Quote post
"Come to the edge."
"We can't. We're afraid."
"Come to the edge."
"We can't. We will fall!"
"Come to the edge."
And they came.
And he pushed them,
And they flew.
-- Guillaume Apollinaire, 1880-1918
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.- Kahlil Gibran
Words are the vibrations of nature
Therefore beautiful words create beautiful nature
Ugly words create ugly nature
This is the root of the universe. - Masaru Emoto
They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. --Edgar Allan Poe
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death." Winter, 1931-1932 from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume One 1931-1934
If you're going through hell, keep going.
--Sir Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)
In the Midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.
--Deepak Chopra
"The cure for loneliness is solitude." --Marianne Moore
The most profound relationship we'll ever have is the one with ourselves. --Shirley MacLaine
Fond as we are of our loved ones, there comes at times during their absense an unexplained peace. --Anne Shaw
To love one's self is the beginning of a life-long romance. Oscar Wilde
"First seek your own path and only then look for a companion to share the journey."
Stephen C. Paul
Don't aspire to become irreplaceable.
If you can't be replaced you can't be promoted.
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us most.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented, and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that
other people won't feel insecure around you.
As we let our light shine, we unconciously give
other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
Our presence automatically liberates others."
Nelson Mandela, 1994
People take different roads seeking fulfillment and happiness. Just because they're not on your road doesn't mean they've gotten lost. ~H. Jackson Browne
Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.
Albert Einstein
Death isn't the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies
inside of us while we live.
-Norman Cousins
The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings.
-Henri Frederic Amiel
That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.
Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of
opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of
increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.
-Harry S. Truman
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
The essence of living is discovering. Indeed, it is the joy of discovering that makes life worth the effort.
Whoever destroys a single life is as guilty as though he had destroyed the entire world; and whoever rescues a single life earns as much merit as though he had rescued the entire world.
Fall seven times, stand up eight.
The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.
You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.
Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains or slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me; give me liberty or give me death!
All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.
A great philosophy is not one that passes final judgments and establishes ultimate truth. It is one that causes uneasiness and starts commotion.
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.
I'll gladly pay the costs of bad choices in return for the ability to make choices.
"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
"In great attempts it is glorious even to fail."
"You do not destroy an idea by killing people; you replace it with a better one.
"It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!"
-Emiliano Zapata
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow brave by reflection. 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death."
-Thomas Paine, The Crisis, 1776
Today enormous effort goes into convincing the American public that we're just consumers of media manipulation and sound-bites and spin doctors. That we care only about ourselves, money, and "stuff". That acting out of passion and conviction "doesn't make a difference". But all history shows that it does.
-Bernadine Dorn
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. That makes it hard to plan the day.
-E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White
"It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens."
-Baha'u'llah
Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours, because it is rich with the blood of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch. Our departed braves, fond mothers, glad, happy hearted maidens, and even the little children who lived here and rejoiced here for a brief season, will love these somber solitudes and at eventide they greet shadowy returning spirits. And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land.
-Chief Seattle, [text of Chief Seattle's Treaty Oration] (1854), "Originally published in the Seattle Sunday Star", October 29, 1887
Since when do you have to agree with people to defend them from injustice?
-Lillian Hellman, (attributed)
"courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the knowledge that something is more important then fear. the brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all." - Princess Diaries
"When you're a kid, they tell you it's all... grow up. Get a job. Get married. Get a house. Have a kid, and that's it. But the truth is, the world is so much stranger than that. It's so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better."
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar