Niamh: Quotes and Notes Index | Quotes and Notes RSS
2010-02-27
“If you can see the good in other people, you’ll find it easier to treat them skillfully. Their good points are like water for your heart. You need to focus on them to nourish your own goodness now and in the future.” ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu
“If you want to see a person’s past actions, you look at his present condition; if you want to see his future condition, you look at his present actions.” ~ Buddhist Saying
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
“The words ‘I am…’ are potent words; be careful what you hitch them to. The thing you’re claiming has a way of reaching back and claiming you.” – A. L. Kitselman
“Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be” – Martin Luther King Jr
“I define comfort as self-acceptance. When we finally learn that self-care begins and ends with ourselves, we no longer demand sustenance and happiness from others.” – Jennifer Louden
“Knowledge and timber shouldn’t be much used till they are seasoned.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
“To receive such a simple wish of love quietly opens our minds to an innate wisdom that recognizes the essential goodness of being, the intrinsic goodness of experience itself, the joy of being alive. It brings out the natural wisdom that was hidden in our minds – a purer vision that knows the beings and things all around us to be utterly holy, as if they were all messengers of the Buddha.” ~ John Makransky
“The law is not so much carved in stone as it is written in water, flowing in and out with the tide.” ~ Jeff Melvoin
“Better to get up late and be wide awake than to get up early and be asleep all day.” ~ Anonymous
“Good girls have a lot of anger, you know. And when something sets it off, BOOM, it explodes” ~ Charlotte Joko Beck
“Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self – your thoughts, etc. – is to forget the self. And to forget the self is . . . what? It’s to be enlightened by all things.” ~ Charlotte Joko Beck
“Identifying with a desire or a fear tightens the knot that binds one to it and thereby increases the sway it can have over one. Only when Buddha was able to experience the desires and fears that threatened to overwhelm him as nothing but impersonal and ephemeral conditions of mind and body, did they lose their power to mesmerize him.” – By Stephen Batchelor
“As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.” – Leonardo da Vinci
“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” – Carrie Fisher
“If my hands are fully occupied in holding on to something, I can neither give nor receive.” – Dorothee Solle
2010-02-06
“Humility, metaphysically, implies the absence of any entity to be either ‘proud’ or ‘humble’.” ~ The Tenth Man by Wei Wu Wei…
“And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.” – Marianne Williamson
“Such is the irresistible nature of truth that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.” – Thomas Paine
“Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.” – Blaise Pascal
The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, worry about the future, or anticipate troubles, but to live in the present moment wisely and earnestly. – Buddha…
“Genuine beginnings begin within us, even when they are brought to our attention by external opportunities.” – William Bridges
“The most decisive actions of our life – I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future – are, more often than not, unconsidered.” – Andre Gide
A Zen teaching goes: “When you become you, then Zen becomes Zen, Buddha becomes Buddha.”
“May all beings be happy.
May they live in safety and joy.
All living beings,
Whether weak or strong,
Tall, stout, average, or short,
Seen or unseen, near or distant,
Born or to be born,
May they all be happy.” – From the Metta Sutta, Sutta Nipata I.8
“The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.” – Harry Golden
“It’s just a ride and we can change it any time we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings and money, a choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your door, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one.” ~ Bill Hicks
“We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.” ~ Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
“I have never met a person whose greatest need was anything other than real, unconditional love. You can find it in a simple act of kindness toward someone who needs help. There is no mistaking love. You feel it in your heart. It is the common fiber of life, the flame that heals our soul, energizes our spirit and supplies passion to our lives. It is our connection to God and to each other.” – Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
“All that may be wished for by nature fades to nothing.” – Shantideva
“If power was an illusion, wasn’t weakness necessarily one also?” – Lois McMaster Bujold
“Man is in appearance a derivative of the world, but intrinsically the origin of the world.” – Jalaluddin Rumi …
“Experience is what you get if you don’t get what you wanted” – unknown
“I looked always outside of myself to see what I could make the world give me instead of looking within myself to see what was there.” – Belle Livingstone
“What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient, but restless mind, of sacrificing one’s ease or vanity, of uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully.” – Charles Victor Cherbuliez
“The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else.” – Martina Navratilova
“Your world is made of your memories, and your memories are given to you by your world. The whispering voice of happenstance is always in our ears. ‘This is the world. This is the way things are. Look. Pay attention. Remember.’” – Real Live Preacher
“By becoming attached to names and forms, not realising that they have no more basis than the activities of the mind itself, error rises and the way to emancipation is blocked.” -Buddha..
“Therefore, be ye lamps unto yourselves, be a refuge to yourselves. Hold fast to Truth as a lamp; hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for a refuge in anyone beside yourselves. And those, who shall be a lamp unto themselves, shall betake themselves to no external refuge, but holding fast to the Truth as their lamp, and holding fast to the Truth as their refuge, they shall reach the topmost height.” – Buddha…
“The true person is an active participant, engaged in her environment while remaining unoppressed by it.” – Thich Nhat Hanh
“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” – Sir Arthur Eddington
“The important thing is not to stop questioning.” – Albert Einstein
“Real strength is not just a condition of one’s muscle, but a tenderness in one’s spirit.” ~ McCallister Dodds
“The qualities we possess should never be a matter for satisfaction, but the qualities we have discarded.” – Fingers Pointing Toward the Moon by Wei Wu Wei…
“You will find that the mere resolve not to be useless, and the honest desire to help other people, will, in the quickest and delicatest ways, improve yourself.” ~ John Ruskin
“Buddhists go to a lot of trouble to build meditation halls and monasteries. Their main purpose is to create a physical environment free of distractions in which to learn [concentration]. No noise, no interruptions. Just as important, however, is the creation of a distraction-free emotional environment. The development of concentration will be blocked by the presence of certain mental states which we call the five hindrances. They are greed for sensual pleasure, hatred, mental lethargy, restlessness, and mental vacillation.” ~ Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
2009-12-31
“I wish that I could Fan back to life The dying embers Of my long lost passion. Descending deeper. With black as my light. With twist and turn. All me will be tried in life. We look for light to call. The call to save us all. Lest we fall to our knees. The death, we kiss his feet. Oh, sacred mother come. For our fate is done. In blindness do we run Always backwards.” ~ unknown
“To want to be what one can be is purpose in life.” ~ Cynthia Ozick
“Endurance is one of the most difficult disciplines, but it is to the one who endures that the final victory comes.” – Buddha
“..We have to surrender, we have to take a risk. Otherwise what we’re doing is standing back in order to judge, in order to feel superior. Often the obstacle is fear: we don’t think we’ll ever succeed. And so we’d rather stand apart and be cynical, to feel protected in that way, not having to try…Just do something. It doesn’t have to be a lifetime commitment, just do something for the sake of the doing, for the engagement, for the involvement.” – Sharon Salzberg
“He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much.” – Bessie A. Stanley
“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.” Maulana Jalalu’ddin Rumi
“I’ve grown certain that the root of all fear is that we’ve been forced to deny who we are.” ~ Frances Moore Lappe
“All you need is already within you, only you must approach your self with reverence and love. Self-condemnation and self-distrust are grievous errors. Your constant flight from pain and search for pleasure is a sign of love you bear for your self, all I plead with you is this: make love of your self perfect. Deny yourself nothing…”. Nisargadatta Maharaj
“Loving ourselves opens us to truly knowing ourselves as part of a matrix of existence, inextricably connected to the boundlessness of life. When we keep opening past any version of who we are that is crafted by others, when we see that we are far bigger than the person that is delineated by family or cultural expectations, we realize that we are capable of so much more than we usually dare to imagine.”- Sharon Salzberg
“Every instance of heartbreak can teach us powerful lessons about creating the kind of love we really want.” – Martha Beck
“We can travel a long way and do many different things, but our deepest happiness is not born from accumulating new experiences. It is born from letting go of what is unnecessary, and knowing ourselves to be always at home.” - unknown
“Our heroes are people and people are flawed. Don’t let that taint the thing you love.” – Randy K. Milholland
“Do something every day that you don’t want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.” – Mark Twain
“A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.” – Edward Chapin
“To be mature means to face, and not evade, every fresh crisis that comes.” – Fritz Kunkel
“Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of ‘crackpot’ than the stigma of conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be counted at any cost.” – Thomas J. Watson
“If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not working on hard enough problems. And that’s a big mistake.” – Frank Wilczek
“We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another”. Frank Zappa
“Turn your midlife crisis to your own advantage by making it a time for renewal of your body and mind, rather than stand by helplessly and watch them decline.” ~ Jane E. Brody
“Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
2009-11-30
“To freely bloom – that is my definition of success.” – Gerry Spence
“Frequency of a tragedy does not diminish the wound when it is your own.” – Linda Berdoll
“Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.” – Heraclitus
“The idea of perfect closes your mind to new standards.. When you drive hard toward one ideal, you miss opportunities and paths, not to mention hurting your confidence. Believe in your potential and then go out and explore it; don’t limit it.” – John Eliot, Ph.D.
“The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don’t be trying all the time to fix things. What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.” – Chuck Palahniuk
“Ambition and anger will disappear when you stop concerning yourself with the fruit of your actions.” – Buddha…
“That best portion of a good man’s life, / His little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.” – William Wordsworth
“If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn
“To get thine ends, lay bashfulness aside; Who fears to ask, doth teach to be deny’d.” – Robert Herrick
“Doubt ’til thou canst doubt no more…doubt is thought and thought is life. Systems which end doubt are devices for drugging thought.” – Albert Guerard
“The grass is not, in fact, always greener on the other side of the fence. Fences have nothing to do with it. The grass is greenest where it is watered. When crossing over fences, carry water with you and tend the grass wherever you may be.” – Robert Fulghum
“A good friend can tell you what is the matter with you in a minute. He may not seem such a good friend after telling” – Arthur Brisbane
“Twilight, again. Another ending. No matter how perfect the day is, it always has to end.” – Stephenie Meyer
2009-11-08
“Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster. Your life will never be the same again.” – Og Mandino
“The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of friendship or affection.” – Bertrand Russell
“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” – William James
“And since, in our passage through this world, painful circumstances occur more frequently than pleasing ones, and since our sense of evil is, I fear, more acute than our sense of good, we become the victims of our feelings, unless we can in some degree command them.” – Ann Radcliffe
“Having found no self that is not other, The seeker must find that there is no other that is not self, So that in the absence of both other and self, There may be known the perfect peace, Of the presence of absolute absence.” – “The Tenth Man” by Wei Wu Wei…
“Life is full of obstacle illusions.” – Grant Frazier
“Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is strengthened by doing it.” – Robbie Gass
“Slight not what’s near, while aiming at what’s far.” – Euripides
“Never bear more than one trouble at a time. Some people bear three kinds – all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.” – unknown
“Learn to let go of the need to be manically occupied.” – Niamh Brown
“Ask not what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive… then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman
“Your best shot at happiness, self-worth and personal satisfaction – the things that constitute real success – is not in earning as much as you can but in performing as well as you can something that you consider worthwhile.” – William Raspberry
“I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me – shapes and ideas so near to me – so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.” – Georgia O’Keeffe
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” – Douglas Adams
“You are beautiful…when you let friends have their space, when you believe, when you laugh, or are moved to tears, when you let it just roll right off your back, when you talk about your dreams, when you help a turtle across the road, when you try to do the right thing even when it comes out wrong, when you love.” – Anonymous
“My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.” – George Bernard Shaw
“A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation.” – Bertrand Russell
“Sanity is a madness put to good use.” – George Santayana
“Success is meaningless if you can’t sleep at night because of harsh things said, petty secrets sharpened against hard and stony regret, just waiting to be plunged into the soft underbelly of a ‘friendship.’” – Margaret Cho
“This heart is more spacious than the mind can ever imagine.” – Ezra Bayda
“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.” – Eugene Delacroix
“If only I could throw away the urge to trace my patterns in your heart, I could really see you.” – David Brandon (Zen in the Art of Helping)…
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” – Flannery O’Connor
“before you speak, stop, breathe, and consider if what you are about to say will improve upon the silence.” – Allan Lokos, from “Skillful Speech,”
“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.” – Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others”. Vincent van Gogh
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.” Arthur Rubenstein
“The soul wants, the soul waits. And I could never take a chance of losing love to find romance.” – U2
“To the world you may be one person, But to one person you may be the world.” – Bill Wilson
“Silent gratitude isn’t much use to anyone.” – Gladys Bronwyn Stern
“Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
“I gave way to delight, as mystics have for centuries when they peeked through the curtains and discovered that this world- so manifestly real was actually a tiny stage set constructed by the mind. We discover abruptly that everything we accept as reality is just social fabrications.” – Timothy Leary
“I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand. Henceforth will I apply ALL my efforts to become the highest mountain of all and I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy.” – Og Mandino
“Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none” – William Shakespeare in All’s Well That Ends Well
“Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The noun of self becomes a verb. This flashpoint of creation in the present moment is where work and play merge.” – Stephen Nachmanovitch
“True love is your soul’s recognition of its counterpoint in another”. Owen Wilson in Wedding Crashers
“Human pain does not let go of its grip at one point in time. Rather, it works its way out of our consciousness over time. There is a season of sadness. A season of anger. A season of tranquility. A season of hope.” – Robert Veninga
“You can’t choose the ways in which you’ll be tested.” – Robert J. Sawyer
“Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure.” – William Saroyan
“No matter what side of the argument you are on, you always find people on your side that you wish were on the other.” – Jascha Heifetz
“Truth is that which lies in a dimension beyond the reach of thought. Whole-mind has no ‘thoughts’, thoughts are split-mind.” – Ask the Awakened by Wei Wu Wei…
“When I’m not doing something that comes deeply from me, I get bored. When I get bored I get distracted and when I get distracted, I become depressed. It’s a natural resistance, and it insures your integrity.” – Maria Irene Fornes
“A man over time falls in love with the woman he is attracted to, and a woman over time becomes more attracted to the man she loves.” Jennifer Wilkinson
“Personality can open doors, but only character can keep them open.” – Elmer G. Letterman
“There shall be eternal summer in the grateful heart.” – Celia Thaxter
“Marriage resembles a pair of shears, So joined that they cannot be separated; Often moving in opposite directions, Yet always punishing anyone who comes between them!” Sydney Smith
“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.” – “An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.” ~ unknown
“In the province of connected minds, what the network believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the network’s mind there are no limits.” – Dr. John C. Lilly, M.D….
“Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious.” – Brendan Gill
2009-08-16
“We think in generalities, but we live in detail.” – Alfred North Whitehead
“Refuse to be ill. Never tell people you are ill; never own it to yourself. Illness is one of those things which a man should resist on principle.” – Edward Bulwer-Lytton
“Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart, don’t know how to laugh either.” – Golda Meir
“Any clod can have the facts, but having opinions is an art.” – Charles McCabe
“There are moments when one feels free from one’s own identification with human limitations and inadequacies. At such moments one imagines that one stands on some spot of a small planet, gazing in amazement at the cold yet profoundly moving beauty of the eternal, the unfathomable; life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution nor destiny; only Being.” – Albert Einstein
Meditation, simply defined, is a way of being aware. It is the happy marriage of doing and being.- Lama Surya Das
“There are two main strategies we can adopt to improve the quality of life. The first is to try making external conditions match our goals. The second is to change how we experience external conditions to make them fit our goals better.” – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.” – Robert Bresson
The practice of mediation invites us to investigate the flux of rising and passing events. When we get the hang of it, we can begin to see how each artifact of the mind is raised and lowered to view, like so many flash cards. But we can also glimpse, once in a while, the sleight of hand shuffling the cards and pulling them off the deck. Behind the objects lies a process. Self is a process. Self is a verb.- Andrew Olendzki
The identified man takes part: the unidentified looks on! Open Secret by Wei Wu Wei…
Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
- Edgar Allan Poe
“Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition”. – Alexander Smith
“Love is to feel what the other is feeling even if they are far away.” Barak
“To succeed is nothing, it’s an accident. but to feel no doubts about oneself is something very different: it is character.” – Marie Leneru
“Never regret something that once made you smile.” – Amber Deckers
To experience love, we must go inside. When you experience real love you get into a state which is beyond words. You are filled with a joy that goes beyond all emotions. True love is the love of the inner Self. – Swami Muktananda…
“We are told that people stay in love because of chemistry or because they remain intrigued with each other, because of many kindnesses, because of luck… But part of it has got to be forgiveness and gratefulness.” – Ellen Goodman
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Patience has its limits. Take it too far, and it’s cowardice. – George Jackson
“The really potent part of love is that it allows you to carry around beliefs about yourself that make you feel special, desirable, precious, innately good. Your lover couldn’t have seen [these qualities] in you, even temporarily, if they weren’t part of your essential being.” – Martha Beck
“Your task is not to seek for love, But merely to seek and find All the barriers within yourself That you have built against it.” Rumi
“One thing is clear to me. You can’t know everything you’d like to know. You can’t do everything you’d like to do. You can’t read everything you’d like to read. You must hold onto some things and let go of others. Learning to make that choice is one of the big lessons of this life.” – Real Live Preacher
“When I’m trusting and being myself… everything in my life reflects this by falling into place easily, often miraculously.” – Shakti Gawain
“How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking, always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you’ll know right away what you amount to.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.” – Maya Angelou
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. – Umberto Eco
We have the habit of always looking outside ourselves, thinking we can get wisdom and compassion from another person or the Buddha or his teachings (Dharma) or our community (Sangha). But you are the Buddha, you are the Dharma, you are the Sangha. – Thich Nhat Hanh
Past and Future are a duality of which Present is the reality. The now-moment alone is eternal and real. – Why Lazurus Laughed by Wei Wu Wei.
“One does not love another if one does not accept anything from him”. Anonymous
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mindfulness is the aware, balanced acceptance of the present experience. It isn’t more complicated that that. It is opening to or receiving the present moment, pleasant or unpleasant, just as it is, without either clinging to it or rejecting it. – Sylvia Boorstein
“Love can make you do things that you never thought possible!” Phil Collins
To comprehend and to understand God above all similitudes, as He is in Himself, is to be God with God, without intermediary, and without any otherness that can become a hindrance or an intermediary. Whosoever wishes to understand this must have died to himself, and must live in God, and must turn his gaze to the eternal light in the ground of his spirit, where the Hidden Truth reveals Itself without means. – Ruysbroek
Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.
- Robert Frost
“The highest reward for man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.” – John Ruskin
“He can make me love something just by showing me the energy with which he loves it.” – Heather Armstrong
“Love me when I least deserve it, because that’s when I really need it.” Swedish proverb
“Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it.” – Thomas Fuller
“I’d rather be a failure at something I love than a success at something I hate.” – George Burns
“In life we don’t get what we want, we get in life what we are. If we want more we have to be able to be more, in order to be more you have to face rejection.” – Farrah Gray
major advancements in this particular wrinkle of the social fabric may have to be measured in centuries rather than decades. – William James
“Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible – not to have run away.” – Dag Hammarskjold
“I believe that one of life’s greatest risks is never daring to risk.” – Oprah Winfrey
“Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.” – Fulton J. Sheen
The only people who find what they are looking for in life are the fault finders. – Foster’s Law
“If you would stand well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of yourself; if with a little mind, leave him with a favorable impression of himself.” – Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Life is endless. We are all in the very middle of it. We alone are responsible. There is no way out except through it. – Ajahn Sumano Bhikkhu with Emily Popp
“Slow down and enjoy life. It’s not only the scenery you miss by going too fast – you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.” – Eddie Cantor
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart”. Helen Keller
“No disguise can long conceal love where it exists, or long feign it where it is lacking.” Francois La Rochefoucauld
“The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.” – Frances Willard
Those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace. – Buddha …
“Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter”. T.S. Eliot
“Love has the power to break all chains – Swim the deepest seas – Endure the strongest pains – Love is the glow in the darkest night leading you on until you have sight.” Cristoto
“Greater Love has no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Jesus
“And what is it to work with love? It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth. It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house. It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit. It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit, And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.” Kahlil Gibran
“Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” – e e cummings
The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows. – Buddha …
“When the petty ego appears, do not be concerned with it. Simply ignore it. When a negative thought strikes you, acknowledge it, then drop it. The Zen saying goes: The occurrence of an evil thought is an affliction; not to continue it is the remedy.” – Katsuki Sekida
“If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years.” – Bertrand Russell
Renunciation is not getting rid of the things of this world, but accepting that they pass away. – Aitken Roshi
“How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it.” – Mark Twain
“Imagine you’re a treasure hunter. One day you discover a chunk of metal in the ground. You dig a hole, pull out the metal, take it home, and start to clean it. At first, one corner of the nugget reveals itself, bright and shining. Gradually, as you wash away the accumulated dirt and mud, the whole chunk is revealed as gold. So let me ask: Which is more valuable? the chunk of gold buried in mud, or the one you cleaned? Actually, the value is equal. Any difference between the dirty nugget and the clean is superficial.The same can be said of natural mind. The neuronal gossip that keeps you from seeing your mind in its fullness doesn’t really change the fundamental nature of your mind. Thoughts like “I’m ugly,” “I’m stupid,” or “I’m boring” are nothing more than a kind of biological mud, temporarily obscuring the brilliant qualities of Buddha nature, or natural mind.” – Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche
“If the only place where I could see you was in my dreams, I’d sleep forever.” – anon
“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else. – Buddha…
Often we hear the adage, Follow your heart. But having practiced and looked at all the things that have arisen in my heart, I’ve seen that while some things were fine and beautiful, many were not so noble. The heart is not only driven by love, kindness, and compassion; it is also driven by desire, greed, and anger. We need to train the heart, not simply follow it. – Joseph Goldstein
“Absence is to love What wind is to fire; It extinguishes the small, It enkindles the great.” Anonymous
“The most precious possession that ever comes to a man in this world is a woman’s heart.” Josiah G. Holland
Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you. – Aldous Huxley…
“You don’t need to win every medal to be successful.” – Jason Fried
“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.” Sophocles
“Dare to be yourself.” – Andre Gide
“Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.” Goncourt
“That is what marriage really means: helping one another to reach the full status of being persons, responsible and autonomous beings who do not run away from life.” ~ Paul Tournier
“Emotions color how we see the world around us, they affect how we are in any given moment and how we behave, and ultimately they serve as the motivating forces for how we humans transform the world around us. If we spend time dwelling on our desire, we gradually cocreate a world driven by greed, advertising, and compulsive consumerism. When we dwell in anger and fear, we cocreate a world filled with weapons, conflicts, and wars. To the extent that we dwell in love and compassion, we cocreate a world characterized by peace, mercy, safety and inspiring beauty. We need not believe in paradise to see how compassion makes our homes, our towns, and our world better places in which to live.” ~ Lorne Ladner, from The Lost Art of Compassion
You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance. – Ray Bradbury
“Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs; therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity, or undue depression in adversity.” – Socrates
“Not everything made you stronger. It was possible to survive, yet still be crippled for your trouble. Sometimes it was okay to run away, to skip the test, to chicken out. Or at least to get some help.” – Scott Westerfeld
We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems – John W. Gardner
“If you can solve your problem, then what is the need of worrying? If you cannot solve it, then what is the use of worrying?” – Shantideva
“I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” ~ John Adams
Trekking any spiritual path is a balancing act. As you gain effort and mastery, you also gain ease. That means that while you may work harder, the effort will come more naturally. While you will certainly encounter new distractions, and who does not?,you also have the means to overcome them. Do not be discouraged. There is always a new moment in which to experience living kindness. ~ Donald Altman
“Beauty often seduces us on the road to truth.” ~ David Shore
“All the ill that is in us comes from fear, and all the good from love”. Eleanor Farjeon
2009-05-29
“Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
“I always wanted a happy ending… Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity.” – Gilda Radner
“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” – Krishnamurti
“Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.” – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness”. Bertrand Russell
“Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.” ~ Dorothy Allison
“Dignity comes not from control, but from understanding who you are and taking your rightful place in the world.” ~ Real Live Preacher
“As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, keep it.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
“Forget injuries, never forget kindnesses.” ~ Confucius
“General principles should not be based on exceptional cases.” ~ Robert J. Sawyer
“Write down the advice of him who loves you, though you like it not at present.” – English Proverb
“We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.” – Samuel Johnson
“I have argued that every human being is born with an innate drive to experience altered states of consciousness periodically — in particular to learn how to get away from ordinary ego-centered consciousness. I have also explained my intuition that this drive is a most important factor in our evolution, both as individuals and as a species. Nonordinary experiences are vital to us because they are expressions of our unconscious minds, and the integration of conscious and unconscious experience is the key to life, health, and spiritual development, and fullest use of our nervous systems.” – Andrew Weil, M.D….
“I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one’s inner life. And that too is a deed.” – Etty Hillesum
“We each have no choice but to start where we are with what we have. This is our challenge, our life, our practice. Each obstacle, problem, handicap is part of the practice. Every advantage, every success helps to clarify our practice.” – Marc Lesser, from Z.B.A.: Zen of Business Administration
“The qualities we possess should never be a matter for satisfaction, but the qualities we have discarded.” – Fingers Pointing Toward the Moon by Wei Wu Wei…
“Nothing is too small to know, and nothing is too big to attempt.” – William Van Horne
“It is a paradoxical but profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at some more ambitious goal beyond it.” – Arnold Toynbee
“Mistakes are the portals of discovery.” – James Joyce
“My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.” – Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” – Epicurus
2009-05-02
“Everything we accept is available to us to see, to use, to learn from, to let go” – Cheri Huber
“It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required.” ~ Sir Winston Churchill
“No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.” – Thomas Mann
“To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes may be the biggest mistake of all.” – Peter McWilliams
“I have found that if you love life, life will love you back.” – Arthur Rubinstein
“You know when you listen to music playing from another room? And you’re singing along because it’s a tune that you really love? When a door closes or a train passes by so you can’t hear the music anymore, but you sing along anyway…then, no matter how much time passes, when you hear the music again, you’re still in the exact same time with it. That’s what love is like.” ~ Anonymous
“Love is sometimes denied, sometimes lost, sometimes unrecognized, but in the end, always found with no regrets, forever valued and kept treasured.” ~ unknown
“There is a paradox between great faith and great questioning. We need faith to anchor us and questioning to open us. With faith only, we might stagnate and become narrow-minded, with questioning only we might become disturbed and agitated. These two qualities balance and support each other.” ~ Martine Batchelor, from Principles of Zen
“Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.” – James M. Barrie
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” ~ Carl Jung
“I love you the more that I believe you have liked me for my own sake and for nothing else.” – John Keats
“There is only one you… Don’t you dare change just because you’re outnumbered!” – Charles Swindoll
“The heart has its reasons that reason does not know.” ~ Pascal
“When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong– or absolutely right.” – Albert Guinon
“Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self respect springs.” – Joan Didion
“Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.” – Robert Heinlein
“If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.” – Bertrand Russell
“Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.” – Buddha
“Nobody got anywhere in the world by simply being content.” – Louis L’Amour
“The most powerful factors in the world are clear ideas in the minds of energetic men of good will.” – J. Arthur Thomson
“The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.” – Okakura Kakuzo
“When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.” John Ruskin
“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.” – Edward Gibbon
“Humankind cannot stand very much reality.” – T. S. Eliot
“Maybe it’s easier to like someone else’s life, and live vicariously through it, than take some responsiblity to change our lives into lives we might like.” – Tish Grier
“Truth is that which lies in a dimension beyond the reach of thought. Whole-mind has no ‘thoughts’, thoughts are split-mind.” – Ask the Awakened by Wei Wu Wei…
“Look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog.” ~ Caroline K. Simon
“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.” ~ Henri Bergson
“A brahmin once asked The Blessed One: “Are you a God?” “No, brahmin” said The Blessed One. “Are you a saint?” “No, brahmin” said The Blessed One. “Are you a magician?” “No, brahmin” said The Blessed One. “What are you then?” “I am awake.”… ~ unknown
“You can go a long way with bad legs and a good head.” ~ Gavin McDonald
“Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better.” – Anonymous
“Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.” – Buddha …
“If we discover a desire within us that nothing in this world can satisfy, also we should begin to wonder if perhaps we were created for another world.” – C. S. Lewis
“Fear is finding fault with the future. If only we could keep in mind how uncertain our future is, then we would never try to predict what could go wrong. Fear ends right there.” ~ Ajahn Brahm
“Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can’t trade for your heart’s desire is your heart.” ~ Lois McMaster Bujold
“There is only one real deprivation, I decided this morning, and that is not to be able to give one’s gifts to those one loves most.” ~ May Sarton
“Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.” – Robertson Davies
“I think people don’t place a high enough value on how much they are nurtured by doing whatever it is that totally absorbs them.” – Jean Shinoda Bolen
“A kiss is something you cannot give without taking and cannot take without giving.” Anonymous
“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”
- Martin Luther King Jr.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” ~ Charles Darwin
“The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself.” ~ Rita Mae Brown
“Love that remains longest in your heart is the one that is not returned.” ~ unknown
“Man is in appearance a derivative of the world, but intrinsically the origin of the world.” – Jalaluddin Rumi
“Despise not any man, and do not spurn anything; for there is no man who has not his hour, nor is there anything that has not its place.” ~ Ben Azai
“You cannot shake hands with a clenched fist.” – Indira Gandhi
“Absence is to love What wind is to fire; It extinguishes the small, It enkindles the great.” Anonymous
“Some people come into our lives, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never the same.” ~ unknown
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” – Thomas A. Edison
“Love is a gift of one’s innermost soul to another so both can be whole.” ~ Tea Rose
“We find rest in those we love, and we provide a resting place in ourselves for those who love us.” ~ Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
“Follow the grain in your own wood.” – Howard Thurman
“How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one’s senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.”
- Norman Douglas
“Let not thy will roar, when thy power can but whisper.” ~ Dr. Thomas Fuller
“Reason and love are sworn enemies.” ~ Pierre Corneille
“Love is the journey from wanting to having.” ~ Anthony Citrano
2009-03-05
“If you are unsuccessful in an insane world you are going in the right direction” ~ Niamh Brown
“Worry does not empty tomorrow of it’s sorrows, it empties today of it’s strength” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
I am the ocean aware of this wave ~ Niamh Brown
“Your doubt destroys all the happiness in your life” ~ Masami Saionji
I have nothing more to face than the present moment. If I can bare that I can bare anything ~ Niamh Brown
“Fear less, hope more. Eat less, chew more. Whine less, breathe more. Hate less, love more and all good things are yours” ~ Swedish Proverb
Justifying is clinging ~ Niamh Brown
Practise is an offering. You wouldn’t expect anything in return for charaty, so is the principle of practise ~ Niamh Brown
The ‘One’ uses the ‘All’ for self consolation ~ Niamh Brown
“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.” – Buddha
Mind objects are an extension of our awareness; our true nature ~ Niamh Brown
“Furious activity is no substitute for understanding” – H. H. Williams
“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.”- Ernest Hemingway
There are no mistakes; universal perfection ~ Niamh Brown
“Work is not always required… there is such a thing as sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.” – George McDonald
“It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves – in finding themselves.” – Andre Gide
“It’s impossible to waste time, it’s all necessary” ~ Niamh Brown
“Only the mediocre are always at their best” ~ Jean Giraudoux
“Take the wanting out of waiting” ~ unknown
“Ask yourself this; Are you a human being having a spiritual experience, or a spiritual being having a human experience?” – Wayne Dyer, PhD
“Belief Clings. Faith lets go.” ~ Alan Watts
I am what I need. Life is what I need. I am life. ~ Niamh Brown
“Craving to become something other than we are” ~ unknown
“We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.” ~ Bertha Calloway
“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
“Frustration is the therapy” ~ unknown
“None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Action is … a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one’s balance and keep afloat.” ~ Eric Hoffer
“Brains, like hearts, go where they are appreciated.” ~ Robert S. McNamara
“When great doubt, great faith, and great determination function together in balance, we keep the spiritual journey alive.” ~ John Daido Loori
“Those who get up in the morning and set a direction for their day have an entirely different experience than those who do not” ~ intenders handbook
“When you are deluded and full of doubt, even a thousand books of scripture are not enough. When you have realized understanding, even one word is too much.” – Fen Yang
“Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.” – Andre Gide
“whatever you meet unexpectedly, join with meditation” ~ unknown
“He’s so heavenly minded he is no earthly good!” ~ unknown
“Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.” ~ Mary Tyler Moore
“In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.” – Bertrand Russell
“Who we are has many faces, but these faces are not who we are.” ~ Charlotte Joko Beck
“The more we trust our instincts, the more trustworthy our instincts become.” ~ unknown
“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” ~ Charles Dickens
“For the spiritual path to work, you have to be ‘reality-centered’ rather than ‘self-centered’” ~ kyabgon traleg rinpoche
To be great is to be misunderstood. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends. – Baltasar Gracian
“Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.” ~ Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“Ability will never catch up with the demand for it.” – Malcolm Forbes
“Anyone can be an idealist. Anyone can be a cynic. The hard part lies somewhere in the middle i.e. being human.” ~ Hugh Macleod
“Traditions are group efforts to keep the unexpected from happening.” – Barbara Tober
“The way we see the problem is the problem.” ~ Stephen Covey
“Searching for something is endless – just be” ~ Niamh Brown
“It’s at the moment that we lend our agreement to a belief that we bring it to life.” ~ intenders handbook
“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” – Buddha
“Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.” ~ Dr. Laura Schlessinger
“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.” ~ Jimi Hendrix
“An idealist is a person who helps other people to be prosperous.” – Henry Ford
“Reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.” – Jane Wagner
“Speak the truth, but leave immediately after.” – Slovenian Proverb
“Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.” – Bertrand Russell
“Ask not what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive… then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” ~ Howard Thurman
“Givers have to set limits because takers rarely do.” ~ Irma Kurtz
“When love beckons to you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep. And when his wings enfold you, yield to him, though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you. And when he speaks to you believe in him, Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.” ~ Kahil Gibran
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Og Mandino
“Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster. Your life will never be the same again.”
// All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and Jill a rich widow.
- Evan Esar I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.
- Michael Crichton All human situations have their inconveniences. We feel those of the present but neither see nor feel those of the future; and hence we often make troublesome changes without amendment, and frequently for the worse.
- Benjamin Franklin // <![CDATA[ // <![CDATA[ // // Sticky Note//
// <![CDATA[
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Current: Overcast
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[...] will be a number of topics, the first one of which is ‘Life‘ which is also a mix of philosophy, self help and personal development. There are plans for a [...]