Collected Works: Giants
If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
- Isaac Newton (1642-1727), Letter to Robert Hooke, 5 February 1676, in H.W. Turnbull (ed.) "Correspondence of Isaac Newton, Volume 1" (1959) p. 416If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.
- Hal AbelsonA dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant can see farther than the giant himself.
- StekelA dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two.
- George Herbert (1593-1633), Jacula Prudentum (1651)A dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant may see farther than a giant himself.
- Robert Burton (1577-1640), The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621-1651), "Democritus to the Reader''If we stand tall it is because we stand on the shoulders of many ancestors.
- Yoruba ProverbIn the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
- Gerald HoltonBernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness on sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.
- Bernard of Chartres (d. c.1130), John of Salisbury Metalogicon (1159) bk. 3, ch. 4It is a special trick of low cunning to squeeze out knowledge from a modest man, who is eminent in any science, and then to use it as legally acquired, and pass the source in total silence.
- Horace Walpole“In the summer of 1998, I attended the Clearwater Festival, Great Hudson River Revival, Croton Point Park, Croton-on-Hudson, Westchester County, New York, which starred Arlo Guthrie. Arlo in one of his highy entertaining interludes between songs talked about the creative process of stealing songs. His give was that you find a song you Love and you want to imitate you can change a little here and a little there until it is completely unrecognizable even to you who have done the tinkering, chances are it will sound original to everyone else. I searched the web to see if he is quoted to have said this elsewhere in performance. I didn't find exactly what I was looking for, hence my reliance on memory. What I did find in related quotations appears immediately below.”
- Reverend R ClarkAndrew Ford: “There are a lot of musicians today, Randy Newman is a good example, but you're certainly one of them, where you listen to the songs and you hear the whole history of American music. I mean some of your songs have a great debt to gospel, some of them have a sort of New England hymnody there. ‘Alice's Restaurant’ is ragtime. Are you aware of this kind of eclecticism, I suppose, American eclecticism in your music?”
Arlo Guthrie: “Yes. Not only that, I love it, because primarily my learning came from my Dad's record collection. I learned a lot going to these clubs and listening to people, but mostly my Dad had an extensive collection of 78 records, you know, these old breakable records with a song on each side. It took up an entire wall, and I listened to it all, and I loved it all. I fell in love with ragtime piano, mostly because I didn't want to study the classical music lessons that I was taking lessons for, it just drove me crazy. Why sit there and play Beethoven when you could sit there and listen to some great barrelhouse style keyboard. I fell in love with it. And later on I loved Beethoven too, he came into it, and I would steal from him as well as anyone else. You see folk music to me is not a genre, it's the way that you learn the music you play, you learn it from somebody else, you learn it from a record, you learn it by ear, there's no course you take on it. Now there may be, but in those days there certainly wasn't. There wasn't even a book written on it. As a matter of fact even the Lomax books that went out and collected the songs, there weren't arrangements for songs in there, they just gave you the words and said ‘This is So-and-so sang this cowboy song, I met him Wyoming’, that's the end of their story. But on the records you could hear it, and not only that, you could hear the history of the people in the songs. In their voices you could hear something that a book could never translate. You could hear the actual guys, and I love that. There was something about just making contact with the rest of humanity through the voices and through the instrumentation and the playing of all these people that connects you, not just to the world, but to yourself, to the parts of yourself that you awaken when you do that.”
- Radio National: The Music ShowStories led into songs and songs led into more stories. Woody Guthrie's "I Ain't Got No Home in This World" spawned another anecdote. “My father used to steal a lot of songs,”" Arlo [Guthrie] said. “People used to call it plagiarism and stealin' and nasty words like that until Pete Seeger came around and renamed it ‘the folk tradition’.”
- Chris Wanjek“We've heard some of the people talk about some of the songs he wrote tonight. And the truth is, he did steal old songs from other places. He took the old gospel songs, he took the old traditional ballads, and he put his words to them like we heard tonight. People still called it stealing. Plagarism, bad words like that, 'til Pete Seeger come along and renamed it the folk process,” Guthrie continued, to howls of laughter. “I think my dad's theory was that if you wanted people to be singing along with you on your new song, it'd be a hell of a start if they already knew the tune. Or even some of words.”
- Arlo GuthrieWoody Guthrie believed in the free flow of information. He generously shared the songs that he sang and made his lyrics available to anyone who asked. According to Pete Seeger, “”When Woody Guthrie was singing hillbilly songs on a little Los Angeles radio station in the late 1930’s, he used to mail out a small mimeographed songbook to listeners who wanted the words to his songs."
On the bottom of one page appeared the following:
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do.””
- Woody Guthrie as quoted by The Museum of Musical Instruments
Other Quotations by Woody Guthrie
“If you play more than two chords, you're showing off.”“Left wing, chicken wing, it don't make no difference to me.”
“Life has got a habit of not standing hitched. You got to ride it like you find it. You got to change with it. If a day goes by that don't change some of your old notions for new ones, that is just about like trying to milk a dead cow.”
“This land is your land, this land is my land, From California to the New York Island. From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters This land was made for you and me.”
Other Quotations by Arlo Guthrie
“Building walls isn't going to work in the long run. Some people are happy with the wall in Israel, but somebody will get a weapon someday and knock it over or something. Walls aren't the answer between countries, though.”“But think of the last guy. For one minute, think of the last guy. Nobody's got it worse than that guy. Nobody in the whole world.”
"The Pause of Mr. Claus"“Everyone has a responsibility to not only tolerate another person's point of view, but also to accept it eagerly as a challenge to your own understanding. And express those challenges in terms of serving other people.”
“Greed and globalization aren't just America's fault.”
“I don't want a pickle, just want to ride on my motorsickle.”
“I'd rather have friends who care than friends who agree with me.”
“The death of what's dead is the birth of what's living.”
“There are people all over the world who are willing to exploit others. You can't just point the finger at America.”
“There's only one God. Call him whatever you want.”
“We live in an increasingly sophisticated world that makes it difficult to make simple comments on stuff. There are too many people on both sides of the border who are taking advantage of circumstances and the situation.”
“We would turn everything into songs in those days.”
“You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in.”
“You get people talking about being worried about their art, and dances... their culture being wiped out or taken over, and yet these same people are taking advantage of their people to use them as cheap labour.”
“If you're gonna be original, you can count on being copied.”
- Mike's Hard LemonadeStealing from one source is plagiarism. Stealing from many sources is research.
- Laurendo AlmeidaCopy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research.
- Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)
Everything important has been said before by somebody who did not discover it.
- Alfred North Whitehead
Our best thoughts come from others.
- Ralph Waldo EmersonMessiah's Handbook and Reminders for the Advanced Soul
Perspective - use it or lose it. If you turned to this page, you're forgetting that what is going on around you is not reality. Think about that. Remember where you came from, where you're going, and why you created the mess you got yourself into in the first place. You're going to die a horrible death, remember. It's all good training, and you'll enjoy it more if you keep the facts in mind. Take your dying with some seriousness, however. Laughing on the way to your execution is not generally understood by less-advanced life-forms, and they'll call you crazy.
by Richard Bach (1936 - ) from: "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah" (1977)Learning is finding out what you already know.
Doing is demonstrating that you know it.
Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you.
You are all learners, doers, teachers.Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.
The simplest questions are the most profound.
Where is your home?
Where are you going?
What are you doing?
Think about these once in a while, and watch your answers change.You teach best what you most need to learn.
Live never to be ashamed if anything you do or say is published around the world - even if what is published is not true.
Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.
The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, "I've got responsibilities."
You are led through your lifetime by the inner learning creature, the playful spiritual being that is your real self. Don't turn away from possible futures before you're certain you don't have anything to learn from them. You're always free to change your mind and choose a different future, or a different past.
There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands.
You seek problems because you need their gifts.The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life.
Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they're yours.
Imagine the universe beautiful and just and perfect, then be sure of one thing:
the Is has imagined it quite a bit better than you have.A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed.
It feel an impulsion...this is the place to go now.
But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true.
You may have to work for it, however.The world is your exercise-book, the pages on which you do your sums.
It is not reality, although you can express reality there if you wish.
You are also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages.The original sin is to limit the Is.
Don't.If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.
Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness.
Listen to it carefully.Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there.
What you choose to do with them is up to you.The truth you speak has no past and no future.
It is, and that's all it needs to be.Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished.
If you're alive, it isn't.In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom.
It is not always an easy sacrifice.Don't be dismayed at good-byes.
A farewell is necessary before you can meet again.
And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.Everything in this book may be wrong.
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly.”
“The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.”
“You can't solve problems for someone
whose problem is that they don't want problems solved.”
("One," 1989)“Don't believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is illusion. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you'll see the way to fly.”
("Jonathan Livingston Seagull," 1970)“You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it come true. You may have to work for it, however.”
Bertrand Arthur William Russell Philosopher, Mathematician, Author, Nobel laureate (1872-1970)
One should have a general attitude of welcoming to everybody.
(From the "shot list" of the film, "The Life and Times of Bertrand Russell", BBC TV, 1964; ts., RA1 430 BBC])I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
(From "Introduction: On the Value of Scepticism", Sceptical Essays; London: Allen & Unwin, 1928)Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, "The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance." You would say, "Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment" and that is really what a scientific person would say about the universe.
(From "Why I Am Not a Christian"; London: Watts, 1927)Probably in time physiologists will be able to make nerves connecting the bodies of different people; this will have the advantage that we shall be able to feel another man's tooth aching.
(From "Human Knowledge"; London: Allen & Unwin, 1948)A personality is an aggregate, or an organization, like a cricket club. I can accept the dissolution of the MCC.
To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
The secret of happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible....
I don't believe in meekness.
It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go.
Hatred of some sort is quite necessary---it needn't be towards people.
But without some admixture of hatred one becomes soft and loses energy.
(All from Alan Wood, "Bertrand Russell, the Passionate Sceptic"; London: Allen & Unwin, 1957)The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked. I disbelieve this, absolutely and entirely. I believe that love of truth is the basis of all real virtue, and that virtues based upon lies can only do harm.
(From "The Prospects of Industrial Civilization"; London: Allen & Unwin, 1923, p. 252; written in collaboration with Dora Russell)Truth is a shining goddess, always veiled, always distant, never wholly approachable, but worthy of all the devotion of which the human spirit is capable.
(From "University Education", Fact and Fiction; London: Allen & Unwin, 1961)Mathematics may be defined as the subject where we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
(CPBR 3: 366 : 31-3; "Recent Work on the Principles of Mathematics", a.k.a. "Mathematics and the Metaphysicians")... since one never knows what will be the line of advance, it is always most rash to condemn what is not quite in the fashion of the moment.
(Review of MacColl's "Symbolic Logic and Its Applications," Mind, 15; 1906, p. 260)In very abstract studies such as philosophical logic, ...the subject-matter that you are supposed to be thinking of is so exceedingly difficult and elusive that any person who has ever tried to think about it knows you do not think about it except perhaps once in six months for half a minute. The rest of the time you think about the symbols, because they are tangible, for the thing you are supposed to be thinking about is fearfully difficult and one does not often manage to think about it. The really good philosopher is the one who does once in six months think about it for a minute. Bad philosophers never do.
("The Philosophy of Logical Atomism", Logic and Knowledge, ed. R.C. Marsh; London: Allen & Unwin, 1956, p. 185)Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty--a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.
("The Study of Mathematics")... mathematics is only the art of saying the same thing in different words
(Autobiography, Vol. 3, penultimate par.)I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
("Education and the Social Order"; London: Allen & Unwin, 1932)United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need, of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves.
("The Free Man's Worship" 1903)It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents us from living freely and nobly.&
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists --that is why they invented hell.
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.
Religions that teach brotherly love have been used as an excuse for persecution, and our profoundest scientific insight is made into a means of mass destruction.
Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue.
A man who has learned not to feel fear will find the fatigue of daily life enormously diminished.Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free.
The experience of overcoming fear is extraordinarily delightful.
Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.
Joseph Campbell (March 26, 1904 - October 31, 1987) "The Power of Myth"; Doubleday, 666 Fifth Avenue, New York City, NY, 10103; 1988. ISBN# 0-385-41886-8
“The wound is the wound of my passion and the agony of my love for this creature. The only one who can heal me is the one who delivered the blow.”
(P. 243)“In marriage, every day you love and every day your forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament -- love and forgiveness.”
- Bill Moyers (P. 250)Campbell: “That depends on how you understand marriage, The word "sym-bol" itself means two things put together. One person has one half, the other the other half, and then they come together. Recognition comes from putting the ring together, the completed circle. This is my marriage, this is the merging of my individual life in a larger life that is two, where the two are one. The ring indicates that we are one circle together.” (P. 270)
Moyers: “So joy and pain are in love.”
Campbell: “Yes. Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain.”
Moyers: “But love bears all things.”
Campbell: “Love itself is a pain, you might say — the pain of being truly alive.”
(P. 257)“...the paramount object of experience is the beast. Killed and slaughtered, it yields to people its flesh to become our substance, teeth to become our ornaments, hides for clothing and tents, sinews for ropes, bones for tools. The animal life is translated into human life entirely, through the medium of death, slaughter, and the arts of cooking, tanning, sewing.”
("The Sexual Politics of Meat" by Adams; p 189)“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.”
“Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege!”
("Full Esteem Ahead" by Diane Loomans)“I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”
“One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.”
("A Joseph Campbell Companion," by Diane Osbon, ed.)
H.I.M. Haile Selassie I Lord of Lords, King of Kings, Emperor of Ethiopia
On Evil - “In order that the work of evil may not triumph again over this redeemed humanity, all Peace-loving peoples must rally together for the definite re-establishment of right and Peace.”
- Selassie I, 1937On JAH Guide - “Just as we have done in the past, we will make available to you, through various experts, detectives which will serve as your guide in your work.”
- Selassie IOn Energy - “There is no energy in the world, including the atom, that can not be controlled. However, there is no scientist on earth who could control even for a second, the flow of time. For this reason, never idle away your time, however briefly.”
- Selassie IOn Education - “Humanity by nature is gifted to think freely, but in order that this free thought should lead him to the goal of liberty and independence, his way of thinking must be shaped be the process of education.”
- Selassie I, 1946On Strength - “With the knowledge that unity and co-operation are in themselves strength, take advantage of the possibilities we have opened to you.”
- Selassie I, Sept. 18, 1959On War - “Wars and rumors of wars are occupying the attention of governments and peoples, but the world is thirsting more than ever for Peace and justice.”
- Selassie I, 1936“The historical religions of the world have separated mankind, but the mystic traditions confirm the brotherhood of Man.”
Vladimir Nabokov
I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child.A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me.
Barack Obama (August 4, 1961- ) 44th President of the United States. Community organizer Lawyer, Constitutional law professor, Author, former United States Senator from Illinois.
I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.
(Dreams From My Father; Times Books; 1995)Traditionally, Indonesians practiced a tolerant, almost syncretic brand of faith, infused with the Buddhist, Hindu, and animist traditions of earlier periods.
(The Audacity of Hope; Crown Publishers; 2006)Some of the worst actors on the international stage can also take advantage of the collective exhaustion and outrage that people feel with official corruption, as we've seen with Islamic extremists who promise purification, but deliver totalitarianism. Endemic corruption opens the door to this kind of movement, and in its wake comes a new set of distortions and betrayals of public trust.
(An Honest Government, A Hopeful Future; Speech at the University of Nairobi, Kenya; Aug 28, 2006)I am proud to be sponsoring this amendment with the senior senator from West Virginia [Robert Byrd]. He's absolutely right that Congress has abrogated its oversight responsibilities.
(Remarks of Senator Barack Obama on the Military Commission Legislation; Sep 28, 2006) Time: “What's the best piece of advice that you've gotten from someone about being President?”
Obama: “Well, precisely because it's sui generis, the only people that really know are the collection of ex-Presidents we have.”
(The Interview; Time, New York; Dec 29, 2008)
Osho "Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic"; New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2K ISBN: 0312254571
Spiritual, to me, simply means finding oneself.
("Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic" p 3.)That's how the whole of humanity lives in corruption, in a very slippery, thick mud of lies told to children for centuries. If we can do just one thing, a simple thing--not lie to children and to confess to them our ignorance--then we will be religious and we will put them on the path of religion. Children are only innocence; leave them not your so-called knowledge. But you yourself must first be innocent, unlying, true.
("Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic" p 13.)Unless one is a born troublemaker one cannot become a Buddha.
("Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic" p 18.)Only once in a while a man becomes a wild human being.
("Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic" p 33.)Once you are ready to say, "I don't care about respectability," then the society is absolutely impotent to do anything against your will.
("Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic" p 97.)This meeting [of all opposites] will create a new human being--Zorba the Buddha. That's my name for the new man.
("Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic" p 215.)To transform life into celebration is the only authentic science of religion.
H.L. Mencken writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.Imagine the Creator as a stand up comedian -- and at once the world becomes understandable.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office.
I never lecture, not because I am shy or a bad speaker, but simply because I detest the sort of people who go to lectures and don't want to meet them.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) essayist and novelist
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.
Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom.
I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic:
I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.It is always the secure who are humble.
[The will] is particularity reflected into itself and so brought back to universality, i.e. it is individuality.
- Hegel, Introduction to "Philosophy of Right"The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth.
- "The Everlasting Man". New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1925. p 19.The world will never starve for want of wonders.
At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spirited life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder.
- ChaucerThe way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
William James (1842-1910) Psychologist and philosopher
William James, who thought that no reasonable psychology could question the existence of "personal selves," and who believed that the worst a psychology might do is rob those selves of significance, might be pleased to discover that today there are plausible if not yet proven hypotheses for the neural basis of the self.
- Antonio R. Damasio, "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain"; New York: Avon Books, 1998. p 244.Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect. ... The horrors make the fascination. ... Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents.
(1907, Rollo May, "Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence", New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1972. p 173.)The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.
There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.
Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.
The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
Johrei Wisdom
“Only loving deeds, good deeds can ever bring forth the realization of a world completely filled with truth, virtue and beauty. Paradise on earth will be a world of beauty, where the inner hearts of all its inhabitants will be beautiful also. A person whose thoughts, words and deeds are always pure, always beautiful, can surely be considered one who lives in paradise.”
- Mokichi Okada (1882-1955) Japanese poet, artist, mystic, visionary, businessman, husband, father, and spiritual teacher founder of Johrei.Nothing's as precious,
Priceless, as true makoto (love & integrity).
Nothing has its strength,
The power to penetrate
Even an iron-hard rock.
- Meishu-samaMakoto, true love,
Is a most priceless treasure
Cherished in the hearts
Of sincere, honest persons
In whom there is no falsehood.
- Meishu-samaLet us remember--
Even the gigantic tree
Which has grown so tall
It now seems to reach the sky
Was once a tiny seedling.
- Meishu-samaThe divine light plan
Is advancing day by day.
Let us help young people
To grow spiritually
And prepare for the future.
- Kyoshu-samaAh, how beautiful
It is to see young people
Giving of themselves,
Devoting their energies
To humanity's welfare!
- Kyoshu-sama
Dorothy Parker
The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.And it is that word "hummy," my darlings, that marks the first place in "The House at Pooh Corner" at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
(New Yorker, 1928; review by D.P. as "Constant Reader")There's a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise-cracking is simply calisthenics with words.
Mark Twain (Samuel Longhorne Clemens) U.S. Author and Humorist (1835-1910)
As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
The streets of hell are paved with good intentions.
Love: The irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence to practice neither.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
Anyone with a new idea is a crank, until the idea succeeds.
The physician who knows only medicine, knows not even medicine.
Sing as if no one is listening, Dance as if no one is watching, And love as if you have never been hurt before.
Suppose you were an idiot...And suppose you were a member of Congress...But I repeat myself.
The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.
When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.
Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.
Necessity is the mother of taking chances.
Be careful about reading health books.
You might die of a misprint.“Eschew surplusage.”
“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
- Charles Dudley Warner (Hartford [CN] Courant newspaper editor) (Twain's friend, colleague and co-author with him of, "The Guilded Age: A Tale of Today." Twain usually gets the credit for this quotation.)
Ralph Waldo Emerson American essayist, poet and philosopher (1803-1882, Gemini)
Emersonian Ideal
(1) the wish to be different; the wish to be unique; the wish to go off in one's own direction; the wish to experiment, to wander, to float;
(2) the wish to be let alone; the wish to be uninvolved in somebody else's game; the wish to be unobserved; the wish to be mysterious; to have secrets; the be thought undefined;
(3) the wish to be unbeholden; the wish to own oneself;
(4) the wish to think, judge, and interpret for oneself;
(5) the wish to feel real, not dazed; the wish to live, not play just one lifelong role or perform just one lifelong function;
(6) the wish to go to one's limit; the wish to score, to accumulate heterogeneous experiences;
(7) the wish to shape one's life, but not into a well-shaped story, or a well-made work of art; the wish to be fluid, not substantial;
(8) the wish to find oneself, to find the "real me"; to be oneself rather than somebody else's idea of that self; the wish to be reborn as oneself.
- Kateb, "Democratic Individuality and the Meaning of Rights," in "Liberalism and the Moral Life" 183, 191 by Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed. 1989. Also quoted in "Overcoming Law." Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. p 27-28 by Posner, Richard A., Posner's note: Notice the resemblance to Mill's principle of individuality, on which see Alan Ryan, "The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill," ch. 13 (2nd ed 1990). Kateb's last clause ("the wish to be reborn as oneself") puts one in mind of Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence.The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.
It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, “Always do what you are afraid to do.”
Nothing can bring you Peace but yourself.
You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.
Without a rich heart, wealth is an ugly beggar.
The ancestor of every action is thought.
Common sense is genius dressed up in work clothes.
Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could;
Some blunders and absurdities crept in;
Forget them as soon as you can.
Tomorrow is a new day;
You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.It is a happy talent to know how to play.
(Beverly Elaine Eanes, "Joy")Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.
(Molly Young Brown, "Lighting a Candle")Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful; for beauty is God's handwriting.
(Caesar Johnson, ed., "To See the World in a Grain of Sand")What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have never been discovered. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
("Self-Reliance," Essays, First Series 1841, repr. 1847).We are reformers in spring and summer; in autumn and winter we stand by the old -- reformers in the morning, conservatives at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism is negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth.
He who is not every day conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
Knowledge is the antidote to fear.
Knowledge is the knowing that we cannot know.
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
I am become a transparent eyeball...
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
If a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider.
It is not length of life, but depth of life.
All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.
When the eyes say one thing and the tongue another, the practiced person relies on the language of the first.
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
Every artist was first an amateur.
'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in, forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day, you shall begin it well and serenely...
Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it. The [One] who knows how will always have a job. The [One] who also knows why will always be their boss. As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The [One] who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The [One] who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
Nature is too thin a screen; the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere.
There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.
As we grow old ...the beauty steals inward.
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
(Essays: First Series, "Essay XII, Art")
It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping themselves.
An individual has a healthy personality to the exact degree to which they have the propensity to look for the good in every situation.
It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion, it is easy in solitude to live after your own; but the great [One] is... who, in the midst of the world, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty,
to find the best in others;
to leave the world a bit better,
whether by a healthy child, a garden patch
or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life has breathed
easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
“Words are a mirror of their times. By looking at the areas in which the vocabulary of a language is expanding fastest in a given period, we can form a fairly accurate impression of the chief preoccupations of society at that time.”
- John Ayto, lexicographer
Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) original gonzo journalist
Writing in 1970 to his editor at Random House, Thompson said that “...anything I write is going to be about the death of the American Dream.”“There are a hundred or more people wandering around Washington today who have heard the ‘real stuff,’ as they put it - and despite their professional caution when the obvious question arises, there is one reaction they all feel free to agree on: that nobody who felt shocked, depressed or angry after reading the edited White House transcripts should ever be allowed to hear the actual tapes, except under heavy sedation or locked in the trunk of a car. Only a terminal cynic, they say, can listen for any length of time to the real stuff without feeling a compulsion to do something like drive down to the White House and throw a bag of live rats over the fence.”
(04JUL1973)“If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past 10 years, about 600 people--including me--would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.”
“The music 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.”
“I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.”
“Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why.”
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
“For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.”
“We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.”
Henry David Thoreau , born David Henry Thoreau, American author, poet, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, transcendentalist. (12JUL1817 – May 6MAY1862)
“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”
("Walden", "Economy")“Knowledge does not come to us by details, but in flashes of light from heaven.”
“None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.”
“There is no remedy for love but to love more.”
“We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”
“In the long run you hit only what you aim at.
Therefore, though you should fail immediately,
you had better aim at something high.”“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”
“What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.”
“It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.”
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”
“Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
- Henry David Thoreau“Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much of life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.”
“One (who) advances confidently in the direction of (one's) dream, and endeavors to live the life which (one) has imagined... will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
“Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749 – 1832)
“Only begin and then the mind grows heated; only begin and the task will be completed.”Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to pull back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans; that the moment one definitely commits oneself then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no (wo)man dreamed could have come (her)his way.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Begin it now.Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them. One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if it were possible, speak a few reasonable words.
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Before you can do something, you must first be something.
All truths are old, and all that we have to do is recognize and utter them anew.
Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.
The greatest thing in this world is not so much where you stand as in what direction you are moving.
Is not the core of nature in the heart of man?
Love and desire are the spirit's wings to great deeds.
“Desire and hope will push us on toward the future.”
- Michel de Montaigne
Tenzin Gyatso His Holiness, The 14th Dalai Lama, (1935 – )
Whether listening or reading teachings, we are like a vase meant to collect wisdom.The period of greatest gain in knowledge and experience is the most difficult period in one's life.
Without the human community one single human being cannot survive.
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion.
If you want to be happy, practice compassion.Each of us in our own way can try to spread compassion into people's hearts. Western civilizations these days place great importance on filling the human “brain” with knowledge, but no one seems to care about filling the human “heart” with compassion. This is what the real role of religion is.
Whether one believes in religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion.
Compassion is what makes our lives meaningful. It is the source of all lasting happiness and joy. And it is the foundation of a good heart, the heart of one who acts out of desire to help others. Through kindness, through affection, through honesty, through truth and justice toward all others we ensure our own benefit. This is not a matter for complicated theorizing. It is a matter of common sense. There is no denying that consideration of others is worthwhile. There is no denying that our happiness is inextricably bound up with the happiness of others. There is no denying that if society suffers we ourselves suffer. Nor is there any denying that the more our hearts and minds are afflicted with ill-will, the more miserable we become. Thus we can reject everything else; religion, ideology, all received wisdom. But we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion.
(Back cover of "Ethics For The New Millennium")The development of a kind heart (a feeling of closeness for all human beings) does not involve the religiosity we normally associate with conventional religious practice. It is not only for people who believe in religion, but is for everyone regardless of race, religion, or political affiliation. It is for anyone who considers himself or herself, above all, a member of the human family and who sees things from this larger and longer perspective.
(A Human Approach to World Peace)May I become at all times, both now and forever:
A protector for those without protection,
A guide for those who have lost their way,
A ship for those with oceans to cross,
A bridge for those with rivers to cross,
A sanctuary for those in danger,
A lamp for those without light,
A place of refuge for those who lack shelter,
And a servant to all in need.
("Ethics For The New Millennium")The essence of all religions is love, compassion, and tolerance. Kindness is my true religion. The clear proof of a person's love of God is if that person genuinely shows love to fellow human beings.
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
When unfortunate things happen in our lives there are two possible results. One possibility is mental unrest, anxiety, fear, doubt, frustration and eventually depression, and in the worst case, even suicide. That's one way. The other possibility is that because of that tragic experience you become more realistic, you become closer to reality. With the power of investigation, the tragic experience may make you stronger and increase your self-confidence and self-reliance. The unfortunate event can be a source of inner strength
("The Dalai Lama's Book of Wisdom," 1995)It is important to energize our everyday practice and daily good works with enthusiasm, without anyone else telling us to, but doing it for our own sake.
From early morning until I go to bed and in all situations of life, I always try to check my motivation and be mindful and present in the moment.
("The World of Tibetan Buddhism")“I was walking through the airport smiling and they were looking at me like ‘What are you smiling at!?’ ” (from a lecture at the University of Minnesota, 08MAY2K1, as quoted by Dan Engebretson)
Jeddu Krishnamurti, author, speaker, and philosopher (1895 – 1986)
“In oneself lies the whole world, and if you know how to look and learn, then the door is there and the key is in your hand. Nobody on earth can give you either that key or the door to open, except yourself.”“Understanding can never be made into a habit, a matter of routine; it demands constant watchfulness, alertness. To understand, there must be pliability, sensitivity, a warmth that has nothing to do with sentimentality.”
“To understand a problem obviously requires a certain intelligence, and that intelligence cannot be derived from or cultivated through specialization. It comes into being only when we are passively aware of the whole process of our consciousness, which is to be aware of ourselves without choice, without choosing what is right and what is wrong. When you are passively aware, you will see that out of that passivity - which is not idleness, which is not sleep, but extreme alertness - the problem has quite a different significance; which means there is no longer identification with the problem and therefore there is no judgment and hence the problem begins to reveal its content. If you are able to do that constantly, continuously, then every problem can be solved fundamentally, not superficially.”
“There is hope in men, not in society, not in systems, not in organized religious systems, but in you and in me. “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
“Truth is a pathless land. Man cannot come to it through any organisation, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, nor through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection...”
“Relationship... is the mirror in which you discover yourself. Without relationship you are not; to be is to be related; to be related is existence. You exist only in relationship; otherwise you do not exist; existence has no meaning. It is not because you think you are that you come into existence. You exist because you are related; and it is the lack of understanding of relationship that causes conflict.”
“When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”
("Freedom from the Known")“When you see something, just Look at it- don't categorize it, try to understand it, try to grasp it. Just Look. You have never seen it before ...and if you are looking at your anger, just looking at it, will make it go.”
Adolf Hitler Nazi Reich Chancellor
I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work.
[Speech, Reichstag, 1936]There is a road to freedom. Its milestones are Obedience, Endeavor, Honesty, Order, Cleanliness, Sobriety, Truthfulness, Sacrifice, and love of the Fatherland.
[Message, signed Hitler, painted on walls of concentration camps; Life, August 21, 1939]Woman's world is her husband, her family, her children and her home. We do not find it right when she presses into the world of men.
[as quoted by Lucy Komisar, "The New Feminism"]Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . we need believing people.
[Speech, April 26, 1933, made during negotiations leading to the Nazi-Vatican Concordant of 1933]I have followed [the Church] in giving our party program the character of unalterable finality, like the Creed. The Church has never allowed the Creed to be interfered with. It is fifteen hundred years since it was formulated, but every suggestion for its amendment, every logical criticism, or attack on it, has been rejected. The Church has realized that anything and everything can be built up on a document of that sort, no matter how contradictory or irreconcilable with it. The faithful will swallow it whole, so long as logical reasoning is never allowed to be brought to bear on it.
[Rauschning, "The Voice of Destruction," pp. 239-40]My feelings as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. As a Christian I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice... And if there is anything which could demonstrate that we are acting rightly, it is the distress that daily grows. For as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people. And when I look on my people I see them work and work and toil and labor, and at the end of the week they have only for their wages wretchedness and misery. When I go out in the morning and see these men standing in their queues and look into their pinched faces, then I believe I would be no Christian, but a very devil, if I felt no pity for them, if I did not, as did our Lord two thousand years ago, turn against those by whom today this poor people are plundered and exposed.
[Speech, on April 12, 1922, "My New Order," in "Freethought Today," April 1990]I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.
[Mein Kampf, pp. 46]What we have to fight for...is the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may be enabled to fulfill the mission assigned to it by the Creator.
[Mein Kampf, pp. 125]This human world of ours would be inconceivable without the practical existence of a religious belief.
[Mein Kampf, pp.152]And the founder of Christianity made no secret indeed of his estimation of the Jewish people. When He found it necessary, He drove those enemies of the human race out of the Temple of God.
[Mein Kampf, pp.174]Catholics and Protestants are fighting with one another... while the enemy of Aryan humanity and all Christendom is laughing up his sleeve.
[Mein Kampf, pp.309]I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.
[To Gen. Gerhard Engel, 1941]Any violence which does not spring from a spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain. It lacks the stability which can only rest in a fanatical outlook.
[Mein Kampf, p. 171]I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 1]I was not in agreement with the sharp anti-Semitic tone, but from time to time I read arguments which gave me some food for thought. At all events, these occasions slowly made me acquainted with the man and the movement, which in those days guided Vienna's destinies: Dr. Karl Lueger and the Christian Social Party.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 2]...the unprecedented rise of the Christian Social Party... was to assume the deepest significance for me as a classical object of study.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]As long as leadership from above was not lacking, the people fulfilled their duty and obligation overwhelmingly. Whether Protestant pastor or Catholic priest, both together and particularly at the first flare, there really existed in both camps but a single holy German Reich, for whose existence and future each man turned to his own heaven.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]Political parties has nothing to do with religious problems, as long as these are not alien to the nation, undermining the morals and ethics of the race; just as religion cannot be amalgamated with the scheming of political parties.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]For the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of his people must always remain inviolable; or else has no right to be in politics, but should become a reformer, if he has what it takes!
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]In nearly all the matters in which the Pan-German movement was wanting, the attitude of the Christian Social Party was correct and well-planned.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]It [Christian Social Party] recognized the value of large-scale propaganda and was a virtuoso in influencing the psychological instincts of the broad masses of its adherents.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]The anti-Semitism of the new movement [Christian Social movement] was based on religious ideas instead of racial knowledge.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 3]If Dr. Karl Lueger had lived in Germany, he would have been ranked among the great minds of our people.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 3, about the leader of the Christian Social movement]Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 5]I had so often sung "Deutschland u:ber Alles" and shouted "Heil" at the top of my lungs, that it seemed to me almost a belated act of grace to be allowed to stand as a witness in the divine court of the eternal judge and proclaim the sincerity of this conviction.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 5]Only in the steady and constant application of force lies the very first prerequisite for success. This persistence, however, can always and only arise from a definite spiritual conviction. Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 5]I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian- Social movement, especially in Lueger's time achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its success.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 6]Once again the songs of the fatherland roared to the heavens along the endless marching columns, and for the last time the Lord's grace smiled on His ungrateful children.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 7, reflecting on World War I]The more abstractly correct and hence powerful this idea will be, the more impossible remains its complete fulfillment as long as it continues to depend on human beings... If this were not so, the founders of religion could not be counted among the greatest men of this earth... In its workings, even the religion of love is only the weak reflection of the will of its exalted founder; its significance, however, lies in the direction which it attempted to give to a universal human development of culture, ethics, and morality.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 8]To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 8]The fight against syphilis demands a fight against prostitution, against prejudices, old habits, against previous conceptions, general views among them not least the false prudery of certain circles. The first prerequisite for even the moral right to combat these things is the facilitation of earlier marriage for the coming generation. In late marriage alone lies the compulsion to retain an institution which, twist and turn as you like, is and remains a disgrace to humanity, an institution which is damned ill-suited to a being who with his usual modesty likes to regard himself as the "image" of God.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 10]Parallel to the training of the body a struggle against the poisoning of the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is like a hothouse for sexual ideas and simulations. Just look at the bill of fare served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able to deny that this is not the right kind of food, particularly for the youth...Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political, and cultural idea.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 10, echoing the Cultural Warfare rhetoric of the Religious Right]But if out of smugness, or even cowardice, this battle is not fought to its end, then take a look at the peoples five hundred years from now. I think you will find but few images of God, unless you want to profane the Almighty.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 10]While both denominations maintain missions in Asia and Africa in order to win new followers for their doctrine-- an activity which can boast but very modest success compared to the advance of the Mohammedan faith in particular-- right here in Europe they lose millions and millions of inward adherents who either are alien to all religious life or simply go their own ways. The consequences, particularly from a moral point of view, are not favorable.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 10]The great masses of people do not consist of philosophers; precisely for the masses, faith is often the sole foundation of a moral attitude. The various substitutes have not proved so successful from the standpoint of results that they could be regarded as a useful replacement for previous religious creeds. But if religious doctrine and faith are really to embrace the broad masses, the unconditional authority of the content of this faith is the foundation of all efficacy.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 10]Due to his own original special nature, the Jew cannot possess a religious institution, if for no other reason because he lacks idealism in any form, and hence belief in a hereafter is absolutely foreign to him. And a religion in the Aryan sense cannot be imagined which lacks the conviction of survival after death in some form. Indeed, the Talmud is not a book to prepare a man for the hereafter, but only for a practical and profitable life in this world.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 11]The best characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties-- and this against their own nation.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 11]...the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.
[Mein Kampf, Vol. 1, Chapter 11, precisely echoing Martin Luther's teachings of anti-Semitism]Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 1 Chapter 12]The greatness of every mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right, it intolerantly imposes its will against all others.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 1 Chapter 12]The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own doctrine.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 1 Chapter 12]All in all, this whole period of winter 1919 – 20 was a single struggle to strengthen confidence in the victorious might of the young movement and raise it to that fanaticism of faith which can move mountains.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 1 Chapter 12]Thus inwardly armed with confidence in God and the unshakable stupidity of the voting citizenry, the politicians can begin the fight for the "remaking" of the Reich as they call it.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 1]Of course, even the general designation "religious" includes various basic ideas or convictions, for example, the indestructibility of the soul, the eternity of its existence, the existence of a higher being, etc. But all these ideas, regardless of how convincing they may be for the individual, are submitted to the critical examination of this individual and hence to a fluctuating affirmation or negation until emotional divination or knowledge assumes the binding force of apodictic faith. This, above all, is the fighting factor which makes a breach and opens the way for the recognition of basic religious views.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 1]Anyone who dares to lay hands on the highest image of the Lord commits sacrilege against the benevolent creator of this miracle and contributes to the expulsion from paradise.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 1]A folkish state must therefore begin by raising marriage from the level of a continuous defilement of the race, and give it the consecration of an institution which is called upon to produce images of the Lord and not monstrosities halfway between man and ape.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 2]It would be more in keeping with the intention of the noblest man in this world if our two Christian churches, instead of annoying Negroes with missions which they neither desire nor understand, would kindly, but in all seriousness, teach our European humanity that where parents are not healthy it is a deed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor little healthy orphan child and give him father and mother, than themselves to give birth to a sick child who will only bring unhappiness and suffering on himself and the rest of the world.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 2]That this is possible may not be denied in a world where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily submit to celibacy, obligated and bound by nothing except the injunction of the Church. Should the same renunciation not be possible if this injunction is replaced by the admonition finally to put an end to the constant and continuous original sin of racial poisoning, and to give the Almighty Creator beings such as He Himself created?
[Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 2]For the greatest revolutionary changes on this earth would not have been thinkable if their motive force, instead of fanatical, yes, hysterical passion, had been merely the bourgeois virtues of law and order.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 2]It doesn't dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture-race must remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 2]It may be that today gold has become the exclusive ruler of life, but the time will come when man will again bow down before a higher god.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 2]Christianity could not content itself with building up its own altar; it was absolutely forced to undertake the destruction of the heathen altars. Only from this fanatical intolerance could its apodictic faith take form; this intolerance is, in fact, its absolute presupposition.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 5]For how shall we fill people with blind faith in the correctness of a doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty and doubt by constant changes in its outward structure? ...Here, too, we can learn by the example of the Catholic Church. Though its doctrinal edifice, and in part quite superfluously, comes into collision with exact science and research, it is none the less unwilling to sacrifice so much as one little syllable of its dogmas... it is only such dogmas which lend to the whole body the character of a faith.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 5]The folkish-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God's will, and actually fulfill God's will, and not let God's word be desecrated. For God's will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord's creation, the divine will.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 10]In the ranks of the movement [National Socialist movement], the most devout Protestant could sit beside the most devout Catholic, without coming into the slightest conflict with his religious convictions. The mighty common struggle which both carried on against the destroyer of Aryan humanity had, on the contrary, taught them mutually to respect and esteem one another.
[Mein Kampf Vol. 2 Chapter 10]For this, to be sure, from the child's primer down to the last newspaper, every theater and every movie house, every advertising pillar and every billboard, must be pressed into the service of this one great mission, until the timorous prayer of our present parlor patriots: "Lord, make us free!" is transformed in the brain of the smallest boy into the burning plea: "Almighty God, bless our arms when the time comes; be just as thou hast always been; judge now whether we be deserving of freedom; Lord, bless our battle!"
[Adolf Hitler's prayer, Mein Kampf, Vol. 2 Chapter 13]The Government, being resolved to undertake the political and moral purification of our public life, are creating and securing the conditions necessary for a really profound revival of religious life
[Speech to the Reichstag on March 23, 1933]I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.
[Speech, 15 March 1936, Munich, Germany.]Today Christians ... stand at the head of [this country]... I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit ... We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press - in short, we want to burn out the "poison of immorality" which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of "liberal excess" during the past ... (few) years.
[The Speeches of Adolph Hitler, 1922 – 1939, Vol. 1 (London, Oxford University Press, 1942), pg. 871-872]“All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself. The great masses of the people [...] will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one. What luck for rulers that men do not think.”
“The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, because the vast masses of a nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad.
The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them more easy victims of a big lie than a small one, because they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones.
Such a form of lying would never enter their heads. They would never credit others with the possibility of such great impudence as the complete reversal of facts. Even explanations would long leave them in doubt and hesitation, and any trifling reason would dispose them to accept a thing as true.
Something therefore always remains and sticks from the most imprudent of lies, a fact which all bodies and individuals concerned in the art of lying in this world know only too well, and therefore they stop at nothing to achieve this end.”
[Mein Kampf]
Jalalu'l-Din Rumi AKA Jelaluddin AND Jalaluddin AND Jalal-ud-Din Rumi
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.
If you are seeking, seek us with joyMysteries are not to be solved. The eye goes blind when it only wants to see why.
For we live in the kingdom of joy.
Do not give your heart to anything else
But to the love of those who are clear joy,
Do not stray into the neighborhood of despair.
For there are hopes: they are real, they exist –
Do not go in the direction of darkness –
I tell you: suns exist.
Ecstatic Love is an ocean, and the Milky Way is a flake of foam floating on it.
Behead yourself! Dissolve your whole body into Vision; become seeing, seeing, seeing!
The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart.
In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.
That which God said to the rose, and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty, he said to my heart, and made it a hundred times more beautiful.
(translated by Kabir Helminski)Just as intellects are bewildered by my madness, I am bewildered by the frozen state of these intellects. Because in this path, anything other than confusion and madness is distance and alienation from God.
(translated by Coleman Barks)
Drumsound rises on the air, its throb, my heart.
A voice inside the beat says, “I know you're tired, but come. This is the way.”
Hazrat Inayat Khan Sufi master, founder of the Sufi order in the West
There are different ways of listening to music. There is a technical state when a person who has developed in technique and has learnt to appreciate better music, feels disturbed by a lower grade of music. But there is a spiritual way, which has nothing to do with technique. It is simply to tune oneself to the music; therefore the spiritual person does not worry about the grade of the music. No doubt, the better the music, the more helpful it is to a spiritual person; but at the same time one must not forget that there are lamas in Tibet who do their concentrations and meditations while moving a kind of rattle, the sound of which is not specially melodious. They cultivate thereby that sense which raises a person by the help of (sound) vibration to the higher planes. There is nothing better than music as a means for the upliftment of the soul.”
- as quoted by Eric StuerSend Thy Peace, O [Lady and] Lord, which is perfect and everlasting that our souls may radiate Peace.
Send Thy Peace, O Lord [and Lady], that amidst our worldly strife we may enjoy Thy Bliss.
Send Thy Peace, O [Lady and] Lord, that we may endure all, tolerate all in the thought of Thy Grace and Mercy.
Send Thy Peace, O Lord [and Lady], our Father and Mother, That we Thy children on Earth may all Unite in One family.The true work of a mystical teacher is not to teach but to tune,
to tune the pupil so that he may become the instrument of God.
For the mystical teacher is not the player of the instrument;
he is the tuner. When he has tuned it,
he gives it into the hands of the Player
whose instrument it is to play.
("The Heart of Sufism" by H. J. Witteveen, ed.)Mysticism without devotion is like uncooked food, it can never be assimilated.
("The Inner Life")All things pertaining to spiritual progress in life depend upon Peace.
("The Heart of Sufism" by H. J. Witteveen, ed.)
“The only enemy is injustice.
The only death is death of the conscience.”
- "Guru Granth Sahib" (Sikh holy book)
Hafiz or Hafez AKA Khajeh Shamseddin Mohammad Hafiz-s Shirazi 13th century Sufi Master, poet (~1320 – 1389)
"Stay with Us"
You leave our company when you speak of shame and this makes everyone in the tavern sad.Stay with us as we do the hardest work of rarely laying down that pick and shovel that will keep revealing our deeper kinship with god, that will keep revealing our own divine worth.
You leave the company of the beloved's friends whenever you speak of guilt, and this makes everyone in the tavern very sad.
Stay with us tonight as we weave love and reveal ourselves, reveal ourselves as his precious garments.
Saghi Nameh
O Bearer, bring the wine that brings joy
To increase generosity, & let perfection buoyGive me some, for I have lost my heart
Both traits from me have kept apartBring the wine whose reflection in the cup
Signals to all the kings whose times are upGive me wine, and with the reed-flute I will sing
When was Jamshid, and when Kavoos was kingBring me the elixir whose grace and alchemy
Bestows treasures, from bonds of time sets freeGive me so they'll open the doors once again
Of long life and the bliss that will remainBearer give the wine that the Holy Grail
Will make claims of sight in the Void and thus failGive me so that I, with the help of the Grail
All secrets, like Jamshid, themselves availSpeak of the tale of the wheel of fate
proclaim to the kings and heroes of lateThis broken world is in the same state
As seen by Afrasiab, the mighty, the greatWhence his mobilizing army generals
Whence cunning heroes' war cries and callsNot only his palace has gone to the dust
Even his tomb is destroyed and long lostThis barren desert is in the same stage
As the armies of Salm & Toor were lost in its rageBring the wine whose reflection in the cup
Signals to all the kings whose times are upWell said Jamshid, the old majestic king
Worthless is this transient stage and ringCome Bearer, that fire, radiant, bright
Zarathushtra, beneath the earth, seeks so rightGive me wine, in the creed of the drunk
Whether fire-worshipper or worldly monkCome Bearer, that wholesome drunk
Who is forever in the tavern sunkGive me, ill repute bring to my name
The cup and the wine I shall only blameBring Bearer, the water that burns the mind
If lion drinks, forest will burn and grindCourageous, I'll go hunting lions of fate
Mess up this old wolf's trap and baitBring Bearer, that high heavenly wine
That angels with their scent would entwineGive me wine, I'll burn it like sweet incense
Its wise aroma I will sense now and henceBearer, give me the wine that makes kings
Witnessing its virtues, my heart singsGive me wine to wash away all my flaws
Joyous rise above this rut's deadly clawsWhen the spiritual garden is my abode
Why have me bound to a board on this roadGive me wine and then see the Ruler's face
Ruin me & see treasures of wisdom and graceAnd when I hold the cup in my hand
In the mirror everything I understandIn my drunken state, kingship proclaim
A monarch, when I am drunken and lameDrunken, pearls of wisdom unveil
In hiding secrets, the selfless failHafiz, drunken, songs will compose
From its melody Venus' song flowsO singer, with the sound of the stream
Of that majestic song muse and dreamTill I make my work joy and ecstasy
I will dance and play with robe of pietyGiven a crown and throne by his fate
The fruit of the kingly tree of this estateRuler of the land, and Lord of the time
The grand and fortunate King of the climeHe is the greatness vested in the Throne
comfort of bird and fish from Him aloneFor the blessed, he is light of the eyes
Yet he is the gift of the soul of the wiseBehold, O, auspicious bird
The happy inspiration to be heardThe world has no pearls in its shells like Thee
Fereydoon and Jamshid had no heirs like TheeInstead of Alexander, be here many a year
Know thy heart and discover joy is nearBut seditious fate many plans may devise
Me and my drunkenness troubled by Beloved's eyesOne, for his work, may pick up the sword
Another's business only deals with the wordO Player, play the song of the new creed
To music of the stream tell to my rival breedFinally with my enemy I have a chance
At victory, in the skies I can glanceO Player, play something pleasing to the ear
With a song and a Gahzal begin a story, dearMy sorrows have tied me to the ground
Raise me with my principles that are soundO singer, with the sound of the stream
Play and sing that majestic song I dreamMake the great souls happy with you
Parviz and Barbad remember tooO Player, paint a picture of the veil
Listen, inside, they tell a taleSing a minstrel's song, such
That Venus' harp dances with her touchPlay so the Sufi goes into a trance
Drunken, in Union, leaves his stanceO Player, tambourine and harp play
With a lovely tune, sing and swayDeceptions of the world make a vivid tale
The night is pregnant, what will it entailO Player, I'm sad, play one or two
In his Oneness, as long as you can, play tooI am astounded by the revolving fate
I don't know who will next degenerateAnd if the Magi set one on fire
Don't know whose light will then expireIn this bloody resurrection field
Let the cup and jug their blood yieldTo the drunk, of a good song, give a sign
To friends bygone, a salutation divine
©20DEC2K1 Shahriar Shahriari; Los Angeles, CA, USAThe God Who Only Knows Four Words.
Every child has known God,
not the God of names,
not the God of don'ts,
but the God who only knows four words
and keeps repeating them, saying, “Come dance with me.”
“Come dance with me.”“In his poetry Hafiz has inscribed undeniable truth indelibly ... Hafiz has no peer!”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe“Hafiz defies you to show him or put him in a condition inopportune or ignoble ... He fears nothing. He sees too far; he sees throughout; such is the only man I wish to see or be.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson“...you may remember the old Persian saying, 'There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whosoever snatches a delusion from a woman.' There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.”
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle“The best musician of Words.”
- Edward Fitzgerald“It is as if his mental eye; endowed with wonderful acuteness of vision, had penetrated into those provinces of thought which we of a later age were destined to inhabit.”
- Gertrude Bell“...Hafiz is as highly esteemed by his countrymen as Shakespeare by us, and deserves as serious consideration.”
- A.J. Arberry
Kabir Helminski Author/translator of numerous books, including "Living Presence, The Knowing Heart," "The Pocket Rumi," and "The Rumi Collection."
Between the pillars of spirit and matter the mind has put up a swing.
There swings the bound soul and all the worlds with not even the slightest rest.
The sun and moon also swing, and there is no end to it.
The soul swings through millions of births like the endless circling of sun and moon.
Billions of ages have passed with no sigh of relief.
The earth and sky swing,
Wind and water swing,
Taking a body, God Himself swings.
("Teachings of the Hindu Mystics," ©2K1 by Andrew Harvey; Shambhala Publications, Boston)On Connections
On Listening
On Josef
Albert Einstein 1879 – 1955, German-born American Physicist, Person of the 20th Century
Force always attracts men of low morality.The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.
The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.
How vile and despicable war seems to me! I would rather be hacked to pieces than take part in such an abominable business.
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
A question that sometimes drives me hazy: "Am I or are the others crazy?"
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.
Information is not knowledge.
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Your imagination is your preview of life's coming attractions.
("Zen and the Art of Making a Living" by Laurence G. Boldt)Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the Gods.
Do not worry about your problems with mathematics, I assure you mine are far greater.
The hardest thing in the world to understand, is income tax.
To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.
Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour.
Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's "Relativity."Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
The only reason for Time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.
Setting an example is not the main means of influencing others; it is the only means.
He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him a spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.
Or in more brief alternate... Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism? How passionately I hate them!
To my mind to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
A country cannot simultaneously prepare and prevent war.
Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through understanding.
Alternatively... Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.We must be prepared to make heroic sacrifices for the cause of Peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of War. There is no task that is more important or closer to my heart.
I don't know how World War III will be fought, but I do know that World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.
It gives me great pleasure indeed to see the stubbornnessof an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.
[alternate give]
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
[and yet another give]
The most beautiful experience is to meet the mysterious. This is the source of all true art and scholarly pursuit. He, who has never had this experience, is not capable of rapture and cannot stand motionless with amazement, is as good as dead. His eyes are closed.The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.
[alternate give]
The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.
("Holy Clues" by Stephen Kendrick)I want to know God's thoughts,..... the rest are details...
Recapitulating: we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists Aether.
(1920)Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
We cannot solve the problems that we have created with the same thinking that created them.
[alternate give] The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.The high destiny of the individual is to serve rather then rule.
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them.
I know quite certainly that I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession and dogged endurance, combined with self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas.
Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science.
Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural and spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.
Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
(H. Eves, "Return to Mathematical Circles," Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1988)By academic freedom I understand the right to search for truth and to publish and teach what one holds to be true. This right implies also a duty: one must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true. It is evident that any restriction on academic freedom acts in such a way as to hamper the dissemination of knowledge among the people and thereby impedes national judgment and action.
If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
Out of Clutter, Find Simplicity.
From Discord, Find Harmony.
In the Middle of Difficulty Lies Opportunity.Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.
When the solution is simple, God is answering.
When a group of individuals becomes a "we", a harmonious whole, then the highest is reached that humans as creatures can reach.
The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and sense in which he has attained liberation from the self.
(Jon Kabat-Zinn "The World As I See It,", p. 236)A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
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.
The only real valuable thing is intuition.
I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice.
God is subtle but he is not malicious.
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own
-- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.
I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.
God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.
The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.
We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.
Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.
Alterntively... 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.If A is success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.
Too many of us look upon Americans as dollar chasers. This is a cruel libel, even if it is reiterated thoughtlessly by the Americans themselves.
No, this trick won't work... How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive without our frail and feeble mind.
The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.
... one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton)
Charles Stanley
We are either in the process of resisting God's truth or in the process of being shaped and molded by his truth.Since God knows our future, our personalities, and our capacity to listen, He isn't every going to say more to us than we can deal with at the moment.
We can be tired, weary and emotionally distraught, but after spending time alone with God, we find that He injects into our bodies energy, power and strength.
An unschooled man who knows how to meditate upon the Lord has learned far more than the man with the highest education who does not know how to meditate.
Of all the things Christ wants for us, loving Him and focusing our attention on Him are the most important.
The amount of time we spend with Jesus - meditating on His Word and His majesty, seeking His face - establishes our fruitfulness in the kingdom.
I'm convinced that the man who has learned to meditate upon the Lord will be able to run on his feet and walk in his spirit. Although he may be hurried by his vocation, that's not the issue. The issue is how fast his spirit is going. To slow it down takes a period of time.
The essence of meditation is a period of time set aside to contemplate the Lord, listen to Him, and allow Him to permeate our spirits.
Often times God wants us to sit before Him in quietness. He doesn't want us to do all the talking. As Is. 30:15 says "In quiet and confidence will be your strength."
To have God speak to the heart is a majestic experience, an experience that people may miss if they monopolize the conversation and never pause to hear God's responses.
"Yieldedness" is vital in listening to what He has to say.
If we rationalize our problems when He points them out, we will spend less and less time meditating because we won't want to face God in that area of our lives.
He wants you all to Himself to put His loving, divine arms around you.
How can God speak to us if we don't take time to listen? Quietness is essential to listening. If we are too busy to listen, we won't hear. It takes time and quietness to prepare to listen to God. Ps. 62:5
God's voice is still and quiet and easily buried under an avalanche of clamour.
God will never tell us to do something that gratifies the flesh.
When God speaks, oftentimes His voice will call for an act of courage on our part.
His voice leads us not into timid discipleship but into bold witness. The best way in the world to deceive believers is to cloak a message in religious language and declare that it conveys some new insight from God.
The greatest gift we can give to others is our prayers.
Sir Rabindranath Tagore Thakur poet, philosopher, author, songwriter, painter, educator, composer, Nobel laureate (1861 – 1941)
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever.Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.
Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
He who wants to do good, knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gates open.
When the universe is in harmony with man - the eternal, we know it as truth but we feel it as beauty.
“If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.”
- Emily Bronte (1818 – 1848)“My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was less competition there.”
- Indira Gandhi“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
- Harry S Truman
(Mahatma) Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869 – 1948 Hindu Indian nationalist leader)
Gandhi's Seven Deadly Sins
Wealth without Work
Pleasure without Conscience
Science without Humanity
Knowledge without Character
Politics without Principle
Commerce without Morality
Worship without SacrificeTruth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.
Victory attained by violence is tantamount to a defeat, for it is momentary.
Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.
Was not war itself a crime against God and humanity, and therefore, were not all those who sanctioned, engineered and conducted wars, war criminals?
My religion is Truth, my practice is non-cooperation with evil.
A language is an exact reflection of the character and growth of its speakers.
If you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth. - Ben Kingsley as Gandhi in "Gandhi" Columbia, 1982
There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.
Force, violence, pressure, or compulsion with a view to conformity are both uncivilized and undemocratic.
I believe that a man is the strongest soldier for daring to die unarmed.
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always.
In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right.
I am part and parcel of the whole and cannot find God apart from the rest of humanity.
If you don't find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further.
All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family, and each one of us is responsible for the misdeeds of all the others. I cannot detach myself from the wickedest soul...You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place.
To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.
The spirit of democracy cannot be imposed from without. It has to come from within.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Fear has its use, but cowardice has none. I may not put my hand into the jaws of a snake, but the very sight of the snake need not strike terror into me. The trouble is that we often die many times before death overtakes us.
You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.
An eye for and eye and soon the whole world is blind.
Mahatma Gandhi, one of the busiest and most famous men in the world, used to set aside Monday as a Day of Silence. He needed the stillness, he said, in order to rest his vocal cords and to promote inner harmony in his soul amid the turmoil of life around him. I wonder what power would be released if all Christians devoted one day a week to listening to the voice of God to discern His coded message for our lives.. The Counselor can only lead us if we receive His voice.
(Paul Brand, "In His Image" page 211)Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul.
God speaks to us every day only we don't know how to listen.
(James W. Jones, "In the Middle of This Road We Call Life")You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not permit violence being inflicted upon ones opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy.
(from Defense Against Charge of Sedition)The ally we must cultivate is the part of our enemy which knows the truth.
It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.
Hatred ever kills; love never dies. Such is the vast difference between the two. What is obtained by love is retained for all time. What is obtained by hatred proves a burden in reality, for it increases hatred. The duty of a human being is to diminish hatred and to promote love.
The only safe way to overcome an enemy is to make of the enemy a friend.
It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
Man and his deed are two distinct things. Whereas a good deed should call forth approbation, and a wicked deed disapprobation, the doer of the deed, whether good or wicked always deserves respect or pity as the case may be.
Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment.
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.
What you do is of little significance; but it is very important that you do it.
My life is my message.
Albert Camus Author, playwright, philosopher, Nobel laureate (1913 – 1960)
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”“I love my country too much to be a nationalist.”
“We suffocate among people who think they are absolutely right, whether in their machines or their ideas. And for all those who can live only in an atmosphere of human dialogue, the silence is the end of the world.”
“I found in myself an invincible sun.”
("De L'Envers et l'endroit")“After a prolonged research on myself, I brought out the fundamental duplicity of the human being. Then I realized that modesty helped me to shine, humility to conquer, and virtue to oppress.”
("The Fall")“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
“Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.”
“Life is the sum of all your choices.”
“Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don't walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend.”
Carl Gustav Jung (July 26, 1875 – 1961) Swiss psychologist and theorist
Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.Once upon a time men were possessed by devils. Now they are not less obsessed by ideas.
Man cannot cast a shadow without standing in light.
Really--I don't know what the meaning or purpose of life is. But it looks exactly as if something were meant by it.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.
In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.
We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.
("Memories, Dreams, Reflections", 1962; Vintage Books, 1989)The patient's treatment begins with the doctor, so to speak. Only if the doctor knows how to cope with himself and his own problems will he be able to teach the patient to do the same.
("Memories, Dreams, Reflections", 1962; Vintage Books, 1989; p. 132)There are many cases which the doctor cannot cure without committing himself. When important matters are at stake, it makes all the difference whether the doctor sees himself as a part of the drama, or cloaks himself in his authority.
("Memories, Dreams, Reflections", 1962; Vintage Books, 1989; p. 133)The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. "Only the wounded physician heals." But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armor, he has no effect.
("Memories, Dreams, Reflections", 1962; Vintage Books, 1989; p. 134)He wanted to be an analyst. I said to him, "Do you know what that means? It means that you must first learn to know yourself. You yourself are the instrument. If you are not right, how can the patient be made right? If you are not convinced, how can you convince him? You yourself must be the real stuff. If you are not, God help you! Then you will lead patients astray. Therefore you must first accept an analysis of yourself."
("Memories, Dreams, Reflections", 1962; Vintage Books, 1989; p. 134)For psychotherapy to be effective a close rapport is needed, so close that the doctor cannot shut his eyes to the heights and depths of human suffering. The rapport consists, after all, in a constant comparison and mutual comprehension, in the dialectical confrontation of two opposing psychic realities. If for some reason these mutual impressions do not impinge on each other, the psychotherapeutic process remains ineffective, and no change is produced. Unless both doctor and patient become a problem to each other, no solution is found.
("Memories, Dreams, Reflections", 1962; Vintage Books, 1989; p. 143)The doctor who does not know from his own experience the luminosity of the archetypes will scarcely be able to escape their negative effect when he encounters it in his practice.
("Memories, Dreams, Reflections", 1962; Vintage Books, 1989; p. 144)In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in my "underground," I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them, as it were. I felt not only violent resistance to this, but a distinct fear. For I was afraid of losing command of myself and becoming a prey to the fantasies--and as a psychiatrist I realized only too well what that meant. After prolonged hesitation, however, I saw that there was no other way out. I had to take the chance, had to try to gain power over them; for I realized that if I did not do so, I ran the risk of their gaining power over me. A cogent motive for my making the attempt was the conviction that I could not expect of my patients something I did not dare to do myself. The excuse that a helper stood at their side would not pass muster, for I was well aware that the so-called helper--that is, myself--could not help them unless he know their fantasy material from his own direct experience, and that at present all he possessed were a few theoretical prejudices of dubious value. This idea--that I was committing myself to a dangerous enterprise not for myself alone, but also for the sake of my patients--helped me over several critical phases.
("Memories, Dreams, Reflections", 1962; Vintage Books, 1989; p. 178-179)The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.
("Modern Man in Search of a Soul")Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
("On the Psychology of the Unconciousness", 1917)If one does not understand a person, one tends to regard him as a fool.
Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it. It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness. But deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience, he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code.
(in the introduction to Frances G. Wickes', "Analysis der Kinderseele" (The Inner World of Childhood), 1931)An understanding heart is everything, is a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
The teacher pretended that algebra was a perfectly natural affair, to be taken for granted, whereas I didn't even know what numbers were. Mathematics classes became sheer terror and torture to me. I was so intimidated by my incomprehension that I did not dare to ask any questions.
It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are themselves.
In studying the history of the human mind one is impressed again and again by the fact that the growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and that each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement. One could almost say that nothing is more hateful to man than to give up even a particle of his unconsciousness. Ask those who have tried to introduce a new idea!
All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.
Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.
There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
Creative powers can just as easily turn out to be destructive. It rests solely with the moral personality whether they apply themselves to good things or to bad. And if this is lacking, no teacher can supply it or take its place.
I could not say I believe. I know! I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God.
The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.
Religion is a defense against the experience of God.
Religious experience is absolute. It is indisputable. You can only say that you have never had such an experience… No matter what the world thinks about religious experience, the one who has it possesses the great treasure of a thing that has provided him with a source of life, meaning and beauty and that has given a new splendor to the world and to mankind.
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
The word "happiness" would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.
Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.
Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.
Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.
The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.
I have always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way.
To me dreams are part of nature, which harbors no intention to deceive but expresses something as best it can.
RooseveltsAnna Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962), Married Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1905, First Lady 1933 – 1945, mother of six, Anna (1906), James (1907), Elliott (1910), Franklin, Jr. (1914) and John (1916).
“Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.”“...no matter how plain a woman may be if truth & loyalty are stamped upon her face all will be attracted to her...”
“Life must be lived and curiosity kept alive.
One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.”“We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face ... we must do that which we think we cannot.”
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
“When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?”
“It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.”
“When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die.”
“People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built.”
(My Day, one of many candid opinions expressed in her daily syndicated newspaper column)“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself. "I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along."”
("You Learn By Living," 1960)“We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together and if we are to live together we have to talk.”
“You must do the very thing you think you cannot do.”
“I could not at any age be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945) 32nd U.S. President, 1933 – 1945
“I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified, terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”
("First Inaugural Address," March 4, 1933)“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.” “It may appear that what goes on is happenstance, but the government most surely has planned it.”
Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919) 26th U.S. President, 1901 – 1909
“I want to see you game, boys; I want to see you brave and manly and I also want to see you gentle and tender.”“The only man who makes no mistakes is the man who never does anything.”
“Do what you can with what you've got, where you are.”
“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country.”
- President Theodore Roosevelt, 1908
Da BelViso - Frank Zappa Quotes
“Remember there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over.”“You have just destroyed one model XQJ-37 nuclear powered pansexual roto-plooker....and you're gonna have to pay for it.”
“He was in a quandary...being devoured by the swirling cesspool of his own steaming desires... uh.. the guy was a wreck.”
“And now....you are going to dance...like you've never danced before!”
“Bring the band on down behind me, boys.”
“Not a speck of cereal. Nothing but the best for my dog.”
“You drank beer, you played golf, you watched football - WE EVOLVED!”
“It looks just like a Telefunken U-47!”
“They're serving burgers in the back!”
“Jazz is not dead...it just smells funny.”
("Beebop Tango" introduction)“I have a message to deliver to the cute people of the world...if you're cute, or maybe you're beautiful...there's MORE OF US UGLY MOTHERfvckERS OUT THERE THAN YOU ARE!! So watch out.”
“Is that a real poncho or a Sears poncho?”
“You're an asshole! You're an asshole!
That's right! You're an asshole! You're an asshole! Yes yes!”“Number one ain't you...
You ain't even number two.”“We could jam in Joe's garage,
we didn't have no dope or LSD,
but a coupl'o'quarts o'beer,
would fix it so the intonation,
would not offend your ear.”“Who are the brain police?”
“This is the exciting part. This is like the Supremes see the way it builds up? Feel it?”
“A prune isn't really a vegetable... CABBAGE is a vegetable...”
“Here's one for mother Only thirteen, and she knows how to NASTY”
ARE YOU HUNG UP?
“Diamonds on velvets on goldens on vixen
On comet & cupid on donner & blitzen
On up & away & afar & a go-go
Escape from the weight of your corporate logo!”“Don't it ever get lonesome?
Eddie, are you kidding?”“I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...”
“Never try to get your peter sucked in France.”
“Kill Ugly Radio”
“I'm not black, but there's a whole lot of times I wish I could say, "I'm not white."”
“Help! I'm a rock!”
“Another day, another sausage...”
“I want a garden!”
“Don't mind your make-up, you'd better make your mind up.
On a personal level, Freaking Out is a process whereby an
individual casts off outmoded and restricting standards of
thinking, dress, and social etiquette in order to express
Creatively his relationship to his immediate environment and
the social structure as a whole.”
(liner notes of "Freak Out.")“Great googly-moogly - you're gonna do it too!”
“Information is not knowledge,
Knowledge is not wisdom,
Wisdom is not truth,
Truth is not beauty,
Beauty is not love,
Love is not music
and Music is THE BEST.”“[Music is] the only religion that delivers the goods.”
“Gee, it's so hard to find a place to park around here.”
“Playing guitar is like fvcking -- you never forget it.
Unless you're really, really stupid.”“There are more love songs than anything else.
If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.”“If classical music is the state of the art, then the arts are in a sad state.”
“Beauty is a French phonetic corruption of a short, cloth neck ornament, currently in resurgence.”
“Don't cry...
Gotta go bye bye...
Suddenly die die...
Cop kill a creep!
Pow pow pow.”“Modern music is a sick puppy.”
“Some Scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is
so plentiful, is the basic building block of the
universe. I dispute that. I say there is more
stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic
building block of the universe.”“Most people wouldn't know good music if it came up and bit them in the ass.”
("Whole Grains", an early 1970's book of quotations)“I figure the odds be fifty-fifty I just might have some thing to say. The person who stands up and says, "This is Stupid," either is asked to "behave" or, worse, is greeted with a cheerful "Yes, we know! Isn't it terrific!" The more BORING a child is, the more the parents, when showing off the child, receive adulation for being GOOD PARENTS -- because they have a TAME CHILD-CREATURE in their house. The worst aspect of "typical familyism" (as media-merchandised) is that it glorifies Involuntary Homogenization. Gail has said in interviews that one of the things that makes our relationship work is the fact that we hardly ever get to talk to each other. The language and concepts contained herein are guaranteed not to cause eternal torment in the place where the guy with the horns and pointed stick conducts his business. My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can. I like having the capitol of the United States in Washington, D.C., in spite of recent efforts to move it to Lynchburg, Virginia. He [Barney Frank] is one of the most Impressive guys in Congress. He is a great model for young gay men. Children are naive -- they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble.”
“It would be easier to pay off the national debt overnight than to neutralize the long-range effects of OUR NATIONAL STUPIDITY.”
“Nuclear explosions under the Nevada desert? What the fvck are we testing for? We already know the shit blows up.”
“Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.”
“Star Wars won't work. Star Wars won't work. The gas still gets through; it could get right on you. And what about those germs, now? Star Wars won't work. Washington, D.C.: a city infested with statues -- and Congressional Blow-Boys who WISH they were statues.”
“Thanks to our schools and political leadership, the U.S. has acquired an international reputation as the home of 250 million people dumb enough to buy "The Wacky Wall-Walker."”
“Stupidity has a certain charm --ignorance does not.”
“The real question is: Is it possible to laugh while fvcking?”
“The single-child yuppo-family that uses the child as a status object: "A perfect child? Of course! We have one here -- he's under the coffee table. Ralph, stand up! Play the violin!"”
“Americans like to talk about (or be told about) Democracy but, when put to the test, usually find it to be an "inconvenience." We have opted instead for an authoritarian system "disguised" as a Democracy. We pay through the nose for an enormous joke-of-a-government, let it push us around, and then wonder how all those assholes got in there”.
“In every language, the first word after "Mama!" that every kid learns to say is "Mine!" A system that doesn't allow ownership, that doesn't allow you to say "Mine!" when you grow up, has -- to put it mildly -- a fatal design flaw.”
“From the time Mr. Developing Nation was forced to read "The Little Red Book" in exchange for a blob of rice, till the time he figured out that waiting in line for a loaf of pumpernickel was boring as fvck, took about three generations. ...Decades of indoctrination, manipulation, censorship and KGB excursions haven't altered this fact: People want a piece of their own little Something-or-Other, and, if they don't get it, have a tendency to initiate counterrevolution.”
“If it sounds GOOD to YOU, it's bitchen; and if it sounds BAD to YOU, it's shitty.”
“The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.”
“In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”
“Let's not be too tough on our own ignorance. It's the thing that makes America great. If America weren't incomparably ignorant, how could we have tolerated the last eight years?”
“Lord have mercy on the people in England for the terrible food these people must eat. And Lord have mercy on the fate of this movie and God bless the mind of the man in the street.”
Interviewer: “So Frank, you have long hair. Does that make you a woman?” FZ: “You have a wooden leg. Does that make you a table?”
“If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they're gonna murder you in your sleep...”
("Whole Grains," an early 1970's book of quotations)“I'm not a man for all seasons but I'm doing something right.”
(during the Senate PMRC hearings)“Ugly as I might's be, I am your futum!”
“There is no hell. There is only France.”
“"Conducting" is when you draw "designs" in the "nowhere" with your stick, or with your hands which are interpreted as "instructional messages" by guys wearing bow ties who wish they were fishing.”
“Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.”
“The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has the medieval aroma -- like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball -- I find this unfathomable -- but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing a bassoon.”
“Whatever you have to do to have a good time, let's get on with it, so long as it doesn't cause a murder.”
“Let's just admit that public education is mediocre at best.”
“Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible.”
“The last election just laid the foundation of the next 500 years of Dark Ages (circa 1981)”
“Look, just because you have got that fvckin' thing between your legs it doesn't make any difference. If a girl does something stupid I am going to call her just as I would a guy.”
“A world of sexual incompetents, encountering each other, under disco circumstances... Now can't you do songs about that?”
“A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.”
“There is no such thing as a dirty word. Nor is there a word so powerful, that it's going to send the listener to the lake of fire upon hearing it. fvck that! When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children? Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are? Life is like high school with money. "Information doesn't kill you..."”
(Senate Hearing on "Porn Rock", 1985 during an exchange with a Born Again Christian)“Wherever you're going, don't walk the first. If you do, people will think you know where you're going.”
“A drug is not bad. A drug is a chemical compound. The problem comes in when people who take drugs treat them like a license to behave like an asshole.”
“Flatulence can be cruel!”
“Speed: It will turn you into your parents.”
(1970 public service announcement regarding amphetamine use)“Sopranos!? That's why God made the rocket launcher and grenades!”
(Frank Zappa and I were talking about the difficulties of getting good performances of music each of us write. I asked him if had had as many problems with sopranos and I had had. That was his response! I got to drive him around Columbus Ohio in April 1984 for the week he was at Ohio State participating in the 1984 National Conference of the American Society of University Composers. We spent lots of hours together during that week and stayed in touch thereafter."
- E. Michael Harrington“There were 45 men in the jail cell, the toilet and shower had never been cleaned, the temperature was 110 degrees so you couldn't sleep night or day, there were roaches in the oatmeal, sadistic guards, and everything that was nice.”
{(1969 interview) This had happened during the days of Studio Z in Cucamonga (1963). Frank was released on bail (his father took out a bank loan to pay for it). Frank had been busted for "conspiracy to commit pornography," after making a silly recording of suggestive sexual sounds (giggling edited out) for someone who had asked him to provide a "special" tape recording for a stag night. That someone turned out to be Detective Willis of the San Bernadino Vice Squad. A hidden microphone recorded their conversation and this was used as evidence at Zappa's trial. (More info from "ZAPPA - A Visual Documentary by Miles", Omnibus Press, 1993, ISBN#0.7119.3099.6)}“Winos don't march.”
”Reporter: "This is a personal thing, I think that if you wanted to make top ten hits and sell millions of records, you could."
Frank Zappa: "Yeah, but who wants to go through life with a tiny nose and one glove on? I was writing all kinds of positive and negative canons and weird inverted this and retrograde that and getting as spaced-out mathematically as I could and I was going "Wait a minute (laughs), who cares about that stuff?" I had always liked rhythm and blues so here I was stuck between the slide rule and the gut bucket somewhere and I decided that I would opt for a third road someplace in between.”
(From an 1972 interview to Martin Perlich. On giving up writing serial music)“It is always advisable to be a loser if you cannot become a winner.”
“I knew Jimi (Hendrix) and I think that the best thing you could say about Jimi was: there was a person who shouldn't use drugs.” (From the second of two FZ interviews which were transcribed from an imported CD called "The Frank Zappa Interview Picture Disk". Conducted sometime in early to mid 1984)
“Sometimes you got to get sick before you can feel better.”
“t's better to have something to remember than nothing to reget...”I
“Why do people continue to compose music, and even pretend to teach others how to do it, when they already know the answer? Nobody gives a fvck.”
“If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT.”
("The Real Frank Zappa Book")“A mind is like a parachute. It doesn't work if it not open.”
“You've got to be digging it while it's happening 'cause it just might be a one shot deal.”
(From "Waka/Jawaka")“There will never be a nuclear war; there's too much real estate involved.”
("Tonight Show," C.A. 1988)“Heaven would be a place where bullshit existed only on television.”
“Hallelujah! We's halfway there!”
(TV. Sometime probably in 1988. "The Real Frank Zappa Book" p. 234)“Don't expect anything, don't expect fun, don't expect friends. If you get something...it's a Bonus.”
“Golly, do I ever have a lot of soul!!”
(A reference from "We're only in it for the money" regarding his ability to strum, sing dance, and make merry fun all over the stage!)“Shoot low, they're riding Shetlands.”
(European Zappa distributors "Music For Nations" on the occasion of some anniversary of theirs)“Everyone in this room is wearing a uniform, and don't kid yourself.”
(Live at the Circle Star, from 20 Years on the Road, when notified there were "cops in uniform" in the audience)
“Children are naive-they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble.”
(Zappa expressing his opinion pertaining to raising a child. He was saying that institutions such as schools and churches, which have the power to control and brainwash your child, are totally over rated, and shouldn't always be recognized as a genuinely good thing)“The ONLY thing that seems to band all nations together, is that their Governments are universally bad....”
(German television interview)“If we can't be free at least we can be cheap.”
“Whoever we are, wherever we're from, we should have noticed by now our behavior is dumb, and if our chances are expected to improve, it's gonna take a lot more than trying to remove, the other race, or the other whatever, from the face of the planet altogether.”
("Dumb All Over, You Are What You Is")“Nobody looks good bent over. Especially to pick up a check.”
("Guitar Magazine" 1984)“The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just keep your fvcking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.”
("Playboy" Interview, April 1993)“When we talk about artistic freedom in this country We sometime lose sight of the fact that freedom is often dependent on adequate financing.”
“If you want to get laid, go to college, but if you want an education, go to the library.”
(Pittsburgh Press in the summer of '67)“A lot of things wrong with society today are directly attributable to the fact that the people who make the laws are sexually maladjusted.”
("I Seem To Be a Verb" by R. Buckminster Fuller, 1970)“The gorilla is on an island, eats bananas and has a good time all day long. He plays out there in the bushes. Some Americans find out about the gorilla and they hear how BIG he is - you know. They're very impressed with the size of the beast. So they catch the gorilla & they stick him in a boat & bring him back to the US. They show him off to everybody & make a bunch of money. ...Then they kill him!”
(The song "King Kong" 1968 tour, Wisconsin)“Well, you know I've been here many times, and only certain hours of the day when I'm here am I asleep; the rest of the time I'm actually awake.”
(I have a filler on a DAT with Zappa being interrogated by a couple of Swedish fans? state officers? ...in which they are arguing over the pornographic contents of his work. He tells them he has been spying on them, and claims that their porno industry is bigger than that of the US. It's pretty funny. BTW this is from the '88 tour.)“I can gross out anybody in this room.”
(Said during a concert at Mount Holyoke College in the early 1970's)“Anything played wrong twice in a row is the beginning of an arrangement.”
“Outdoors for me is walking from the car to the ticket desk at the airport.”
(Regarding secondhand smoke, "The Real Frank Zappa Book")“My music is like a movie for your ear.”
“Here I stand hoping against hope that it's a chick with a low voice.”
(At a concert in Beloit, Wisconsin 1968 or 69 a guy in the audience yelled out, "Eat me Zappa")“Don't clap for destroying America. This place is as good as you want to make it.”
(introduced "Billy the Mountain" by revealing that Billy and Ethel took a vacation trip across the United States, destroying it in the process. This was Zappa's response to the applause and cheers from the audience. Cleveland Coliseum, 1971)“If it can be conceived as music, it can be executed as music, and presented to an audience in such a way that they will perceive it as music: "Look at this. Ever seen one of these before? I built this for you. What do you mean, "What the fvck is it?" It's a god dam ETUDE, asshole."”
“This is a really nice place. Don't fvck it up.”
(Chrysler Hall, Norfolk, Virginia in the Spring of 1984. A very genteel place to see fine compositions performed live. Usually the opera folks hang out there)“The whole Universe is a large joke. Everything in the Universe are just subdivisions of this joke. So why take anything too serious.”
(In September 1992 on SFB 3 when he gave an interview about the "Yellow Shark")“Kid's heads are filled with so many nonfacts that when they get out of school they're totally unprepared to do anything. They can't read, they can't write, they can't think. Talk about child abuse. The U.S. school system as a whole qualifies.”
(Discussing the state of the education system in America - "Playboy," April 1993)“We haven't got 'em whipped on this one yet. You got a bear by the tail here, uh? Jeezis!”
(Bill of Rights ground into "hoopla" by a woman <presumably a senator's wife> from sleeve "MOP" –1985)“There are forty people in this world, and five of them are hamburgers.”
“If something goes wrong and you tend to smile it away, then you have someone to blame.”
“Drop out of school, before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts...”
("Zappa behind the Sneer," June 1995, "SLUG" magazine; Salt Lake City, UT.)“Never stop until your good becomes better, and your better becomes the best.”
“Now imagine a Moebius vortex inside a spherical constant, and you've got my cosmology.”
(1992)“The people of your century no longer require the service of composers. A composer is as useful to a person in a jogging suit as a dinsoaur turd in the middle of his runway.”
("Them Or Us The Book")“The Very Big Stupid is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D Department.”
("The Real Frank Zappa Book")“For my taste, these solos [of some 50s blues guitarists] are exemplary because what is being played seems honest and, in a musical way, a direct extension of the personality of the men who played them.”
(January 1977)“We play the new free music, music as the absolutely free, unencumbered by American cultural suppression. It's not pretty, also you can't dance to it.”
“There's no single ideal listener out there who likes my orchestral music, my guitar albums and songs like "Dyna-Moe-Humm."”
“It's all one big note. Ladies and gentleman, watch Ruth. All through the show, Ruth has been thinking...Ruth has been thinking? All Through The Show?”
(17 November 1974, Philadelphia)“We'll get back to the wimp, and his low-budget conception of personal freedom, in just a moment ["Thing-Fish"]. You can tell what they think of our music by the places we are forced to play it in. This looks like a good spot for a livestock show.”
(April 1968, Chicago, "Mothers of Invention" open for "Cream")“I'm not going to be Bill Clinton and say I never inhaled. I did inhale. I liked tobacco a lot better.”
Interviewer:
“The notion of a "guitar solo" has preconceptions based on it; people automatically refute it because it's supposed to be self-indulgent or "for musicians." It's almost like things become iconographic and somehow lose their value for outsiders.”Zappa:
“Well, who's fault is that? That's what”writers” do. Musicians don't do that. The average person doesn't sit around thinking about "iconographic problems of a guitar solo."”
(Interview for "Musician" magazine, by Matt Resnicoff, November 1991, Reprinted in July 1995)
“Consider for a moment any beauty in the name Ralph.”
(In an interview with Joan Rivers who had just asked him why he gave his children such odd names, Frank gave the reply above)“I write the music I like. If other people like it, fine, they can go buy the albums. And if they don't like it, there's always Michael Jackson for them to listen to.”
(Frank was talking about his music from the "Yellow Shark")“I never set out to be weird. It was always the other people who called me weird.”
(Baltimore Sun, October 12, 1986)“I don't want to spend my whole life explaining myself. Either you get it, or you don't!”
“Government is the Entertainment Division of the military-industrial complex.”
("The Real Frank Zappa Book")“Why doncha come on over to the house and I'll show 'em to ya?”
(Senate hearing on pornography in music, when Sen. Paula Hawkins from Florida said ... "I'd like to see what kind of toys your children play with.")“Throwing objects such as this are capable of damaging expensive musical equipment and musicians. Any more of this and there will be no more music.”
(Autumn 1981 at Northrup auditorium in Minneapolis, Minnesota. After someone threw a plunger on stage about two-thirds of the way through the show, he stopped the band with a wave of his hand speaking in the general direction that the dangerous object was thrown, while holding it in his hand. This did not prove to be an amusing act and Frank's mood hardened. It was, however, an evening of excellent, serious musicianship around the release of "Shut up and play yer guitar")“Music is the most physically inspiring of all the arts.”
(Said as he gave the keynote address at the American Society of University Composers in Columbus Ohio in 1985)“And all the rest of whom for which to whensonever of partially indeterminate bio-chemical degradation seek the path to the sudsy yellow nozzle of their foaming nocturnal parametric digital whole-wheat inter-faith geo-thermal terpsichorean ejectamenta.”
(From board tape at Zappa concert, outdoors, at Blossom Music Center, Akron, Ohio, summer 1984. This quote was in the middle of a spoken section of "The Mud Club" in which a dude walks into the club with a blue Mohawk and proceeds to "work the floor, work the wall, work the monitor system." The band was having monitor feedback problems at the Blossom concert, and there are numerous references to P.A. equipment throughout this ramble. Other than that, the quote is meaningless, I guess. But great imagery!)“You get nothing with your college degree.”
("Roxy & Elsewhere")“Weedley-Weedley-Wee.”
(Specifically, the small fret guitar-playing technique that musicians have a tendency to display while in pursuit of a cross between a waitress and a Hoover vacuum...)“Beware of forest fires...Don't fvck too hot-a-gal in it might jest set 'em on fire.”
(From a series of bootlegs that were recorded in the 3 European tours that I traveled with during my illustrious military career in Pirmasens, W. Germany, 11/76-6/79, most of the quotes came from the live "Titties & Beer" versions with FZ and skinny little Terry Ted Bozio. Definitely in Paris, Stutgart and outside of Kaiserslaughtern <K-Town>)“It was 11 o'clock upon a Friday night... you know that me an' her were feelin' outasite... yeah 20 reds and a big ol' pile of weed... ya know we drank some wine and then we LSD'd... well Chrissy puked twice and jumped on my bike...she said fire it up because you know what I like... then she burned her leg on the tailpipe then and said shiter-ree and puked again...”
(From a series of bootlegs that were recorded in the 3 European tours that I traveled with during my illustrious military career in Pirmasens, W. Germany, 11/76-6/79, most of the quotes came from the live "Titties & Beer" versions with FZ and skinny little Terry Ted Bozio. Definitely in Paris, Stutgart and outside of Kaiserslaughtern <K-Town>)“Playing guitar with this band is like trying to grow Watermelon In Easter Hay.”
“Always get a second opinion.”
(His personal physician did not diagnose prostate cancer before it was too advanced to treat with any success)“I think "when" is a very important thing, but "what the fvck!" is also a very important thing to ask. Just keep asking "what the fvck?" I mean, why the fvck bother? See what i mean? The important thing is, deal with the "when". "When" will open a lot of shit for you. "What the fvck" really makes it easier to deal with it when you understand the "when".”
“It's fvcking great to be alive, ladies and gentlemen, and if you do not believe it is fvcking great to be alive, you better go now, because this show will bring you down so much.”
("Just Another Band From L.A.")“All right, Zubin, hit it!”
(Frank's onstage cue to conductor Zubin Mehta during their collaborative effort with the L.A. Philharmonic orchestra in 1970)“The crux of the biscuit is: If it entertains you, fine. Enjoy it. If it doesn't, then blow it out your ass. I do it to amuse myself. If I like it, I release it. If somebody else likes it, that's a bonus.”
("Playboy" magazine on May 2, 1993)“You can tell what they think of our music by the places we are forced to play it in. This looks like a good spot for a livestock show.”
(The "Mothers of Invention" were opening for "Cream" in April of 1968 in Chicago. The place was very large and did look like it had been used for displays of cattle and other such animals)“It has never mattered to me that thirty million people might think I'm wrong. The number of people who thought Hitler was right did not make him right... Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?”
(Why they don't play my stuff on the radio, from "The Real Frank Zappa Book," 1989, Poseidon Press)“The Future is scary!
It makes me wanna dance.”
(From an interview about some music written in 17/35 <or some time signiture like that> he had composed on the synclavier)“This is Frank Zappa saying, Don't do speed. Speed turns you into your parents.”
(this used to play Often as a public service announcement <PSA> on radio station WHFS at 102.5 FM in Bethesda, MD, USA, during the early '70's. It was followed by a nearly inaudible whisper, "...but grass and acid are O.K.", which may have been Frank, or one of the "Mothers of Invention")“I never took a shit on stage, and the closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1973.”
("The Real Frank Zappa book")“Rain is good for you...
Rain is bad for electrical equipment...”
(Outdoor concert, Jones Beach, NY, Circa 1984)“You can't be a Real Country unless you have a BEER and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of a football team or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a BEER.”
“Nobody looks good in brown lipstick.”
“Get yer ass out there and register to VOTE!”
“Whenever your down, just think about how you got there.”
“Anything over a mouthful is wasted.”
“The family was from Arkansas. The Dad (Dink) was a furniture salesman in San Bernardino, but, back in the way-back-when, he used to play "bones" or "spoons" in a minstrel show. To relive the golden days of yesteryear he would, from time to time, force his children to accompany him (Ronnie on guitar, Kenny on trombone) in a living room replay of a minstrel routine called "Lazy Bones." The kids often found this to be an inconvenience, as they were fascinated by, and constantly perfecting new techniques for, The Manly Art Of Fart-Burning. Kenny explained to me that it was scientific - that it demonstrated <this is a real quote> "Compression, ignition, combustion and exhaust."”
(Kenny & Ronnie Williams later "immortalized" in "Let's Make The Water Turn Black" From "The Real Frank Zappa Book" Chapter 4)“I can't think of anything I like more than audience participation.”
("Mothers of Prevention")“To me, cigarettes are food.”
(Response to an assertion that his nicotine habit conflicted with his anti-drug stance)“May you never hear a vloerbedekking again.”
(The beginning of "Theme from Lumpy Gravy," performed in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Vloerbedekking means "carpet" in Dutch. It must be one of the Frank's made up musical terms translated into Dutch, just like putting eyebrows on something.)“It's not ordinary and it's not mundane, but it does not involve golden showers and appliances.”
(He was talking about his sex life with Gail in 1980, "Frank Zappa: In His Own Words")“Ooooh the way you love me baby,
I get so hard now I could die.
Ooooh the way you squeeze me lady
red balloons just pop behind my eyes.”
("Magic Fingers," "200 Motels")“You see, when I was a kid I used to save up for a month, so I could get an R&B album and, the same day, the completed works of Anton Webern. Maybe that means something. Maybe that tells you something about my music.”
("Rock and Other Four Letter Words", 1968)“Seeing a psychotherapist is not a crazy idea, it's just wanting, a second opinion of one's life.”
“All year long you people manufactured this crap, and one night a year you've got to listen to it!”
(Frank introducing "psychedelic music" to the audience of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Science dinner in New York, 1968, at which the Mothers were invited to play)“Did anybody dance?”
(Said after performing "Black Page #2" on "Zappa In New York" this was the song that alerted FZ to the existence of his stunt guitarist to be, Steve Vai, after receiving a sheet music transcription of the song, made by young master Vai)“...and then they put them on their heads, they were having a good time, the girl was in the water, she didn't even see what was going on with her Underpants. But wearing the pants, it looked just like a tiny little Party Hat!”
(Establishing the tradition of the "Jazz Discharge Party Hats" whilst in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Man From Utopia, 1983)“I'd like to know who's Plunkin' the monkeys?”
(It was on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I can't remember the year maybe 10 years ago? They were talking about AIDS and how AIDS all got started, he had 3 theory's. First Frank said something about AIDS being a government test gone wrong Then maybe it was an Alien (ET) test or mistake and finally they talked about the theory of AIDS coming from a monkey and then Frank said "I'd like to know who's plunkin' the monkey's?"“This is Frank Zappa suggesting you Un-Load yourself...
Don't do Smack or Downers.”
(Public service announcement on KMET rock radio in Southern California during the Early Mid-Seventies.)“You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.”
“Well, you know people; I'd rather have my own game show than enough votes to become president.”
“The drummer's playing in 4/4, the Saxophone player is playing 5/4, the guitar player is picking his nose....”
“A true Zen saying, nothing is what I want.”
(From Roxy & Elsewhere, Dec 1973)“Beware of the fish people, they are the true enemy.”
(Speaking at a ProChoice rally in Los Angeles around 1989 – 90)“Anything can be music.”
(Answer to critics accusing him of not doing any actual music on "Uncle Meat")“Did everyone hear the great news today? "Jimmy Swaggart under investigation." One day every one of those cocksuckers will get caught.” ("Make A Jazz Noise Here" album of a live performance in either Boston or Poughkeepsie)
“Seriousity is something to be laughed at.”
(FZ responding to Ivo Niehe from Dutch television after being told that Europeans take Frank's music very seriously)“Get smart and I'll fvck you over - Sayeth The Lord.”
(about the basics of Christianity and it's perpetuation of ignorance as a way of life)“Scientology, how about that? You hold on to the tin cans and then this guy asks you a bunch of questions, and if you pay enough money you get to join the master race. How's that for a religion?”
(Concert at the Rockpile, Toronto, May 1969)“My music makes the mind think”
("Time" magazine 20DEC93, page 73)“Think I'll go out and get a little action.”
(Pamela Zarubica described this as something Zappa would say when beginning an average day. This time her husband was visiting and FZ scared the crap out of him... he was compared to Dr. Zhivago. I read this little story in "MOTHER! the Frank Zappa Story")“This tree is ugly and it wants to DIE...”
(graphic art work "Absolutely Free")“Producing satire is kind of hopeless because of the literacy rate of the American public.”
(A quote in response to criticism of "Jewish Princess" in "People" magazine, circa 1979)“...I think [Abbey Road is] the best engineered, best mastered rock and roll album ever produced...except that I take exception to stereo placement.”
“DENSE, PUTRID VAPORS from a SMOKE GUN (we rent it)”
(concert poster graphic, "Therapeutic Abortion with the Mothers...")“For some real personal satisfaction, try yelling out your own names.”
(At a concert in Boston, Massachusetts to some fans who kept yelling out Frank's name)“I didn't know such things existed, a guy walking in front of the stage with a fvcking t-shirt to sell to somebody, well you live and learn... ...us regular folks know this exquisite little inconvenience by the name of Commercialism”
(bootleg recording "Project/Object" intro to "Stinkfoot")“The manner in which Americans "consume" music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie -- it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it was made.”
("The Real Frank Zappa Book" Chapter 11)“Never stop and keep going.”
(Giving advice to young musicians. Early 80's interview with Pennsylvania state police officer that is also a Zappa fan. Originally to be shown to local high school students of the area but FZ ended up on the subject of politics and you can just imagine why the kids never saw this video)Frank Zappa appeared on the Mike Douglas show (solo, playing guitar with recorded backup).
Mike asked, “Your latest album is called Zoot Allures. How do you come up with such names for your records?”
“Well Mike, I'm abnormal.” Was Frank's succinct reply.
“So long as somebody gets a laugh out of it, what the fvck?”
("Guitar Player's - Mother of All Interviews" Part 2)“All right kiddies, we'll play "Wipe-Out" for you in a moment.”
(comment to the crowd at a 1968 concert in Dallas, TX)“People who think of videos as an art form are probably the same people who think "Cabbage Patch Dolls" are a revolutionary form of soft sculpture.”
(on videos from "Viva Zappa – Biography")“People make a lot of fuss about my kids having such supposedly "strange names," but the fact is that no matter what first names I might have given them, it is the last name that is going to get them in trouble.”
("The Real Frank Zappa Book," "Mr. Dad" chapter)“The formal structure of "You Didn't Try to Call Me" is not revolutionary, but it is interesting. You don't care.”
(Liner notes for "You Didn't Try to Call Me" on "Freak Out!")“Wowie Zowie” is what [Pamela Zarubica] says when she's not grouchy...who would guess it could inspire a song? No one would guess. None of you are perceptive enough. "Why are you reading this?"
(Liner notes for "You Didn't Try to Call Me" on "Freak Out!")“Carl Orestes Franzoni...is "freaky" down to his toe nails. Some day he will live next door to you and your lawn will die.”
(Liner notes for "Hungry Freaks, Daddy" on "Freak Out!")“Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mundane educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and "educate yourself" if you've got any guts. Some of you like "pep rallies" and plastic robots who tell you what to read. Forget I mentioned it. "This song has no message." Rise for the flag salute.”
(Liner notes for "Hungry Freaks, Daddy" on "Freak Out!")“Of course you realize you won't be able to hear the organ once we turn the guitars on.”
(Introduction to "Louie, Louie" on "Uncle Meat")During a 1968 Dallas, Tex. tour, Frank Zappa was conducting the Mothers of Invention by flipping the bird to the musician he wanted to perform. He turned to the audience and using both hands, he swept his fickle fingers wildly into the air. The crowd of several thousand at the convention center sat silent. “My, you sure are slow here in Texas, aren't you?” he yelled and the punks went crazy!
“Meanwhile at the Fornebu duty free shop.”
(Phrase used between songs during the March, 1988, concert in Skedsmohallen, near Oslo, Norway. Fornebu is the Oslo airport)“You think our music- the Monkees music is banal and insipid?”
(Frank replying to Mike Nesmith on an episode of "The Monkees" on which Frank and Mike pretended to be each other for several minutes before the opening theme.)“If there is a hell, it waits for them, not us!”
“There's no question in my mind -- the beer, the balloons and the bunting all start with "B" for some cosmic reason.”
(Words that start with "B" and remind him of the Republican party. "The Real Frank Zappa Book" Page 238)“Anyone who is disturbed by the idea of newts in a nightclub is potentially dangerous.”
(I can't remember the exact details but it was during one of his trials. One of the prosecuting lawyers quoted some of his lyrics which pertained to newts in a nightclub and said he found this image disturbing. Frank responded with the above. I like it as a sentence.)“Ever try to have a conversation with someone on drugs? It just doesn't work...”
(Sometime during the summer of 1987, when asked by a DC reporter, "What are your feelings on the war on drugs?" His first response was to criticize the inherent invasion of privacy, followed by the above statement against drug use.)“You wouldn't know a revolution if it bit you on the dick.”
(In response to a young crowd member continually shouting "Revolution" between songs at a late 60's gig at Middle Earth in Indianapolis, Indiana)“Bad facts make bad laws.”
(Said during the PMRC hearings)“No one has forced Mrs. Baker or Mrs. Gore to bring Prince into their homes.”
(PMRC Hearing 1985)”May your shit come to life and kiss you on the face.”
(to Mrs. Gore about parental advisory labels on album covers)”Nobody looks good with brown lipstick on.”
("The Real Frank Zappa Book")”I wrote a song about dental floss but did anyone's teeth get cleaner?”
(In response to Tipper Gore's allegations that music incites people towards deviant behavior, or influences their behavior in general)”Yeah, I tell them to change the channel if they see some guy in a brown suit with a telephone number at the bottom of the screen asking for money.”
(on being asked by Tipper Gore if there was anything on TV he Didn't allow his kids to watch)“It began with lyrics, but even looking at the PMRC fund raising letter in the last paragraph, at the bottom of the page, it starts looking like it's branching into other areas when it says, "We realize that this material's pervaded other aspects of society" and it's like "What, you gonna fix it all for me?" Mr. Zappa, I am astounded at the courtesy and soft voiced nature of the comments of my friend, the Senator from Tennessee. I can only say that I find your statement to be boorish, incredibly and insensitively insulting to the people who were here previously, that you could manage to give the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States a bad name, if I felt you had the slightest understanding of it, which I do not.”
- Senator Slade Gorton“You don't have the slightest understanding of the difference between government action and private action, and you have certainly destroyed any case you might otherwise have had with this Senator.”
- Senator Gorton, to which Frank Zappa responds with, “Is this private action?”“I think you should leave it up to the parent, because not all parents want to keep their children totally ignorant.”
- Frank Zappa in response to a question from Senator Hollings.
“Well, you and I would differ on what's ignorance and educated.”
- Senator Ernest Hollings to Zappa“Yes, Ladies and gentleman, even in this agricultural enviroment, We're gonna' play a love song.”
(This was about 1974 in Harrisburg Pa. at the Farm Show Arena, a week after the Farm show had left town... Frank never admitted to playing there, and I can't say as I blame him. But, I will never forget what a magical night that was.)“Tax the fvck out of the churches!”
“The concept of the rock-guitar solo in the eighties has pretty much been reduced to: Weedly-weedly-wee, make a face, hold your guitar like it's your weenie, point it heavenward, and look like you're really doing something. Then, you get a big ovation while the the smoke bombs go off, and the motorized lights in your truss twirl around!”
("The Real Frank Zappa Book")“If there's ever an obscene noise to be made on an instrument, it's gonna come out of a guitar! On a sax you can play sleze, on a bass you can play balls. but on a guitar you can be truly obscene! Lets be realistic about this, the guitar can be the single most blasphemous device on the earth! The guitar makes a stink noise. that's why I like it!!”
“The first hyphen in MAH-JUH-REEN could be used for erotic gratification by a very desperate stenographer.”
(Sydney australia, 1974, second night. on "Mystery box III")“I feel it's better to sing about these things ourselves and perform them with the people who it happened to than to have some jounralist one day say "then in 1971, one time when they were at the mudshark hotel..." But people have problems with things of a glandular nature in connection with things of a musical nature. They say why, music is way up here, and glands are way down there and they can't get 'em together, but then they are hypocritical because they take a band that doesn't sing about such things directly and couches their language a little and does it with a little choreography and say that that's great and that's real rock and roll. I maintain that there's no difference, we're just honest enough to get up and say "this is this and that's that and here you are and respond to it" and the response is "why... I'm hip, but of course I am offended."”
("Vitamin Deficiency" bootleg)
P.T. Barnum (July 5, 1810, Bethel, CT – April 7, 1891, Bridgeport, CT) American showman. Best known for promoting circuses, carnivals, and freakshows, with attractions ranging from General Tom Thumb to Jumbo the Elephant.
“If you can't dazzle them with dexterity, baffle them with bull.”“Every crowd has a silver lining.”
“The greatest humbug of all is the man who believes - or pretends to believe - that everything and everybody are humbugs. We sometimes meet a person who professes that there is no virtue; that every man has his price, and every woman hers; that any statement from anybody is just as likely to be false as true and that the only way to decide which, is to consider whether truth or a lie was likely to have paid best in that particular case. Religion he thinks one of the smartest business dodges extant, a first rate investment, and by all odds the most respectable disguise that a lying or swindling business man can wear. Honor he thinks is a sham. Honesty he considers a plausible word to flourish in the eyes of the greener portion of our race.... Poor fellow! he has exposed his own nakedness. Instead of showing that others are rotten inside, he has proved that he is.”
("The Humbugs of the World") “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
(often attributed to Lincoln but denied by Spofford and Giga.)“There is a sucker born every minute.”
“Never give a sucker an even break.” - W. C. Fields as Professor Eustace P. McGargle in "Poppy" Paramount, 1936
“You can't cheat an honest man. He has to have larceny in his heart in the first place.” - W.C. Fields, "Never Give a Sucker an Even Break: W.C. Fields on Business"; JAN2K.
(often attributed to P.T. Barnum)
Stephen Crane (1871 – 1900) novelist, poet, short-story writer
At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.
("The Red Badge Of Courage," 1895)I am enchanted, believe me, To die, thus, In this mediaeval fashion, According to the best legends.
("The Black Riders")"There Was Crimson Clash of War" exerpt from "The Black Riders," XIV
There was crimson clash of war.
Lands turned black and bare;
Women wept;
Babes ran, wondering.
There came one who understood not these things.
He said, “Why is this?”
Whereupon a million strove to answer him.
There was such intricate clamour of tongues,
That still the reason was not.
Paul Tillich "The Eternal Now"; Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1963© ISBN: 0334028752
“Being alive means being in a body--a body separated from all other bodies. And being separated means being alone.”
(p 15)“Thus, man and woman remain alone even in the most intimate union. They cannot penetrate each other's innermost center. And if this were not so, they could not be helpers to each other. They could not have human community. This is why God himself cannot liberate man from his aloneness. It is man's greatness that he is centered within himself. Separated from his world, he is thus able to look at it. Only because he can look at it can he know and love and transform it. ... Only he who has an impenetrable center in himself is free. Only he who is alone can claim to be a man. This is the greatness and this is the burden of man.”
(p 17)
PC Instant Re-Play
“Thus, man and woman remain alone even in the most intimate union. They cannot penetrate each other's innermost center. And if this were not so, they could not be helpers to each other. They could not have human community. This is why God himself cannot liberate [us] from [our] aloneness. It is [our] greatness that we are centered within [Self]. Separated from [the] world, [s]he is thus able to look at it. Only because [s]he can look at it can [s]he know and love and transform it. ... Only [s]he who has an impenetrable center in [themself] is free. Only [s]he who is alone can claim to be [human]. This is the greatness and this is the burden of [humanity].”
(p 17)“No communication with others can remove it, as no other's presence in the actual hour of dying can conceal the fact that it is our death, and our death alone.”
(p 21)“Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude.”
(p 21)“But life calls us back to its empty talk and the unavoidable demands of daily routine. It calls us back to its loneliness and the cover that it, in turn, spreads over our loneliness.”
(p 22)“This is the ultimate source of man's greatness, and those of us who openly or covertly accuse life should open ourselves to this truth: in the short span of our life, and the short span of human history and even of the existence of this planet, something of eternal significance did happen--the depth of all things became manifest in one being, and the name of that being is man.”
(p 76)
Teachings of Swami Vivekananda (1863 – 1902)
These quotes were found by browsing the new version of the computer CD "Swami Vivekananda: Life, Works and Research".The best thermometer to the progress of a nation is its treatment of its women. In ancient Greece there was absolutely no difference in the state of man and woman. The idea of perfect equality existed. No Hindu can be a priest until he is married; the idea being that a single man is only half a man, and imperfect. The idea of perfect womanhood is perfect independence.
We must not look down with contempt on others. All of us are going towards the same goal. The difference between weakness and strength is one of degree; the difference between virtue and vice is one of degree; the difference between heaven and hell is one of degree; the difference between life and death is one of degree; all differences in this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of everything. All is One, which manifests Itself, either as thought, or life, or soul, or body, and the difference is only in degree. As such, we have no right to look down with contempt upon those who are not developed exactly in the same degree as we are.
Condemn none; if you can stretch out a helping hand, do so. If you cannot, fold your hands, bless your brother, and let them go their own way. Dragging down and condemning is not the way to work. Never is work accomplished in that way. We spend our energies in condemning others. Criticism and condemnation is a vain way of spending our energies, for in the long run we come to learn that all are seeing the same thing, are more or less approaching the same ideal, and that most of our differences are merely differences of expression.
Swami Ashokananda (1893 – 1969), head of the Vedanta Society of Northern California;
Excerpts from "Shafts of Light"We are so busy with our own thoughts that we do not hear the celestial music that is in our hearts. Every moment we are realizing God in our immortal soul, but we do not listen.
Thou art playing in my heart. Thou hast made me the instrument of thy music.
The heart - it is there that all the fun is. It is from there that you rise.
Questions such as "Where is God? Who is he? What is he?" are foolish. In that very moment, whatever you see is God. He is here. Rub your eyes. Clear your brain.
Every experience contains within itself the germ of freedom. Mistakes contribute to our freedom.
Where your heart is, there your strength is. When your heart is not whole, the strength goes out of it.
God does not like begging. He gives himself in response to love. The mind becomes very calm - joy is felt, then sweetness, then love. A person who is progressing in meditation feels this refreshing calmness and is bathed in an unutterable sweetness and love that will stay with him all his life.
We are continually trying to regain the lost memory of our true Self - that is what is called life.
In criticizing a person, you are shutting off the most wonderful truth: that person is God.
A spiritual person should have no animosity for anyone, In seeing faults in others, we are strengthening the same faults in ourselves. It is a vicious cycle and a psychological fact.... Have forgiveness and a sense of humor. Once you recognize hurt, you rarely forgive.
It is not necessarily the worthy person who advances in spiritual life. It is the determined person.
Whatever wrongs you might have done, however terrible you might be, still say that you are the Spirit. Affirm this until your backbone has become strong and you have become ten feet tall.Our troubles in spiritual life are symptoms of our lack of enthusiasm. One sure way to overcome spiritual difficulties is to come in contact with people who are eagerly seeking God and learn from them.
"Reiki - Sistema Tradicional Japonęs" excerpt from Johnny de Carli´s book about traditional Japanese Reiki, Reido as taught by Sensei Aoki. Translated from the Portugese.
En and Tao are the same in essence, to quote the preface:In the West there is a strong tendency to cleave things apart and to place the pieces in neat glass-covered compartments for study and analysis. This tendency has extended even into the unseen subtleties of metaphysics, religion and psychology and has resulted in a vague malaise and sense of wrongness about our lives. An overview of the differences between Eastern and Western religious thought casts some light on the source of this wrongness. Joseph Campbell, in his book "The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology," sharply delineates the fundamental religious configurations of East and West. I had understood that in the West there was a separation between mankind and the anthromorphic God, while in the East there was an inward-directed search for reunion with the Mystical Oneness, that is, a return to the great origin. But as Campbell points out, Western religion aims at determining man´s relationship to a distinct transcendent God who is forever separate from mankind. The separation exists from the creation forward and leads to a view of creation, Adam´s fall from grace, and all religious happenings since, as historical and ethical events. Campbell says that Eastern religion centers on the view that creation was the fragmentation of oneness as personified in god, and that the divine therefore is inherent in everything. In the East salvation comes through a casting aside of illusion and ignorance caused by ego, and by recognizing and reintegrating with the divine oneness found within. In the West a historical event Adam´s fall separated us from the grace of a separate God and only a historical event the end of time will bring us back into grace with a still separate God. In the East, reunification with the fragmented divine oneness requires only self-examination and an altering of our psychological orientation. The western view is historical, ethical, and externally directed toward another life in another realm. The Eastern view is metaphysical, poetic, and internally directed toward a correct and egoless life in this realm.
In the West the separation of mankind from God requires that both have a domain, a holy city and a secular city. For us to achieve grace and to return to the holy city some part of us must be able to survive physical death and earthly discorporation. So Descartes wielded the logical cleaver and said "I think therefore I am" and the spirit was neatly separated from the body. This separation instills many practitioners of western religion with a drive for the after-life in heaven and an almost causal disregard for the manifestations of the secular, corporeal world. It gives a zealous incentive to conquer profane nature rather than to participate in its sacred but not divine unity.
On a psychological plane, as opposed to metaphysical, Descartes split the brain and its function into the logical, pragmatic, empirical, left-brainedness of the masculine West and the intuitive, poetic, artistic, right-brainedness of the feminine East. This gave westerners a science that could and would dissect anything into its component parts in the interest of logical understanding. It also gave us a technology based in that understanding, capable of amazingly complex fabrications and manipulations on the one hand, and of a resulting devastating destruction of nature on the other. But, because religion told us that we were only temporary residents, we use science and technology to help us in the conquest of the profane. We forgot that we were charged with stewardship by that same religion.
We have only just begun to realize that the religious and psychological configurations, that were going to save us from immersion in the physical world and propel us to heaven, has instead made us vandals who have sacked and desecrated the very temple in which we must live.
It is this sense of wrongness of the path which we collectively pursue which has turned my attention to the wandering Taoist sage. He participates in and finds accord with nature and the natural way of heaven and earth. This book is the manifestation of my efforts to understand taoism and to present it to others to consider. I am driven by the conviction that if enough people were to read and understand the Tao Te ching, the world would be profoundly influenced and thereby improved. This work is presented in the enduring hope that it will help others, as it has helped me, to turn away from the path we are pursuing. It is not too late to retrace the false steps which have brought us to this point. It is not too late to turn [in our] healing journey – backward down the path, things rise to activity, and I watch their return. They come forth and flourish, Then return to their origin. Returning to one´s origin is stillness. Stillness is the fulfillment of one´s nature. Fulfilling one´s nature is to be constant. Insight leads to enlightenment, Enlightenment leads to impartiality, Impartiality leads to power, Power leads to oneness with nature, Oneness with nature leads to the Tao. When eternally with the Way, one will not come to harm throughout life.
Alan W. Watts (1915 – 1973)
“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
("Shaving the Inside of Your Skull: Crazy Wisdom for Discovering Who You Really Are" by Mel Ash; New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1996. p 16.)“It is both dangerous and absurd for our world to be a group of communions mutually excommunicate. This is especially true of the great cultures of the East and the West, where the potentialities of communication are the richest, and the dangers of failure to communicate the worst. ... On the one hand, it is necessary to be sympathetic and to experiment personally with the way of life to the limit of one's possibilities. On the other hand, one must resist every temptation to "join the organization," to become involved with its institutional commitments. In this friendly neutral position one is apt to be disowned by both sides.”
("The Way of Zen." Originally 1957. Vintage Spiritual Classics Edition 1999. p xi-xii.)“Our philosophy of action falls into the alternatives of voluntarism and determinism, freedom and fate, because we have no sense of the wholeness of the endless knot and of the identity of its actions and ours.”
("Nature, Man, and Woman," p. 7)“We might call these two types of culture progressive and historical on the one hand, and traditional and nonhistorical on the other. For the philosophy of the first is that human society is on the move, that the political state is a biological organism whose destiny is to grow and expand. Examining the record of its past, the progressive society reconstructs it as history, that is, as a significant series of events which constitute a destiny, a motion toward specific temporal goals for the society as a whole. The fabricators of such histories easily forget that their selection of "significant" events from the record is subjectively determined--largely by the need to justify the immediate political steps which they have in mind. History exists as a force because it is created or invented here and now.
On the other hand, traditional societies are nonhistorical in that they do not imagine themselves to be in linear motion toward temporal goals. Their records are not histories but simple chronicles, which delineate no pattern in human events other than a kind of cycling like the rotation of the seasons. Their political philosophy is to maintain the balance of nature upon which the human community depends, and which is expressed in public rites celebrating the timeless correspondences between the social order and the order of the universe.”
("Nature, Man, and Woman," p. 16)“Underlying this continuity [from spirit-loving Christianity to body-loving Paganism] is the fact that, as one might say, both God and the Devil subscribe to the same philosophy since both inhabit a cosmology where spirit stands against nature. Furthermore, the architects of this cosmology were unaware of the mutual interdependence, or correlativity, of opposites, which is the principal reason why they did not perceive the inner identity of spirit and nature, subject and object, and why they did not notice the hidden compact between God and the Devil to reproduce one another. They did not notice it even when, as the conceptions of the two became fully elaborated, they sometimes exchanged characters so that the image of God became diabolical and the image of the Devil divine. For as the image of God was composed of goodness piled on goodness, power piled on power, it became insufferable and monstrous. But in conceiving the image of the Devil there were no laws to be kept, and the creative imagination could run riot, emptying all its repressed and sensuous contents. Hence the persistent allure of Satanism and the fascination of evil.
When the mutual interdependence of the opposites is not seen, it becomes possible to dream of a state of affairs in which life exists without death, good without evil, pleasure without pain, and light without darkness. The subject, the soul, can be set free from the concrete limitations of the object, the body. ... The idea that the good can be wrested from the evil, that life can be delivered permanently from death, is the seed-thought of the progressive and historical cultures.”
("Nature, Man, and Woman," p. 18)“The ruler who wants to be above the people must speak of himself as below them./If he wants to be ahead of the people, he must keep himself behind them.”
- Lao Tzu, "Nature, Man, and Woman" by Alan W. Watts; p 38-39“At first sight [God's omniscience] is a fascinating and marvelous conception--an infinitely conscious mind, concentrated simultaneously on every galaxy and every atom with the entirety of its attention.
Yet on second thought the conception is more monstrous than marvelous--a kind of intellectual elephantiasis, being simply a colossal magnification and multiplication of the conscious, analytical mode of knowledge.
For God is conceived in the image of a severed consciousness, without inwardness, since he knows not only all things but himself as well through and through. He is completely transparent to his own conscious understanding; his subjectivity is totally objective, and for this very reason he lacks an inside.
This is perhaps what Western man would himself like to be--a person in total control of himself, analyzed to the ultimate depths of his own unconscious, understood and explained to the last atom of his brain, and to this extent completely mechanized. When every last element of inwardness has become an object of knowledge, the person is, however, reduced to a rattling shell.
Equally monstrous is the notion of absolute omnipotence when considered as perfect self-control, which is actually tantamount to a state of total paralysis. For control is a degree of inhibition, and a system which is perfectly inhibited is completely frozen.”
("Nature, Man, and Woman," p. 43)“Yet even in the most beneficent state, force remains the ultimate authority however well hidden. This is because, politically conceived, people are others, that is to say, alien wills and isolated consciousnesses upon which order has to be imposed from without.”
("Nature, Man, and Woman," p. 49)“I disagree that this will happen. In Microcosmos they said that even in the event of nuclear catastrophe, bacteria would still survive. The solution has to be found, as Krishnamurti has said, in the problem and not away from it. In other words, the "bad" man's disturbing emotions and urgent desires have to be seen as they are--or, better, the moment in which they arise has to be seen as it is, without narrowing attention upon any aspect of it.”
("Nature, Man, and Woman," p. 68)“The idea of nothing has bugged people for centuries, especially in the Western world.We have a saying in Latin, Ex nihilo nuhil fit, which means "out of nothing comes nothing." It has occurred to me that this is a fallacy of tremendous proportions. It lies at the root of all our common sense, not only in the West, but in many parts of the East as well. It manifests in a kind of terror of nothing, a put-down on nothing, and a put-down on everything associated with nothing, such as sleep, passivity, rest, and even the feminine principles. But to me nothing -- the negative, the empty -- is exceedingly powerful. I would say, on the contrary, you can't have something without nothing. Image nothing but space, going on and on, with nothing in it forever. But there you are imagining it, and you are something in it. The whole idea of there being only space, and nothing else at all is not only inconceivable but perfectly meaningless, because we always know what we mean by contrast.”
“The difficulty for most of us in the modern world is that the old-fashioned idea of God has become incredible or implausible. When we look through our telescopes and microscopes, or when we just look at nature, we have a problem. Somehow the idea of God we get from the holy scriptures doesn't seem to fit the world around us, just as you wouldn't ascribe a composition by Stravinsky to Bach. The style of God venerated in the church, mosque, or synagogue seems completely different from the style of the natural universe. It's hard to conceive of the author of one as the author of the other.”
On EGO
I find that the sensation of myself as an ego inside a bag of skin is really a hallucination. What we really are is, first of all, the whole of our body. And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment. Obviously a body requires air, and the air must be within a certain temperature range. The body also requires certain kinds of nutrition. So in order to occur the body must be on a mild and nutritive planet with just enough oxygen in the atmosphere spinning regularly around in a harmonious and rhythmical way near a certain kind of warm star.
That arrangement is just as essential to the existence of my body as my heart, my lungs, and my brain. So to describe myself in a scientific way, I must also describe my surroundings, which is a clumsy way getting around to the realization that you are the entire universe. However we do not normally feel that way because we have constructed in thought an abstract idea of our self.
“Well,” you ask. “How do I get rid of it?”
And my answer to that is: “That's the wrong question. How does one get rid of what?”
You can't get rid of your hallucination of being an ego by an activity of the ego.
Sorry, but it can't be done . . .
If you try to get rid of your ego with your ego you will just end up in a vicious circle.
You'd be like somebody who worries because they worry because they worry.On Faith
On Play
On Self
On Teachers
On Peace ("Nature, Man, and Woman")Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931) mystic, poet, dramatist, and artist
“Your suffering is the pain of holding onto that which no longer serves you.”“Say not, "I have found The truth," but rather, "I have found A truth."”
“Yes, there is Nirvanah; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture, and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your poem.”
("Sand and Foam")“Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.”
“How can you sing if your mouth be filled with food? How shall your hand be raised in blessing if it is filled with gold?”
("Sand and Foam")“He who listens to truth is not less than he who utters truth.”
("Sand and Foam")“He who does be listenin tuh trutes ent lesser dan he who he be tahkin trutes.”
(Ebonics version)“Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfful to seek other than itself.”
("Sand and Foam")“Of life's two chief prizes, beauty and truth, I found the first in a loving heart and the second in a laborer's hand.”
Ken Keyes, Jr. "Handbook to Higher Consciousness"; 1975© Living Love Center LCCN: 86-27785; ISBN: 0-9600688-8-0
“Love everyone unconditionally... including yourself.”“I am perceiving everyone, including myself, as an awakening being who is here to claim his or her birthright to the higher consciousness planes of unconditional love and oneness.”
“The past is dead; The future is imaginary; Happiness can only be in the Eternal Now Moment.”
“A loving person lives in a loving world; A hostile person lives in a hostile world; Everyone you meet is your mirror.”
“Life is warning you to get rid of an addiction every time you are emotionally uncomfortable in any way.”
“How soon will you realize that the only thing you don't have is the direct experience that there's nothing you need that you don't have?”
“Expand your love, your consciousness, and your loving compassion by experiencing everything that everyone does or says as though you had done or said it.”
“Even when we get what we addictively want, our wanting to keep things that way automatically creates a new addiction.”
“All there is in your life is the eternal now moment - and your experience of the moment is created by the programming in your head.
“You add suffering to the world just as much when you take offense as when you give offense.”
“We see things not as they are - but as we are.”
“The Love and Peace of higher consciousness flow from just being - and enjoying it all. Anything you do will not be enough unless you feel fulfilled in just being. Usually we are not happy when we find doing whatever it is that we think we have to do. Doing creates expectations that your world and the people around you may or may not fit. The things we do disappear in time. We must learn to appreciate just being alive in the nowness of whatever situation we are in.”
Thaddeus Golas (1924 – 1997) "The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment"; 1972© ISBN: 0553263587
“The "motive" for purifying yourself - that you feel spiritually impure - will prevent any genuine gain until you learn to love the impurity you started with. Can any being seriously think that he is going to pass through the infinity of time without ever making another mistake? Quite often a flash of enlightenment will give you this message: Go back to where you started and learn to love it more.”
(Chapter Six: Self-improvement)“There are many paths to enlightenment. Some of us who have expanded to a degree of illumination have thereafter preached the dogmatic certainty of one particular path. But enlightenment doesn't care how you get there. And if you aren't going to be thinking about it in paradise, then don't worry about it now.”
(Chapter Ten: How you get there)“One of my psychedelic excursions had gotten off to a bad start, and I was sinking into a really satanic bummer. As I looked about me at people turning evil, shrunken, colorless, old, and weird, I suddenly thought, "Well, what did you think it was that needed to be loved?" And just like that the doors opened and I was in paradise. "No resistance." This does not mean that you must be physically passive or meekly put up with bad vibrations or rip-offs. This means no resistance in your mind. Be free in your head, act out of love, and do what feels good. There is no action that is always right or wrong the only true variable is the love with which you act. As you open your awareness, life will improve of itself, you won't even have to try. It's a beautiful paradox the more you open your consciousness, the fewer unpleasant events intrude themselves into your awareness.
"Love as much as you can from wherever you are." This line is especially good to recall when you feel frightened, crazy, or have taken some bad dope. Write it on the wall of your room. You may not want to love what you feel or see, you may not be able to convince yourself that you could love it at all. But just decide to love it. Say out loud that you love it, even if you don't believe it. And say, "I love myself for hating this."
"Love it the way it is." The way you see the world depends entirely on your own vibration level. When your vibration changes, the whole world will look different. It's like those days when everyone seems to be smiling at you because you feel happy. The way to raise your vibration level is to feel more love. Start by loving your negative feelings, your own boredom, dullness and despair. It's hard to believe, but changing the "content" of your mind does nothing to change your vibration level. For the purpose of raising your awareness, it is useless to change your ideas, your faith, your behavior, your place of residence, or your companions. It is not arbitrary or an accident that you are where you are, so you might as well get your attitude straight before you make a change. Otherwise you might find yourself chasing all over creation looking for the right place, and not even the Sea of Infinite Bliss will feel right to you. You take yourself with you wherever you go. As they say in Zen: If you can't find it where you are standing, where do you expect to wander in search of it?”
(Chapter Four: Lifesavers)“Loving yourself is a willingness to be in the same space with your own creations. How contracted would you become if you try to withdraw from your own ideas? Loving yourself is not a matter of building your ego. Egotism is proving you are worthwhile after you have sunk into hating yourself. Loving yourself will dissolve your ego: you will feel no need to prove you are superior.”
(Chapter Four: Lifesavers)“I am a lazy man. Laziness keeps me from believing that enlightenment demands effort, discipline, strict diet, non-smoking, and other evidences of virtue. There is a paradise in and around you right now, and to be there you don't even have to make a move. There is nothing you need to do first in order to be enlightened. All potential experiences are within you already. You can open up to them at any time.”
(Foreword)“It's astonishing how much energy some people waste worrying that someone else might be enjoying life in ways that they don't approve of.”
- Kevin Michael Vail“It is important not to judge others for their pleasures of the flesh. What you deny to others will be denied to you, for the plain reason that you are always legislating for yourself, all your words and actions define the world you want to live in. One of the necessary laws for our relations as equal beings is this: What you say, goes - but only for you and those who agree with you. If you say a man should not receive help undeservedly, it may not affect his life much, but it will hold for you: you will not get undeserved help. If you say other people's sexual preferences are vulgar, it won't change their experiences, but your pleasures will become vulgar. It is precisely your unlimited power to control your experience that hangs you up. How much compassion and forgiveness do you want for yourself? Give it to others. Go to the extreme: forgive all beings for their karmic debts to you. Grant to others the freedom, the love, the consciousness that you want for yourself.”
(Chapter Three: How to feel good)“It is not a personal affront to you when someone is being discordant, it is a measure of his pain. He's showing you how much he hurts, and how much compassion he needs. But keep in mind, too, that not all victims are innocent. In a certain karmic sense, no victims are innocent, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't help them, for it is our fate to exist in a relation to them, and how we behave determines our own karma. But we should give help in a way that does not extend our attachment to low vibrations. That means we should give what we would expect to get, good or bad, in the same circumstance, and begin with the knowledge that all beings are equals.”
(Chapter Eight: Going through changes)“Go beyond reason to love - it is safe. It is the only safety. Love all you can, and when you are ready all will be shown to you. The state of mind that most needs enlightenment is the one that sees human beings as "needing" to be guided or enlightened. The sin that most needs to be loved and forgiven is the state of mind that sees human beings as sinners.”
“We have all probably gone through periods of belief system house-cleaning, with the feeling of being in control and taking charge of our lives, success, and all of that. What I'm suggesting is that there is a basic illusion underlying this appearance, which is the feeling that "I" am doing this. If I choose to change a belief for whatever reason, then who has chosen the new belief? Me, or the reason for the choice? Choosing to change one's belief system is a good way to avoid looking at one's relationship to belief systems per se. We are motivated by pain, or uncomfortableness, and rather than understand our relationship to those feelings, we seek to change them by adopting new belief systems, finding new lovers, moving to different cities, changing jobs, ... We always try to "fix" what is perceived as being outside of us, rather than trying to understand the motivation to fix.”
- Gerald Bryan on talk.religion.newage“Anything that really frightens you may contain a clue to enlightenment. It may indicate to you how deeply you are attached to structure, whether mental, physical, or social. Attachment and resistance are appearances with the same root: when you resist by pulling away your awareness, the emotion is one of fear, and the contraction is experienced as a pull like magnetism or gravity; that is, attachment. That is why we often fear to open our minds to more exalted spiritual beings. We think fear is a signal to withdraw, when in fact it is a sign we are already withdrawing too much.”
(Chapter Eight: Going through changes)“Whatever we have done in withdrawing from full consciousness of the One Mind, we are doing now. Whatever we are doing will always be within us to do, even when we are not doing it, and therefore is not to be resisted, but transcended. These are reminders I frequently use: "That's always within me." "This, too, can be experienced with a completely expanded awareness.”
(Chapter One: Who Are We?)“What does it mean, to be whole? It means that we must be willing to conceive of, to contain within ourselves, whatever is "other than" any limited idea. It means knowing that when we create a positive, we are at the same time creating a negative. When we choose an ideal of knowledge, then we must deal with the ignorance that is "other than" the knowledge. When we emphasize an ideal of holiness, then we must live with the sin that is its companion, and accept our responsibility for having created it. However, if we remain constantly open and unresisting to such negatives, we are not compelled to dwell on them: If we allow that ugliness is always within us, then we are free to create beauty. If we know that stupidity is always within us, then we are free to emphasize this intelligence. Love is the highest and holiest action because it always contains that which is not love within itself, it always and ever moves to include the unloving.
What you cannot think about, you cannot control. What you cannot conceive of in your awareness, you will stumble over in your path. Violent human beings are precisely those who refuse at some time that they could be violent. It also happens that if you are unwilling to conceive of people being the victims of violence, you may become a victim yourself, for you will not be sufficiently aware of how it happens to avoid it. Everything that is manifest begins in the spirit: every evil that is manifest to us is there because we refused to conceive of causing it, or denied someone else the freedom to conceive of it. The way out, as hard as it may be to believe, is not by resisting further, by moving the furniture around, but by being willing to conceive of it - by loving it, in short. As we should have done in the first place. Unfortunately, most people with good intentions are trying to deny or eliminate what is already manifest. And many spiritual revivals are a deeper denial of the facts of our vibration level. What can we do about evil? A great deal, if our heads are clear. My catch-all phrase is: "I wouldn't deny that experience to the One Mind." Once you have cleared your head on the matter, then do whatever feels right to you. Evil occurs as a secondary reality, after you have withdrawn to a low vibration level. The seduction of evil is precisely in that it involves us in trying to get rid of it. "What am I doing on a level of consciousness where this is real?" That is the first question to ask yourself when you become aware of something ugly or evil or stupid.
When you learn to love hell, you will be in heaven.”
(Chapter Two: Look, Ma, I'm Enlightened)“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
- John Milton (1608 – 1674), "Paradise Lost"“What you resist, you draw to yourself. As long as you resist something, you are locked into combating it and merely perpetuate its influence in your life. Resistance is fear, something that you need to karmically resolve. You must let go of the fear by encountering it until you learn to consciously detach from what you view to be negative.”
- Dick Sutphen, "The Oracle Within"“Why believe in God when you can experience God?
Belief is a poor substitute for experience.
If you want to know, don't simply believe.
You can only believe things you don't actually know.”
- Dick Sutphen, "The Oracle Within"“Oh, oh, I just hurt that person by what I said. I must control my behavior better in the future. Whoops, there, I did it again. Hmmm, my behavior seems to come from my thoughts/feelings, so if I control them, then I won't have to worry about controlling my behavior. Uh, oh, there goes a bad thought. I'll replace it with a good one. Whoops, gotta bad feeling. Lessee now, which good one should I replace it with? Hmmm, the problem is that by the time I know I have a bad thought or feeling, it's already happened. How can I control something that I don't even know is coming? Wait a minute, why do I want to control my thoughts/feelings? Isn't the desire for control itself a feeling? Where does it come from? I seem to want control in order to avoid seeing/thinking/feeling certain things. Somehow, these things are threatening to me. In what way do these things threaten me? Somehow, I perceive them as being "alien" and "not me". But how do I know what is "me" and "not me"? Who is deciding this? Perhaps the boundary needs to be examined. Who created the boundary, and who is going to examine it?”
- Gerald Bryan on talk.religion.newage“In a human-potential story you are told to imagine yourself walking down a road by the sea when you come upon a drowning man. Because you don't know how to swim, you can deal with the problem in one of three ways: 1. Sympathy: You jump in the river and drown with him. 2. Empathy: You sit down and moan and cry about him drowning. 3. Compassion: You do something about it. Throw him a rope or run and find someone who knows how to swim.”
- Dick Sutphen, "The Oracle Within"“A warning may not be out of place to those who have a tendency to be argumentative. Those who are easily provoked to argument should recollect that when they rush out eagerly to verbal battle they throw open the doors of their mental fortress, leaving it undefended. At such times any thought-forces which may happen to be in their neighborhood can enter in and possess their mental bodies. While strength is being wasted over points which are often of no importance, the whole tone of their mental bodies is being steadily deteriorated by the influences which are flowing into it. The occult student should exercise great care in permitting himself to enter into arguments. It is a common experience that argument seldom tends to alter the opinion of either side; in most cases it but confirms the opinions already held.”
- Arthur E. Powell, "The Mental Body"“An immense amount of suffering is caused by undisciplined imagination. The failure to control the lower passions (especially sex-desire) is the result of an undisciplined imagination, not of a weak will. Even though strong desire is felt, it is creative thought which brings about action. There is no danger in merely seeing or thinking about the object of desire, but when a man imagines himself as giving way to his desires, and allows the desires to strengthen the image he has made, then his danger begins. It is important to realize that there is no power in objects of desire as such, unless and until we indulge in imaginations which are creative. Once having done this, struggle is certain to ensue. In this struggle we may call upon what we think is our will, and try to escape from the results of our own imaginings by frantic resistance. Few have learned that anxious or frantic resistance inspired by fear are very different from will. The will should rather be employed to control the imagination in the first instance, thus eradicating the cause of our troubles at its source and origin.”
- Arthur E. Powell, "The Mental Body"“Those who of old were good practitioners of Tao did not use it to make people bright, but rather used it to make them simple.”
- Lao Tzu“In the beginners mind there are many possibilities, but in the experts mind there are few..”
Shunryu Suzuki as quoted Azizdjembe@aol.com“Simplicity is the essence of the great, the true, and the beautiful in art.”
- George Sand, French author Mme. Amandine Aurore Lucile Dudevant“Failure: A few errors in judgment repeated every day. Success: A few simple disciplines practiced every day.”
- James Rohn“Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on Simplicity.”
- Plato ("The Republic," Book 3, 400-D)Five centuries before Jesus Christ, Lao Tsu, in the Tao Te Ching offered a prescription for living: “Everyone says my way of life is of a simpleton. Being largely the way of a simpleton is what makes it worthwhile. It is simple. If it were not the way of a simpleton, it would have been worthless long ago. These possessions of a simpleton, being the three I choose and cherish: To be humble, to care, to be fair. When a man is humble, he can grow. When a man cares, he is unafraid. When a man is fair, he has enough for others.” Living a simple life means keeping our priorities in order.
- Mary Manin Morrissey“It's so simple to be wise. Just think of something stupid to say and then don't say it.”
- Sam Levenson“This problem, too, will look simple after it is solved.”
- Charles Franklin Kettering“I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.”
- Laura Ingalls Wilder“Angels know that the care of the soul lies in its simplicity.”
- Kathryn Schein“Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough.”
- Charles Dudley Warner, editor and author (1829 – 1900)“Those who are enlightened "liberate" themselves not from the world but from their own deluded minds, which force metaphysical distinctions upon the world. If it is a cow, it is a cow; if it is a moon shining through the window, it is moonlight.”
- Zen Master Nansen
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929 – 1968) civil-rights leader
“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture of their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land.”
("Unarmed Truth and Unconditional Love," when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1964. Reprinted in Light of Consciousness, Vol. 15 No. 2, Autumn 2003. p 11.)“Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.”
“The means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.”
“Peace and a monoculture are contradictory--mutually exclusive. This is again a very important connection: violence always reduces diversity, while a true appreciation of diversity always draws upon and helps to create nonviolence. Let me quote Martin Luther Kng: "I can never be what I oughta be until you are what you oughta be; and you can never be what you oughta be until I'm what I oughta be." ”
- Michael Nagler, interviewed by David Kupfer. "Nonviolence, Spiritual Growth, and Real Security"; Whole Earth, Fall 2002. p 46.“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it... Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. ... The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.”
(Strength To Love, 1963)“Man must evolve for all human conflict a method, which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”
“We will not resort to violence; we will not degrade ourselves with hatred. We will return good for evil, we will love our enemies...Christ showed us the way and Gandhi in India showed it could work.”
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
“Wars are poor chisels for carving out Peaceful tomorrows.”
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
“Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”
“A riot is the language of the unheard.”
“One who condones evil is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.”
“I have decided to stick with Love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
“Freedom has always been an expensive thing.”
“A right delayed is a right denied.”
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.”
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
“I want to be the white man's brother, not his brother-in-law.”
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must be demanded by the oppressed.”
“In the End, we will remember not the word of our enemies but the silence of our friends.”
“It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.”
“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continous struggle.”
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
“Life's most urgent question is, "What are you doing for others?" ”
“Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.”
“We are not makers of history. We are made by history.”
“We may have come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.”
“Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
“If we do not learn to live together as friends, we will die apart as fools.”
“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”“As you press on with justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapons of love.”
“Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.”
“The nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had. Finally it reaches the opponent and so stirs his conscience that reconciliation becomes a reality.”
“We are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through life. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it understands that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.”
“The question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be.”
“Reconsider your definitions. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to mankind.”
“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.”
“There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of people in that society, who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.”
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
“Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into immortality.”
“All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.”
“The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that make all men human and, therefore, brothers.”
“Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, 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 host of heaven and earth will pause to say, "Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well." ”
“Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace... A soul generated by love.”
Osensei Ueshiba Morihei
“Life is growth. If we stop growing, technically and spiritually, we are as good as dead. The Art of Peace is a celebration of the bonding of heaven, earth, and humankind. It is all that is true, good, and beautiful.”“Mankind's role is to fulfill his heaven-sent purpose through a sincere heart that is in harmony with all creation and loves all things.”
“Create each day anew by clothing yourself with heaven and earth, bathing yourself with wisdom and love, and placing yourself in the Heart of Mother Nature.”
“The Divine is not something high above us. It is in heaven, it is in earth, it is inside us.”
“Always keep your mind as clear as the vast sky, the great ocean, and the highest peak, empty of all thoughts. Always keep your body filled with light and heat. Fill yourself with the power of wisdom and enlightenment.”
“Iron is full of impurities that weaken it: through forging, it becomes steel and is transformed into a razor-sharp sword. Human beings develop in the same fashion..”
“From ancient times, deep learning and valor have been the two pillars of The Path. Through the virtue of training, enlighten both body and soul.”
“Do not fail to learn from the pure voice of an Ever-flowing mountain stream splashing over the rocks.”
“There are many paths leading to the top of Mount Fuji, but there is only one summit - Love.”
In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.
- Brian K. Reid
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