|
We've gathered these quotes over many years and often return to them
when we're seeking clarity or fresh inspiration. They're arranged in no
particular order. We don't have the sources on some quotes, if you can
fill us in on these we'd appreciate it. Enjoy!
Who the Buddhas Are All the beings of the universe are already realized. That is, with the
—Gary Snyder
As a musician the idea is to uplift your own spirit, because if you don't
uplift your spirit, you won't be able to lift anyone else's.
One should not be ashamed of wishful thinking, for this is just what all inventive and creative people do. They are dreamers, and they find ways of realizing their dreams because they wish and dream effectively. That is to say, their wishful thinking is not vague; their desires are imagined so precisely and specifically that they can very often be carried out. The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination and of adventure in trying to find out what it is that one really wants. I cannot conceive any better way of trying to understand myself, or human nature in general, than a thorough exploration of my desires, making them as specific as possible, and then asking myself whether this is actually what I want. Why not ask therefore, what might be the most esthetically satisfying explanation for one's own existence in our particular universe? It must be an explanation that will completely satisfy me for the most appalling agonies that can be suffered in this world. Upon what terms would I be actually willing to endure them? -Alan Watts
- George Leonard
- Alan Watts
"Science could not survive without a community sharing scientific values. Moral systems do not continue unless individuals subscribe to a common set of ethics. Values are so ephemeral that they require the joint psychic input of a group to retain their hold on each person's attention." -Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi The Sangha can be described as a stream of life going in the direction of emancipation, joy and peace. The only condition for us to enter the stream of the holy Sangha is that we practice. -Thich Nhat Hanh "Someday, after mastering the winds, tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then, for the second time in history, we shall have discovered fire!" - Teilhard de Chardin Gay Hendricks:
Real cooperation comes not through merely agreeing to carry out some project together, but with the joy, the feeling of togetherness: because in that feeling there is not obstinacy of personal ideation, personal opinion. When the thing to be done-the plan, the concept, the ideological utopia-assumes primary importance, then there is no real cooperation. Then it is only the idea that is binding us together; and if one idea can bind us together,another idea can divide us. -J. Krishnamurti All suffering is bearable if it is seen as part of a story. -Isak Dinesen To live a creative life we must lose our fear of being wrong. -Joseph Chilton Pearce '…we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make" - J.R.R. Tolkien Fellowship of the Ring. The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. -Dianne Di Prima A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection - not an invitation for hypnosis. -Umberto Eco "The place where God calls you is the place where the world's deepest
"There are two things one should know about the direction of their life.
"Until you do what you believe in, you don't know whether you believe it or not." -Leo Tolstoi What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy
for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The
conditions for your existence are as old as the rocks. For thousands of
years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought
forth in pain. A hundred y ears ago, perhaps, another man—or woman—sat
on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the
dying of the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman.
He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you
yourself? What is this Self of yours?
"You got to sing, like you don't need the money,
The child is tricked into the ego feeling by the attitudes, words and actions of the society which surrounds him -- his parents, relatives, teachers, and above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers. Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are perhaps rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment. We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitude to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from society. Society is our extended body and mind. Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he is indeed separate! ....Just because we do not exist apart from the community, the community is able to convince us that we do -- that each one of us is an independent source of action with a mind of its own. -Alan Watts When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it 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 an 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
There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go—if there
are no doors or windows—he walks through a wall. - Bernard Malamud
Once you love the practice of awakening, it won't matter to you whether
something called "awakening" ever happens. The moment you love the
process of ending suffering, it doesn't matter whether or not suffering
ever ends. That love of the practice of ending suffering will
probably be all of the awakening that you would ever desire. It would
be so far beyond your wildest dreams of what life could be like that it
would be difficult to imagine anything more wonderful. - Cheri Huber.
"If a seed is given good soil and plenty of sun and water, it doesn't have to try to unfold. It doesn't need self-confidence or self-discipline or perseverance. It just unfolds. As a matter of fact, it can't help unfolding. "If a seed has to grow with a rock on top of it, or in deep shade, or without enough water, it won't unfold into a healthy full-sized plant. It will try - hard - because the drive to become what you were meant to be is incredibly powerful. But at best it will become a sort of ghost of what it could be: pale, undersized, drooping... "In the age of ecology, we ourselves are the only creature we would ever expect to flourish in an environment that does not give us what we need! We wouldn't order a spider to spin an exquisite web in empty space, or a seed to sprout on a bare desk top. And yet that is exactly what we have been demanding of ourselves." --Barbara Sher "Where do we put our time, our strength, our creativity, our love? We must look at our life without sentimentality, exaggeration, or idealism. Does what we are choosing reflect what we most deeply value?" "The things that matter most in our lives are not fantastic or grand. They are moments when we touch one another, when we are there in the most attentive or caring way. This simple and profound intimacy is the love we all long for." "Sooner or later we have to learn to let go and allow the changing mystery of life to move through us without our fearing it , without holding and grasping." "The longing for love and the movement of love is underneath all of
our activities."
Watch your thoughts; they become your words. Watch your words; they
become
"This is the true joy of life, the being used up by a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. Life for me is no "brief candle". It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before passing it on to future generations." -- G.B. Shaw When you're talking about a huge social transformation and the huge social struggle that precedes that transformation, there must be a huge shift in the collective imagination before any of that can take place. That's a prerequisite; it must come first. We must imagine the possibility of a more just world before the world may become more just. -Martin Espada. "Only in an ego mad world do we think that destiny is revealed in our own thoughts and will. You know something that I don't know about where I want to be. If I just listen to myself, I will be trapped in a circle. If you don't speak to me about what you see and suspect, then I won't know the direction in which I want to go. And if I don't listen to my neighbors and friends, I'll be stuck in the labyrinth of what I think I want." -- Thomas Moore A vision with out a task is but a dream.
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes."
We work on ourselves then, in order to help others. And we help others
as a vehicle for working on ourselves
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once
he grows up.
In a sense, we are all crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the
-Vladimir Nabokov
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you've imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler. -Thoreau "The better happiness arises out of a sense of alignment between your powers and the world's woe..." -Norman Rush Mating "You have to figure out what you really have faith in and then find other people who feel the same way. The only thing you have to do alone is decide what's important to you." - author unknown Let us act, at last, in the best interests of all.... Then the sun will shine another day, and another still, and life will not merely go on, but will achieve its highest expression, its grandest glory, its greatest joy. Can we give this gift to our children? Please say yes. -Neale Walsch All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.
As an artist it is central to be unsatisfied! This isn't greed, though it might be appetite. -Lawrence Calcagno We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids but by an infinite expectation of the dawn which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful: but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. -Thoreau "A human being is a part of the whole called by us 'Universe', a part
limited time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings
as something separate from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his
consciousness. The 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."
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening
"Drunkenness is the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed [i.e., bestowed] to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what, in its totality, is so degrading a poison." William James Intense beauty and intense pleasure are always gratuitous, and are revealed only to senses that are not seeking and straining. For our nerves are not muscles: to push them is to reduce their efficiency. - Alan Watts Capitalism makes networks. It doesn't make communities. Imagination
makes communities.
Only a few achieve the colossal task of holding together, without being
split asunder, the clarity of their vision alongside an ability to take
their place in a materialistic world. They are the modern heroes.... Artists
at least have a form within which they can hold their own conflicting opposites
together. But there are some who have no recognized artistic form to serve
this purpose, they are the artists of living. To my mind these last are
the supreme heroes in our soulless society.
Always this energy smolders inside
If we are open only to discoveries that will accord with what we know already, we may as well stay shut. That is why the marvelous achievements of science and technology are of so little real use to us. It is in vain that we can predict and control the course of events in the future, unless we can live in the present. It is in vain that doctors prolong life if we spend the extra time being anxious to live still longer. It is in vain that engineers devise faster and easier means of travel if the new sights that we see are merely sorted and understood in terms of old prejudices. It is in vain that we get the power of the atom if we are to just continue in the rut of blowing people up. -Alan Watts
It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop. It is not only weakness that yields to temptation. There are temptations which it requires strength and courage to yield to. What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come All great enterprises are undertaken at great risk. The chief concern of our age has been the perfection of means, with a confusion of goals Don't worry about what the world wants from you, worry about what makes you come alive. Because what the world really needs is people who are alive. -Lawrence LeShan I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big
success. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving human forces that work
from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world
like so many rootlets or the capillary oozing of water, which, if given
time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride.
Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation of how it should be spent. A ship is safest in a harbor, but that's not what ships are for. Why is it better to love than to be loved? It is surer. An old question asks: What is the best form of government in an insane asylum? A republic, a democracy? Socialism? A monarchy with an enlightened ruler? A meritocracy? Communism? A dictatorship? Our mind can start to get caught in the question but it quickly becomes clear that it's not really a relevant question. An insane asylum does not lack for ideas, passions and creative energy. The real problem is harnessing the available human energy. The place is full of crazy people! No matter how good the ideas and intentions, their execution invariable becomes warped, crazy and destructive. What we need to do is cure the widespread insanity, to bring people to their senses, to help them live in reality instead of illusion. If we could do that, probably any one of these forms of government could be made to work rather well in promoting the general good, and a sane community could then intelligently discuss the issue of the best form of government. - Charles Tart
He is no fool
The universe is the language of god. -Lorenz Oken. Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are. -Ortega y Gasset All that we do is touched with ocean yet we remain on the shore of what we know. -Richard Wilber We need to give ourselves permission to act out our dreams and visions, not to look for more sensations, more phenomena, but live our strongest dreams -- even if it takes a lifetime. -Jean Anouilh "Life and love generate effort but effort will not generate them." - Alan Watts |