A mind is like a window. Some keep it open in order to enjoy a better view of the world outside. Others keep it closed out of fear that bugs might get in.
"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist after he grows up."
-- Pablo Picasso
Do you feel that you have a body, or that you are a body? Do you feel that you have a brain, or that you are a brain? Do you feel that you have a mind, or that you are a mind? Do you feel that you have awareness, or that you are awareness?
And if you feel like that, then who is doing the feeling?
"Dream different dreams while on the same bed."
Chinese proverb
"You can waste a whole lifetime
trying to be
what you think is expected of you
but you'll never be free"-- Chris Rea
"If you build a bridge to someone else, you can always cross it in both directions."
-- Anonymous
"It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings.
The conditions for your existence are almost 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 years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the lying light on 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?"-- Erwin Schroedinger
"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind."
-- Albert Einstein
Do you see the world as it is? Or do you see the world as you are?
"We must beware of committing the fatally common fallacy of assuming that all we see is all there is to see."
-- Warren Leadbeater
Love is both a noun and a verb.
We never forget anything. Each time you say "Oh yes, I'd forgotten that!" it means that you haven't.
"Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans."
-- Robert A."Heinlein
"The universe doesn't have laws. It has habits, and habits can be broken."
-- Anonymous
"The function of genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions --which time and mediocrity can solve."
-- Hugh Trevor-Roper
Love can be multiplied, but not divided.
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use."
-- Galileo Galilei
"Thou art God."
The so-called "laws" of physics are an illusion; they do not govern future events, but merely describe past observations and assume that all processes are identical.
True Unity Consciousness, and the insight that All is One, cannot be fully expressed in words, since words are in fact vocalized restrictions. Acquiring true knowledge of the All is essentially a non-verbal process.
Time is an illusion. There is nothing but the Eternal Present, changing constantly and inscribing itself upon us, thus creating the illusion of a past, and, through memory and expectation, the illusion of Cause and Effect.
There is no such thing as a false sense of well-being.
"We must no more ask whether the soul and the body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one."
-- Aristotle
"Realize that true happiness lies within you. Waste no time and effort searching for peace and contentment and joy in the world outside. Remember that there is no happiness in having or in getting, but only in giving. Reach out. Share. Smile. Hug. Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting a few drops on yourself."
-- Og Mandino
"There is so much good in the worst of us,
And so much bad in the best of us,
That it hardly becomes any of us
To talk about the rest of us."-- Edward Hoch
"It raineth on the just and on the unjust, likewise shineth the sun."
"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is even stranger than we can imagine."
-- Haldane
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened."-- Douglas Adams
"Being right too soon is socially unacceptable."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"Only change is eternal."
-- 'Doc' E. E. Smith
"It did not rain when Noah built his Ark."
-- Loesje
"Kindness in words
creates confidence.
Kindness in thinking
creates profoundness.
Kindness in giving
creates love."-- Lao-Tse
"Only a fool believes that life has but one meaning."
-- Roger Zelazny
"Mythology, n.:
The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later."-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary
"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
"Failure is success if we learn from it."
-- Malcomb S. Forbes
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away."
-- Henry David Thoreau
Jones' First Law:
Anyone who makes a significant contribution to any field of endeavor, and stays in that field long enough, becomes an obstruction to its progress -- in direct proportion to the importance of their original contribution.
"The most difficult assignments in life are only given to the best."
-- Anonymous
"Spirituality is not something that happens at a retreat or in a church. It happens where your emotions are most heated, where your needs are most pronounced, where your doubt is most severe."
-- Phil Catalfo
"You can't add days to your life. But you can add life to your days."
-- Anonymous
"Wollen ist nicht genug. Man muss auch noch tun."
-- Göethe
"Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?"
-- Thomas Wolfe
"Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
"I turn to the sun, and my shadow falls behind me."
-- Toon Hermans
"Ordinary men hate solitude.
But the master makes use of it, embracing his aloneness, realizing he is one with the whole universe."-- Lao-Tzu, Tao-te-ching
"If you ask a class of kindergarten kids how many of them can draw, they all raise their hands. If you ask a class of sixth graders, though, only one or two will. The rest of them have had it beaten into their souls that what they used to call "drawing" isn't good enough for adults. Only a few have the courage to keep trying."
-- Elf Sternberg
"The mark of true beauty is that it increases when closely examined; that of false beauty is that it diminishes."
-- Greville
"In song and in dance Man expresses himself as a member of a higher community."
-- Nietzsche, The Birth Of Tragedy
"To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection."
-- H. Poincaré
"He who does not believe in miracles is not a realist."
-- Herman Finkers
"A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person."
-- Dave Barry
"Man is so unlikely that if he did not exist, the possibility would not be worth discussing."
-- Damon Knight
"The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day. I have spent my days in stringing and unstringing my instrument. The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set; Only there is the agony of wishing in my heart."
-- Rabindranth Tagore
"If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He WILL NOT use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle."
-- Dave Barry
"So Heaven's this huuuuuge party, with lots of booze, food and live bands (or dead bands for that matter) with loads of interesting people to talk to and fun stuff to do - and you can stay as long as you like, chill out if you want, whatever.
And Hell is: You're not invited."-- Simon Travaglia
"Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
and see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which
we are, we are..."-- From: "Ulysses", ALfred Lord Tennyson
"I used to think I was a child. Now I think I'm an adult. Not because I don't do childish things anymore, but because the people around me are no more mature than I am."
-- Anonymous
"If we look up to someone or look down on someone, in both cases we're looking the wrong way."
-- Toon Hermans
"More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason."
-- George Carlin, on the 6th commandment
"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift."
-- Albert Einstein
"Don't forget until too late that the business of life is not business, but living."
-- Bertie Charles Forbes
"If you're going through hell... keep going!"
-- Sir Winston Churchill
"Here's something to think about: How come you never see a headline like `Psychic Wins Lottery'?"
-- Jay Leno
"We white men in this country are inclined to underestimate the black man [...] because we see him out of his cultural matrix. Those we know have had their own culture wrenched from them some generations back and a servile pseudo culture imposed on them by force. We forget that the black man has a culture of his own, older than ours and more solidly grounded, based on character and the power of the mind rather than the cheap, ephemeral tricks of mechanical gadgets. But it is a stern, fierce culture with no sentimental concern for the weak and the unfit, and it never quite dies out.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
"Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens." (Against stupidity the very gods Themselves contend in vain.)"
-- Friedrich von Schiller
"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church."
-- Thomas Paine
"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
-- H.G. Wells
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use."
-- Galileo Galilei
"Everything you need you already have. You are complete right now, you are a whole, total person, not an apprentice person on the way to someplace else. Your completeness must be understood by you and experienced in your thoughts as your own personal reality."
-- Wayne Dyer
Contents copyright © 2004 F.W. van Wensveen - all rights reserved.