September 9, 2012 If you want to be happy, be – Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian moral thinker, novelist and philosopher Don’t seek God in temples. He is close to you. He is within you. Only you should surrender to Him and you will rise above happiness and unhappiness – Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself – If it is true that there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts – It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness – All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love – The only thing that we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom – It is not beauty that endears, it’s love that makes us see beauty – Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold – The vocation of every man and woman is to serve other people – The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity – In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you – If one loves, one loves the whole person as he or she is, and not as one might wish them to be – Man discovers truth by reason only, not by faith – Boredom: the desire for desires – I have discovered nothing new, I have only perceived what I already new – Joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness – Happiness does not depend on outward things, but on the way we see them – Moral perfection is beyond reach but this is the law of human life – The means to gain happiness is to throw out from oneself like a spider in all directions an adhesive web of love, and to catch in it all that comes – I sit on a man’s back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means – except by getting off his back – The educated minority, although no longer believing in the existing religious teaching, still pretend to believe – What an immense mass of evil must result…from allowing men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen – To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business – All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way – We have become so accustomed to the religious lie that surrounds us that we do not notice the atrocity, stupidity and cruelty with which the teaching of the Christian church is permeated – Before we can study the central issues of life today, we must destroy the prejudices and fallacies born of previous centuries – Why must children die? I have reached the conclusion that the only purpose in the life of every man is to strengthen love within himself, and by strengthening it with himself, to infect other people with it – If there existed no external means for dimming their consciences, one-half of the mean would at once shoot themselves, because to live contrary to one’s reason is a most intolerable state, and all men of our time are in such a state – If you are content with the old world, try to preserve it, it is very sick and cannot hold out much longer. But if you cannot bear to live in everlasting dissonance between your beliefs and your life, thinking one thing and doing another, get out of – Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal –that there is no human relation between master and slave – I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders – It is true, I deny the incomprehensible Trinity, and the fable regarding the fall of man, which is absurd in our day. It is true, I deny the sacrilegious story of a God born of a virgin to redeem the race – Man has received direct from God only one instrument wherewith to know himself and to know his relation to the universe –he has no other –and that instrument is reason – Without knowing why I am and why I am here, life is impossible – Pleasure in wealth is a fickle joy – The only significance of life consists in helping to establish the kingdom of God; and this can be done only by means of the acknowledgement and profession of the truth by each one of us – Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity – There was no answer except the usual answer life gives to the most complicated and insoluble questions. This answer is: carry on with your everyday affairs, that is to say, put it out of your mind – I have learned that every man lives not through care of himself, but by love – Genius…arises in the natural, aboriginal concern for the conscious unity of all phenomena – Mary Austin (b. 1828) When a woman ceases to alter the fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of her experience – Surely there comes a time when counting the costs and paying the price aren’t things to think about any more. All that matters is value –the ultimate value of what one does – James Hilton (1900-1954), English novelist If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears – No one ever kills himself for the love of a woman, but because love –any love –reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness – Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic – Cesar Pavese (1908-1950), Italian poet, critic, novelist and translator The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies – Suffering is by no means a privilege, a sign of nobility, a reminder of God. Suffering is a fierce, bestial thing, commonplace, uncalled for, natural as air. It is intangible; no one can grasp it or fight against; it dwells in time /is the same thing as time; if it comes in fits and starts, that is only so as to leave the sufferer more defenseless during the moments that follow, those long moments when one relives the last bout of torture and waits for the next – The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped – Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world – Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first tow totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances – Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest/thought, action/is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then is to come to grips with reality – When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of...- All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition – Love is the cheapest of religions – If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be – It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and is it not true, that, as children, we were imaginative? – Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity – Paul Goodman (1911-1972), American poet The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with you own reaction-formation – The organization of American society is an interlocking system of semi-monopolies notoriously venal, an electorate notoriously unenlightened, misled by a mass media notoriously phony – Few great men could pass personal – Americans are experts at winning, but still amateurs at losing – Edward Walsh (b. 1925) Tolkien went through it himself (as an infantryman) in World War I. But it just got worse in his lifetime,…I think he was very preoccupied with the nature of evil, the nature of technology, the way in which things could be abused, the way good intentions are subverted. That’s what it’s all about – My colleagues in the literary department say it’s all very escapist stuff. I think, “No, no, no.” It’s actually all about what happened in the 20th century. The 20th century as basically been industrialized warfare – Tom Shippey (b. 1943) I believe that this nation can only heal from the wounds of racism if we all begin to love blackness. And by that I don’t mean that we love only that which is best within us, but that we’re also able to love that which is faltering, which is wounded, which is contradiction, incomplete – Secrets find a way out in sleep…It is the place where there is no pretense – For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed – It is in the act of having to do things that you don’t want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego – Bell Hooks (b. 1952) When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us – Death is with you; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it’s not unfamiliar to you. It’s always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life –
Posted on: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 14:32:10 +0000
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