Quotes

I’ve saved over a thousand quotes now,
over the last five years or so. Like i wrote
i keep em organized in categories. But a month or so ago,
i decided, just for fun to go thru all of em, and pick my
favorites and put them in one unorganized lump. So, i first
cut the 1000 down to 500. Then the 500 down to 250. Etc.

This is the last group i ended up with. Fwiw.
(Course as one changes, one’s favorite quotes change…)

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Favorite Random Quotes

“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that
in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
——————–

“It’s a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human
problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than‘try to be a little kinder.’ “ Aldous Huxley

“We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.” ― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“People of our time are losing the power of celebration. Instead of celebrating we seek to be amused or entertained. Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation. To be entertained is a passive state–it is to receive pleasure afforded by an amusing act or a spectacle…. Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one’s actions.” — Abraham Joshua Heschel

“You have come to the shore. There are no directions.” Denise Levertov

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.” ― Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

“The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity. And he is
not insensible who pays them the undemonstrative tribute of a
sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile that is not a grin.” Joseph Conrad

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, or to steal bread.” Anatole France

“..James Baldwin wrote in the ‘Fire Next Time’ that if you cant
suffer you cant really grow up— because there’s no real
change you go through. M.Scott Peck tells us “All change is
a moment of Loss.” And usually at a moment of loss we feel
sorrow, grief, pain even. And if people don’t have the apparatus
by which they can bear that pain, there can only be this attempt
to avoid it– and that’s where the place of so much addiction is
in our life….its in the place or ‘let me not feel it’….”
Bell Hooks

“The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between this profusion of matter and the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.” Les Noyers de l’Altenburg: Andre Malraux

“There are places in the heart that do not yet exist; suffering has to enter in for them to come to be.” Leon Bloy

“And throughout all eternity, I forgive you, and you forgive me…” William Blake

“Know emptiness, be Compassionate.” Milarepa

“There are no others.” Ramana Maharshi

“I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars; none of them seems to me important it itself, but only the whole. The whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that there is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one’s affections outward toward this one God, rather than inwards on one’s self, or on humanity, or on human imaginations and abstractions, the world of the spirits.”- Robinson Jeffers, 1934

“Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers. ” — Rainer Maria Rilke

“Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?” A. Dillard

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness, simply means being able to say, “What are you going through?” Simone Weil

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in our hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.” Henri Nouwen.

“…when we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.” Sogyal Rinpoche

“The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no.” ― Gore Vidal

“…Becker argues that… since man has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, man is able to transcend the dilemma of mortality through heroism, a concept involving his symbolic half. By embarking on what Becker refers to as an “immortality project,” in which he creates or becomes part of something which he feels will last forever, man feels he has become heroic and, henceforth, part of something eternal…”(Wiki – “Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker)

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. ”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti

“In fact, I suspect that our only hope is disaster. Cruel tho’ it is to say it, there has got to be a vast die-off in the human population — likely including us and our families — before the survivors find themselves in a world where a new and humble and ‘religious’ adaptation with nature is possible. Disaster is not necessary; the better world could be achieved through reason and common sense and a sense of fellowship — but most of the present human world is dead set against us…” Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“Love all God’s creation, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love each separate thing. If thou love each thing thou wilt perceive the mystery of God in all; and when once thou perceive this, thou wilt thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until thou come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity, or, it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” ― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“I know not how I may seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with.” ― Plato

“Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.” ― Joseph Conrad

“There is no neutral education. Education is either for domestication or for freedom.” -Joao Coutinho

“…Because the schools serve an economic system rather than a
political or philosophical idea, they promote, not unreasonably
, the habits of mind necessary to the preservation of that system,
which is why an American education resembles the commercial
procedure that changes caterpillers into silkworms instead of
butterflies. Silkworms can be turned to a profit, but butterflies
blow around in the wind and do nothing to add to the wealth
of the corporation or the power of the state. “ L.Lapham

“The river that flows in you also flows in me.” — Kabir

“Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.”
Peter Ustinov

“Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it.” — Henri J.M. Nouwen

“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in the darkness,
ghe Astonishing Light, of your own Being! — Hafiz

“Life is a shipwreck but we must remember to sing in the lifeboats” ― Voltaire

“Alice wonders if other women in the middle of the night have begun to resent their Formica.” — Barbara Kingsolver

“I’d tried to straighten him out, but there’s only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.” — David Sedaris

“Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.”
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

“I hate goddamn fruits and vegetables. And your omega 3’s, and the treadmill, and the cardiogram, and the mammogram, and the pelvic sonogram, and oh my god the colonoscopy, and with it all, the day still comes where they put you in a box, and its on to the next generation of idiots, who’ll also tell you all about life and define for you what’s appropriate. My father committed suicide because the morning newspapers depressed him. And could you blame him? With the horror, and corruption, and ignorance, and poverty, and genocide, and AIDS, and global warming, and terrorism, and-and the family value morons, and the gun morons. “The horror,” Kurtz said at the end of Heart of Darkness, “the horror.” Lucky Kurtz didn’t have the Times delivered in the jungle. Ugh… then he’d see some horror. But what do you do? You read about some massacre in Darfur or some school bus gets blown up, and you go “Oh my God, the horror,” and then you turn the page and finish your eggs from the free range chickens. Because what can you do. It’s overwhelming!” — Woody Allen

“God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, ‘Ah!” ― Joseph Campbell

“We’re in a freefall into future. We don’t know where we’re going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It’s a very interesting shift of perspective and that’s all it is… joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes. — Joseph Campbell

“The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.” ― C.G. Jung

Shambhala: “Spiritual awareness isnt feelings?” Ken Wilber: “No, it is not feelings, it is the awareness of feelings. And that awareness itself is free of feelings and free of thoughts, and allows both feelings and thoughts to float by, just as clouds float by in the emptiness of the sky. But if you confuse experiential feelings with that emptiness, then you will confuse emotionalism and sentimentalism with spirit, and this is often the first step on a regressive slide into the unending world of your own subjective fascination. You don’t transcend the self, you simply feel the self intensely, and this is called “spiritual.” This is a bit of a mess, really….”

Pre-Trans Fallacy – Ken Wilber — Excerpt from “One Taste” p.103
“… “The Pre/Trans Fallacy”…is a simple concept. It says that because both pre-rational and trans-rational are non-rational, they are easily confused. And then one of two very unfortunate things happens: either mature, spiritual, trans-rational states get reduced to infantile, pre-rational states; or, infantile, narcissistic, pre-rational states get elevated to trans-rational glory. Reductionism and elevationism. Freud was a typical reductionist, who tried to reduce profound nondual mystical states to primary narcissism and infantile oceanic fusion: The Future Of An Illusion. And Jung was a typical elevationist, who took pre-rational myth, and elevated it to transcendental greatness….
….It used to be that the real threats to genuine spiritual studies were the reductionists, but an even greater threat has surfaced from the new-age movement, namely, the elevationists. These folks, with many good and decent intentions, nonetheless take some rather infantile, childish, egocentric states and simply because they are ‘nonrational’ re-label them ‘sacred’ or ‘spiritual’ which is definitely a problem….
…Alas, it seems to me, much of the ‘spiritual renaissance’ supposedly sweeping this country is really a case of pre-rational regression, not trans-rational growth…
…this entire package of ‘spirit’ is being sold by publishers and book clubs at an astonishing rate…. “

“Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” E.Debbs

“Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.” Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah

“I had once believed that we were all masters of our fate–that we could mold our lives into any form we pleased… I had overcome deafness and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life’s struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance on a subject I knew little about… I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone.” — Helen Keller

“In practice legal mythology is primarily directed at obscuring
the bitter struggle between the classes and at articulating in
consciousness the view that law is unaligned with any interests…
…law can be characterized in its modern period, by the
conscious camouflaging of interests…expressing in human
relationships on one hand, while hiding its relation to
economics institutions on the other…legal theorists believe
‘will’, rather than material conditions to be the basis of law. …
the state is the political form through which the ruling class
controls and mediates class antagonisms…..law is fundamentally
class law…..
“The law is therefore a regulation of equality among unequals.
For those who believe the official slogans of the ruling class
— that we are a government of laws and not men,
and that our system guarantees equal protection —
Anatole France once answered by describing how
“the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well
as the poor from sleeping under the bridge.” …the law is an
expression of political ideology and propaganda as well as
an instrument of oppression….”
M.E. Tigar (radical lawyers)

“When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you
don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not
doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or
less sun. You never blame the lettuce…” — Thich Nhat Hanh

“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.” ― Thomas More Utopia

“Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“…Buddhist teacher Daisaku Ikeda told me there are three types
of love: dependent, independent and contributive….dependent
love is controlling, manipulative…independent is characterized by
mutual respect and a strong sense of individuality…the happiest and
least common type of love relationship is contributive — an
independent relationship in which the partners ALSO share a sense
of mission in life…” T.Gold

“If falling in love is not love, then what is it other than a temporary
and partial collapse of ego boundaries? I do not know. But the
sexual specificity of the phenomenon leads me to suspect
that it is a genetically determined instinctual component of
mating behavior. In other words, the temporary collapse of ego
boundaries that constitute falling in love is a sterotypic response
of human beings to a configuration of internal sexual drives and
external sexual stimuli which serves to increase the probability
of sexual pairing and bonding so as to enhance the survival of
the species. Scott Peck.

“…I heard a fable once about the sun going on a journey
to find its source, and how the moon wept
without her lover’s warm gaze.” Meister Eckhart

“Where love rules, there is no will to power and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. – Carl G. Jung

“There is a way of loving
not attached to what is loved…
All love without an object,
is true love…” Rumi

“To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the Earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim — the rocks — the motion of the waves —
the ships with men in them.
What stranger miracles are there?” Walt Whitman

“Mysticism means nothing, absolutely nothing,
to the man who has no experience of it.” H.Bergson

“…. all blades of grass, wood, and stone, all things are One. “ – Meister Eckhart

“The overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual
and the Absolute Is the great mystic achievement. In mystic
states we both become one with the Absolute and we become
aware of our Oneness. …we feel them as reconciling, unifying
states. They appeal to the yes-funcion more than the no-function
in us. In them the unlimited absorbs the limits and peacefully
closes the account. … W.James

“All things in this creation exist within you, and all things
in you exist in creation; there is no border between you and
the closest things, and there is no distance between you
and the farthest things, and all things, from the lowest
to the loftiest, from the smallest to the greatest, are
within you as equal things. In one atom are found
all the elements of the earth; in one motion of
the mind are found the motions of all the laws of existence;
in one drop of water are found the secrets of all the
endless oceans; in one aspect of you
are found all the aspects of existence.” – Kahlil Gibran

“The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the
miraculous in the common.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.” – William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, 1863

“Mystical experience….is a direct intuition of ultimate reality.”
Aldous Huxley

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient allover the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.” ― Howard Zinn

“The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. But perhaps it is because the red man is a savage and does not understand. There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities, no place to hear the leaves of spring or the rustle of insects’ wings. Perhaps it is because I am a savage and do not understand, but the clatter only seems to insult the ears.The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of the pond, the smell of the wind itself cleansed by a midday rain, or scented with pinon pine. The air is precious to the red man, for all things share the same breath – the animals, the trees, the man.Like a man who has been dying for many days, a man in your city is numb to the stench.” Chief Seattle – Suqwamish & Duwamish

“Who can say what heartbreaks are caused in a dog by our discontinuing a romp?” ― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“The earth laughs in flowers.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“ We need a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of wolves. Man surveys the wolf through the glass of his knowledge, and sees a feather magnified, and the whole image is distorted. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therin we err. For no animal shall be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. Henry Beston, The Outermost House

“Butterflies are self propelled flowers. ~R.H. Heinlein

”The butterfly is a flying flower, The flower a tethered butterfly.
~Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun

”There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be
a butterfly. ~Richard Buckminster Fuller

“…Then came the embrace. There are ways to embrace a woman that are
standard and there are ways that are perfect. This was the latter. If
you are tall as I am, you begin to notice that men about your height
always try to arrange for the first embrace-kiss sequence to take place
while you are seated, so that they can subtly slide you down and deliver
the coup de grace of the embrace, the declaratory kiss, from above
with your head bent back and your throat exposed so you’re like an
animal signaling submission to a larger member of the species. The
nice thing with Nelson was that no kiss followed. The embrace was
not just the scaffolding for the great declaratory kiss. The best standing-up embrace
is like that one, slightly off-center so
that you have his leg and not his actual temeraire up against you,
one hand on the base of your spine, and you are brought in
against him but not smashingly. His cheek is at your ear, but not
occluding your actual ear canal. His breath is in your hair. Then
you want to feel him sinking against you, slightly, suggesting relief,
repose: the embrace from something, not simply stage one in a
campaign of possession…” N.Rush, in the novel “Mating”

“The sage must distinguish between knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge is of things, acts and relations….To become One with god is the only wisdom.” Upanishads

“Every creature is a word of God.” Miester Ekhart (1260-1328)
“In the East, disentangling oneself from the world and realizing the One is equated with wisdom. Subsequently descending and returning to embrace the Many is equated with compassion, and the integration of ascent and descent is “the union of wisdom and compassion”. From this nondual perspective, the world and the flesh are not evil or degraded. However, becoming entranced by them, that is, becoming entrapped in maya, illusion–what psychologist Charles Tart calls the consensus trance–and thereby losing awareness of the transcendental domains and our unity with them is disastrous. Once lost, the challenge is to regain this awareness through a discipline of “recollection” that opens “the eye of the soul” (Plato), “the eye of the heart” (Sufism) or “the eye of Tao” (Taoism). The goal is an illusion-shattering wisdom that recognizes our true transcendental nature and is variously known as Hinduism’s jnana, Buddhism’s prajna, Islam’s marifah and sometimes as Christian gnosis…” Roger Walsh
“Don’t make a self. There’s nothing more to say.” Ajahn Chah
“All there is, is Consciousness. And the mind is merely a reflection of that Consciousness.” Ramesh S. Balsekar

“The Buddha taught some people the teachings of Duality
that help them avoid sin and acquire spiritual merit.
To others he taught non-duality,
that some find profoundly frightening.” Nagarjuna

“The stream of human knowledge is impartially heading towards a non-mechanical reality. The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter. We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of this realm. “ Sir James Jeans

“..In other words, ‘in this model,’ consciousness is a function of the
subquantal implicate order of Bohm, functioning Non-Locally.
Consciousness, ‘in this model’ is not ‘in’ our heads. Our brains are
merely local recievers; consciousness is ‘an aspect of the non-local-field.
The ‘ego’ then is a LOCALLY TUNED IN aspect of this usually NOT tuned-in
Non-Local-Field. This sounds like Schrodinger’s notion that if you add up
all the ‘minds’ around, the total you will arrive at is one.
If this model has any value — if it is sensible to talk of ‘consciousness’ as
non-local ‘software’ rather than local ‘hardware’ — then it is
permissible to ask to what extent a local reciever, or ‘ego,’ can tune
in or influence the non-local-field…” Robert Anton Wilson

“Buddhism stands unique in the history of human thought in denying the existence of a Soul, Self or Atman. According to the teachings of the Buddha, the idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine’, selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities and problems. It is the source of all troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world. —What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula

“A human being is part of the whole called by us universe … We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of 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 the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive. (Albert Einstein

“All things come out of the One, and the One out of all things.” Heraclitus 500 B.C.

“Reality cannot be found except in One single source, because of the interconnection of all things with one another. (Leibniz, 1670

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” ― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“To wound the heart is to create it.” Antonio Porchia

“The heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking
it is necessary to go through
dark and deeper dark
and not to turn ” ― Stanley Kunitz, The Testing Tree

“In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.” – Octavia Butler

“Difficulties are considered of such great value that a Tibetan prayer recited before each step of practice actually asks for them: “Grant that I be given appropriate difficulties and sufferings on this journey so that my heart may be truly awakened and my practice of liberation and universal compassion be truly fulfilled.”
J.Kornfield

“Letting go is the central theme in spiritual practice, as we see the preciousness and brevity of life. When letting go is called for, if we have not learned to do so, we suffer greatly….letting go and moving through life from one change to another brings the maturing of our spiritual being. In the End, we learn that to Love and Let Go can be the same thing. Both ways do not seek to possess. Both allow us to touch each moment of this changing life and allow us to be there fully for whatever arises next… “ J.Kornfield

“Our present economic, social, and international agreements are based, in large measure, upon organized lovelessness.” Aldous Huxley

“For the poor, the economic is spiritual.” Gandhi

“The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.” Theodor Adorno (1903-1969
“Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation to man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations: as long as you have not shown it to be “uneconomic” you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.” ― E.F. Schumacher

“The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.” Karl Marx

“The cannon thunders…limbs fly in all directions…one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice…it’s Humanity in search of happiness” ― Charles Baudelaire

“My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.” Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United State

“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ” ― Paulo Freire

“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” ― Denis Diderot

“The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago… had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.” ~Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life

“A hierarchal society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. The war is waged by the ruling group against its subjects, and its object is not victory, but to keep the very structure of society in tact.” -George Orwell

“The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. That is why, as one historian aptly has said, far from the heroic and romantic heraldry that customarily is used to symbolize the European settlement of the Americas, the emblem most congruent with reality would be a pyramid of skulls.” — David E. Stannard (American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World

“That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.” — Noam Chomsky

“Everyone’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s really an easy way: Stop participating in it.” — Noam Chomsky

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.” Noam Chomsky

“It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.” — Albert Camus

“Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate.” Bertrand Russell

“In democratic countries, the most important private organizations are economic. Unlike secret societies, they are able to exercize their terrorism without illegality, since they do not threaten to kill their enemies, but only to starve them.” Bertrand Russell

Marine Colonel, Smedley Butler (1933) — “War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses……I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist” Camara,Helder

“I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world.” ~Eugene V. Debs

Louis Brandeis: “We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.” ― Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition

“Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever. ” ― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

“On Prozac, Sisyphus might well push the boulder back up the mountain with more enthusiasm and creativity. I do not want to deny the benefits of psychoactive medication. I just want to point out that Sisyphus is not a patient with a mental health problem. To see him as a patient with a mental health problem is to ignore certain larger aspects of his predicament connected to boulders, mountains, and eternity.” ― Carl Elliott

“…Intimacy is telling your partner the main thing on your mind and feeling that he or she understands… On any given day people have certain feelings that they feel ashamed of ie, that they judge themselves to be weak, bad, crazy, immature, unmanly, or unfeminine for having. They react to such judgment by…doing the following: 1) Lose the ability to get these feelings across 2) Generate Symptoms [lash out for example] 3) snap into alienated states 4) experience decrease in intimacy 5) lose the capacity to think 6) become self-blaming. Mental life to a large extent is a struggle for self-justification. …the mind is a self-justifying organ…
….in response to self-blaming people do two further things 7) engage in self-justification 8) blame their partners…. Mental life is to an important extent an ongoing effort at self-justification to deal with self-blame….what do people do when they are harangued by their harsh internal voice….they run for cover…take warm bath…go to a movie, watch television, go shopping, run around the block, clean the closets, …anything to distract themselves and drown out their internal taskmaster’s voice “ Dan Wile

“I have been an outspoken critic of some New Age Spirituality.
I don’t like sloppy thinking, a refusal to ask questions, or an easy acceptance of things we cannot know to be true because we find them comforting or far more entertaining than our everyday busy lives, and I have seen too much of all this in some New Age philosophies and groups. I think its dangerous.
Of course there is some truth in all of these judgments, and I will continue to raise questions about the claims made by all spiritual paths because I am interested in learning the truth as far as we can know it. But there are ways to raise questions that open inquiry – that make it ‘our’ inquiry – and other ways to pose questions that close down communication. And there are ways intended to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ ways that aim to make me feel right – more authentic, grounded, intelligent – by making the other wrong…” Oriah (the Dance)

“The perennial philosophy holds that the world’s great spiritual traditions, in spite
of their obvious differences, express the same fundamental truth about the nature
of reality, a truth that can be directly apprehended during mystical experience. Implicit
in the perennial philosophy is the notion that mystical perceptions transcend time, place
culture, and individual identity. Just as a farmer in first century China and a web sitedesigner in twenty-first century New York see the same moon when the look skyward,so will they glimpse the same truth in the depths of a mystical vision. J. Horgan

“Huston Smith likened religions to “a stained glass window whose sections divide the light of the world into different colors.” J Horgan

“Nondual Awareness does not make your problems vanish, Wilber said, so much as it distances you from them. Emotions pass through your awareness “like clouds in the sky” he said, pointing to the roof of our glassed-in chamber. “You have a sense of skyness and not a sense of contracting on everything that comes along.”
Enlightenment can also help you come to terms with your mortality. “To the extent’
that you stay relaxed in this open state, death doesn’t have this overpowering terror.”
But nondual awareness does not resolve the mystery of death, at least not in Wilber’s case. “There is a great Zen koan where a zen master was asked what happens when we die. The zen master says “I don’t know.” And the student says “But you’re a zen master.” And he says, “Yes, but not a dead one.”
Rational Mysticism. J.Horgan.

“…In Psychedlic Drugs Reconsidered, Lester Grinspoon suggested the
chief benefit of psychedelics is “enriching the wonder of normality”
— that is, enhancing our appreciation of ordinary consciousness
and ordinary life. …but psychedelics can have the opposite effect
This world may seem drab in comparison to the bizarre virtual realms
into which LSD or DMT propel us. Instead of opening our eyes to the
miraculousness of everyday reality, psychedelics can blind us. …
…to be enlightened Ken Wilber once wrote, “is to snap out of the
movie of life”. This is perhaps the greatest danger of mysticism,
that you will be left with a permanent case of dereallization and
depersonalization. If you are lucky your glimpse of the abyss will make this life seem more real, not less. J Horgan (Rational Mysticism

“You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?” ― Mark Twain

“If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.” — Charles Simic

“The wedding of Christianity or Judaism with nationalism is lethal.” — Arthur Miller

“If triangles had a God, he would have three sides.
Baron de Montesquieu

“Christianity began to die in the moment when theologians began to
treat the divine story as history — when they mistook the story of God,
of the Creation, and the Fall for a record of facts in the historical past.
For the past goes ever back and back into nothing; it never leads to its
Creator, to its explanation — at least not in the backward direction. For
the past is the creation, the empty echo of the Now. Time does not
flow forward from a Creator who ‘made’ the world; if flows backwards
, like the tail of a comet, from a Creator who ‘makes’ the world and whom
no-one can remember.” Alan Watts

“The World is divided into armed camps ready to commit genocide just because we can’t agree on whose fairy tales to believe. In the end, Religion will kill us all.” — Ed Krebs

“It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.” — John Steinbeck (East of Eden

“Can one be a saint if God does not exist?
That is the only concrete problem I know of today. A.Camus 1913-1960

“Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies. “
Voltaire on his deathbed in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan

“ …what hurts you blesses you.
Darkness is your candle…
Rumi

“Become a moth: enter the flame! – Rumi

“…Galway Kinnell said that the core of soul art is a ‘tenderness toward existence.’
Coleman Barks

“… there are two major streamings in consciousness, particularly in the ecstatic life, and in Rumi’s poetry: call them Fana and Baqa, Arabic words that refer to the play and intersection of human with divine. Rumi’s poetry occurs in that opening, a dervish doorway these energies move through in either direction. A movement out, a movement in. Fana is the streaming that moves from the human out into mystery– the annihilation, the orgasmic expansion, the dissolving swoon into the all…. wild and
boundaryless absorptions….”What was in that candle’s light that opened and consumed me so quickly!”. That is the moth’s question after Fana, after it becomes flame. There is an extravagance in the magnificent disintegration of Fana… Three hundred billion galaxies might seem a bit gaudy to some, but not to this awareness….Fana is what opens our wings… Its human-becoming-God. …this is the ocean with no shore into which the dewdrop falls…
Baqa goes the other way across the doorsill. The Arabic word means a ‘living within’: it is the walk back down the mountain, where the vision came, life lived with clarity and reason… The concentration of a night of stars into one needle’s eye. …The absorbing work of ‘this’ day…. God-becoming-human. …compassion and work within a community…Baqa is also a return from expansion into each’s unique individuation work, into pain and effort, confusion and dark comedy….the deep knowing of absence. Baqa is where animal and angel meet in an awkward but truly human dance. It’s a breathtaking birth, the dying and then being born again that all religions know isthe essence of soul growth… Bodhisattval service… Baqa brings the next stage in the process of prayer: there’s the opening into annihilation, then the coming back to tend specific
people. A melody, the little band coming up through Beethoven’s Ninth. This is the ocean coming to court the drop! …
By letting these two conditions, Fana and Baqa , flow and exist simultaneously in his poetry, Rumi is saying that they are one thing, the core of a
true human being… The Soul of Rumi, by Coleman Barks

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that 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. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”Always remember: the journey is all. The destination is beside the point”. Albert Einstein

“The tendency of modern physics is to resolve the whole material universe into waves, and nothing but waves. These waves are of two kinds: bottled-up waves, which we call matter, and unbottled waves, which we call radiation or light. If annihilation of matter occurs, the process is merely that of unbottling imprisoned wave-energy and setting it free to travel through space. These concepts reduce the whole universe to a world of light, potential or existent, so that the whole story of its creation can be told with perfect accuracy and completeness in the six words: ‘God said, Let there be light’.
— Sir James Jeans The Mysterious Universe (1930), 37-8.

“Something unknown is doing we don’t know what—that is what our theory amounts to.[Expressing the quantum theory description of an electron has no familiar conception of a real form.] Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington The Nature Of The Physical World (1928)

“There aren’t just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It’s our evolutionary history. James Lovelock

“Everything you’ve learned in school as ‘obvious’ becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.” Buckminster Fuller

“I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process, an integral function of the universe.” B. Fuller

“…The statement that we are all “star stuff,” coined by the late astronomer Carl Sagan (not sure if this was before or after Joni Mitchell sang “we are stardust; we are golden. we are billion year old carbon”), is meant to imply more than that we are made of the same elements that stars are made of. Beyond that, the elements themselves (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.) were synthesized, cooked up as it were, in the nuclear furnaces that are the deep interior of stars. These elements are then released at the end of a star’s lifetime when it explodes, and subsequently incorporated into a new generation of stars — and into the planets that form around the stars, and the lifeforms that originate on the planets. M. Loewenstein

“All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” ― Max Planck

“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” ― Werner Heisenberg

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
― Werner Heisenberg Across the Frontiers

“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” ― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time

“The reduction of the universe to the compass of a single being,
and the extension of a single being until it reaches God – that is love. .” — Victor Hugo

“There is a saying that ‘the psychotic drowns in the waters that the mystic swims in.’ The health and structural integrity of the ego means the difference between spiritual emergence, the unfolding of a transpersonal identity; and a spiritual emergency a crisis brought on by the same unfolding, during which the foundations of sanity can be shaken.” — Jason Kirkey (The Salmon in the Spring: The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality

“All love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore love for love’s sake, because it is law of life, just as you breathe to live. — Swami Vivekananda

“There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.” — Adrienne Rich

“Why is it that only girls stand on the sides of their feet? As if they’re afraid
to plant themselves?” Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams, 1990

“I asked a Burmese why women, after centuries of following their men, now walk
ahead. He said there were many unexploded land mines since the war.” Robert Mueller
“We were together. I forget the rest.” — Walt Whitman

“Do anything, but let it produce joy.” — Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)

“These are the days that must happen to you.” — Walt Whitman

“A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.” Walt Whitman
“And your very flesh shall be a great poem.” — Walt Whitman