Quotes

[Shaker]

"Equating faith with the granting of your desires makes it a tool of the ego and reduces God to a servant with super powers, a genie with a lamp." Dean Sluyter: The Zen Commandments

[Shaker]

"Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of ‘God’ to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers in God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher, purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is now nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines. Critics persist in describing as ‘deeply religious’ anyone who admits to a sense of man’s insignificance or impotence in the face of the universe, although what constitutes the essence of the religious attitude is not this feeling but only the next step after it, the reaction to it which seeks a remedy for it. The man who goes no further, but humbly acquiesces in the small part which human beings play in the great world - such a man is, on the contrary, irreligious in the truest sense of the word." - Sigmund Freud: The Future of an Illusion, VI.

[Nearly Sane]

I agree with most of that quote from Freud, though I think the first word is suspect.

[Udayana]

"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."

BERTRAND RUSSELL, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism


http://www.notable-quotes.com/r/russell_bertrand.html

[Shaker]

Hardly the point of philosophy, but certainly the result, sometimes

[Rhiannon]

Always one of my favourites, from Eliot.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

[Bubbles]

You've gotta dance like there's nobody watching,
Love like you'll never be hurt,
Sing like there's nobody listening,
And live like it's heaven on earth.”
― William W. Purkey

[Bubbles]

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

[Bubbles]

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
― Rob Siltanen

[Bubbles]

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
― Albert Einstein

[Bubbles]

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
― Anonymous


Just a few I like 🌹

[Aruntraveller]

There are some great quotes that open novels - a few of my favourites here:

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way."

Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking."

Christopher Isherwood - Goodbye to Berlin (1939)


"It was the day my grandmother exploded."
 
Iain Banks - The Crow Road (1992)

[Shaker]

Reading Jane Kenyon just now I came across a thought-provoking poem, one of my favourites:

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

[Shaker]

A conversation earlier reminded me of this. There is relatively little poetry which can be considered to be avowedly non- (or even anti-) religious which espouses an explicitly secular, humanistic world-view and even less of it of quality, but one of the front runners for me is the poem Minnermus in Church by William Johnson Cory (1823-1892) which I first discovered more years ago than I care to remember, as lovely a meditation on the transience but for that reason fragile beauty of this life in this world as I know:

You promise heavens free from strife,
Pure truth, and perfect change of will;
But sweet, sweet is this human life,
So sweet, I fain would breathe it still;
Your chilly stars I can forgo,
This warm kind world is all I know.

You say there is no substance here,
One great reality above:
Back from that void I shrink in fear,
And child-like hide myself in love:
Show me what angels feel. Till then
I cling, a mere weak man, to men.

You bid me lift my mean desires
From faltering lips and fitful veins
To sexless souls, ideal quires,
Unwearied voices, wordless strains:
My mind with fonder welcome owns
One dear dead friend's remember'd tones.

Forsooth the present we must give
To that which cannot pass away;
All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But O, the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die.

[Shaker]

... and while I'm about it, since I might as well give this as a gift to those who may not have encountered it before, though considered a minor, occasional Victorian poet, Cory is best known, as far as he's known at all (which nowadays is not much at all) for eight of the loveliest, saddest lines in English poetry. Think on absent friends:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

[Gonnagle]

Dear Shaker,

You promise heavens free from strife,
Pure truth, and perfect change of will;
But sweet, sweet is this human life,
So sweet, I fain would breathe it still;
Your chilly stars I can forgo,
This warm kind world is all I know.

You say there is no substance here,
One great reality above:
Back from that void I shrink in fear,
And child-like hide myself in love:
Show me what angels feel. Till then
I cling, a mere weak man, to men.

You bid me lift my mean desires
From faltering lips and fitful veins
To sexless souls, ideal quires,
Unwearied voices, wordless strains:
My mind with fonder welcome owns
One dear dead friend's remember'd tones.

Forsooth the present we must give
To that which cannot pass away;
All beauteous things for which we live
By laws of time and space decay.
But O, the very reason why
I clasp them, is because they die.

Once again in the words of Para Handy "sublime, chust Sublime" you are Dear Shaker one of the most religious members on this forum.

Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

Not for you Shaker, the accusation of Auditor, you can stand beside old Nearly and Sir Terry as Cheerful atheists, or more simply, just plain old atheists, a badge I think to be worn with pride.

Gonnagle.

[Aruntraveller]

And by way of linking to my last post here - this is a wonderful, exuberant opening to a novel as well as a playful homage to Dickens:

It was the best of crimes, it was the worst of crime; it was born of love, it was spawned by greed; it was completely unplanned, it was coldly premeditated; it was an open-and-shut case, it was a locked-room mystery; it was the act of a guile-less girl, it was the work of a scheming scoundrel; it was the end of an era, it was the start of an era; a man with the face of a laughing boy reigned in Washington, a man with the features of a lugubrious hound ruled in Westminster; an ex-marine got a job at a Dallas book repository, an ex-Minister of War lost a job in politics; a group known as the Beatles made their first million, a group known as the Great Train Robbers made their first two million; it was the time when those who had fought to save the world began to surrender it to those they had fought to save it for; Dixon of Dock Green was giving way to Z-Cars, Bond to Smiley, the Monsignors to the Maharishis, Matt Dillon to Bob Dylan, l.s.d. to LSD, as the sunset glow of the old Golden Age imploded into the psychedelic dawn of the new Age of Glitz. It was the Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and sixty three.”

Reginald Hill - Recalled to Life

[Shaker]

As a devotee of all things Japanese I'm currently reading Hojoki by Kamo no Chomei (c. 1155-1216). Chomei became a reclusive Buddhist monk, living the life of a hermit in a ten foot square hut in the middle of nowhere. Hojoki is a very Buddhistic record of his thoughts of the impermanence of all things and the transience of life; the opening section (translated by Meredith McKinney) struck me as intensely beautiful, worth quoting for its sheer poetry, expressing the very Japanese concept of mono no aware or the calmly melancholy emotion felt by apprehending the frailty, fragility and fleetingness of the world and all in it - ourselves included:

On flows the river ceaselessly, nor does its water ever stay the same. The bubbles that float upon its pools now disappear, now form anew, but never endure long. And so it is with people in this world, and with their dwellings.

In our dazzling capital the houses of high and low crowd the streets, a jostling throng of roof and tile, and have done so down the generations - yet ask if this is truly so and you discover that almost no house has been there from of old. Some burned down last year and this year were rebuilt. Others were once grand mansions, gone to ruin, where now small houses stand.

And it is the same with those that live in them. The places remain, as full of people as ever, but of those one saw there once now only one or two in twenty or thirty still survive. Death in the morning, at evening another birth - this is the way of things, no different from the bubbles on the stream.

Where do they come from, these newborn? Where do the dead go? I do not know. Nor do I know why our hearts should fret over these brief dwellings, or our eyes find such delight in them. An owner and his home vie in their impermanence, as the vanishing dew upon the morning glory. The dew may disappear while the flower remains - yet it lives on only to fade with the morning sun. Or perhaps the flower wilts while the dew still lies - but though it stays, it too will be gone before the evening.

[Samuel]

... and while I'm about it, since I might as well give this as a gift to those who may not have encountered it before, though considered a minor, occasional Victorian poet, Cory is best known, as far as he's known at all (which nowadays is not much at all) for eight of the loveliest, saddest lines in English poetry. Think on absent friends:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

A gift gratefully recieved! I've never seen that and it is lovely.

A small contribution from me by perhaps my favorite poet

"And thus he lives, too happy to be poor"

From The Cottager, by John Clare

[Rhiannon]

Words that have shaped my thinking as a parent.

Your children are not your children.
They are sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For thir souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

Kahlil Gibran - The Prophet

[Samuel]

That's something I try to remember, that my children do not belong to me and that they their own people. It feels important.

[Rhiannon]

That's something I try to remember, that my children do not belong to me and that they their own people. It feels important.

Me too, Sam. It's very important. We have to want them to be who they are.

[Shaker]

Any Soul to Any Body

So we must part, my body, you and I
Who've spent so many pleasant years together.
'Tis sorry work to lose your company
Who clove to me so close, whate'er the weather,
From winter into winter, wet or dry;
But you have reached the limit of your tether,
And I must journey on my way alone,
And leave you quietly beneath a stone.

They say that you are altogether bad
(Forgive me, 'tis not my experience),
And think me very wicked to be sad
At leaving you, a clod, a prison, whence
To get quite free I should be very glad.
Perhaps I may be so, some few days hence,
But now, methinks, 'twere graceless not to spend
A tear or two on my departing friend.

Now our long partnership is near completed,
And I look back upon its history;
I greatly fear I have not always treated
You with the honesty you showed to me.
And I must own that you have oft defeated
Unworthy schemes by your sincerity,
And by a blush or stammering tongue have tried
To make me think again before I lied.

'Tis true you're not so handsome as you were,
But that's not your fault and is partly mine.
You might have lasted longer with more care,
And even now, with all your wear and tear,
'Tis pitiful to think I must resign
You to the friendless grave, the patient prey
Of all the hungry legions of Decay.

But you must stay, dear body, and I go.
And I was once so very proud of you:
You made my mother's eyes to overflow
When first she saw you, wonderful and new.
And now, with all your faults, 'twere hard to find
A slave more willing or a friend more true.
Ay — even they who say the worst about you
Can scarcely tell what I shall do without you.

William Cosmo Monkhouse: 1840-1901

[Rhiannon]

Reading some Rumi today which I love.

Are you searching for your soul?
Then come out of your prison.
Leave the stream and join the river
That flows into the ocean.

and

Imitating others,
I failed to find myself.
I looked inside and discovered
I only knew my name.
When I stepped outside
I found my real Self.

[ekim]

Gestalt prayer

I am not in this world to live up to your expectations,
And you are not in this world to live up to mine.
You are you, and I am I,
and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.
If not, it can't be helped.

Fritz Perls