our trust in the nameless manufacturers of our goods. Capitalism is a communal effort. -- Brian Jay Stanley % Some nights my wife is late getting home, and, bypassing the innocent explanation that she is running errands or had a meeting after work, my mind flies to the thought it dreads: she has wrecked her car, she is never coming home. I permit these morbid hypotheses because they renew my love with miraculous potency. In the midst of my anticipatory mourning, I hear a key turning in the lock: the door opens: she is resurrected from the dead! I kiss her and thank fate, and she kisses back, perplexed by my excess affection. For a happy marriage, the only counseling couples need is an occasional fear that each other has died. -- Brian Jay Stanley % Always be a first rate version of yourself instead of a second rate version of somebody else. -- Judy Garland % If you want to make money, you have to be smart and an asshole and also work harder than anyone else. Most people can't manage all three. --Sam Lipsyte % The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, he said: "Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived." % Making standards is the process of making choices where that choice does not matter. And the corollary is that the choices that don't matter have the longest discussions. -- Phillip Hallam-Baker % A lot of people mistake a short memory for a clear conscience. -- Doug Larson % In school, you're taught a lesson and then given a test. In life, you're given a test that teaches you a lesson. -- Tom Bodett % The purpose of a book is to serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us --Franz Kafka % Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering. -- Carl Jung % Do only assholes succeed, or does success turn you into an asshole? This is the great unanswered question of capitalism. -- Sparrow % What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on? -- Henry David Thoreau % All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible. -- George Santayana % The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways. -- Florence King % I once wanted to save the world. Now I just want to leave the room with some dignity. -- Lotus Weinstock % The moral high ground is wreathed in fog. -- Arthur Miller % It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little. -- Sydney Smith % You have much more power when you are working for the right thing than when you are working against the wrong thing. -- Peace Pilgrim % Our salvation is in striving to achieve what we know we'll never achieve. -- Ryszard Kapuscinski % Right actions in the future are the best apologies for bad actions in the past. -- Tryon Edwards % I look for what needs to be done... After all, that's how the universe designs itself. -- R. Buckminster Fuller % When we grow old, there can only be one regret -- not to have given enough of ourselves. -- Eleonora Duse % Belief is the wound that knowledge heals. -- Ursula K. LeGuin % A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants. -- Arthur Schopenhauer % Infinite Patience Brings Immediate Results. -- Wayne Dyer % It didn't matter if the souffle had fallen, beause he was eating the memory of other souffles. -- Christianne Buuck % Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man. -- Leon Trotsky % The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generallyemployed only by small children and large nations. -- David Friedman % A wrong war brings wrong; so does a right war. -- Ignazio Silone % Weapons of mass destruction are always in the wrong hands. -- Deepak Chopra % If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. -- Anais Nin % Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do. ~Bruce Crampton % As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls. -- Matt Cartmill % If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -- Arthur C. Clarke % He continued to be an infant long after he ceased to be a prodigy. -- Robert Moses % I am the outgoing president of the Extroverts Association. -- Sparrow % Zen Buddhism is silent on the subject of God, and God is silent on the subject of Zen Buddhism. -- Sparrow % The road to hell is paved with good inventions. -- Sparrow % The one compelling argument for pacifism is war. -- Sparrow % There are countless lives we could live in addition to the life we do live. That is our condition and our fate. The unlived life is there in the next car on the freeway nodding to us; it is up there in that jet taking off for Provence; it is in the bar onstage we pass by on our way home; the unlived life, the life we might have lived, is all around us, and one of our tasks as vibrant, growing, fearless people is to see that the life we have is the life we chose, and to honor the fact that we chose it and not that other life. We have to remember we chose it for good reasons, not all of which are on the surface. Some of the reasons we choose things are secret. They have to do with what we need, not what we want. -- Cary Tennis % [Facebook embodies] many of the properties of the Holy Inquisition. I mean its data-mining capabilities. Or what Torquemada had in mind. I mean, the NKVD and the Gestapo were content aggregators. -- Lewis Lapham % They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? -- Jeanette Winterson % It should not be important to us to keep or copy the past, but we should be adaptable enough to experience the new and to engage ourselves in it with all our strength. In this context, grief in the sense of holding on to what has been lost is not a good thing, and is not in accord with true life. -- Hermann Hesse % Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs. -- Bill Gates % I think there are two sides to the BitCoin story. One side believes it's a major enabler for markets in drugs, prostitution, and tax and copyright evasion. But the negative side says that it enables clandestine arms sales, human trafficking, and assassination markets. -- nsb % I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying. -- Nelson Mandelo % To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you. -Lewis B Smedes % Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet. -- Mark Twain % Some of us think holding on makes us strong; but sometimes it is letting go. -Hermann Hesse % If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. -Carl Sagan % He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts -- for support rather than for illumination. - Andrew Lang % Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened. -- Dr. Seuss % By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day. -- Robert Frost % When it comes time to die, make sure all you got to do is die. -- Jim Elliot % You are a citizen of a great and powerful nation. Are you not ashamed that you give so much time to the pursuit of money and reputation, and honors, and care so little for truth and wisdom and the improvement of your soul? -- Socrates % What is hardest to accept about the passage of time is that the people who once mattered the most to us are wrapped up in parentheses. - John Irving % Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true. -- Leon J. Suenens % Boredom is immoral. All a man has to do is see. All about us nature puts on the most thrilling adventure stories ever created, but we have to use our eyes. -- William Beebe % Did Persephone sometimes find the summer sun too hot, the flowers more gaudy than beautiful? Did she ever, even briefly, think fondly of the dim silence of Hades, the cool and barren nowhere of it? Did she yearn, occasionally, for her winter release from abundance, from a world that demanded happiness of her, a world so rife with wonders that the garland and the dance were all but mandatory? -- Michael Cunningham % A myth is something that never happened but is always true. -- Joseph Campbell % The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. -- Mahatma Gandhi % The masters in the art of living make little distinction between their work and their play, their labor and their leisure, their minds and their bodies, their information, their recreation, their love and their religion. They hardly know which is which, they simply pursue their vision of excellence at whatever they do, leaving others to decide whether they are working or playing. -- James Albert Michener % Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can. -- John Wesley % Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations. -- Alan Watts % The opposite of faith is not doubt; it is certainty. -- Anne Lamott % Whatever is happening is the path to enlightenment. -- Pema Chodron % Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way. -- Viktor E. Frankl % Religions are social facts. Religion cannot be studied in lone individuals any more than hivishness can be studied in lone bees. - Jonathan Haidt % Religions are moral exoskeletons. -- Jonathan Haidt % The trick is to be grateful when your mood is high and graceful when it is low. -- Richard Carlson % I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look both ways before they cross the road. -- Stephen Hawking % In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you. -- The Buddha % Speak in extremes, it'll save you time. -- David Bowie % Our days are precious but we gladly see them going If in their place we find a thing more precious growing: A rare, exotic plant, our gardener's heart delighting; A child whom we are teaching, a booklet we are writing. -- Hermann Hesse (translated by Richard and Clara Winston) % Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones. -- Benjamin Franklin % Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared. -- Buddha % At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us. -- Albert Schweitzer % Preach the Gospel at all times, and if necessary use words. -- Saint Francis of Assisi % To change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil. -- Jeanette Winterson % It is the politician's task to pass legislation, not to sit around saying principled things. -- Lyndon Baines Johnson % We die not because we are ill but because we are complete... Illness is the occasion of our dying, but not the cause. -- anonymous Tibetan lama % If your time hasn't come, not even a doctor can kill you. -- Meyer A. Perlstein % Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. -- George Bernard Shaw % All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live. -- Mark Twain % Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death. -- Erik Erikson % Death does not wait to see if things are done or not done. -- The Kularnava Tantra % A man and his body are like a boy and the buddy who has a driver's license and the use of his father's car for the evening; he goes along, gratefully, for the ride. -- John Updike % The Seven Social Sins: 2. Wealth without work. 3. Pleasure without conscience. 4. Knowledge without character. 5. Commerce without morality. 6. Science without humanity. 7. Worship without sacrifice. 1. Politics without principles. -- Mahatma Gandhi % [T]he duty of the old [is] to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old. -- Philip Pullman % Most of us have the good or bad fortune of seeing our lives fall apart so slowly we barely notice it. -- Carlos Ruiz Zafon % Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge... is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another's world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding. -- Bill Bullard % The only lies worth believing are the ones in the Bible. -- Reverand Lionel Preacherbot, Futurama % Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. -- Helen Keller % Depression is rage spread thin. -- Paul Tillich % Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. -- Nelson Mandela, after being released from prison. % Deprived of an essential connection -- the feeling that though we die, we matter -- hope perishes and with it the aspiration to goodness. Honor slumps into complacency; evolution gives way to regret. We lose the magic and ourselves when the world is stripped of its sacred dimension. -- Mark Matousek % Atheist or true believer, we can sacramentalize our lives by waking to wonder, the now-and-never-again-for-all-time-ness of things, and bring this tenderness to other people. -- Mark Matousek % Our job is to know the difference between sinning well and sinning badly. -- Mark Matousek % You're mourning the loss of what you thought your life was going to be. Let it go. Things don't always work out how you planned; that's not necessarily bad. Things have a way of working out anyway. -- "Frasier" % Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for. -- Epicurus % Let others think for you and you throw away your opportunity of possessing your own life. -- Edgar Pangborn % Dreams don't come back. It's just as well that they don't, for if we hoped to find our unfinished dreams we'd be forever sleeping, and who'd cook breakfast? -- Edgar Pangborn % Wishing for the impossible in the future is a good exerise, I think, especially for children; wishing for it in the past is surely the emptiest and saddest of occupations. -- Edgar Pangborn % The difference between a happy ending and an unhappy ending is simply the place you decide to stop telling your story. -- Stephen Elliott % Childhood is the barrel they give you to go over the falls in. -- Linda McCarriston % Intelligence without goodness is worse than high explosive in the hands of a baboon. -- Edgar Pangborn % Civilization begins with distillation. -- William Faulkner % I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road. -- Stephen Hawking % Only the very lucky and the very unlucky...get an unmixed fate; the rest of us have to choose. -- Rachel Cusk % Only when their will has been exhausted do the majority of people recognize the decree of fate. -- Rachel Cusk % Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. -- Lao Tzu % We are all different. There is no such thing as a standard or run-of-the-mill human being, but we share the same human spirit. -- Stephen Hawking % The Emperor, his bullies and henchmen, terrorize the world every day which is why every day we need a little poem of kindness, a small song of peace, a brief moment of joy. -- David Budbill % If you hide yourself away in the thickest woods, how will your wisdom's light shine through? A bag of bones is not a sturdy vessel. -- Han Shan Back and forth, back and forth. That's the way it goes. Happy and content one day, ambition and desire eat you alive the next. It's always been this way. Back and forth, back and forth. That's the way it goes. -- David Budbill % There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you. -- Norman Mailer % If 40 million people say a foolish thing it does not become a wise one. -- W. Somerset Maugham % The greatest test of courage on the earth is to bear defeat without losing heart. -- Robert Ingersoll % The Zen master would say if you want to change government, you have to aim at changing corporations, and if you want to change corporations, you first have to change the consumers. Whoa, wait a minute! The consumer? That's me. You mean I'm the one who has to change? -- Yvon Chouinard % Even if I do not see the fruits, the struggle has been worthwhile. If my life has taught me anything, it is that one must fight. -- Ella Winter % Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. -- Joseph Campbell % The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the... myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. -- John FItzgerald Kennedy % Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclination, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. -- John Adams % Do one thing every day that scares you. -- Eleanor Roosevelt % A woman is like a tea bag, you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water. --Eleanor Roosevelt % Be the change you want to see in the world. --Mahatma Gandhi % If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery % When one's expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have. -- Stephen Hawking % I find hope in the darkest of days, and focus in the brightest. I do not judge the universe. -- Dalai Lama % The world will be saved by beauty. -- Dostoevsky % Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by the attitude you bring to life; not so much by what happens to you as by the way your mind looks at what happens -- Khalil Gibran % The joy is in the rereading. -- Morris Parslow % If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. -- Oscar Wilde % We often miss opportunity because it's dressed in overalls and looks like work. -- Thomas Edison % Happy is the man who can recognize in the work of To-day a connected portion of the work of life, and an embodiment of the work of Eternity. The foundations of his confidence are unchangeable, for he has been made a partaker of Infinity. He strenuously works out his daily enterprises, because the present is given him for a possession. Thus ought Man to be an impersonation of the divine process of nature, and to show forth the union of the infinite with the finite, not slighting his temporal existence, remembering that in it only is individual action possible, nor yet shutting out from his view that which is eternal, knowing that Time is a mystery which man cannot endure to contemplate until eternal Truth enlighten it. -- James Clerk Maxwell % Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to . . . Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when science is renewed, its newformulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules. -- William James % Every wall is a door. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson % If you are afraid of being lonely, don't try to be right. Jules Renard % Zen Buddhism is the exception to every generalization about religion including this one. -- nsb % Three o'clock is always too late or too ealry for anything you want to do. -- Jean Paul Sartre % We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when en are afraid of the light. -- Plato % That a man can take pleasure in marching in fours to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him, and [he] has only been given his big brain by mistake; unprotected spinal marrow was all he needed. -- Albert Einstein % He who has a why can bear any how. -- Viktor Frankl % It's okay to love something bigger than yourself without fearing it. Anything worth loving is bigger than we are anyway. -- Percival Everett % The more you lose yourself in something bigger than yourself, the more energy you will have. -- Norman Vincent Peale % I'm not against the police; I'm just afraid of them. -- Alfred Hitchcock % "Crimes of passion" -- that phrase drives me crazy. A man murdering his girlfriend is not a crime of passion. Premature ejaculation, that's a crime of passion. -- Hellura Lyle % The fact that, in the United States, there are people serving ten-year prison terms for growing marijuana plants in their backyards while Wall Street racketeers, who have defrauded millions of people and destroyed the global economy, walk free is a kid of bizarre hypocrisy that boggles my mind. -- Mark Haskell Smith % It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not br judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones. -- Nelson Mandela % Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave -- and it sre behooves us to be kind to one another along the way. -- Alice Childress % Always be a little kinder than is necessary. -- Sir J.M. Barrie % Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves. -- Horace Mann % Genuine compassion comes from the fact that you see y our own limitations; you wish to be kind, and you find that you aren't kind. Then, instead of beating yourself up, you see that that's what all human beings are up against, and you begin to have...genuine compassion for the human condition. -- Pema Chodron % Suffering makes kinsmen of us all. -- Elbert Hubbard % Compassion for me is just what the word says; it is "suffering with." It is an immediate participation in the suffering of another to such a degree that you forget yourself and your own safety and spontaneously do what is necessary. -- Joseph Campbell % What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other? -- George ELiot % Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in m isery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human. -- Henri J.M. Nouwen % You may call God love, you may call God goodness, but the best name or God is compassion. -- Meister Eckhart % Give people what they need: food, medicine, clean air, pure water, trees and grass, pleasant homes to live in, some hours of work, more hours of leisure. Don't ask who deserves it. Every human being deserves it. -- Howard Zinn % Provision for others is a fundamental responsibility of human life. -- Woodrow Wilson % It is hard to talk about a middle ground for something that is a fundamental right. -- Teri Reynolds % Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it. -- Rick Bragg % I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when all this ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing. -- Albert Camus % No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century. -- Mark Twain % We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable -- but then, so did the divine right of kings. -- Ursula K. LeGuin % Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the opressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand. -- Simone Weil % No man consciously chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for the happiness he seeks. -- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley % Don't agonize. Organize. -- Florynce R. Kennedy % Almost anything you do will seem insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. -- Mohandas K. Gandhi % In the Soviet Union, capitalism has triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism has triumped over democracy. -- Fran Lebowitz % I don't believe there's any problem in this country, no matter how tough it is, that Americans, when they roll up their sleeves, can't completely ignore. -- George Carlin % The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. -- Flannery O'Connor % If Rosa Parks had taken a poll before she sat down in the bus in Montgomery, she'd still be standing. -- Mary Frances Berry % Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. -- Frederick Douglas % Fall seven times. Stand up eight. -- Japanese proverb % If you assume that there's no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope. If you assume that there is an instinct for freedom, that there are opportunities to change things, there's a chance you may contribute to making a better world. That's your choice. -- Noam Chomsky % As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using on the weapon of love. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. % Since I became enlightened, I have never come across a person who is not enlightened. -- Osho % If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it -- Toni Morrison % An epidemic of loneliness [is] generated by the misguided idea that romantic love is the only solution to loneliness. -- Alain de Botton % Maybe that's what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes. - Arundhati Roy % Change and the resistance to change always work hand in hand - Mark Kurlansky % To achieve a great result is one thing, to achieve it at the right moment is another. -- Nikola Tesla to J. P. Morgan, % Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act. -- Truman Capote % To love another person is to see the face of God. -- Victor Hugo % Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us. - Jerry Garcia % "Basically, when you get to my age, you'll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don't care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster." -- Warren Buffett % You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere. - Ursula Le Guin % True prophets sometimes, false prophets always, have fanatical adherents. -- Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach % There's something in every atheist, itching to believe, and something in every believer, itching to doubt. -- Mignon McLaughlin % As it turns out, the only people who are really tolerant of other people's religions are people who are really not that religious. -- Fran Lebowitz % Skip religion and the politics, head straight for the compassion. Everything else is a distraction. -- Talib Kweli % Kindness is the mark of faith, and whoever has not kindness has not faith. -- Muhammad % A poor person who is unhappy is better off than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope, he thinks that money would help. -- Jean Kerr % The only time the word "incorrectly" isn't spelled incorrectly is when it's spelled incorrectly. -- unknown % If one's bowels move, one is happy, and if they don't move, one is unhappy. That is all there is to it. -- Lin Yutang % You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere. -- William S. Burroughs % There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. -- Sylvia Plath % Complaining about a problem without posing a solution is called whining. -- Teddy Roosevelt % Most successes are unhappy. That's why they are successes -- they have to reassure themselves by achieving something that the world will notice. -- Agatha Christie % There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy to be acted out under the guise of virtue. -- Erich Fromm % Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, beautiful old people are works of art. -- Eleanor Roosevelt % When the country falls into chaos, patriotism is born. -- Lao Tzu % The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you. -- Neil deGrasse Tyson % The true tragedy of a routinely spent life is that its wastefulness does not become apparent till it is too late. -- Amitav Ghosh % We can all get lucky if we don't want too much. -- Joanna Trollope % Thank God, they cannot cut down the clouds! -- Henry David Thoreau % Have compassion for all beings, rich and poor alike; each has their suffering. -- Buddha % A thief passes for a gentleman when stealing has made him rich. -- Dutch proverb % I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed. -- Jonathan Swift % You may call me an anarchist, a socialist, or a communist, I care not, but I hold to the theory that if one man has not enough to eat three times a day and another man has $25,000,000, that last man has something that belongs to the first. -- Social Reformer Mary Elizabeth Lease % Think of all the beauty that's still left in and around you and be happy. -- Anne Frank % The trouble with self-knowledge is that it's so often bad news. -- Anonymous % Trouble is a part of life, and if you don't share it, you don't give the person who loves you a chance to love you enough. -- Dinah Shore % The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. -- Eleanor Roosevelt % The individual life is made significant just by the struggle. -- Eugene O'Neil % Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're probably right. -- Henry Ford % Be the change you want to see in the world. -- Mahatma Gandhi % You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. -- Mark Twain % Loneliness is the most terrible poverty. -- Mother Teresa % We cannot all do great things, we can only do small things with great love. -- Mother Teresa % Self-expression must pass into communication for its fulfillment. -- Pearl S. Buck % The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world. -- Tracy Kidder % Embarking on the spiritual journey is like getting into a very small boat and setting out on the ocean to search for unknown lands. With wholehearted practice comes inspiration, but sooner or later we will also encounter fear. For all we know, when we get to the horizon, we are going to drop off the edge of the world. Like all explorers, we are drawn to discover what's waiting out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it. -- Pema Chodron % History says, don't hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme. -- Seamus Heaney % We enjoy only while our means of enjoyment are passing from us, as the spark, which shines only while it is consuming. -- Horace Mann % People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway. Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway. --The Paradoxical Commandments, Kent M. Keith % I believe in a Higher Power and it's called 'Whatever Dude' and he's a queer, surfing Santa that's a bit like my grandpa. -- Sia % Young people like to talk about death but do not really think about it. It is just the other way round with old people. -- Hermann Hesse % Indeed, it is nearly impossible to behave ethically in a world where "good" and "bad" outcomes are determined by the guest appearances of a deity that reflects our own beliefs. -- Sankara Saranam % The ideals of religion and spirituality - its timeless counterpart - are the same: both aspire to assist human beings in leading a happy, service-oriented, and purposeful life. -- Sankara Saranam % Never think you want to win with someone you love if they have to lose. -- Patch Adams % Humor is a trick to bring love close. -- Patch Adams % Laughter is a joyful gateway to all emotions. -- Corinne Cosseron % The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. -- Martin Luther King, Jr. % It is said that desire for knowledge lost us the Eden of the past; but whether that is true or not, it will certainly give us the Eden of the future. -- Robert G. Ingersoll % I bet that the gap in intelligence between God and me is rather bigger than the gap between me and [my cat] Wensley. -- John Cleese % I always say that luck is the greatest superpower, because if you have good luck then everything goes your way. -- Stan Lee % The importance and unimportance of the self cannot be exaggerated. -- R.H. Blyth % The ego will endure the worst agonies of neurotic misery rather than consent to one minute of diminishment of its sense of importance. -- Helen Luke % The most excellent jihad is that for the conquest of self. -- Muhammad % Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama. -- Ram Dass % All is well, prqactice kindness, heaven is nigh. -- Jack Kerouac % The only difference between man and man all the world over is one of degree, not of kind... Wherein is the cause for anger, envy, or discrimination? -- Gandhi % Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. -- Karen Armstrong % There are some things you've got to do. You don't know all the answers. You don't know all the consequences -- but you've got to do something because you know it's right. There is no alternative. You cannot sit in silence. You cannot maintain neutrality. You know it's right, and you've got to move. -- Marlon Riggs % The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy. -- Yevgeny Zamyatim % Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. -- Gandhi % Because we all share a wish for happiness and an identical need for love, it is possible to feel that anyone we meet, in whatever circumstances, is a brother or sister. We do not need to become religious; nor do we need to believe in an ideology. I believe that at every level of society the key to a happier and more successful world is the growth of compassion. -- The Dalai Lama % Nothing is illegal if a hundred businessmen decide to do it. -- Andrew Young % When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses. -- Shirley Chisholm % Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. -- Edward Abbey % The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more. -- Kim Hubbard % It is difficult but not impossible to conduct strictly honest business. -- Gandhi % Modern man lives isolated in his artificial environment, not because the artificial is evil as such, but because of his lack of comprehension of the forces which make it work -- of the principles which relate his gadgets to the forces of nature, to the universal order. It is not central heating which makes his existence "unnatural," but his refusal to take an interest in the principles behind it. By being entirely dependent on science, yet closing his mind to it, he leads the life of an urban barbarian. -- Arthur Koestler % Five things to consider before speaking. Is what you're about to say: Factual and true Helpful, or beneficial Spoken with kindness and good-will Endearing (spoken gently, in a way the other person can hear) Timely -- Buddha? Socrates? Sai Baba? Rumi? Bernard Meltzer? % To appreciate the beauty of a snowflake, it is necessary to stand out in the cold. -- Aristotle % Of course, he understood the work he did involved some element of moral luck; so it is for all men of science. You work partly in the dark, uncertain of future ramifications, unsure what blackness your name might yet carry, what bodies will be laid at your door. No one working in a new field, doing truly visionary work, can be certain of getting through his century or the next without blood on his palms. But stop the work? Gag Einstein? Tie Heisenberg's hands? What can you hope to achieve? -- Zadie Smith % A religious man is a person whose greatest passion is compassion. -- Abraham Joshua Heschel % It is gratefulness which makes the soul great. -- Abraham Joshua Heschel % God loves news. -- Abraham Joshua Heschel % Racism is man's gravest threat to man -- the maximum of hatred for the minimum of reason. -- Abraham Joshua Heschel % The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. -- Gandhi % Self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself. -- Abraham Joshua Heschel % The U.S. is about competition and achievement and acquisition, all of which are antithetical to happiness. Happiness is simplicity and submission to fate. -- Poe Ballantine % The mistake 99 percent of humanity made... was being ashamed of what they were; lying about it, trying to be someone else. -- J.K. Rowling % We, each of us, need so much to be affirmed. For each of us has -- gnawing away at the center of our being -- a sense of insecurity, some more than others. And frequently, the more insecure, the more aggressive we become, the more we throw our weight about and say people should recognize us. -- Desmond Tutu % Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they've become. -- James Baldwin % Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before -- more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle. -- Charles Dickens % If your conpassion does nbot include yourself, it is inconplete. -- Jack Kornfield % People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar. -- Thich Nhat Hanh % Empathy is the antidote to shame... The two most powerful words when we're in struggle: me too. -- Brene Brown % Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried. -- Megan Divine % Don't be ashamed to be a human being, be proud! Inside you one vault ater another opens endlessly. You'll never be complete, and that's as it should be. -- Tomnas Transtromer % Five years is nothing in a man's life except when he is very young and very old. -- Pearl S. Buck % The worst thing about communication is the illusion that it's happened. -- John Stibbs % You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, not look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books. You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, you shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself. -- Walt Whitman % It is important always to remember that virtual contact cannot and must not take the place of direct human contact with people at every level of our lives. -- Pope Benedict XVI % In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -- Friedrich Nietzsche % People do not come to the dictionary for excitement and romance; that's what encyclopedias are for. -- Kory Stamper % Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren't tears. She wasn't crying. They were just the memories, leaking out. -- Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being % One can choose what to do, but not what to want. -- Arthur Schopenhauer % The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful. -- Carl Jung, in a letter to Freud % By temperament, which is the real law of God, many men are goats and can't help committing adultery when they get a chance; whereas there are numbers of men who, by temperament, can keep their purity and let an opportunity go by if the woman lacks in attractiveness. -- Mark Twain % The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. -- Thomas Merton % Some people are so poor that all they have is money. -- Gaur Gopal Das % We are slowed down sound and light waves, a walking bundle of frequencies tuned into the cosmos. We are souls dressed up in sacred biochemical garments and our bodies are the instruments through which our souls play their music. - falsely attributed to Albert Einstein % Just because you find that life's not fair, it Doesn't mean that you just have to grin and bear it. If you always take it on the chin and wear it, nothing will change. Just because I find myself in this story, It doesn't mean that everything is written for me. If I think the ending is fixed already, I might as well be saying I think that it's OK, And that's not right! -- Tim Minchin (Matilda) % Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets. -- Arthur Miller % Whatever a man prays for, he prays for a miracle. Every prayer reduces itself to this: Great God, grant that twice two be not four. -- Ivan Turgenev % Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he's destroying is this God he's worshiping. -- Hubert Reeves % I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken. -- Oliver Cromwell % If it came from a plant, eat it. If it was made in a plant, don't. -- Michael Pollan % Nothing is more important than empathy for another human being's suffering. Nothing. Not a career, not wealth, not intelligence, certainly not status. We have to feel for one another if we're going to survive with dignity. -- Audrey Hepburn % The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise. -- Alden Nowlan % At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. -- Toni Morrison % Don't you ever let a soul in the world tell you that you canm't be exactly who you are. -- Lady Gaga % The state calls its own violence "law," but that of the individual "crime." -- Max Stirner % The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier. -- George Bernard Shaw % No sin is so light that it may be overlooked; no sin is so heavy that it may not be repented of. -- Moses ibn Ezra % Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always. -- Robin Williams % Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible. -- Stanislaw Lem % I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education. -- Wilson Mizner % The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. -- Bertrand Russell % Skepticism is the highest of duties, and blind faith the one unpardonable sin. -- T.H. Huxley % War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today. -- John F.Kennedy % Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one true illusion. -- Marguerite Young % Every hand that we don't shake must become a phone call that we place. Every embrace that we avoid must become a verbal expression of warmth and concern. Every inch and every foot that we physically place between ourselves and another must become a thought as to how we might help that other, should the need arise -- Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky % Every charitable act is a stepping stone towards heaven. -- Henry Ward Beecher % To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike. -- Horace Mann % WE are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond. -- Gwendolyn Brooks % The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others. -- Mahatma Gandhi % No one has ever become poor by giving. -- Anne Frank % No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. -- Aesop % No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another. -- Charles Dickens % Help thy brother's boat across and lo! Thine own has reached the shore. -- Hindu Proverb % I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver. -- Maya Angelou % One must know not just how to accept a gift, but with what grace to share it. --Maya Angelou % Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God. -- Hebrews 13:16 % A man's true wealth is the good he does in this world. -- Muhammad % Grief is a sign that we loved something more than ourselves... [It] makes us worthy to suffer with the rest of the world. Joan Chittister % Grief, I've learned, is really just love. It's all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go. -- Jamie Anderson % Grief is love not wanting to let go. -- Earl A. Grollman % Grief is a sign that we loved something more than ourselves . . . [It] makes us worthy to suffer with the rest of the world. -- Joan Chittister % All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to thosee around us. -- Richard Rohr % It took years -- far past the point when I actually knew better -- for me to realize that my reflexive rejection of everything Christian wasn't just the Church's loss but mine as well. Slowly, haltingly, I came to accept that somnewhere in that vast ocean of toxic bathwater was a beautiiful baby Jesus. Shame to throw iit all out together. -- Andrew Boyd % God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing shows through.-- Paul Valery % Men think there are circumstances in which one may deal with human beings without love; and there are no such circumstances. -- Leo Tolstoy % When we compare the present life of man on Earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like a swift flight of a single sparrow through a banquet hall on a winter's day. After a few moments of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on Earth for a little while, but of what went before this life or what will follow, we know nothing. -- from The Tudors, Henry VIII % It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment. -- Freeman Dyson % I ask not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders. -- Jewish proverb % Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness. . . . Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words. -- Rainer Maria Rilke % Open your eyes and look for some man, or some work for the sake of men, which needs a little time, a little friendship, a little sympathy, a little sociability, a little human toil. . . . [It] is needed in every nook and corner. Therefore search and see if there is not some place where you may invest your humanity. -- Albert Schweitzer % Down in their hearts, wise men know this truth: the only way to help yourself is to help others. -- Elbert Hubbard % Sometimes it helps to have never had a chance of understanding in the first place -- Unknown % The act of writing itself feels like renewal. I love the act of creation from the first glimmering of an idea to the final manuscript. I find the sheer mechanics to be a source of pleasure. I love the carpentry of the writing process: finding the perfect word, sanding and burnishing rough sentences, tinkering with the tick-tocks of phrase and sentence cadence. -- Irvin D. Yalom % Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public. -- Cornel West % I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope. -- Cornel West % In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. --Aristotle % There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie. -- Cornel West % The law of large numbers means that nearly all of us know of people both better and worse off than us. The choices are looking up with envy or looking down with compassion. -- Nathaniel Borenstein % The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. -- Oscar Wilde % When it comes to race, uncomfortable is best. -- Jemele Hill % Love all the people you can. The sufferings from love are not to be compared to the sorrows of loneliness. -- Susan Hale % Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it." -- William Faulkner % There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest. -- Elie Wiesel % In the past we have been seduced by technology, but I think people are becoming more mature. They are paying more attention to inner values and finding inner peace. I feel strongly that education should include instruction about our inner world -- the workings of our mind and emotions. We need to learn, for example, that it's destructive emotions like anger that destroy our peace of mind. -- The Dalai Lama % What are the things that you can't see that are important? I would say justice, truth, humility, service, compassion, love. You can't see any of those, but they're the guiding lights of a life. -- Jimmy Carter % Many things would be changed for Americans if they would only admit that there is ill luck in this world and that misfortune is not a priori a crime. -- Simone de Beauvoir % To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving. -- William Sloane Coffin % Regard yourself as a cloud, in the flesh, because you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that was misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No, they always do the right thing. But if you will treat yourself for a while as a cloud or a wave, and realize that you can'rhutchint make a mistake whatever you do. Because even if you do something that appears totally disastrous, it will all come out in the wash somehow or another. Then through this capacity you will develop a kind of confidence. And through confidence you will be able to trust your own intuition. -- Alan Watts % Morality is doing what is right no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told no matter what is right. -- H. L. Mencken % Our world is not divided by race, color, gender, or religion. Our world is divided into wise people and fools. And fools divide themselves by race, color, gender, or religion. -- Mohamad Safa % Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced. -- James Baldwin % I point the way, but people come and suck on my finger. -- Nasiruddin (peer Jim Fadiman, per Jim Morris) % Software engineering is a set of management methods for creating serviceable software employing large numbers of people with an average IQ of 115. -- Alan Newell (per Jim Morris) % Everything will be alright in the end. If it is not alright it is not the end. -- Richard Rohr % It's much harder to be a liberal than conservative. Why? Because it's easier to give someone the finger than a helping hand. -- Mike Royko % Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances. -- Mahatma Gandhi % A failed non-violent uprising does more lasting good than a successful violent uprising. -- Michael N. Nagler % Noviolence is invincible -- if you do it right. -- Michael N. Nagler % To be happy, you must let go of what's gone, be grateful for what remains, and look forward to what is coming next. -- "Heaven Soul" % Comparing yourself to others is an act of violence against your authentic self. -- Iyanla Vanzant % Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves. It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking we have all the answers for everybody else. -- Archibald MacLeish % Behind every beautiful thing, there 's some kind of pain. -- Bob Dylan % If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want your children to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. -- Albert Einstein % Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life's light to be determined by the darkness around me. -- Sojourner Truth % When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent, and some of them are straight, and some of them are evergreens, and some of them are whatever. And you look at the tree and you allow it. You see why it is the way it is. You sort of understand that it didn't get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don't get all emotional about it. You just allow it. You appreciate the tree. The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying 'You are too this, or I'm too this.' That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are. -- Ram Dass % I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. -- Henry David Thoreau % The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That's how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I'll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I'll become saccharine and won't develop much compassion for other people's suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible. -- Francis Ward Weller % The buying of more books than one can read is nothiing less than the soul reaching toward inifinity. -- A. Edward Newton % One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. -- Aldo Leopold % Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. -- Henry David Thoreau % Buddha told a parable in sutra: A man traveling across a field encountered a tiger. He fled, the tiger after him. Coming to a precipice, he caught hold of the root of a wild vine and swung himself down over the edge. The tiger sniffed at him from above. Trembling, the man looked down to where, far below, another tiger was waiting to eat him. Only the vine sustained him. Two mice, one white and one black, little by little started to gnaw away the vine. The man saw a luscious strawberry near him. Grasping the vine w ith one hand, he plucked the strawberry with the other. How sweet it tasted! % Man... thinks of himself as a creator instead of a user, and this delusion is robbing him, not only of his natural heritage, but perhaps of his future. -- Helen Hoover % Like the mind-set that places men above women, whites above Blacks, and rich above poor, the mentality that places humans above nature is a dysfunctional delusion. -- Petra K. Kelly % Part of the irony of loving the natural world is understanding that it would be better off without human presence. -- Jill Fredston % It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matter. - Amit Ray % Judaism is generally annoying -- a series of tedious, repetitive, and useless prayers until someone dies. Then it suddenly seems as brilliant as an astrophysicist. -- Sparrow % I rarely meddled in the cat's personal affairs and she rarely meddled in mine. Neither of us was foolish enough to attribute human emotions to our pets. -- Kinky Friedman % The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. -- Eden Phillpotts % I'd rather die happy than not die at all, For a man is a fool who will not heed the call. -- Robbie Robertson % Walking the bodhisattva path -- dedicating one's life to the benefit of all beings -- includes doing whatever we can to help ourselves be happy and free. -- Cyndi Lee % When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of reality. -- Henry David Thoreau % People you love never die... Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters. If you stop mourning them, and start listening to them, they still have the power to change your life. They can, in short, be salvation. -- Matt Haig % I think it is a less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part. -- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. % When a judge sits in judgment over another man, he should feel as if a sword is pointed at his own heart. -- Talmud END