April 27, 2008

• Quotations — Work in Progress

  The list is long and growing longer.  From time to time I weed out some old ones and put in some new ones, but usually not at the top or bottom, so you’ll just have to scroll through them if you want to find any changes.

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  THE VOYAGERS QUATRAIN
  All phenomena is illusion
  Neither attracted nor repelled
  Not making any sudden moves
  My habits will carry me through.
  ~E. J. Gold

  “If you’ve ever awakened from a dream because you knew it was a dream . . . taking it one step further. . . if you awaken from here and realize it’s a dream, you’re in the waking state.
  ~E. J. Gold

  “It’s infinitely simple. You could sum up the secrets of the universe in two sentences:  Be where you are. Choose what you want.”
  – Gradius & Ragon

  “In Oneness, there is no such thing as disagreement. There is simply infinite variance upon the same, one theme. As your Reconnected Planetary Heart begins to beat in rhythm with this simple truth, your need for policemen and courtrooms will vanish. The time and resources once used to maintain them will be re-allocated to other endeavors. That alone could feed and clothe all the people of the world several times over.
  ~ The Reconnections

  “There’s nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”
  ~Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith

  “Writing is easy, you just sit down and open a vein.”
  ~Ring Lardner, attributed by Dorothy Bryant

  “Writing is easy:  All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”
  ~Gene Fowler

  “Be obscure clearly.”
  ~E.B. White
   
  “I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.”
  ~Kurt Vonnegut

  “The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number.  The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism, but they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.”
  &
  “Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can’t help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”
  —Robert Anson Heinlein
  from Notebooks of Lazarus Long

  “At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.” 
  –Aldous Huxley

  He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.  
  &
  Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
  &
  My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities.
  &
  It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
  &
  Whoever can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.

  –Albert Einstein

  “Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.”
   –James Baldwin

  “No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” 
  –Mary Wollstonecraft

  “There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.”
  —Søren Kierkegaard

  “Truth will have no gods before it. The belief in truth begins with the doubt of all truths in which one has previously believed.” 
  – Friedrich Nietzcshe,
  in Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

  “The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer.” 
  – Albert Einstein

  You cannot put spiritual joy under a microscope; you cannot weigh love in a balance; you cannot measure moral values; neither can you estimate the quality of spiritual worship.
  –The Urantia Book,
  Page 2095 (196:3.5)

  “More faults are committed while we are trying to oblige than while we are giving offense.”
   —Tacitus—

  “The answer is never the answer. What’s really interesting is the mystery. ”
   —Ken Kesey—
  9/17/1935-11/10/2001
  Merry Prankster
  American writer

  “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”
  —Carl Gustav Jung—

  “It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.”
  —Giordano Bruno—

  “The final conflict will be between Pavlov’s dog and Schroedinger’s Cat.”
  —RobertAnton Wilson—

  “TRUTH is within ourselves; it takes no rise,
  From outward things, whate’er you may believe.
  There is an inmost centre in us all,
  Where truth abides in fullness; and around,
  Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,
      This perfect, clear perception—which is truth.
  A baffling and perverting carnal mesh
  Binds it, and makes all error: and, to KNOW,
  Rather consists in opening out a way
  Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,
  Than in effecting entry for a light
  Supposed to be without.”
  —Robert Browning—

  “America will never be destroyed from the outside.  If we falter and lose ourfreedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
  —Abraham Lincoln—

  “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes…known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. … No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
  —James Madison—
  from Political Observations, 1795

  “One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul.”
  from Letter to a Young Activist in Troubled Times
  —Clarissa Pinkola Estés, PhD—

  “There are two things you can truly call your own: Attention and Presence”
  —E.J. Gold—

  “Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
  —G. K. Chesterton—

  “Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when one does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses their intelligence.”
  —Albert Einstein—

  “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in the lack of understanding, but in the lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Have courage to use your own understanding!”
  —Immanuel Kant—

  “Any idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”
  —Oscar Wilde—

  “Rely not on the teacher, but on the teaching.
  Rely not on the words of the teaching, but on the spirit of the words.
  Rely not on theory, but on experience.
  Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
  Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
  Do not believe anything because it is spoken and rumored by many.
  Do not believe in anything because it is written in your religious books.
  Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
  But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
  —the Buddha, Kalama Sutra—

  “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive.  It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then.”
  —Thomas Jefferson—
  from a letter to Abigail Adams,
  February 22, 1787

  “Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.  The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things.”
  —Amelia Earhart—

  Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas.  If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.
  —Howard Aiken—

  “Priests are no more necessary to religion than politicians to patriotism.”
  —John Haynes Holmes—
  American clergyman & reformer
  (1879-1964)

  “How simple it is to see that all the worry in the world cannot control the future.  How simple it is to see that we can only be happy now and that there will never be a time when it is not now.”
  —Gerald Jampolsky—

  “Traditional American values:  genocide, aggression, conformity, emotional repression, and the worship of comfort and consumer goods.”
  —George Carlin—

  “Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral?  It is because we are not the person involved.”
  &
  “The difference between truth and fiction:  Fiction has to make sense.”
  —Mark Twain—

  “What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”
  —F. Scott Fitzgerald—
  from The Love of the Last Tycoon

  “Almost all our faults are more pardonable than the methods we think up to hide them.”
  —Francois de la Rochefoucauld—

  

  • 7:37 pm
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