Zach Blocker's Quote Page

To live fully is to let go and die with each passing moment, and to be reborn in each new one. -- Jack Kornfield, Seeking the Heart of Wisdom

We apologize for the Princess Diana Page One headline "Di Goes Sex Mad" that is still on the stands in some locations. This issue was locked up last week before her death and went on sale Friday, Aug. 29, 1997. It is currently being replaced as quickly as we are able with a special 72 page tribute issue: "A Farewell to the Princess We All Loved . . . Di -- Her Final Hours" -- Apology on National Enquirer Homepage (www.nationalenquirer.com)

... not appreciating the weirdness of life is a punishment of its own. -- Rachel Ellen Sherman, FSEW

Farewell we call to hearth and hall!
Though wind may blow and rain may fall.
We must away ere the break of day.
Far over wood and mountain tall.

-- J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

Oh, one world at a time! -- Henry David Thoreau, when asked about afterlife.

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced...
Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice
-- Cherokee saying

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. -- Lily Tomlin

[Benjamin Lee Whorf] discovered that [Hopi] differs dramatically from languages of the Indo-European family such as English or French, particularly in its expression of the concept of time. English and its related languages have three major tenses - past, present, and future ("it was," "it is," "it will be") - plus the fancier compound tenses such as "it will have been". Having these tenses, Whorf argued, encourages Europeans and Americans to think of time as so many ducks in a row. Time past is made up of uniform units of time - days, weeks, months, years - and the future is similarly measured out. This division of time is essentially artificial, Whorf said, since people can only experience the present. Past and future are only abstractions, but Westerners think of them as real because their language virtually forces them to do so. This view of time has given rise to the fondness in Western culture for diaries, records, annals, histories, clocks, calendars, wages paid by the hour or day, and elaborate timetables for the use of future time. Time is continually quantified. -- David S. Thomson, "Worlds Shaped by Words"

Close your eyes. Listen closely.
All that you've learned,
Try to forget it.

-- Bjork

Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself and yourself alone one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is: Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use. -- Carlos Castaneda

Must one choose between a refusal to live and an individualism which makes others suffer? ..... And can the individualist cut himself off to be free, yet live in the rarified air? -- Albert J. Guerard, André Gide

La vie humaine commence de l'autre côté du désespoir.
Human life begins on the other side of despair.
-- Jean-Paul Sartre, "Les Mouches", III:2

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost.
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

-- J.R.R. Tolkien

Rien n'empêche le bonheur comme le souvenir du bonheur.
Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.
-- André Gide, L'immoraliste, p. 74

Existentialism has not eliminated heaven and hell; it has just internalized them. -- Unknown

How wonderful, O Lord, are the works of your hands, the sun and the stars, the valleys and the hills, the rivers and lakes all disclose your presence. The beasts of the field, the birds of the air bespeak your wondrous will. In your goodness you have made us able to hear the music of the world, a divine voice sings through all creations. -- Hebrew prayer

But Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things; and their language was actually more degraded and filthy than I have shown it. I do not suppose that any will wish for a closer rendering, though models are easy to find. Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain any verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong. -- J.R.R. Tolkien

Rejection is the greatest aphrodisiac -- Madonna

They were truly people out of time, but it was not that alone which drew me to them. Being a people to whom adversity was natural, they had retained a remarkable capacity for tolerance of other human beings, together with qualities of generosity toward one another and toward strangers in their midst which surpassed anything I had ever known before except, perhaps, among the Eskimos. They were the best of people, and I promised myself that one day I would come and live among them and escape from the increasingly mechanistic mainland world with its March Hare preoccupation with witless production for mindless consumption; its disruptive infatuation with change for its own sake; its idiot dedication to the bitch goddess, Progress. -- Farley Mowat, A Whale for the Killing, speaking of the fishermen of South Newfoundland

The bigger things get the smaller and duller or flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb. When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, USSR, the Pampas, el Gran Chaco, the Danubian Basin, Equatorial Africa, Hither Further and Inner Mumbo-land, Gondhwanaland, Lhasa, and the villages of darkest Berkshire, how happy we shall all be. At any rate it ought to cut down travel. There will be nowhere to go. So people will (I opine) go all the faster. -- J.R.R. Tolkien

Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war. -- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III:2

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for awhile. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. -- J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

Lois de l'imitation; je les appelle: lois de la peur.
Laws of imitation; I call them: laws of fear.
-- André Gide: Ménalque, L'immoraliste

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. -- Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Less doth yearning trouble him who knoweth many songs, or with his hands can touch the harp: his possession is his gift of 'glee' [music/verse] which God gave him. -- Exeter Book, quoted by Tolkien, Letter #52

Despite his formidable fighting abilities, Wol [a pet owl] was seldom the aggressor. Those other beasts which, like man, have developed the unnatural blood lusts that go with civilization would have found Wol's restraint rather baffling, for he used his powerful weapons only to protect himself, or to fill his belly, and never simply for the joy of killing. There was no moral or ethical philosophy behind his restraint - there was only the indisputable fact that killing, for its own sake, gave him no pleasure. Although perhaps, if he and his descendants had lived long enough in human company, he might have become as sanguinary and as cruel as we conceive all other carnivores - except ourselves - to be. -- Farley Mowat, The Dog Who Wouldn't Be

'Yes,' I said, as though carrying on a discussion, 'and amongst other things you dreamed foolishly of a certain butterfly; but when one fine morning your dream came in your way you did not let the splendid opportunity escape. Did you? Whereas he...' Stein lifted his hand. 'And do you know how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams I had lost that had come in my way?' He shook his head regretfully. 'It seems to me that some would have been very fine - if I had made them come true. Do you know how many? Perhaps I myself don't know.' 'Whether his were fine or not,' I said, 'he knows of one which he certainly did not catch.' 'Everybody knows of one or two like that,' said Stein; 'and that is the trouble - the great trouble....' -- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Everyone must have two pockets, so that he can reach into the one or the other, according to his needs. In his right pocket are to be the words: "For my sake was the world created," and in his left: "I am dust and ashes." -- Hasidic saying

A shared cigarette and a hidden knife, a too-small suit, probably borrowed from a brother who was expecting it back that evening, and a bloody betrayal. I listened to this tale and heard huge boulders moving somewhere, my centre of gravity shifted and I saw the breath of monsters gathering on the horizon. Terrible things could happen, even to ordinary people like me, and they were always unplanned. -- Meera Syal, Anita and Me

Look, Roark, there's one thing about you, the thing I'm afraid of. It's not just the kind of work you do; I wouldn't care, if you were an exhibitionist who's being different as a stunt, as a lark, just to attract attention to himself. It's a smart racket, to oppose the crowd and amuse it and collect admission to the side show. If you did that, I wouldn't worry. But it's not that. You love your work. God help you, you love it! And that's the curse. That's the brand on your forehead for all of them to see. You love it, and they know it, and they know they have you. -- Ayn Rand's character Cameron in The Fountainhead

He looked at Roark and saw the calmest, kindest face - a face without a hint of pity. It did not look like the countenance of men who watch the agony of another with a secret pleasure, uplifted by the sight of a beggar who needs their compassion; it did not bear the cast of the hungry soul that feeds upon another's humiliation. Roark's face seemed tired, drawn at the temples, as if he had just taken a beating. But his eyes were serene and they looked at Mallory quietly, a hard, clean glance of understanding - and respect. -- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

The self-image is like a mirage; it promises us nourishment, but when a problem arises that demands the strength of a clear and self-confident mind, the self-image has nothing to offer; it fails to sustain us when we most need support. Because the self-image is based on how we wish we were, on what we fear we are, or how we would like the world to see us, it prevents us from seeing ourselves clearly. We fail to recognize both our true strengths and many of our faults. -- Tarthang Tulku, Skillful Means

There is the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. -- J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter #75

When the glamour [of one's marriage] wears off, or merely works a bit thin, they think they have made a mistake, and that the real soul-mate is still to find. The real soul-mate too often proves to be the next sexually attractive person that comes along. Someone whom they might indeed very profitably have married, if only - . Hence divorce, to provide the 'if only'. And of course they are as a rule quite right: they did make a mistake. Only a very wise man at the end of his life could make a sound judgement concerning whom, amongst the total possible chances, he ought most profitably to have married! Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might have found more suitable mates. But the 'real soul-mate' is the one you are actually married to. You really do very little choosing: life and circumstances do most of it (though if there is a God these must be His instruments, or His appearances). It is notorious that in fact happy marriages are more common where the 'choosing' by the young persons is even more limited, by parental or family authority, as long as there is a social ethic of plain unromantic responsibility and conjugal fidelity. But even in countries where the romantic tradition has so far affected social arrangements as to make people believe that the choosing of a mate is solely the concern of the young, only the rarest good fortune brings together the man and woman who are really as it were 'destined' for one another, and capable of a very great and splendid love. The idea still dazzles us, catches us by the throat: poems and stories in multitudes have been written on the theme, more, probably, than the total of such loves in real life (yet the greatest of these tales do not tell of the happy marriage of such great lovers, but of their tragic separation; as if even in this sphere the truly great and splendid in this fallen world is more nearly achieved by 'failure' and suffering). In such great inevitable love, often love at first sight, we catch a vision, I suppose, of marriage as it should have been in an unfallen world. In this fallen world we have as our only guides, prudence, wisdom (rare in youth, too late in age), a clean heart, and fidelity of will..... -- J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter #43

We are so apt, in our engrossing egotism, to consider all those accessories which are drawn around us by prosperity, as pertaining and belonging to our own persons, that the discovery of our unimportance, when left to our own proper resources, becomes inexpressibly mortifying. -- Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy

I walked up University, then along Shattuck, passing through the streets like a happy phantom, the Buddha's ghost. I wanted to whisper in people's ears, "Wake up! Wake up! Soon the person you believe you are will die - so now, wake up and be content with this knowledge: There is no need to search; achievement leads to nowhere. It makes no difference at all, so just be happy now! Love is the only reality of the world, because it is all One, you see. And the only laws are paradox, humor, and change. There is no problem, never was, and never will be. Release your struggle, let go of your mind, throw away your concerns, and relax into the world. No need to resist life; just do your best. Open your eyes and see that you are far more than you imagine. You are the world, you are the universe; you are yourself and everyone else, too! It's all the marvelous Play of God. Wake up, regain your humor. Don't worry, just be happy. You are already free! -- Dan Millman, Way of the Peaceful Warrior

Well, the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter - leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines. As the servants of the Machines are becoming a privileged class, the Machines are going to be enormously more powerful. What's their next move? -- J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter #96, 1945

The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o'er a cold decree, such a hare is madness the youth to skip o'er the meshes of good counsel the cripple. -- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Faisons quelque chose, pendant que l'occasion se présente! Ce n'est pas tous les jours qu'on a besoin de nous. Non pas à vrai dire qu'on ait précisément besoin de nous. D'autres feraient aussi bien l'affaire, sinon mieux. L'appel que nous venons d'entendre, c'est plutôt à l'humanité tout entière qu'il s'adresse. Mais à cet endroit, en ce moment, l'humanité c'est nous, que ça nous plaise ou non. Profitons-en, avant qu'il soit trop tard.

Let's do something, while we have the chance! It's not every day that someone needs us. Not to say that one precisely needs us. Others could do the job just as well, if not better. The call that we just heard, it addresses all humanity. But in this place, at this moment, humanity: that's us, whether we like it or not. Let's profit by it, before it's too late.
-- Samuel Beckett, Vladimir, En attendant Godot

... that of all the propensities which teach mankind to torment themselves, that of causeless fear is the most irritating, busy, painful, and pitiable. -- Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret. -- Ambrose Bierce

But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

-- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Envier le bonheur d'autrui, c'est folie; on ne saurait pas s'en servir.
Wanting another's happiness is folly; one wouldn't know what to do with it.
-- André Gide: Ménalque, L'immoraliste

He didn't have to worry about jagged bottle-necks after all, or the microbes which might have been in the cheeseburgers from the Burger Ranch, for that matter. One of life's great truths is this: when one is about to be struck by a speeding six-hundred-pound Coke machine, one need worry about nothing else.
-- Stephen King, The Tommyknockers

It seems to me that the real cop-out is to say that the universe has meaning. Mystery is part of nature's style, that's all. It's the Infinite Goof. It's meaning that has no meaning. That paradox is the key to the meaning of meaning. To look for meaning - or lack of it - in things is a game played by beings of limited consciousness. Behind everything in life is a process that is beyond meaning. Not beyond understanding, mind you, but beyond meaning. -- Amanda, from Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins

The human doesn't see things as they are, but as he is. -- Racter

Aucun n'a su être malade. Ils vivent, ont l'air de vivre et de ne pas savoir qu'ils vivent. D'ailleurs, moi-même, depuis que je suis auprès d'eux, je ne vis plus.
None of them have known what it is to be sick. They live, or seem to live and yet not know that they are living. Besides, ever since I've been among them, I myself live no more.
-- André Gide: Michel, L'immoraliste

Ce qui me séparait, me distinguait des autres, importait; ce que personne d'autre que moi ni disait ni ne pouvait dire, c'était ce que j'avais à dire.
That which separated and distinguished me from others, mattered. That which no one else said or could say, was what I had to say.
-- André Gide: Michel, L'immoraliste

You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war. -- Albert Einstein

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions. -- Albert Einstein

There is the fear that we shan't prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man - fear that men won't understand us and we shall be cut off from them. -- Robert Frost, 1963 (Newsweek)

What is joy?
It is a bird
That we all want to catch
It is the same bird
That we all love to see flying
-- Sri Chinmoy

The statement in the verse: "God descended upon Mount Sinai" (Ex. 19:20) and other such statements, are expressions from a human perspective: thus was God, praised be He, experienced by man... This is the mighty principle on which are built great matters - that God is experienced relative to the recipient of the experience... And if you say, according to reason we cannot speak of God as descending, consider then that man is not wholly a creature of reason. It is for this reason that descent is ascribed to Him - as man experienced Him. There is no need to elaborate here. -- Judah Loew of Prague, Kabbalist thinker

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence. -- Albert Einstein

Then the dean understood what had puzzled him in Roark's manner.
"You know," he said, "you would sound much more convincing if you spoke as if you cared whether I agreed with you or not."
"That's true," said Roark. "I don't care whether you agree with me or not." He said it so simply that it did not sound offensive, it sounded like the statement of a fact which he noticed, puzzled, for the first time.
"You don't care what others think - which might be understandable. But you don't care even to make them think as you do?"
"No."
"But that's... that's monstrous."
"Is it? Probably, I couldn't say."

-- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts. -- Albert Einstein

If the possibility of the spiritual development of all individuals is to be secured, a second kind of outward freedom is necessary. The development of science and of the creative activities of the spirit in general requires still another kind of freedom, which may be characterised as inward freedom. It is this freedom of the spirit which consists in the interdependence of thought from the restrictions of authoritarian and social prejudices as well as from unphilosophical routinizing and habit in general. This inward freedom is an infrequent gift of nature and a worthy object for the individual. -- Albert Einstein

The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself amoung profoundly religious men. -- Albert Einstein

The world was made before the English language, and seemingly upon a different design. -- Robert Louis Stevenson

He had seen a great deal about decking a ship and building bulwarks and finishing off the gunwales, but like an artist who rides a horse a hundred times, and never comprehends it until he tries to draw it, or like a novelist who has witnessed a human situation repeatedly but has not really understood it until forced to state in cold words what happened, he had lived in the heart of ships but had not seen them. -- James A. Michener, Chesapeake

Art is too serious to be taken seriously -- Ad Reinhardt, US artist

And it's true, is it not? -- incredible, but apparently true -- there are people who feel in life the ease, the self-assurance, the simple and essential affiliation with what is going on, that I used to feel as the center fielder for the Seabees? Because it wasn't, you see, that one was the best center fielder imaginable, only that one knew exactly, and down to the smallest particular, how a center fielder should conduct himself. And there are people like that walking the streets of the U.S. of A.? I ask you, why can't I be one! Why can't I exist now as I existed for the Seabees out there in center field! Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder -- and nothing more! -- from Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth

If I am I because I am I and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you. But if I am I because you are you, and you are you because I am I, then I am not I and you are not you. -- Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (d. 1859)

The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires. -- William Arthur Ward

Odd folk..... -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Americans

Kol ha'olam kulo Gesher tzar m'od V'ha'ikar lo l'facheid k'lal

Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand. -- Chinese Proverb

Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh. The trombones crunched redgold under my bed, and behind my gulliver the trumpets three-wise silverflamed, and there by the door the timps rolling through my guts and out again crunched like candy thunder. Oh, it was wonder of wonders. And then, a bird of like rarest spun heavenmetal, or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now, came the violin solo above all the other strings, and those strings were like a cage of silk round my bed. Then flute and oboe bored, like worms of like platinum, into the thick toffee gold and silver. I was in such bliss, my brothers. -- from A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

De cette abondance ordonnée, de cet asservissement joyeux, de ces souriantes cultures, une harmonie s'établissait, non plus fortuite mais dictée, un rythme, une beauté tout à la fois humaine et naturelle, où l'on ne savait plus ce que l'on admirait, tant étaient confondus en une très parfaite entente l'éclatement fécond de la libre nature, l'effort savant de l'homme pour la régler. Que serait cet effort, pensais-je, sans la puissante sauvagerie qu'il domine? Que serait le sauvage élan de cette sève débordante sans l'intelligent effort qui l'endigue et l'amène en riant au luxe?

From this ordered abundance, from this merry control, from these smiling lands, a harmony was established, not fortuitous but dictated, a rhythm, a beauty both human and natural, where one did not know any more what one admired: the fertile burst of free nature and the skillful efforts of man to regulate it were confused together in perfect agreement. What would these human efforts be, I thought, without the powerful brutality they dominate? What would be this savage dash of sap overflowing without the intelligent effort which dams it up and brings it laughing to luxury?
-- André Gide, L'immoraliste, p.83-4

Two of the greatest gifts we can give our children are roots and wings. -- Hodding Carter

I will not bow before the Iron Crown, nor cast my own small golden scepter down. -- J.R.R. Tolkien in 'Mythopoeia'

There is clearly a lot of dirty bath water surrounding the reality of God. Holy wars. Inquisitions. Animal sacrifice. Human sacrifice. Superstition. Stultification. Dogmatism. Ignorance. Hypocrisy. Self-righteousness. Rigidity. Cruelty. Book-burning. Witch-burning. Inhibition. Fear. Conformity. Morbid guilt. Insanity. The list is almost endless. But is all this what God has done to humans or what humans have done to God? It is abundantly evident that belief in God is often destructively dogmatic. Is the problem, then, that humans tend to believe in God, or is the problem that humans tend to be dogmatic? Anyone who has known a died-in-the-wool atheist will know that such an individual can be as dogmatic about unbelief as any believer can be about belief. Is it belief in God we need to get rid of, or is it dogmatism?
-- M. Scott Peck, M.D., The Road Less Traveled

...he came to the ultimate source of the river. It was a kind of meadow in which nothing happened: no cattle, no mysteriously gushing water, merely the slow accumulation of moisture from many unseen and unimportant sources, the gathering of dew, so to speak, the beginning, the unspectacular congregation of nothingness, the origin of purpose.

Bright sunlight fell on the meadow, and where the moisture stood, sharp rays were reflected back until the whole area seemed golden, and hallowed, as if here life itself were beginning. Thomas Applegarth, looking at this moist and pregnant land, thought: This is how everything begins - the mountains, the oceans, life itself. A slow accumulation - the gathering together of meaning. -- James A. Michener, Chesapeake

Si encore nos médiocres cerveaux savaient bien embaumer les souvenirs! Mais ceux-ce se conservent mal; les plus délicats se dépouillent, les plus voluptueux pourrissent; les plus délicieux sont les plus dangereux dans la suite. Ce dont on se repent était délicieux d'abord.
If only our mediocre brains could embalm well our memories! But these keep badly: the most delicates ones are stripped, the most voluptuous ones rot; the most delicious are the most dangerous later on. What one repents of now was delicious before.
-- André Gide: Ménalque, L'immoraliste

Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. -- (Learned Hand)

He who knows not his own genius has none. -- William Blake

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and then bid the geldings to be fruitful. -- C.S. Lewis

I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. —- Ralph Waldo Emerson

...the world is before you; and it is most probable that as you enter it, so it will receive you. Trust in nothing but in Providence and your own efforts. Never separate the two, like the heathen waggoner. Constancy in love is a good thing, but it means nothing, and is nothing, without constancy in every kind of effort. If you had the abilities of all the great men, past and present, you could do nothing well without sincerely meaning it and setting about it. If you entertain the supposition that any real success, in great things or in small, ever was or could be, ever will or can be, wrested from Fortune by fits and starts, leave that wrong idea here... -- Charles Dickens, speech by Mr. Jarndyce in Bleak House

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness. -- Leo Tolstoy

Threat by Denise Levertov

You can live for years next door
to a big pine tree, honored to have
so venerable a neighbor, even
when it sheds needles all over your flowers
or wakes you, dropping big cones
onto your deck at still of night.
Only when, before dawn one year
at the vernal equinox, the wind
rises and rises, raising images
of cockleshell boats tossed among huge
advancing walls of waves,
do you become aware that always,
under respect, under your faith
in the pine tree's beauty, there lies
the fear it will crash someday
down on your house, on you in your bed,
on the fragility of the safe
dailiness you have almost
grown used to.

There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. -- William Shakespeare

Il faut laisser les autres avoir raison, puis que cela les console de n'avoir pas autre chose.
It is well to let others be right, since that consoles them of not having anything else.
-- André Gide: Ménalque, L'immoraliste

A silly man lies awake all night,
Thinking of many things.
When the morning comes he is worn with care,
And his trouble is just as it was.
-- Norse saying, Edith Hamilton's Mythology

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. -- Henry David Thoreau

The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. But if you have, as it were taken 'a vow of poverty', renounced control, and take delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Tom Bombadil

With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America’s exalted purpose and inspiring way of life? -- Adlai Stevenson

From what I have said of the natives of New Holland they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon earth; but in reality they are far happier than we Europeans, being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous, but with the necessary conveniences so much sought after in Europe; they are happy in not knowing the use of them.
-- Captain James Cook (1728-79), English seaman, explorer. Journal entry, Aug. 1770, on his landing in Australia (then named New Holland)

But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. -- J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter #52

That a man is successful who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much, who has gained the respect of the intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had. -- Robert Louis Stevenson

A ship, like a human being, moves best when it is slightly athwart the wind, when it has to keep its sails tight and attend its course. Ships, like men, do poorly when the wind is directly behind, pushing them sloppily on their way so that no care is required in steering or in the management of sails; the wind seems favorable, for it blows in the direction one is heading, but actually it is destructive because it induces a relaxation in tension and skill. What is needed is a wind slightly opposed to the ship, for then tension can be maintained, and juices can flow and ideas can germinate, for ships, like men, respond to challenge. -- James A. Michener, Chesapeake

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying. -- Woody Allen

GOSSIP

It topples governments, wrecks marriages,
Ruins careers, sullies reputation,
Causes heartaches, nightmares, indigestion -
Spawns suspicion, generates grief.
Makes innocent people cry into their pillows.
Even its name hisses.
It's called gossip. Office gossip.
Shop gossip. Party gossip.
It makes headlines and headaches.
Before you repeat a story, ask yourself,
Is it true? Is it fair?
Is it necessary?
If not - SHUT UP.

-- Unknown

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important. -- T.S. Eliot

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin and the bones in the flesh and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the goodness of God and enclosed. Yea, and more homely; for all these may wear and waste away, but the Goodness of God is ever whole. -- Dame Julian, anchoress of Norwich, c. 1393

We have gone completely overboard on security. Everything has to be secured, jobs, wages, hours - although the ultimate in security is jail, the slave labor camp, and the salt mine. -- Cola Parker

Work like you don't need the money
Dance like no one is watching
Sing like no one is listening
Love like you've never been hurt
And live every day as if it were your last.
-- Irish proverb?

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you 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 their 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.
You are the bow from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

-- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.  Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.  The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. -- John Muir, Our National Parks, 1901

Number of seconds that the average person can wait for an elevator before becoming agitated: 40
-- Otis Elevator Company, Farmington, CT (as reported by Editorial Humor Magazine, Issue 166, Vol. 8

Who is more foolish? The fool who jumps blindly, or the fool who waits to know everything? -- Unknown

For when you come to think of it, the only way to love a person is not, as the stereotyped Christian notion is, to coddle them and bring them soup when they are sick, but by listening to them and seeing and believing in the god, in the poet, in them. -- Brenda Ueland

The world's best reformers are those who begin on themselves. -- Anonymous

My friends and I
Are trees in a wood
We glory in autumn's
Goldenhood

On our branches sing
The owl and the lark
And the small deer trot
Through the mist for our bark

And the river below
Runs silvery-grey
With barges to carry
The timber away

And that voyage to the ocean
Seems happy and good
To me and my friends
As we dance in our wood

We Americans suffer from a heavy inheritance of German academic ponderousness, acquired in the late 19th century. The English have an ancient distrust of the "over-clever," or "too clever by half," which the Irish and the Scottish do not share, which is one reason the Irish and Scots get on better with the French than the English and Americans. -- William Pfaff, Boston Globe Columnist

The first time you say something, people look at you astonished, the second time it seems vaguely familiar and is taken seriously, eventually everybody agrees and forgets there was ever any disagreement. -- Fay Weldon, 'Revelations'

Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. -- William Blake.

Where there is doubt, let me sow faith...
Where there is despair, hope
Where there is sadness, ever joy
Grant that I may not so much
Seek to be consoled, as to console
To be understood, as to understand...
To be loved, as to love.

-- St. Francis of Assisi

Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source. -- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

But think for a while on the meaning of this word "peace." Does it seem strange to you that the angels should have announced Peace, when ceaselessly the world has been stricken with War and the fear of War? Does it seem to you that the angelic voices were mistaken, and that the promise was a disappointment and a cheat?

Reflect now, how our Lord Himself spoke of Peace. He said to His disciples "My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you." Did he mean peace as we think of it: the kingdom of England at peace with its neighbours, the barons at peace with the King, the householder counting over his peaceful gains, the swept hearth, his best wine for a friend at the table, his wife singing to the children? Those men His disciples knew no such things: they went forth to journey afar, to suffer by land and sea, to know torture, imprisonment, disappointment, to suffer death by martyrdom. What then did He mean? If you ask that, remember that He said also, "Not as the world gives, give I unto you." So then, He gave to His disciples peace, but not peace as the world gives.

-- T.S. Eliot: Thomas Beckett in "Murder in the Cathedral"

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. -- Henry David Thoreau

You gotta learn how to play golf in the rain. -- Joseph Cook

The most important thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother. -- Reverend Theodore Hesburgh, President of Notre Dame University

For a long time it seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life - but there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. -- Alfred D'Souza

Governor Frank Keating issued a statement saying the shooting "must serve as a call to arms" to address "the root causes of what is happening to our families and young people." He later issued a revised statement, deleting a "call to arms" and substituting the phrase "wake-up call."
-- excerpt from an AP article about the 1999 school shooting in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma

Seriousness is stupidity sent to college. -- P. J. O’Rourke (b. 1947), U.S. journalist

After the first million, it doesn't matter. You can only eat three meals a day - I tried eating four and I got sick. You can't sleep in more than one bed at night. Maybe I have twenty suits, but I can only wear one at a time, and I can't use more than two shirts a day. -- Joseph Hirschhorn

Sweet water and light laughter! -- Elvish greeting (Forgotten Realms)

Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective. Man's peculiarly ambivalent psyche permits him to operate simultaneously according to two opposing codes. There is the code which he professes to live by, and there is the code to whose standards he actually does adhere. The deceit is so ingrained and subtle that most men truly are unaware of it, although to psychologists, philosophers, and the like, it is no news at all. Man is not as good as he thinks he is. (Nor as bad, for that matter, but let's not complicate things.) He has certain needs, demands certain services which in reality are probably healthy and natural, but to which in time's passage and as a result of odd quirks in his ethos, he has ascribed (or allowed his religious leaders - often guilt-warped, psychopathic misfits - to ascribe) negative values. In the queerest of paradoxical metamorphoses, honest desires change into taboos. To simply "say" that a desire is immoral - or, resorting to even flimsier abstraction, to deem the fulfillment of a desire illegal - does not eliminate the desire. It does not eliminate anything except straightforwardness. It creates, in addition to a climate of deception, an underworld into which men "descend" in order to partake of Code B services not permitted under the provisions of Code A. Society hires armed goons to force itself to conform to Code A, but a greater sum of money is spent each year in the surreptitious enjoyment of the services provided by Code B. The underworld persists because society needs it, insists upon it, supports it (at the same time that it denies and persecutes it, of course). But enough of that. Let's simply say that according to Code A, Plucky Purcell - drug dealer and abortionist's agent - is a criminal. Under the reality of Code B, however, he is dutifully serving the interests of his fellow man. -- Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction, p. 64-5

... I remembered the mad dog that had wandered into our communal yard some years ago, whose drunken walk and white-flecked muzzle had sent the mothers screaming for cover, clutching their protesting children to them. I managed to find an airhole in the folds of mama's trousers and had gazed on the object of all this terror, a mottled, scrappy mutt of a dog who seemed proud of his madness, freed by it, whose expression was one of unconcerned, off-the-planet bliss. I really envied him, or rather the effect he was having on the local harpies who, in normal circumstances, would arm-wrestle each other for a parking space. If what that dog had was madness, I wanted some of it. Even then, I felt like I spent most of life saying sorry. -- Meera Syal, Anita and Me

    "The way you disapprove of your life! Why do you do that? It is of no 
value for a man to disapprove of his life the way that you do. You seem 
to take some special pleasure, some pride, in making yourself the butt of 
your own peculiar sense of humor. I don't believe you actually want to 
improve your life. Everything you say is somehow always twisted, some way 
or another, to come out 'funny.' All day long the same thing. In some 
little way or other, everything is ironical, or self-depreciating. 
Self-depreciating?"
    "Self-deprecating. Self-mocking."
    "Exactly! And you are a highly intelligent man - that is what makes it 
even more disagreeable. The contribution you could make! Such stupid 
self-deprecation! How disagreeable!"
    "Oh, I don't know," I said, "self-deprecation is, after all, a classic 
form of Jewish humor."
    "Not Jewish humor! No! Ghetto humor."

The sky was still blue, the sun still beaming when they locked me up. But during my incarceration it had begun to rain. The legendary Seattle rain. It was a thin gray rain; hard and fast and cold. In it, we had to walk four blocks from the Public Safety Building to the Zillers' Jeep - we were at its mercy. As was my custom in such elements I hunkered against the rain, drew my head into my collar, turned my eyes to the street, tensed my footsteps and proceeded in misery. But my hosts, I soon noticed, reacted in quite another way. They strolled calmly and smoothly, their bodies perfectly relaxed. They did not hunch away from the rain but rather glided through it. They directed their faces to it and did not flinch as it drummed their cheeks. They almost reveled in it. Somehow, I found this significant. The Zillers accepted the rain. They were not at odds with it, they did not deny it or combat it; they accepted it and went with it in harmony and ease. I tried it myself. I relaxed my neck and shoulders and turned my gaze into the wet. I let it do to me what it would. Of course, it was not trying to do anything to me. What a silly notion. It was simply falling as rain should, and I a man, another phenomenon of nature, was sharing the space in which it fell. It was much better regarding it that way. I got no wetter than I would have otherwise, and if I did not actually enjoy the wetting, at least I was free of my tension. I could even smile. What I smiled at was the realization that I had been in the Zillers' company less than fifteen minutes and already their example had altered my behavior. Surely, I was on the right track. -- Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction, p. 133-4

I had seen how in an instant, those you called friends could suddenly become tormentors, sniffing out a weakness or a difference, turning their own fear of ostracism into a weapon with which they could beat the victim away, afraid that being an outsider, an individual even, was somehow infectious. -- from Anita and Me, Meera Syal

Ambivalence is a bigger nuisance than schizophrenia. When you're schizoid each of your two personalities is blissfully ignorant of the other, but when you're ambivalent each half of you is painfully aware of the conflicting half, and if you aren't careful your whole life can turn into a taffy pull. -- Amanda, from Tom Robbins' Another Roadside Attraction, p. 163-4

Doubt is a thief that makes us fear to tread where we might have won. -- William Shakespeare

Christ-crucified rules [over the living Jesus], and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth. -- Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed

What Jesus spoke of, and in his life embodied, was the opposite of Roman domination. It was also the opposite, not of anything "Jewish", but of an oppressed people's readiness to turn against itself. Thus "love" defies the occupying enemy, not in some sweetly powdered passive aggression - as if Caesar could be shamed by a timidly turned cheek, as if masochism could function as a strategy - but by truly realizing something entirely other than the institutionalized hatred of phalanx, standard, legion, centurion, siege machine, and, yes, crucifix. -- James Carroll, Constantine's Sword

How wrong Emily Dickinson was. Hope is not the thing with feathers. The thing with feathers turned out to be my nephew. We must take him to a specialist in Zurich. -- Woody Allen

For as rain forests are to the Earth's atmosphere...so are the Tibetan people to the human spirit in this time of its planetary ordeal..." -- Huston Smith, The World's Religions

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

-- William Shakespeare, The Tempest

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