Look for truth, like a man on fire looks for water.
Everyone who seeks the truth from true wisdom will make himself wings so as to fly, fleeing the lust that scorches the spirits of men. And he will make himself wings to flee every visible spirit.
-The Book of Thomas the Contender Translated by John D. Turner
Three things can not be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.
-Buddha
That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in the next.
-John Stuart Mill
The foolish reject what they see; the wise reject what they think.
-Zen Saying
If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.
-Mark Twain
If you tell the truth, you don't have anything to remember.
-Mark Twain
Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
-Mark Twain
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.
-William Blake
The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.
-Mark Twain
The further a society drifts from the truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
-George Orwell
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
-Socrates
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same god who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
-Galileo
History is a set of lies agreed upon.
-Napoleon Bonaparte
And for those pessimists who say we are fighting a lost cause, well, the truth is that the only causes really worth fighting for are lost causes.
-Captain Paul Watson
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope.
Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
-Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History
Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate, ask yourself, 'Is it true?' At the second ask, 'Is is necessary?' At the third gate ask 'Is it kind?'
-Sufi saying
One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.
-John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
The past is just a story we tell ourselves.
-Samantha, Her (Film)
I have heard, or read, many times, this favorite sentence that music speaks for itself. It is true. All sorts of explanations could not convince you if you have not felt the beauty, the urgency, of a piece of music. But a work of art is never born out of nothing. It is composed, written, painted, at a certain time, within a certain society, at a certain moment in history. Ofcourse, music speaks for itself, but it speaks more forcefully ...if you know more about the language of the composer, what he wants to express, and how he wants to express it.
-Pierre Boulez (French composer, conductor, writer, and pianist.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4dSVuZldjc
"...every human being under the impetus of the soul aspires, as Plato said, to the good, the beautiful, and the true."
-Appellatio Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis R+C 3366
A thousand times we die in one life. We crumble, break and tear apart until the layers of illusion are burned away and all that is left, is the truth of who and what we really are.
-Teal Scott
All living things pre-exist in the invisible world before being born on the earth plane. By extension, they remain spiritually after death. In this, it is true, as claimed by Heraclitus in the sixth century BC, that "nothing is lost or is created, but everything changes."
-Ontology of the Rose Croix
In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
-Carl Sagan
Those who are unaware they are walking in darkness will never seek the light.
-Bruce Lee
Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
-Henry David Thoreau, Walden
So, if we lie to the government it's a felony. But if they lie to us it's politics.
-Bill Murray
I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
-Vincent Van Gogh
Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world would do this, it would change the Earth.
-William Faulkner
There is some good in this world and it's worth fighting for.
-J.R.R. Tolkien
Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed by the masses.
-Plato
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
Art is a lie that tells the truth.
-Pablo Picasso
No lie can live forever.
-Thomas Carlyle - Lecture: The Hero as Divinity
Truth, crushed to Earth, shall rise again.
-William Bryant
Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.
-James Russell Lowell
For our personal advancement in virtue and truth one quality is sufficient, namely, love; to advance humanity there must be two, love and intelligence; to accomplish the Great Work there must be three; love, intelligence, and activity. And yet love is ever the root and the source.
-Louis Claude de Saint-Martin
If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserved to be destroyed by the truth.
-Carl Sagan
What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul.
-Joseph Addison
Most terrorists are false flag terrorists, or are created by our own security services. In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI. In fact, we now have citizens taking out restraining orders against FBI informants that are trying to incite terrorism. We’ve become a lunatic asylum.
-David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps intelligence officer, and the second-highest-ranking civilian in the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence
Logic is the beginning of wisdom...not the end.
-Spock, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
-Philip K. Dick
Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.
-Francis Bacon
The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.
-Robert Anton Wilson
Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as the heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines’.
-George Orwell, Looking back on the Spanish War
Our life is what our thoughts make it.
-Marcus Aurelius
I want to stand 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
Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
-Hector Berlioz
To protect the sheep, you gotta catch the wolf. And it takes a wolf to catch a wolf, you understand?
-Denzel Washington, Training Day
As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.
-Albert Einstein
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
-T.E. Lawrence
Without love the acquisition of knowledge only increases confusion and leads to self-destruction.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.
-HH Dalai Lama
I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
-Gerry Spence
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.
-Carl G. Jung
To see what is right without doing it suggests an absence of courage.
[Whether your a master, or just a man.]
-Kakashi, Naruto, Episode 12 "Battle of the Bridge"
Do you think it's possible that if you were to wake up one morning and come to the realization that your freedom is hanging by a thread, that you wouldn't do anything more than get dressed and go to work, as if it were the same as any other day? Is it possible that our freedom and our country could be lost inch by inch without one defining moment to mark the transformation from freedom to oppression, and is it possible that we could miss hearing the call when it comes, or if we do hear it, simply be too tired or not have the time, the strength, the energy, the know-how, or the courage to stand up for justice anyway?
...and if you haven't the courage to tell the truth, or the consciousness to honor the truth, or the love to love the truth, then one day you will not have the truth to tell, and soon thereafter you will not live in a place that will acknowledge the truth when it is told, and not long after that the truth will not be told, for it will no longer be allowed. You cannot hope to be a traitor to life, and then expect to live in a free and just society.
-Mark A.Goldman, The Critical Choice
Everbody knows the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everbody knows that the war is over
Everbody knows that the good guys lost
-Leonard Cohen, "Everybody Knows," 1998
This too shall pass.
-The Universe
If the truth shall kill them, let them die.
-Immanuel Kant
The trajedy of life is not death but what we let die inside of us while we live.
-Norman Cousins
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.
-George Orwell
The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.
-Stephen McCranie
The best stuff usually comes out on impulse. Or inspiration. And I hardly have to think about it. But I am always writing. In the back of my head.
- John Lennon, in conversation with Rolling Stone Magazine, 1975.
The eyes are useless when the mind is blind.
-Unknown
Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks and invents.
~ Ludwig van Beethoven
I think that humans always tend to talk about rubbish, because they don't really want to talk about the reality that citizens and soldiers are being shot.
-John Lennon
Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance.
-Confucius
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.
-Plato
Diamonds are to be found only in the darkness of the earth, and truth in the darkness of the mind.
-Victor Hugo
One of the greatest indicators of our own spiritual maturity is revealed in how we respond to the weaknesses, the inexperience, and the potentially offensive actions of others.
-David A. Bednar
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
-Aristotle
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
-Albert Einstein
Each nation has created a god, and the god has always resembled his creators. He hated and loved what they hated and loved, and he was invariably found on the side of those in power. Each god was intensely patriotic, and detested all nations but his own. All these gods demanded praise, flattery, and worship. Most of them were pleased with sacrifice, and the smell of innocent blood has ever been considered a divine perfume. All these gods have insisted upon having a vast number of priests, and the priests have always insisted upon being supported by the people, and the principal business of these priests has been to boast about their god, and to insist that he could easily vanquish all the other gods put together.
-Robert G Ingersoll
Music is what emotion sounds like.
-Craig Kelley as Tristerin 2019
It will be said of House Republicans, when they found they lacked the courage to confront the most dangerous and unethical president in American history, they consoled themselves by attacking those who did.
-Adam Schiff, 2019 Impeachment of Donald Trump
There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance & Other Essays
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
-Volataire
A seeker of Truth looks beyond the apparent and contemplates the hidden.
-Rumi
When words fail us, art has a way of bridging meaning.
-Unknown
Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.
-Lao Tzu
It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.
-Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves
Aren’t all religions equally true? No, all religions are equally false. The relationship of religion to truth is like that of a menu to a meal. The menu describes the meal as best it can. It points to something beyond itself. As long as we use the menu as a guide we do it honor. When we mistake the menu for the meal, we do it and ourselves a grave injustice.
-Rabbi Rami Shapiro
The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility. Love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep on watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.
We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight. Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.
You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are! There’s nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can’t wake you up. Only you can wake you up. I can’t cure you, only you can cure you.
You’re all geniuses, and you’re all beautiful. You don’t need anyone to tell you who you are. You are what you are. Get out there and get peace, think peace, and live peace and breathe peace, and you’ll get it as soon as you like.
That’s what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshiped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be.
I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.
Peace is not something you wish for; it’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away. Declare it. Just the same way we declare war. That is how we will have peace… we just need to declare it. Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not if you put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don’t expect Carter or Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself.
My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all. When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.
Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
-John Lennon
What we don't want to know about ourselves, appears outwardly as our fate.
-Carl Jung
Art is standing with one hand extended into the universe and one hand extended into the world, and letting ourselves be a conduit for passing energy.
-Albert Einstein
I have failed far more times than I have succeeded. You will never succeed more than you fail... That's just not how it works. I've pitched more than 200 show ideas in Hollywood, out of those 200 they have picked 5 in 33 years of pitching. They don't write about the shows that didn't get picked, just the hits. So when you fail, it's a part of the process. Keep going, you're supposed to fail. Who you know that gets it right all the time? That's impossible. Every time you fail, your one step closer to your goal.
-Steve Harvey
The most wonderful and magical things in this world are a fleeting experience. Nothing is ever as good as a perfect memory. The moments we share together and the knowledge we impart is what lasts the most. Every photo I take of my work, every poem I write, every song I sing, is a moment, a memory. And a live experience of someone elses art is a treasure to me. I hope you can see the same in what I do.
-Professor S Huntington, Chalk Artist on Twitch
Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.
-Winston Churchill
Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.
-William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Listen to the wind,
it talks.
Listen to the silence,
it speaks.
Listen to your heart,
it knows.
Native American Proverb
Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
-Francis Bacon
THE DILEMMA OF RELIGION
The Religionist may reply that even though God has no objective reality to be perceived by man, yet God and the elements of religion are a personal experience. If God and the various elements of religion have a positive, definite nature, even though they are not objective, should they not be experienced to a great extent alike by all men? The religionist's answer to this is that men inwardly perceive these elements differently because of their own dissimilarity. If this is so, then what is the true or absolute nature of the basic elements of religion? If the fundamentals of religion are entirely an individual experience, then it is improper for any religious group or sect to contend that only their experiences are the true ones.
-Ralph M. Lewis, F.R.C., (1904 - 1987 ) - "The Conscious Interlude"
A good book is the precious life blood of a master spirit , embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life....
-John Milton
Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a clear idea of what poets of strong ages have called inspiration? If not, I will describe it.— If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one’s system, one could hardly reject altogether the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely a medium of overpowering forces. The concept of revelation—in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down—that merely describes the facts. One hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form—I never had any choice.
A rapture whose tremendous tension occasionally discharges itself in a flood of tears—now the pace quickens involuntarily, now it becomes slow; one is altogether beside oneself, with the distinct consciousness of subtle shudders and of one’s skin creeping down to one’s toes; a depth of happiness in which even what is most painful and gloomy does not seem something opposite but rather conditioned, provoked, a necessary color in such a superabundance of light; an instinct for rhythmic relationships that arches over wide spaces of forms—length, the need for a rhythm with wide arches, is almost the measure of the force of inspiration, a kind of compensation for its pressure and tension.
Everything happens involuntarily in the highest degree but as in a gale of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity.— The involuntariness of image and metaphor is strangest of all; one no longer has any notion of what is an image or a metaphor: everything offers itself as the nearest, most obvious, simplest expression. It actually seems, to allude to something Zarathustra says, as if the things themselves approached and offered themselves as metaphors (“Here all things come caressingly to your discourse and flatter you; for they want to ride on your back. On every metaphor you ride to every truth. . . . Here the words and wordshrines of all being open up before you; here all being wishes to become word, all becoming wishes to learn from you how to speak“).
This is my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that one has to go back thousands of years in order to find anyone who could say to me, “it is mine as well."
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (tr. Kaufmann)
...since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer … we have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal.
-Werner Heisenberg, "Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, 1958"
"I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer,"
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet
It is science that has made the old creeds and the old superstitions impossible for intelligent men to accept. It is science that has made it laughable to suppose the earth the center of the universe and man the supreme purpose of the creation. It is science that is showing the falsehood of the old dualisms of soul and body, mind and matter, which have their origin in religion. It is science that is beginning to make us understand ourselves, and to enable us, up to a point, to see ourselves from without as curious mechanisms. It is science that has taught us the way to substitute tentative truth for cocksure error.
-Bertrand Russell, The Art of Philosophizing and other Essays, The Art of Rational Conjecture originally published (1942), p.16
If there is peace in your mind you will find peace with everybody. If your mind is agitated you will find agitation everywhere. So first find peace within and you will see this inner peace reflected everywhere else. You are this peace. You are happiness, find out. Where else will you find peace if not within you?
-Papaji
There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself.
-Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
I release my parents from the feeling that they have failed with me.
I release my children from the need to make me proud, so that they can write their own ways, according to their hearts.
I release my partner from the obligation to make me feel complete. I lack nothing in myself.
I learn with all the beings that surround me through all time.
I thank my grandparents and ancestors who met so that today I breathe life. And I release them from the faults of the past and from the wishes they did not fulfill, aware that they did the best they could to resolve their situations, within the consciousness they had at that moment.
I honor them, I love them, and I recognize their innocence.
I bare my soul before their eyes and that is why they know that I do not hide or owe anything, more than being faithful to myself and my own existence walking with the wisdom of the heart.
I am aware that I am fulfilling my life project, free of visible and invisible family loyalties that may disturb my peace and my happiness, which are my greatest responsibilities.
I renounce the role of savior, of being the one who unites or who fulfills the expectations of others. And learning through LOVE, I bless my essence and my way of expressing, although there may be someone who cannot understand me.
I understand myself, because only I lived and experienced my story; because I know myself, I know who I am, what I feel, what I do and why I do it.
I respect and approve.
I honor the Divinity in me and in you.
We are free.
-A Traditional Náhuatl Prayer
The folks who know the truth aren't talking...The ones who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up!
-Tom Waits
To the degree you approach the truth, your solitude will increase...Keep going. Don’t be afraid. The worst has already taken place. Of course, life will rip you apart again; but, as for you, you no longer have much to do with it. Remember this: fundamentally, you are already dead. You are now face to face with eternity.
-Michel Houellebecq
Art attracts us only by what
it reveals of our most
secret self.
-Jean-Luc Godard
The ancients, to awake from life, turned to death. The moderns flee from death in order not to awake, and take pains not even to think of it. Which are the more ‘practical’? Those who compare earthly life to sleep and wait for the miracle of the awakening, or those who see in death a sleep without dream-faces, the perfect sleep, and while away their time with ‘reasonable’ and ‘natural’ explanations? That is the basic question of philosophy, and he who evades it evades philosophy itself.
-Lev Shestov
In Ancient Greece, Socrates had a great reputation of wisdom. One day, someone came to find the great philosopher and said to him:
- Do you know what I just heard about your friend?
- A moment, replied Socrates. Before you tell me, I would like to test you the three sieves.
- The three sieves?
- Yes, continued Socrates. Before telling anything about the others, it's good to take the time to filter what you mean.
I call it the test of the three sieves.
The first sieve is the TRUTH. Have you checked if what you're going to tell me is true?
- No, I just heard it.
- Very good! So, you don't know if it's true.
We continue with the second sieve, that of KINDNESS. What you want to tell me about my friend, is it good?
- Oh, no! On the contrary.
- So, questioned Socrates, you want to tell me bad things about him and you're not even sure they're true? Maybe you can still pass the test of the third sieve, that of UTILITY. Is it useful that I know what you're going to tell me about this friend?
- No, really.
- So, concluded Socrates, what you were going to tell me is neither true, nor good, nor useful. Why, then, did you want to tell me this?
Gossip is a bad thing. In the beginning it may seem enjoyable and fun, but in the end, it fills our hearts with bitterness and poisons us, too!
If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one's own self-deception and ignorance.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations: A New Translation
To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
-Mary Oliver
We are dissipating superstition, ignorance, and fear. We are forging courage, will, and knowledge. Every striving toward enlightenment is welcome. Every prejudice, caused by ignorance, is exposed.
-Nicholas Roerich
Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent."
-Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?
-Robert Louis Stevenson
If you play music with passion, love, and honesty, it will nourish your soul, heal your wounds, and make your life worth living. Music is its own reward.
— Sting