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Post by Tamrin on Feb 18, 2014 11:54:39 GMT 10
When the flower blooms, the bees come uninvited
God is everywhere but He is most manifest in man. So serve man as God. That is as good as worshipping God
One must be very particular about telling the truth. Through truth one can realize God
The world is indeed a mixture of truth and make-believe. Discard the make-believe and take the truth
Travel in all the four quarters of the earth, yet you will find nothing anywhere. Whatever there is, is only here
Many good sayings are to be found in holy books, but merely reading them will not make one religious
It is easy to talk on religion, but difficult to practice itRamakrishna (Gadadhar Chatterji)Indian mystic and Hindu leader (Born this day 1836) If you want to go east, don't go west
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 18, 2014 11:55:34 GMT 10
1 of 2:God, what is all this talk put out by the popes? Paradise is here, my good man. God, give me no other paradise!
The major and almost only theme of all my work is the struggle of man with "God": The unyielding, inextinguishable struggle of the naked worm called "man" against the terrifying power and darkness of the forces within him and around him
I said to the almond tree: "Speak to me of God." And the almond tree blossomed
My prayer is not the whimpering of a beggar nor a confession of love. Nor is it the petty reckoning of a small tradesman: Give me and I shall give you. My prayer is the report of a soldier to his general: This is what I did today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are the obstacles I encountered, this is how I plan to fight tomorrow
General, the battle draws to a close and I make my report. This is where and how I fought. I fell wounded, lost heart, but did not desert. Though my teeth clattered from fear, I bound my forehead tightly with a red handkerchief to hide the blood, and ran to the assault
At every moment of crisis an array of men risk their lives in the front ranks as standard- bearers of God to fight and take upon themselves the whole responsibility of the battle
It is not God who will save us — it is we who will save God, by battling, by creating, and by transmuting matter into spiritBro. Nikos KazantzakisGreek novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher ( Zorba the Greek) (Born this day 1883) I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 18, 2014 11:56:40 GMT 10
2 of 2:You gave me your curse, holy Fathers. I give you a blessing: May you be as moral and religious as I am
What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams
The highest point a man can obtain is not Knowledge, or Virtue, or Goodness, or Victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe!
Every man worthy of being called a son of man bears his cross and mounts his Golgotha
The Great Spirit does not toil within the bounds of human time, place, or casualty. The Great Spirit is superior to these human questionings. It teems with many rich and wandering drives which to our shallow minds seem contradictory; but in the essence of divinity they fraternize and struggle together, faithful comrades-in-arms
Every person, after completing his service in all labors, reaches finally the highest summit of endeavor, beyond every labor, where he no longer struggles or shouts, where he ripens fully in silence, indestructibly, eternally, with the entire Universe
We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval lifeBro. Nikos Kazantzakis(Born this day 1883) Everything is a unity and this unity is a profound mystic intoxication in which death loses its scythe and ceases to exist
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 18, 2014 11:58:31 GMT 10
No one who has lived even for a fleeting moment for something other than life in its conventional sense and has experienced the exaltation that this feeling produces can then renounce his new freedom so easily
To speak of God, to think of God, is in every respect to show what one is made of. I have always wagered against God and I regard the little that I have won in this world as simply the outcome of this bet. However paltry may have been the stake (my life) I am conscious of having won to the full. Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!
To see, to hear, means nothing. To recognize (or not to recognize) means everything. Between what I do recognize and what I do not recognize there stands myself. And what I do not recognize I shall continue not to recognize
Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten
I have always been amazed at the way an ordinary observer lends so much more credence and attaches so much more importance to waking events than to those occurring in dreams ... Man ... is above all the plaything of his memory
Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions
It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhereAndré BretonFrench poet and principal theorist of Surrealism (Born this day 1896) The man that cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 18, 2014 11:59:24 GMT 10
The vision that you glorify in your mind, the ideal that you enthrone in your heart — this you will build your life by, and this you will become
In all human affairs there are efforts and there are results, and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result
The outer conditions of a person's life will always be found to reflect their inner beliefs
You cannot travel within and stand still without
To begin to think with purpose, is to enter the ranks of those strong ones who only recognize failure as one of the pathways to attainment
Whether you be man or woman you will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor
Circumstances do not determine a man, they reveal himJames Lane AllenUS writer ( Choir Invisible) (Died this day 1925) We do not attract what we want, but what we are
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 18, 2014 12:00:12 GMT 10
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate
I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons
Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war
Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are
If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression
Everybody gets everything handed to them. The rich inherit it. I don't mean just inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network
As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you thinkToni MorrisonUS novelist ( Tar Baby, Beloved, Song of Solomon) (Born this day 1931) Make a difference about something other than yourselves
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 18, 2014 12:01:38 GMT 10
Your silence will not protect you
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect
I am defined as other in every group I'm part of. The outsider, both strength and weakness. Yet without community there is certainly no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression
It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences
When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid
I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or chisel to remind you of your me-ness as I discover you in myself
Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever — Only, nothing is eternalAudre LordeCaribbean-American writer and civil rights activist (Born this day 1934) The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 18, 2014 12:02:22 GMT 10
Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries
The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true
There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry. There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors
The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance — these are what may make a vast, complex, ever growing, ever changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world, nevertheless a world of human community
In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose
This is a world in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do…
No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knowsRobert J OppenheimerUS physicist (creator of atomic bomb) (Died this day 1967) I am become death, the destroyer of worlds
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 19, 2014 7:09:05 GMT 10
Tuesday’s Quotes:Moreover, since the sun remains stationary, whatever appears as a motion of the sun is really due rather to the motion of the earth
Accordingly, since nothing prevents the earth from moving, I suggest that we should now consider also whether several motions suit it, so that it can be regarded as one of the planets. For, it is not the center of all the revolutions
In so many and such important ways, then, do the planets bear witness to the earth's mobility
We regard it as a certainty that the earth, enclosed between poles, is bounded by a spherical surface
The earth together with its surrounding waters must in fact have such a shape as its shadow reveals, for it eclipses the moon with the arc of a perfect circle
Pouring forth its seas everywhere, then, the ocean envelops the earth and fills its deeper chasms
I am not so enamored of my own opinions that I disregard what others may think of them. I am aware that a philosopher's ideas are not subject to the judgement of ordinary persons, because it is his endeavor to seek the truth in all things, to the extent permitted to human reason by God. Yet I hold that completely erroneous views should be shunnedNicolaus CopernicusPolish astronomer (heliocentrism) (Born this day 1473) To know that we know what we know, and to know that we do not know what we do not know, that is true knowledge
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Post by Tamrin on Feb 19, 2014 7:09:46 GMT 10
When I recall today my early youth, I should take the boy that I then was, with the exception of a few individual features, for a different person, were it not for the existence of the chain of memories
Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view
The power of mathematics rests on its evasion of all unnecessary thought and on its wonderful saving of mental operations
To us investigators, the concept 'soul' is irrelevant and a matter for laughter. But matter is an abstraction of exactly the same kind, just as good and just as bad as it is. We know as much about the soul as we do of matter
It would not become physical science to see in its self-created, changeable, economical tools, molecules and atoms, realities behind phenomena… The atom must remain a tool for representing phenomena
Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, — the colours, sounds, and so forth — nothing apart from their so-called attributes
Personally, people know themselves very poorlyErnst MachAustrian physicist, philosopher and psychologist (Died this day 1916) The fact is, every thinker, every philosopher, the moment he is forced to abandon his one-sided intellectual occupation by practical necessity, immediately returns to the general point of view of mankind
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