These are quotes from famous people that resonate with me:
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” Buddha quotes (Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.)
“Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence – whether much that is glorious – whether all that is profound – does not spring from disease of thought – from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.” ― Edgar Allan Poe
“Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.” ― Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Let the labyrinth of wrinkles be furrowed in my brow with the red-hot iron of my own life, let my hair whiten and my step become vacillating, on condition that I can save the intelligence of my soul ― let my unformed childhood soul, as it ages, assume the rational and aesthetic forms of an architecture, let me learn just everything that others cannot teach me, what only life would be capable of marking deeply in my skin!” ― Salvador Dalí
Both Harada Roshi and Yasutani Roshi were strong promoters of Zen practice for lay practitioners, and for people of other (non-Buddhist, non-Asian) faith communities and cultures. Harada-Yasutani
“The conventional mind is passive - it consumes information and regurgitates it in familiar forms. The dimensional mind is active; transforming everything it digests into something new and original, creating instead of consuming.”
“Those qualities that separate us are often ridiculed by others or criticized by teachers. Because of these judgments, we might see our strengths as disabilities and try to work around them in order to fit in. But anything that is peculiar to our makeup is precisely what we must pay the deepest attention to and lean on in our rise to mastery.”
“The problem with all students, he said, is that they inevitably stop somewhere. They hear an idea and they hold on to it until it becomes dead; they want to flatter themselves that they know the truth. But true Zen never stops, never congeals into such truths. That is why everyone must constantly be pushed to the abyss, starting over and feeling their utter worthlessness as a student. Without suffering and doubts, the mind will come to rest on clichés and stay there, until the spirit dies as well. Not even enlightenment is enough. You must continually start over and challenge yourself.” ― Robert Greene, Mastery
“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.” ― Allen Ginsberg
A term coined in the 1988 Disney film "Oliver and Co." For those cats that are just too cool for school and have mad amounts of street saviore faire.
Dodger: And once you got the beat,
you can do anything.
Oliver: I can?
Dodger: Absotively Posilutely!
“Nothing is 100% right or wrong; they merely vary in their degree of incompleteness and dysfunction. No one or nothing is 100% good or evil; they just vary in their degree of ignorance and disconnection. All knowledge is a work in progress.” Ken Wilber
“In fact, at this point in history, the most radical, pervasive, and earth-shaking transformation would occur simply if everybody truly evolved to a mature, rational, and responsible ego, capable of freely participating in the open exchange of mutual self-esteem. There is the "edge of history." There would be a real New Age.” Ken Wilber
“I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody — including me — has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace. To Freudians I say, have you looked at Buddhism? To Buddhists I say, have you studied Freud? To liberals I say, have you thought about how important some conservative ideas are? To conservatives I say, Can you perhaps include a more liberal perspective? And so on, and so on, and so on... At no point I have ever said: Freud is wrong, Buddha is wrong, liberals are wrong, conservatives are wrong. I have only suggested that they are true but partial. My critical writings have never attacked the central beliefs of any discipline, only the claims that the particular discipline has the only truth — and on those grounds I have often been harsh. But every approach, I honestly believe, is essentially true but partial, true but partial, true but partial.
And on my own tombstone, I dearly hope that someday they will write: He was true but partial...” Ken Wilber
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” ― Gautama Buddha
“Very few of us are what we seem” Agatha Christie
Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.
We must risk a loss of passionate connection
to distance ourselves from our work,
to grow a little cold to it in order to revise,
in order to look at a poem as a series of decisions.
Why this and not that?
Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction
When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace. Jimi Hendrix
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