Here’s a Thought/Archives
Mediocrity is never daring to do what you love, for fear of what others will say or for fear of losing your security.
Mark Fisher, The Instant Millionaire
Be humble, for you are of the Earth,
Be noble, for you are of the stars.
Slavic Proverb
Why should I give them my mind as well?
Dalai Lama, when asked if he wasn’t angry at the Chinese for taking over his country.
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
Abraham Lincoln
I never try to convert a patient to anything, and never exercise any compulsion. What matters most to me is that the patient should reach his own view of things…
Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Do not free the camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
G. K. Chesterton
If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru’ narrow chinks of his cavern.
William Blake
The difference between perseverance and obstinancy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.
Henry Ward Beecher
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person’s brow.
Charles Brower
A good Buddhist, according to the books I had read, is no missionary, but tolerates the thoughts, decisions, way of life, of others. Toleration leads to friendship. Friendship always wins. There has never been a Buddhist war.
Janwillem van de Wetering, The Empty Mirror
Thomas Jefferson once said: ‘Of course the people don’t want war. But the people can be brought to the bidding of their leader. All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked and denounce the pacifists for somehow a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.’ I think that was Jefferson. Oh wait. That was Hermann Goering. Shoot.
Jon Stewart, hosting the Peabody Awards
Sometimes you have to forgive yourself for anger or depression or negativity. They are the price of knowing what we feel. Knowing what we feel is the basis of compassion.
Mary Rose O’Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World
“Sanctification.”
“Excuse me?”
“If you can’t breathe, see the stars, be quiet, what the hell?”
Mary Rose O’Reilley, The Barn at the End of the World
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize-winning physicist.
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
Carl Jung
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
Albert Einstein
He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
Thomas Paine
Love all that has been created by God, both the whole and every grain of sand. Love every leaf and every ray of light. Love the beasts and the birds, love the plants, love every separate fragment. If you love each separate fragment, you will understand the mystery of the whole resting in God.
Fyodor Dostoevsky
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.
At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it.
Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it.
Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces,
I would still plant my apple tree.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Donald Hall wrote a poem in which two people are talking. One says, “I was a fool three years ago.” The other replies, “One is always a fool three years ago.”
You were born with potential.
You were born with goodness and trust.
You were born with ideals and dreams.
You were born with greatness.
You were born with wings.
You are not meant for crawling, so don’t.
You have wings.
Learn to use them and fly.
Rumi
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world—that is the myth of the “atomic age”—as in being able to remake ourselves.
Mahatma Gandhi
Be not intimidated… nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.
John Adams
When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.
Hasidic saying
Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.
Buckminster Fuller
I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold service was joy.
Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali poet of Calcutta
He who has a why for life can put up with any how.
Frederick Nietzsche
Carpe Diem! Rejoice while you are alive; enjoy the day; live life to the fullest; make the most of what you have. It is later than you think.
Horace
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
Elisabeth Kubler Ross
We belong someplace. The day we are given a name we are also given a place which no one but we can fill.
Maya Angelou
Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.
Henry Ford
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard Shaw
When I was fifteen years old, I lost my mother. I was devastated. In months I went from a happy teen to a morose pessimist. My grades dropped off the cliff. From a very fine and interested student I fell to a “C” average and was just hanging on. I had an advisor, an English teacher, Gertrude Farley. Miss Farley observed my decline, she knew the tragedy I had suffered. She began working on me with the tenaciousness of a terrier. Miss Farley would not let go; she was not going to lose me. She didn’t. Thanks to Gertrude Farley, sent to me from heaven, I came out of my tailspin. Anything I have accomplished in my lifetime I owe to Gertrude Farley.
Captain Kangaroo speaking at the Vermont-NEA Convention,
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Mark Twain
Of particular significance in the course of my examinations, was finding the importance extending over the entire lifespan of overcoming, of the onset of difficulties. This seems to lead to an apparent paradox that perhaps great achievements regularly come from courageously overcoming obstacles, and are not a consequence of original aptitude, but rather the absence of aptitude.
Alfred Adler
We have committed the Golden Rule to memory; let us now commit it to life.
Edwin Markham
I would that I could put into your hands a staff for that somewhat bloody march… I cannot provide you with that staff for your journey; but perhaps I can tell you a little about it, how to use it and lose it and find it again, and cling to it more than ever. You shall cut it—so it is ordained—every one of you for himself, and its name is Courage.
J. M. Barrie, Courage (graduation address)
The whole universe is the stage on which your mind dances with your body, guided by your heart.
On a bag of Yogi tea
Life wants not only the clear but also the muddy, not only the bright but also the dark: it wants all days to be followed by nights, and wisdom herself to celebrate her carnivals.
Carl Jung
Perhaps middle age is, or should be a shedding of shells: the shell of ambition, the shell of material accumulations and possessions, the shell of ego.
Anne Morrow Lindberg
When it gets dark enough you can see the stars.
Lee Salk
You must not be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, when a sadness arises within you of such magnitude as you have never experienced, or when a restlessness overshadows all you do, like light and the shadow of clouds gliding over your hand. You must believe that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand. It shall not let you fall. Why should you want to exclude any anxiety, any grief, any melancholy from your life, since you do not know what it is that these conditions are accomplishing in you?
Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
I remember going into a movie theatre one morning, thinking that my life was nearly over, and helling over the roads of Fairfield that evening, thinking that I would live forever.
John Cheever, Journals of John Cheever
Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.
Martin Luther King
I must learn to love the fool in me—the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries. It alone protects me against that utterly self-controlled, masterful tyrant whom I also harbor and who would rob me of human aliveness, humility, and dignity but for my fool.
Theodore Rubin
What is to give light must endure the burning.
Viktor Frankl (on adversity)
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
Virginia Woolf
Not Empty Now 