Quote of the day
There is a certain cloud,
impregnated with a
thousand lightnings.
There is my body —
in it an ocean formed of His glory.
All the creation,
All the universes,
All the galaxies,
Are lost in it.~ Rumi ~
Beautiful.
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Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.
Robert Maynard Pirsig (born 6 September 1928) is an American philosopher and novelist.
Contents
[hide]
[edit] Quotes
- Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.
- NPR Interview with Pirsig (1974)
- Making… an art out of your technological life is the way to solve the problem of technology.
- NPR Interview (1974)
- The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.
- As quoted in The Book of Bob : Choice Words, Memorable Men (2007) by Tom Crisp, p. 107
[edit] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values ISBN 0553277472 (HC) / ISBN 0060839872 (TPB)
You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other…
Some channel deepening seems called for.
The world of underlying form is an unusual object of discussion because it is actually a mode of discussion itself.
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
These shapes are all out of someone’s mind. That’s important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone’s mind…
The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow…
What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word ‘quality’ cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.
What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos… the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man…
Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion.
Can the dharma of the Hindus and the “virtue” of the ancient Greeks be identical?
Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine “virtue.” But areté. Excellence. Dharma!
The hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send…
The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.
The One can only be described allegorically, through the use of analogy, of figures of imagination and speech… Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don’t know that…
When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes…
What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good… need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We’ve won it. It’s going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.
- What follows is based on actual occurrences. Although much has been changed for rhetorical purposes, it must be regarded in its essence as fact. However, it should in no way be associated with that great body of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles, either.
- Introduction
- You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
- Ch. 1
- The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.
- Ch. 1
- We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone.
- Ch. 1
- I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. “What’s new?” is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?,” a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and “best” was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.
- Ch. 1
- Now I want to begin to fulfill a certain obligation by stating that there was one person, no longer here, who had something to say, and who said it, but whom no one believed or really understood. Forgotten. For reasons that will become apparent I’d prefer that he remain forgotten, but there’s no choice other than to reopen his case.
I don’t know his whole story. No one ever will, except Phædrus himself, and he can no longer speak. But from his writings and from what others have said and from fragments of my own recall it should be possible to piece together some kind of approximation of what he was talking about.
- Ch. 6
- Identifying his “destroyed” personality as “Phædrus“
- The world of underlying form is an unusual object of discussion because it is actually a mode of discussion itself. You discuss things in terms of their immediate appearance or you discuss them in terms of their underlying form, and when you try to discuss these modes of discussion you get involved in what could be called a platform problem. You have no platform from which to discuss them other than the modes themselves.
- Ch. 6
- You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.
- The romantic mode is primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate. “Art” when it is opposed to “Science” is often romantic. It does not proceed by reason or by laws. It proceeds by feeling, intuition and esthetic conscience. In the northern European cultures the romantic mode is usually associated with femininity, but this is certainly not a necessary association.
The classic mode, by contrast, proceeds by reason and by laws… which are themselves underlying forms of thought and behavior. In the European cultures it is primarily a masculine mode and the fields of science, law and medicine are unattractive to women largely for this reason. Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
- Ch. 6
- In recent times we have seen a huge split develop between a classic culture and a romantic counterculture… two worlds growingly alienated and hateful toward each other with everyone wondering if it will always be this way, a house divided against itself.
- Ch. 6
- What Phædrus thought and said is significant. But no one was listening at that time and they only thought him eccentric at first, then undesirable, then slightly mad, and then genuinely insane. There seems little doubt that he was insane, but much of his writing at the time indicates that what was driving him insane was this hostile opinion of him. Unusual behavior tends to produce estrangement in others which tends to further the unusual behavior and thus the estrangement in self-stoking cycles until some sort of climax is reached. In Phædrus’ case there was a court-ordered police arrest and permanent removal from society.
- Ch. 6
- When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he’s insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it.
- Ch. 7
- It took me more than a week to deduce from the evidence around me that everything before my waking up was a dream and everything afterward was reality. There was no basis for distinguishing the two other than the growing pile of new events that seemed to argue against the drunk experience. Little things appeared, like the locked door, the outside of which I could never remember seeing. And a slip of paper from the probate court telling me that some person was committed as insane. Did they mean me?
- Ch. 7
- They had made the mistake of thinking of a personality as some sort of possession, like a suit of clothes, which a person wears. But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
- Ch. 7
- Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included.
- Ch. 8
- We are at the classic-romantic barrier now, where on one side we see a cycle as it appears immediately… and this is an important way of seeing it… and where on the other side we can begin to see it as a mechanic does in terms of underlying form… and this is an important way of seeing things too. These tools for example… this wrench… has a certain romantic beauty to it, but its purpose is always purely classical. It’s designed to change the underlying form of the machine.
- Ch. 8
- That’s all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel. There’s no part in it, no shape in it, that is not out of someone’s mind
- Ch. 8
- I’ve noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this… that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes… pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts… all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees “steel” as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not.
- Ch. 8
- These shapes are all out of someone’s mind. That’s important to see. The steel? Hell, even the steel is out of someone’s mind. There’s no steel in nature. Anyone from the Bronze Age could have told you that. All nature has is a potential for steel. There’s nothing else there. But what’s “potential”? That’s also in someone’s mind!
- Ch. 8
- The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
- Ch. 9; this has also appeared in paraphrased form as “The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
- You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
- Ch. 13
- I think present-day reason is an analogue of the flat earth of the medieval period. If you go too far beyond it you’re presumed to fall off, into insanity. And people are very much afraid of that. I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world. Or the fear of heretics. There’s a very close analogue there.
- Ch. 14
- What’s happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we’re getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought… occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like… because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.
- Ch. 14
- A rush of wind comes furiously now, down from the mountaintop. “The ancient Greeks,” I say, “who were the inventors of classical reason, knew better than to use it exclusively to foretell the future. They listened to the wind and predicted the future from that. That sounds insane now. But why should the inventors of reason sound insane?”
- Ch. 14
- Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you are no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn’t just a means to an an end but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow.
- Ch. 17
- I think metaphysics is good if it improves everyday life; otherwise forget it.
- Ch. 20
- Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word ‘quality’ cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.
- Ch. 20
- In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.
- Ch. 20
- Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.
- Ch. 20
- Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.
- Ch. 24
- The solutions all are simple… after you have arrived at them. But they’re simple only when you know already what they are.
- Ch. 24
- The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is.
- Ch. 28
- There is only one kind of person, Phædrus said, who accepts or rejects the mythos in which he lives. And the definition of that person, when he has rejected the mythos, Phædrus said, is “insane.” To go outside the mythos is to become insane.
- Ch. 28
- You have all these fragments, like pieces of a puzzle, and you can place them together into large groups, but the groups don’t go together no matter how you try, and then suddenly you get one fragment and it fits two different groups and then suddenly the two great groups are one. The relation of the mythos to insanity. That’s a key fragment. I doubt whether anyone ever said that before. Insanity is the terra incognita surrounding the mythos. And he knew! He knew the Quality he talked about lay outside the mythos.
- Ch. 28
- Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to Quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are. You know something and then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality stimulus, but to define it all you’ve got to work with is what you know. So your definition is made up of what you know. It’s an analogue to what you already know. It has to be. It can’t be anything else. And the mythos grows this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to either side… that is the terra incognita of the insane. He knew that to understand Quality he would have to leave the mythos. That’s why he felt that slippage. He knew something was about to happen.
- Ch. 28
- The mythos. The mythos is insane. That’s what he believed. The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!
- Ch. 28
- It’s paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you’d think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn’t see it so much.
The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It’s psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it’s reversed.
- Ch. 29
- That’s the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. I’m undoubtedly over-generalizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true.
- Ch. 29
- Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices… TV, jets, freeways and so on… but I hope it’s been made plain that the real evil isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It’s the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. That’s why I went to so much trouble to show how technology could be used to destroy the evil. A person who knows how to fix motorcycles… with Quality… is less likely to run short of friends than one who doesn’t. And they aren’t going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality destroys objectivity every time.
- Ch. 29
- Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn’t think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.
- Ch. 29
- My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that’s all. God, I don’t want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There’s a place for them but they’ve got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. We’ve had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now it’s just about depleted. Everyone’s just about out of gumption. And I think it’s about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource…individual worth. There are political reactionaries who’ve been saying something close to this for years. I’m not one of them, but to the extent they’re talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich, they’re right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.
- Ch. 29
- The Professor of Philosophy has made a mistake. He’s wasted his disciplinary authority on an innocent student while Phædrus, the guilty one, the hostile one, is still at large. And getting larger and larger. Since he has asked no questions there is now no way to cut him down. And now that he sees how the questions will be answered he’s certainly not about to ask them.
The innocent student stares down at the table, face red, hands shrouding his eyes. His shame becomes Phædrus’ anger. In all his classes he never once talked to a student like that. So that’s how they teach classics at the University of Chicago. Phædrus knows the Professor of Philosophy now. But the Professor of Philosophy doesn’t know Phædrus.
- Ch. 29
- The Professor of Philosophy seems quite aware of what has happened. His previous little eye-flick of malice toward Phædrus has turned to a little eye-flick of fear. He seems to understand that within the present classroom situation, when the time comes, he can get exactly the same treatment he gave, and there will be no sympathy from any of the faces before him. He’s thrown away his right to courtesy. There’s no way to prevent retaliation now except to keep covered.
- Ch. 29
- Aristotle has always been eminently attackable and eminently attacked throughout history, and shooting down Aristotle’s patent absurdities, like shooting fish in a barrel, didn’t afford much satisfaction.
- Ch. 29
- Dialectic generally means “of the nature of the dialogue,” which is a conversation between two persons. Nowadays it means logical argumentation. It involves a technique of cross-examination, by which truth is arrived at.
- Ch. 29
- Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each generation, moving onward and upward toward the “one.” Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the “many.”
- Ch. 29
- Socrates is not using dialectic to understand rhetoric, he is using it to destroy it, or at least to bring it into disrepute, and so his questions are not real questions at all… they are just word-traps which Gorgias and his fellow rhetoricians fall into.
- Ch. 29
- When it is known that Plato put his own words in Socrates’ mouth (Aristotle says this) there should be no reason to doubt that he could have put his own words into other mouths too.
- Ch. 29
- Many of the older Sophists were selected as “ambassadors” of their cities, certainly no office of disrespect. The name Sophist was even applied without disparagement to Socrates and Plato themselves.
- Ch. 29
- The Immortal Principle was first called water by Thales. Anaximenes called it air. The Pythagoreans called it number and were thus the first to see the Immortal Principle as something nonmaterial. Heraclitus called the Immortal Principle fire and introduced change as part of the Principle. He said the world exists as a conflict and tension of opposites. He said there is a One and there is a Many and the One is the universal law which is immanent in all things. Anaxagoras was the first to identify the One as nous, meaning “mind.”
Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot be overstated. It’s here that the classic mind, for the first time, took leave of its romantic origins and said, “The Good and the True are not necessarily the same,” and goes its separate way. Anaxagoras and Parmenides had a listener named Socrates who carried their ideas into full fruition.
- Ch. 29
- What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later. The modern mind sometimes tends to balk at the thought of these dichotomies being inventions and says, “Well, the divisions were there for the Greeks to discover,” and you have to say, “Where were they? Point to them!” And the modern mind gets a little confused and wonders what this is all about anyway, and still believes the divisions were there.
But they weren’t, as Phædrus said. They are just ghosts, immortal gods of the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are in that mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the anthropomorphic Gods they replaced.
- Ch. 29
- The followers of Heraclitus insisted the Immortal Principle was change and motion. But Parmenides’ disciple, Zeno, proved through a series of paradoxes that any perception of motion and change is illusory. Reality had to be motionless.
The resolution of the arguments of the Cosmologists came from a new direction entirely, from a group Phædrus seemed to feel were early humanists. They were teachers, but what they sought to teach was not principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all truths, are relative, they said. “Man is the measure of all things.” These were the famous teachers of “wisdom,” the Sophists of ancient Greece.
- Ch. 29
- Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. The Sophists are the enemy.
Now Plato’s hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not because they are low and immoral people… there are obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece he completely ignores. He damns them because they threaten mankind’s first beginning grasp of the idea of truth. That’s what it is all about.
- Ch. 29
- The results of Socrates’ martyrdom and Plato’s unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish unrediscovered by the Renaissance it’s unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all.
- Ch. 29
- Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things…
- Ch. 29
- How are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue.
- Ch. 29
- “What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism,” Kitto comments, “is not a sense of duty as we understand it… duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate ‘virtue’ but is in Greek areté, ‘excellence’ — we shall have much to say about areté. It runs through Greek life.”
There, Phædrus thinks, is a definition of Quality that had existed a thousand years before the dialecticians ever thought to put it to word-traps. Anyone who cannot understand this meaning without logical definiens and definendum and differentia is either lying or so out of touch with the common lot of humanity as to be unworthy of receiving any reply whatsoever.
- Ch. 29
- Phædrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of “duty toward self ” which is an almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes described as the “one” of the Hindus. Can the dharma of the Hindus and the “virtue” of the ancient Greeks be identical?
- Ch. 29
- Lightning hits!
Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine “virtue.” But areté. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric.
- Ch. 29
- The rain has lifted enough so that we can see the horizon now, a sharp line demarking the light grey of the sky and the darker grey of the water.
- Ch. 29
- The hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing areté.
Areté implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency… or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.
- Ch. 29
- Now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth… but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.
- Ch. 29
- The halo around the heads of Plato and Socrates is now gone. He sees that they consistently are doing exactly that which they accuse the Sophists of doing… using emotionally persuasive language for the ulterior purpose of making the weaker argument, the case for dialectic, appear the stronger. We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
- Ch. 29
- Why destroy areté? And no sooner had he asked the question than the answer came to him. Plato hadn’t tried to destroy areté. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made areté the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.
- Ch. 29
- The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.
- Ch. 29
- Plato finds it necessary to separate, for example, “horseness” from “horse” and say that horseness is real and fixed and true and unmoving, while the horse is a mere, unimportant, transitory phenomenon. Horseness is pure Idea. The horse that one sees is a collection of changing Appearances, a horse that can flux and move around all it wants to and even die on the spot without disturbing horseness, which is the Immortal Principle and can go on forever in the path of the Gods of old.
- Ch. 29
- In his attempt to unite the Good and the True by making the Good the highest Idea of all, Plato is nevertheless usurping areté’s place with dialectically determined truth. Once the Good has been contained as a dialectical idea it is no trouble for another philosopher to come along and show by dialectical methods that areté, the Good, can be more advantageously demoted to a lower position within a “true” order of things, more compatible with the inner workings of dialectic. Such a philosopher was not long in coming. His name was Aristotle.
- Ch. 29
- Under Aristotle the “Reader,” whose knowledge of Trojan areté seems conspicuously absent, forms and substances dominate all. The Good is a relatively minor branch of knowledge called ethics; reason, logic, knowledge are his primary concerns. Areté is dead and science, logic and the University as we know it today have been given their founding charter: to find and invent an endless proliferation of forms about the substantive elements of the world and call these forms knowledge, and transmit these forms to future generations. As “the system.”
- Ch. 29
- Poor rhetoric, once “learning” itself, now becomes reduced to the teaching of mannerisms and forms, Aristotelian forms, for writing, as if these mattered.
- Ch. 29
- The bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and fall. Through the decline and death of ancient Rome and Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire and the modern states… buried so deep and with such ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman centuries later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror what had been done.
- Ch. 29
- Plato often names Socrates’ foils for characteristics of their personality. A young, overtalkative, innocent and good-natured foil in the Gorgias is named Polus, which is Greek for “colt.” Phædrus’ personality is different from this. He is unallied to any particular group. He prefers the solitude of the country to the city. He is aggressive to the point of being dangerous. At one point he threatens Socrates with violence. Phædrus, in Greek, means “wolf.” In this dialogue he is carried away by Socrates’ discourse on love and is tamed.
- Ch. 30
- It is an immortal dialogue, strange and puzzling at first, but then hitting you harder and harder, like truth itself. What Phædrus has been talking about as Quality, Socrates appears to have described as the soul, self-moving, the source of all things. There is no contradiction. There never really can be between the core terms of monistic philosophies. The One in India has got to be the same as the One in Greece. If it’s not, you’ve got two. The only disagreements among the monists concern the attributes of the One, not the One itself. Since the One is the source of all things and includes all things in it, it cannot be defined in terms of those things, since no matter what thing you use to define it, the thing will always describe something less than the One itself. The One can only be described allegorically, through the use of analogy, of figures of imagination and speech. Socrates chooses a heaven-and-earth analogy, showing how individuals are drawn toward the One by a chariot drawn by two horses.
- Ch. 30
- In this allegory the seeker, trying to reach the One, is drawn by two horses, one white and noble and temperate, and the other surly, stubborn, passionate and black. The one is forever aiding him in his upward journey to the portals of heaven, the other is forever confounding him. The Chairman has not stated it yet, but he is at the point at which he must now announce that the white horse is temperate reason, the black horse is dark passion, emotion. He is at the point at which these must be described, but the false note suddenly becomes a chorus.
- Ch. 30
- All this is just an analogy.
- Ch. 30
- Fantastic, Phædrus thinks, that he should have remembered that. It just demolishes the whole dialectical position. That may just be the whole show right there. Of course it’s an analogy. Everything is an analogy. But the dialecticians don’t know that.
- Ch. 30
- No one sees it yet, but they will soon enough. The Chairman of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods has just been shot down in his own classroom.
Now he is speechless. He can’t think of a word to say. The silence which so built his image at the beginning of the class is now destroying it. He doesn’t understand from where the shot has come. He has never confronted a living Sophist. Only dead ones.
- Ch. 30
- When a shepherd goes to kill a wolf, and takes his dog to see the sport, he should take care to avoid mistakes. The dog has certain relationships to the wolf the shepherd may have forgotten.
- Ch. 30
- Once it’s stated that “the dialectic comes before anything else,” this statement itself becomes a dialectical entity, subject to dialectical question.
- Ch. 30
- Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.
- Ch. 30
- A lifetime of blows tends to make a person unenthusiastic about any unnecessary interchange that might lead to more. Nothing friendly has been said or even hinted at and much hostility has been shown.
Phædrus the wolf. It fits.
- Ch. 30
- The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What’s really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat. Phædrus sees that he has thrown away a chance to integrate himself into the organization by submitting to whatever Aristotelian thing he is supposed to submit to. But that kind of opportunity seems hardly worth the bowing and scraping and intellectual prostration necessary to maintain it. It is a low-quality form of life.
- Ch. 30
- Quality is better seen up at the timberline than here obscured by smoky windows and oceans of words, and he sees that what he is talking about can never really be accepted here because to see it one has to be free from social authority and this is an institution of social authority. Quality for sheep is what the shepherd says. And if you take a sheep and put it up at the timberline at night when the wind is roaring, that sheep will be panicked half to death and will call and call until the shepherd comes, or comes the wolf.
- Ch. 30
- The city closes in on him now, and in his strange perspective it becomes the antithesis of what he believes. The citadel not of Quality, the citadel of form and substance. Substance in the form of steel sheets and girders, substance in the form of concrete piers and roads, in the form of brick, of asphalt, of auto parts, old radios, and rails, dead carcasses of animals that once grazed the prairies. Form and substance without Quality. That is the soul of this place. Blind, huge, sinister and inhuman: seen by the light of fire flaring upward in the night from the blast furnaces in the south, through heavy coal smoke deeper and denser into the neon of BEER and PIZZA and LAUNDROMAT signs and unknown and meaningless signs along meaningless straight streets going off into other straight streets forever.
If it was all bricks and concrete, pure forms of substance, clearly and openly, he might survive. It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill.
- Ch. 30
- A single thought begins to grow in his mind, extracted from something he read in the dialogue Phædrus. . . . What is good, Phædrus, and what is not good… need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
- Ch. 30
- For three days and three nights, Phædrus stares at the wall of the bedroom, his thoughts moving neither forward nor backward, staying only at the instant. His wife asks if he is sick, and he does not answer. His wife becomes angry, but Phædrus listens without responding. He is aware of what she says but is no longer able to feel any urgency about it. Not only are his thoughts slowing down, but his desires too. And they slow and slow, as if gaining an imponderable mass. So heavy, so tired, but no sleep comes. He feels like a giant, a million miles tall. He feels himself extending into the universe with no limit.
He begins to discard things, encumbrances that he has carried with him all his life. He tells his wife to leave with the children, to consider themselves separated. Fear of loathsomeness and shame disappear when his urine flows not deliberately but naturally on the floor of the room. Fear of pain, the pain of the martyrs is overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately but naturally down into his fingers until they are extinguished by blisters formed by their own heat. His wife sees his injured hands and the urine on the floor and calls for help.
But before help comes, slowly, imperceptibly at first, the entire consciousness of Phædrus begins to come apart — to dissolve and fade away. Then gradually he no longer wonders what will happen next. He knows what will happen next, and tears flow for his family and for himself and for this world.
- Ch. 30
- A fragment comes and lingers from an old Christian hymn, “You’ve got to cross that lonesome valley.” It carries him forward. “You’ve got to cross it by yourself.” It seems a Western hymn that belongs out in Montana.
“No one else can cross it for you,” it says. It seems to suggest something beyond. “You’ve got to cross it by yourself.”
He crosses a lonesome valley, out of the mythos, and emerges as if from a dream, seeing that his whole consciousness, the mythos, has been a dream and no one’s dream but his own, a dream he must now sustain of his own efforts. Then even “he” disappears and only the dream of himself remains with himself in it.
- Ch. 30
- When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.
- The Quality, the areté he has fought so hard for, has sacrificed for, has never betrayed, but in all that time has never once understood, now makes itself clear to him and his soul is at rest.
- Ch. 30
- I am Phædrus, that is who I am, and they are going to destroy me for speaking the Truth.
- Ch. 31
- Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We’ve won it. It’s going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.
- Ch. 32
Out of sequence:
- Anxiety, the next gumption’s trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You’re so sure you’ll do everything wrong you’re afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than “laziness,” is the real reason you find it hard to get started. This gumption trap of anxiety, which results from over-motivation, can lead to all kinds of errors of excessive fussiness. You fix things that don’t need fixing, and chase after imaginary ailments. You jump to wild conclusions and build all kinds of errors into the machine because of your own nervousness. These errors, when made, tend to confirm your original underestimation of yourself. This leads to more errors, which lead to more underestimation, in a self-stoking cycle. The best way to break this cycle, I think, is to work out your anxieties on paper. Read every book and magazine you can on the subject. Your anxiety makes this easy and the more you read the more you calm down.
- I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature, which are inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another; or with programs full of things for other people to do. I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle.
[edit] Afterword (1984)
- Afterword to the 10th anniversary edition, written in Gothenburg, Sweden.
- Who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
- Certainly no one could have predicted what has happened. Back then, after 121 others had turned this book down, one lone editor offered a standard $3,000 advance. He said the book forced him to decide what he was in publishing for, and added that although this was almost certainly the last payment, I shouldn’t be discouraged. Money wasn’t the point with a book like this.
- There is a Swedish word, kulturbärer, which can be translated as “culture-bearer” but still doesn’t mean much. It’s not a concept that has much American use, although it should have.
- A culture-bearing book, like a mule, bears the culture on its back. No one should sit down to write one deliberately. Culture-bearing books occur almost accidentally, like a sudden change in the stock market. There are books of high quality that are an part of the culture, but that is not the same. They are a part of it. They aren’t carrying it anywhere. They may talk about insanity sympathetically, for example, because that’s the standard cultural attitude. But they don’t carry any suggestion that insanity might be something other than sickness or degeneracy.
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin was no literary masterpiece but it was a culture-bearing book. It came at a time when the entire culture was about to reject slavery. People seized upon it as a portrayal of their own new values and it became an overwhelming success.
The success of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seems the result of this culture-bearing phenomenon. The involuntary shock treatment described here is against the law today. It is a violation of human liberty. The culture has changed.
- The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it “freedom,” but in the final analysis “freedom” is a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren’t really offering any alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it’s hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.
- Nell teaches aspects of parenthood never understood before. If she cries or makes a mess or decides to be contrary (and these are relatively rare), it doesn’t bother. There is always Chris’s silence to compare it to. What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on. In terms of this larger pattern the lines at the end of this book still stand. We have won it. Things are better now. You can sort of tell these things.
[edit] Lila (1991)
- Full title: Lila : An Inquiry Into Morals ISBN 0-553-29961-1
- The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.
- The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society you don’t start with cops. And if you are going to reform intellect you don’t start with psychiatrists. If you don’t like our present social system or intellectual system the best thing you can do with either cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them till last.
- Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
- The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems run down like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only ‘runs up,’ converting low energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep ‘running up’ faster and faster. Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What’s the motive? If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and small amounts of other minerals. It’s a one-way reaction. No matter what kind of chemistry professor we use and no matter what process we use we can’t turn these compounds back into a chemistry professor. Chemistry professors are unstable mixtures of predominantly unstable compounds which, in the exclusive presence of the sun’s heat, decay irreversibly into simpler organic and inorganic compounds. That’s a scientific fact. The question is: Then why does nature reverse this process? What on earth causes the inorganic compounds to go the other way? It isn’t the sun’s energy. We just saw what the sun’s energy did. It has to be something else. What is it?
The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.
- Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It is reproducible.
- Between the subject and the object lies the value. This Value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any ‘self’ or any ‘object’ to which it may be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether possibly something else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. But that the quality is low is absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed.
- The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around.
- Good is a noun rather than an adjective.
- Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food.
- Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
[edit] Disputed
Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience.
- To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience.
- This appears in what could be either a paraphrase, a quote, or a re-translation of Pirsig in My Mercedes Is Not for Sale : From Amsterdam to Ouagadougou : An Auto-misadventure Across the Sahara (2006) by Jeroen van Bergeijk, in a 2008 translation.
[edit] Quotes about Pirsig
- Alphabetized by author or source
- A hypnotist’s crystal… sparkled with diamonds.
- Richard Bach, as quoted in promotinal blurb on a 1984 edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- It is filled with beauty. . . a finely made whole that seems to emanate from a very special grace.
- Baltimore Sun, as quoted in promotinal blurb on a 1984 edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- A moving tale of the modern soul, and a fine detective story of a man in search of himself. Beautifully, lucidly written, it offers a large challenge and an equal reward. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is one Harley of a book.
- Chicago Daily News, as quoted in promotinal blurb on a 1984 edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- This book has as much to say about computers as Zen or motorcycle maintenance… Pirsig says more sensible things about the relationship between man and machines in the first half of his book, than a lot of books have to say in two halves.
- Peter Kugel in Creative Computing (1976)
- This book is brilliant beyond belief, it is probably a work of genius, and will, I’ll wager, attain classic stature.
- James Landis, pitching Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to the editorial board of William Morrow.
- Profoundly important… full of insights into our most perplexing contemporary dilemmas… It is intellectual entertainment of the highest order.
- ‘The New York Times as quoted in promotinal blurb on a 1984 edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- Told by the blurb that we have here “one of the most unique and exciting books in the history of American letters,” one bridles both at the grammar of the claim and at its routine excess. The grammar stays irreparable. But I have a hunch that the assertion itself is valid… Zen and the Art is awkward both to live with and to write about. It lodges in the mind as few recent novels have, deepening its grip, compelling the landscape into unexpected planes of order and menace… the narrative tact, the perfect economy of effect, defy criticism… the analogies with Moby Dick are patent. Robert Pirsig invites the prodigious comparison… What more can one say?
- George Steiner, in “Uneasy Rider”, The New Yorker (15 April 1974)
- It’s a miracle… sparkles like an electric dream. Freshness, originality… that seduces you into loving motorcycles, as tender in their pistons as the petals in the Buddah’s dawn lotus.
- The Village Voice, as quoted in promotinal blurb on a 1984 edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
[edit] External links
- A brief biography of Pirsig from the American Society of Authors and Writers
- Pictures from Robert Pirsig’s original 1968 trip upon which Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is based
- Photograph of Pirsig and the motorcycle he rode in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- Timeline of Robert Pirsig’s life
- “The Quality of Madness in Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: A Conversation”
- ZAMM Travel Route
- robertpirsig.org A website containing a number of papers concerned with the Metaphysics of Quality.
- Metaphysics of Quality page
- Robert M. Pirsig & Quality
- Lila Squad Booklisting
- More Metaphysics of Quality links
- Audio: 1974 NPR Interview with Pirsig
- Audio: 1992 NPR Interview with Pirsig
Retrieved from “http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_M._Pirsig“
Quote of the day
The warm sun kissed the earth
To consecrate thy birth,
And from his close embrace
Thy radiant face
Sprang into sight,
A blossoming delight.
Art is the one form of human energy in the whole world, which really works for union, and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal.
~ John Galsworthy ~
It is the nature of the noble and the good and the wise that they impart to us of their nobility and their goodness and their wisdom while they live, making it natural for us to breathe the air they breathe and giving us confidence in our own untested powers. And the same influence in more ethereal fashion they continue to exert after they are gone.
~ Felix Adler ~
Hard to argue against that.
Sun-swept beaches with a light wind blowing
From the immense blue circle of the sea,
And the soft thunder where long waves whiten —
These were the same for Sappho as for me.Two thousand years — much has gone by forever,
Change takes the gods and ships and speech of men —
But here on the beaches that time passes over
The heart aches now as then.~ Sara Teasdale ~
Beautiful.
Truth alone will endure, all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time. I must continue to bear testimony to truth even if I am forsaken by all. Mine may today be a voice in the wilderness, but it will be heard when all other voices are silenced, if it is the voice of Truth.
- Mahatma Gandhi
One of Carl Sagan’s most pertinent messages for humanity – YouTube.
Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours. In every one of them, there’s a sucsession of incidence, events, occurences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet, at this moment, here we face a critical branch-point in the history. What we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants. It is well within our power to destroy our civilization, and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition, or greed, or stupidty we can plunge our world into a darkness deeper than time between the collapse of classical civilization and the Italian Renaissaince. But, we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth, to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet. To enhance enormously our understanding of the Universe, and to carry us to the stars.
☮Peace is every step.
- Thich Nhat Hahn
The Inner Sun
Love is longing and longing, the pain of being parted;
No illness is rich enough for the distress of the heart,
A lover’s lament surpasses all other cries of pain.
Love is the royal threshold to God’s mystery.
The carnival of small affections and polite attachments
Which litter and consume our passing time
Is no match to Love which pulses behind this play.
It’s easy to talk endlessly about Love,
To live Love is to be seized by joy and bewilderment;
Love is not clear-minded, busy with images and argument.
Language is too precocious, too impudent, too sane
To stop the molten lava of Love which churns the blood,
This practicing energy burns the tongue to silence;
The knowing pen is disabled, servile paper
Shrivels in the fire of Love. Bald reason too is an ass
Explaining Love, deceived by spoilt lucidity.
Love is dangerous offering no consolation,
Only those who are ravaged by Love know Love,
The sun alone unveils the sun to those who have
The sense to receive the senseless and not turn away.
Cavernous shadows need the light to play but light
And light alone can lead you to the light alone.
Material shadows weigh down your vision with dross,
But the rising sun splits the ashen moon in empty half.
The outer sun is our daily miracle in timely
Birth and death, the inner sun
Dazzles the inner eye in a timeless space.
Our daily sun is but a working star in a galaxy of stars,
Our inner sun is One, the dancing nuance of eternal light.
You must be set alight by the inner sun,
You have to live your Love or else
You’ll only end in words.
~ Mevlana Rumi
Translated by Raficq Abdulla
Knowing ignorance is strength; ignoring knowledge is sickness.
- Lao Tzu
I tell you one thing – if you want peace of mind, do not find fault with others. Rather learn to see your own faults. Learn to make the whole world your own. No one is a stranger, my child; this whole world is your own.
– SRI SARADA DEVI
Our world is in profound danger. Mankind must establish a set of positive values with which to secure its own survival.
This quest for enlightenment must begin now.
It is essential that all men and women become aware of what they are, why they are here on Earth and what they must do to preserve civilization before it is too late. ~ Richard Matheson (born 20 February 1926)
I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgement is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.
~ Frederick Douglass ~
There can be no Friendship where there is no Freedom. Friendship loves a free Air, and will not be penned up in streight and narrow Enclosures. It will speak freely, and act so too; and take nothing ill where no ill is meant; nay, where it is, ’twill easily forgive, and forget too, upon small Acknowledgments. ~ William Penn
All in all is all we are. ~ Kurt Cobain (born 20 February 1967)
We picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug-collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.
The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. ~ Hunter S. Thompson (died 20 February 2005)
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. ~ Frederick Douglass
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. ~ Frederick Douglass (died February 20, 1895; born February 1817/1818, birthdate unknown)
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck. ~ Frederick Douglass
If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where else do you expect to find it?
- Dogen Zenji
Words of wisdom
came to me at last
“the beloved you’ve lost
the one you’ve been seeking outside
can only be found inside”
- Rumi
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
- George Bernard Shaw
”…meditation is the only way to make you absolutely sane.”
~ Osho
The rose has come from beyond; it is from the other world. That’s why this world cannot encompass the rose. The rose is so graceful, so elegant that the world of dreams is too narrow to dream of the rose. What is meant by the rose, a messenger from the garden of the intellect, from the grove of spirit? What is the rose? A document that describes the beauty and the highness of the rose of truth that neither turns brown nor withers.
~ Rumi
Come come the roses are in bloom!
The Beloved has arrived!
Now it is time to unite the soul and the world.
~ Rumi
Without trying, the world is heading for perfect awareness – and you are part of it.
- Yoko Ono
We cannot be loving and compassionate unless at the same time we curb our own harmful impulses and desires.
Large human movements spring from individual human initiatives.
- Dalai Lama
☮Peace is the only battle worth waging.
- Albert Camus (1913-1960)
☮All it takes for evil to rule a land is for good men to remain silent.
- Daniel Webster (1782-1852)
Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, What are you doing for others. ♥ Martin Luther King, Jr.
Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
♥ Ralph Waldo Emerson
”Responding to adverse situations or conditions with patience and tolerance rather than reacting with anger and hatred involves active restraint, which arises from a strong, self-disciplined mind. We should not see patience as a sign of weakness or giving in, but rather as a sign of strength.”
- Dalai Lama
Seek out the source
which shines forever.
- Mevlana Rumi
“In the midst of death life persists.
In the midst of untruth truth persists.
In the midst of darkness light persists.”
- Mahatma Gandhi
We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
– George Bernard Shaw
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 shunned. ~ Nicolaus Copernicus (born 19 February 1473)
External success has to do with people who may see me as a model, or an example, or a representative. As much as I may dislike or want to reject that responsibility, this is something that comes with public success. It’s important to give others a sense of hope that it is possible and you can come from really different places in the world and find your own place in the world that’s unique for yourself. ~ Amy Tan (born 19 February 1952)
Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.
~ Paul Simon ~
(Lyrics to “The Sound of Silence” — written on this day in 1964)
Now that your rose is in bloom,
A light hits the gloom on the grave,
I’ve been kissed by a rose on the grave.
~ Seal ~
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said “The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence.”
~ Paul Simon ~ (song written on this day in 1964)
People have such terrible assumptions about ghosts — you know, phantoms that haunt you, that make you scared, that turn the house upside down. Yin people are not in our living presence but are around, and kind of guide you to insights. Like in Las Vegas when the bells go off, telling you you’ve hit the jackpot. Yin people ring the bells, saying, “Pay attention.” And you say, “Oh, I see now.” Yet I’m a fairly skeptical person. I’m educated, I’m reasonably sane, and I know that this subject is fodder for ridicule. … To write the book, I had to put that aside. As with any book. I go through the anxiety, “What will people think of me for writing something like this?” But ultimately, I have to write what I have to write about, including the question of life continuing beyond our ordinary senses. ~ Amy Tan
Baby, I compare you to a kiss from a rose on the grave.
Ooh, the more I get of you,
Stranger it feels, yeah.
And now that your rose is in bloom,
A light hits the gloom on the grave.
~ Seal ~
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/February#19
I’m sure you’ve noticed that more and more people are getting aware.
- Yoko Ono
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.
“You’ve gotta dance like there’s nobody watching,
Love like you’ll never be hurt,
Sing like there’s nobody listening,
And live like it’s heaven on earth.”
— William W. Purkey
“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
— Dr. Seuss
“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.”
— Dr. Seuss
“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.”
— Maya Angelou
“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
“Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
— Albert Camus
“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
— Mark Twain
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
— Oscar Wilde
“It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”
— Abraham Lincoln
“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
“So many books, so little time.”
— Frank Zappa
“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”
— C.S. Lewis
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
— Robert Frost
“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
— Maya Angelou
“Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
— John Lennon
“If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.”
— Malcolm X
“Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. Today is a gift. That’s why we call it ‘The Present’.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
— William Shakespeare (As You Like It)
“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
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
— Mark Twain
“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”
— Marilyn Monroe
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”
— Elie Wiesel
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
— Groucho Marx (The Essential Groucho)
“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring)
“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”
— Mark Twain
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.”
— Steve Martin
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
— Albert Einstein
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere’s Fan)
“If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.”
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
— Jim Henson
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.
The primordial Spirit branches out, overflows, struggles, fails, succeeds, trains itself. It is the Rose of the Winds.
~ Nikos Kazantzakis ~
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Teachers are those who use themselves as bridges, over which they invite their students to cross; then having facilitated their crossing, joyfully collapse, encouraging them to create bridges of their own. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis (born 18 February 1883)
At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that letting go — you let go because you can. ~Toni Morrison (born 18 February 1931)
The doors of heaven and hell are adjacent and identical. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis
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. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis
The heart unites whatever the mind separates, pushes on beyond the arena of necessity and transmutes the struggle into love. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis
Where are we going? Do not ask! Ascend, descend. There is no beginning and no end. Only this present moment exists, full of bitterness, full of sweetness, and I rejoice in it all. ~ Nikos Kazantzakis
I am a mariner of Odysseus with heart of fire but with mind ruthless and clear.
My entire soul is a cry, and all my work the commentary on that cry.
I said to the almond tree: “Speak to me of God”
and the almond tree blossomed.
~ Nikos Kazantzakis
Do not let your peace depend on the hearts of others; whatever they say about you, good or bad, you are not because of it another, for as you are, you are.
– THOMAS A KEMPIS
”I am in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing.”
— Louise L. Hay
”Love yourself as much as you can and all of life will mirror this love back to you.”
- Louise L. Hay
“Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.”
- Eckhart Tolle
The law of nature is that one can never unknow what one knows. So all of us are getting wiser and wiser. There’s no stopping it!
Change is inevitable. And it’s up to us to make it a good change.
- Yoko Ono
☮Peace will be victorious. — Yitzhak Rabin (1922-1995)
”Ambition is bondage.”
–Ibn Gabirol
Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.
♥ Buddha
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud.
♥ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.
♥ Buddha
The BIG question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty YES to your adventure!
♥ Joseph Campbell
You cannot travel on the path until you become the path itself.
♥ Buddha
“The seemingly impossible is possible. We can have a good world.”
~ Hans Rosling
Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.
♥ Horace
“It’s not worth doing something unless someone, somewhere, would much rather you weren’t doing it.”
— Terry Pratchett
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places.
But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now
mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings)
“However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?”
— Siddhārtha Gautama
“Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.”
— Albert Einstein
“Love doesn’t just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Lathe of Heaven)
(I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.)”
— Pablo Neruda
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious – the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”
— Albert Einstein
“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:
THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC”
— Kurt Vonnegut
“By virtue of being human, each of us has the capacity to choose, to change, to grow.”
EKNATH EASWARAN
(1910–1999)
“This is the central principle of meditation: we become what we meditate on.”
EKNATH EASWARAN
(1910–1999)
I claim to be an average man of less than average ability. . . . I have not the shadow of a doubt that any man or woman can achieve what I have, if he or she would make the same effort and cultivate the same hope and faith.
– MAHATMA GANDHI
Our body needs peace of mind and is not suited to agitation. This shows that an appreciation for peace of mind is in our blood.
- Dalai Lama
I understand Being in all and over all, as there is nothing without participation in Being, and there is no being without Essence. Thus nothing can be free of the Divine Presence.
~ Giordano Bruno ~
Treat a person as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat him as he could be, and he will become what he should be. ~ Anonymous
There is one simple Divinity found in all things, everything has Divinity latent within itself. For she enfolds and imparts herself even unto the smallest beings. Without her presence nothing would have being, because she is the essence of the existence of the first unto the last being. ~ Giordano Bruno (died 17 February 1600)
Even to have come forth is something, since I see that being able to conquer is placed in the hands of fate. However, there was in me, whatever I was able to do, that which no future century will deny to be mine, that which a victor could have for his own: Not to have feared to die, not to have yielded to any equal in firmness of nature, and to have preferred a courageous death to a noncombatant life. ~ Giordano Bruno (executed 17 February 1600)
A voiceless song in an ageless light
Sings at the coming dawn
Birds in flight are calling there
Where the heart moves the stones
It’s there that my heart is calling
All for the love of you.
~ Loreena McKennitt ~
All things are in the Universe, and the universe is in all things: we in it, and it in us; in this way everything concurs in a perfect unity. ~ Giordano Bruno
The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it. ~ Giordano Bruno
Writing…is an art; and artists…are human beings. As a human being stands, so a human being is…
Poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality….poetry is being, not doing….if poetry is your goal, you’ve got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about selfstyled obligations and duties and responsibilities . . .
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel …
the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time —and whenever we do it, we are not poets.
I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance. ~ e. e. cummings
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. ~ Henry Adams (born 16 February 1838)
The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until people learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in themselves — as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government — this sort of thing will continue to occur. ~George F. Kennan
Public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent. ~ George F. Kennan
All experience is an arch, to build upon. ~ Henry Brooks Adams
What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn. ~ Henry Adams
Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education. ~ Henry Adams
To be happy is to be able to become aware of oneself without fright.
–Walter Benjamin
I’m sick of following my dreams. I’m just going to ask them where they’re going and hook up with them later.
- Mitch Hedberg
When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.
- William Wrigley Jr.
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.
- George Bernard Shaw
”The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches but to reveal to him his own.”
- Benjamin Disraeli
“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”
—
Siddhārtha Gautama
All the powers in the universe are already ours. It is we who have put our hands before our eyes and cry that it is dark.
- Swami Vivekananda
Love is invisible except here, in us.
Sometimes I praise love,
sometimes love praises me.
Love, a little shell somewhere
on the ocean floor,
open its mouth.
You and I and we, those imaginary beings,
enter that shell as a single sip of seawater.
- Rumi
“Be Yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”
- Oscar Wilde
“The actions of men are the best interpreters of thoughts.”
–Zig Ziglar
Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.
♥ Albert Einstein
☮Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.
- Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.
Friends and enemies do not exist as such; friendship and enmity depend on many factors, of which the primary one is our own mental attitude.
Whoever wants to tell a variety of stories ought to have a variety of beginnings.
–Marie de France
“We all need joy, and we can all receive joy in only one way, by adding to the joy of others.”EKNATH EASWARAN(1910–1999)
As Plato sometimes speaks of the divine love, it arises not out of indigency, as created love does, but out of fullness and redundancy.
– JOHN SMITH THE PLATONIST
“The widest possibilities for spiritual growth lie in the give-and-take of everyday relationships.”
EKNATH EASWARAN
(1910–1999)
“This is the central principle of meditation: we become what we meditate on.”
EKNATH EASWARAN
(1910–1999)
“The capacity to be patient, to bear with others through thick and thin, is within the reach of anyone”
EKNATH EASWARAN
(1910–1999)
Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just. ~ Blaise Pascal
“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can’t be organized or regulated. It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”
—
Ram Dass
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
– WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
“By virtue of being human, each of us has the capacity to choose, to change, to grow.”
EKNATH EASWARAN
(1910–1999)
If God gave the soul his whole creation she would not be filled thereby but only with himself.
– MEISTER ECKHART
“Nothing can be more important than being able to choose the way we think.”
EKNATH EASWARAN
(1910–1999)
”Your progress depends upon your degree of sustained intensity in a given direction.”
- Roger McDonald
”This is what we call love. When you are loved, you can do anything in creation. When you are loved, there’s no need at all to understand what’s happening, because everything happens within you.”
— Paulo Coelho
look at water and fire
earth and wind
enemies and friends all at once
- Rumi
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, and engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”
—
John Keating (Dead Poets Society)
The house of my heart is empty,
devoid of desire, like paradise.
Within it is no work but the LOVE OF GOD,
no inhabitant but the image of union with Him.
I have swept the house clear of good and bad -
my house is full of love for the One…
- Rumi
The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined.
Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell – keeping perfect time for eight minutes and twenty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping a year.
The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.
The wilful filing off of gear teeth, the wilful doing without certain obvious pieces of information.
Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
“Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.”
– Iain M. Banks
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
♥ Martin Luther King Jr.
Fear breeds fear. Hate breeds hate. And Love breeds love.
- Yoko Ono
A given situation can be viewed as either unbearable or beneficial: it depends how we look at it. We must make certain that things don’t begin to seem unbearable. If we look too closely at problems we will see nothing else and they will appear all out of proportion with reality; that is when they become intolerable. If we can stand back from them, we will be better able to judge them and they will seem less serious.
- Dalai Lama
God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.
- Paul Valery
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
- Ronald Reagan
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Special-interest publications should realize that if they are attracting enough advertising and readers to make a profit, the interest is not so special.
- Fran Lebowitz
Now I know what a statesman is; he’s a dead politician. We need more statesmen.
- Bob Edwards
Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.
- Robert Heinlein
God wasn’t too bad a novelist except he was a Realist.
- John Barth
Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us ~ Bill Watterson
Never give in and never give up.
- Hubert H. Humphrey
“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“Where does one go from a world of insanity? Somewhere on the other side of despair.”
- T.S. Eliot
“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made.”
- Robert Browning
We are inclined to believe those whom we do not know because they have never deceived us.
- Samuel Johnson
You’ve achieved success in your field when you don’t know whether what you’re doing is work or play.
- Warren Beatty
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
- Gustave Flaubert
The only things in my life that compatibly exist with this grand universe are the creative works of the human spirit.
No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied — it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.
- Ansel Adams (Born February 20, 1902)
“I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.”
- Kurt Kobain (Born February 20, 1967)
The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
Depth of friendship does not depend on length of acquaintance.
Let this be my last word, that I trust in thy love.
God, the Great Giver, can open the whole universe to our gaze in the narrow space of a single land.
My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.
In this playhouse of infinite forms I have had my play, and here have I caught sight of him that is formless.
Love is the ultimate meaning of everything around us. It is not a mere sentiment; it is truth; it is the joy that is at the root of all creation.
When we define a man by the market value of the service we can expect of him, we know him imperfectly.
Civilisation must be judged and prized, not by the amount of power it has developed, but by how much it has evolved and given expression to, by its laws and institutions, the love of humanity.
The human soul is on its journey from the law to love, from discipline to liberation, from the moral plane to the spiritual.
Joy is the realisation of the truth of oneness, the oneness of our soul with the world and of the world-soul with the supreme lover.
The infinite being has assumed unto himself the mystery of finitude. And in him who is love the finite and the infinite are made one.
Your idol is shattered in the dust to prove that God’s dust is greater than your idol.
The wise man warns me that life is but a dewdrop on the lotus leaf.
In the world’s audience hall, the simple blade of grass sits on the same carpet with the sunbeams, and the stars of midnight.
Wishing to hearten a timid lamp
great night lights all her stars.
God seeks comrades and claims love,
the Devil seeks slaves and claims obedience.
Life’s errors cry for the merciful beauty
that can modulate their isolation
into a harmony with the whole.
Color may, by combination with lines, create great pictures, so long as it does not smother and destroy their value.
- Rabindranath Tagore
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore
Episode 4: “Heaven and Hell”
Episode 5: “Blues for a Red Planet”
If you like this series, buy it!
- http://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Carl-Sagan-DVD-Set/dp/B000055ZOB
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Episode 2: “One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue”
Episode 3: “The Harmony of the Worlds”
If you like this series, buy it!
- http://www.amazon.com/Cosmos-Carl-Sagan-DVD-Set/dp/B000055ZOB
- http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/4774/cosmos-carl-sagan/
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Episode 1: “The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean”
If you like this series, buy it!
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“You were born with potential. You were born with goodness and trust. You were born with ideals and dreams. You were born with greatness. You were born with wings. …You are not meant for crawling, so don’t. You have wings. Learn to use them and fly.”
- Mevlana Rumi
http://www.facebook.com/mevlana
“The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.”
- Harry Golden
http://www.facebook.com/corybooker
“If we don’t end war, war will end us.”
- H. G. Wells
“I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.
It requires twenty years for a man to rise from the vegetable state in which he is within his mother’s womb, and from the pure animal state which is the lot of his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of reason begins to appear. It has required thirty centuries to learn a little about his structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It takes an instant to kill him.
What we find in books is like the fire in our hearths. We fetch it from our neighbor’s, we kindle it at home, we communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
Man is free at the instant he wants to be.”
- Voltaire (Born November 21, 1691)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Voltaire
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/November#21
“”Man’s inhumanity to man” is not the last word. The truth lies deeper. It is economic slavery, the savage struggle for a crumb, that has converted mankind into wolves and sheep.
If your object is to secure liberty, you must learn to do without authority and compulsion. If you intend to live in peace and harmony with your fellow-men, you and they should cultivate brotherhood and respect for each other. If you want to work together with them for your mutual benefit, you must practice cooperation. The social revolution means much more than the reorganization of conditions only: it means the establishment of new human values and social relationships, a changed attitude of man to man, as of one free and independent to his equal; it means a different spirit in individual and collective life, and that spirit cannot be born overnight. It is a spirit to be cultivated, to be nurtured and reared, as the most delicate flower it is, for indeed it is the flower of a new and beautiful existence.”
- Alexander Berkman (Born November 21, 1870)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Berkman
“A story to me means a plot where there is some surprise… Because that is how life is — full of surprises.
There must be a way for man to attain all possible pleasures, all the powers and knowledge that nature can grant him, and still serve God — a God who speaks in deeds, not in words, and whose vocabulary is the Cosmos.
We must believe in free will — we have no choice.
The storyteller and poet of our time, as in any other time, must be an entertainer of the spirit in the full sense of the word, not just a preacher of social or political ideals. There is no paradise for bored readers and no excuse for tedious literature that does not intrigue the reader, uplift him, give him the joy and the escape that true art always grants.”
- Isaac Bashevis Singer (Born November 21, 1902)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Bashevis_Singer
“Fame is something which must be won; honor is something which must not be lost.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer
“I’ve always thought people write because they are not living properly.”
- Tom Stoppard
“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
- Dr. Carl Sagan
“Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail
Beauty is the mark God sets on virtue. Every natural action is graceful; every heroic act is also decent, and causes the place and the bystanders to shine.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backwards.”
- Soren Kierkegaard
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts…
This above all — to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Time’s glory is to command contending kings,
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light.”
- William Shakespeare
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hamlet
“I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
We live in a troubled world, and the United States and China, as two great nations, share a special responsibility to help reduce the risks of war. We both agree that there can be only one sane policy to preserve our precious civilization in this modern age: A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. And no matter how great the obstacles may seem, we must never stop our efforts to reduce the weapons of war. We must never stop at all until we see the day when nuclear arms have been banished from the face of this Earth.”
- Ronald Reagan
“The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment, to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.
We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize.
It’s wonderful to be alive and to walk on earth.
You are a miracle, and everything you touch could be a miracle.
Your true home is in the here and the now. It is not limited by time, space, nationality, or race.
If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. If we really know how to live, what better way to start the day than with a smile? Our smile affirms our awareness and determination to live in peace and joy. The source of a true smile is an awakened mind.
Peace is every step.”
- Thich Nhat Hanh
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nhat_Hanh
“Y E S
Give wings to things around you so they can fly.
A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.
I trust in the human wisdom. We are incredibly intelligent beings. So we might know something without thinking that we know.
Don’t ever give up on life. Life can be so beautiful, especially after you’ve spent a lot of time with it.”
- Yoko Ono
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Yoko_Ono
A Massive Star in NGC 6357
Credit:
NASA,
ESA and
J. M. Apellániz (IAA, Spain)
Explanation:
For reasons unknown, NGC 6357 is forming some of the most massive stars ever discovered.
One such massive star, near the center of
NGC 6357, is
framed above carving out its own
interstellar castle with its energetic light from surrounding gas and dust.
In the greater nebula,
the intricate patterns are caused by
complex interactions between
interstellar winds,
radiation pressures,
magnetic fields, and
gravity.
The overall glow of the nebula results from the
emission of light from
ionized
hydrogen gas.
Near the more obvious
Cat’s Paw nebula,
NGC 6357 houses the open star cluster
Pismis 24,
home to many of these tremendously bright and blue stars.
The central part of
NGC 6357 shown spans about 10 light years
and lies about 8,000
light years away toward the constellation of the
Scorpion.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Explanation:
Big beautiful
lies a mere 35 million light-years away.
About 100 thousand light-years across, the gorgeous island universe
is well known to astronomers as a
member of the Leo Triplet
of galaxies.
In M66, pronounced dust lanes and
young, blue star clusters
sweep along spiral arms
dotted with the tell-tale glow of pink star forming regions.
and deep view also reveals faint extensions beyond the brighter
Of course, the bright,
spiky stars lie in the foreground,
within our own Milky Way Galaxy, but many, small, distant
background galaxies can be seen in the cosmic
snapshot.
with its neighboring
galaxies have likely influenced the shape of spiral galaxy M66.
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