Tag Archives: cornel west

The Greatest Stars- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Mason, Max Born, Kennedy, Santana, Baez, Gaye, Trungpa, & Zinn

Peace is the only battle worth waging.
- Albert Camus

Nonviolence is absolute respect for each human being.
- Adolpho Perez Esquival

The most valuable possession you can own is an open heart. The most powerful weapon you can be is an instrument of peace.

Most people are prisoners, thinking only about the future or living in the past. They are not in the present, and the present is where everything begins.

I’m laughing because I know the secret of life. And the secret of life is that I have validated my existence. I know that I am worth more than my house, my bank account, or any physical thing.
- Carlos Santana

If you want peace, work for justice.
- Pope Paul VI

Peace, like charity, begins at home.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

That’s all nonviolence is – organized love.
- Joan Baez

A lot of Americans think they got a tax cut, and they didn’t because their local property tax went up, their excise tax went up, their sales tax went up, and their prices went up and everything else, because we failed to invest in some of these other things we ought to be doing. … We are squeezing the middle class, we are losing the middle class, and the gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing wider and wider, not closing as it used to be.
- Senator John Kerry (Born December 11, 1943)

http://thinkexist.com

Serenity is not freedom from the storm but peace amid the storm.
- Alcoholics Anonymous

One man in the right makes a majority.
- Abraham Lincoln

To save one life, it is as if you had saved the world.
- Talmud

Let us forgive each other – only then will we live in peace
- Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

Don’t think, just do.
- Horace

A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
- Philip K. Dick

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.
- Marquis de Sade

Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander.
- Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
- John F. Kennedy

Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home.
- William Wordsworth

http://www.quotesaboutlife.ca/

A thorn in the foot is hard to find.
What about a thorn in the heart?
If everyone saw the thorn in his heart,
when would sorrow gain the upper hand?
- Mevlana Rumi

Translated by Camille and Kabir Helminski

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=44206766546

http://www.facebook.com/beloved.of.rumi

When will you begin your long journey into yourself?
- Rumi

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
- Blaise Pascal

Peace is a daily,a weekly,a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures
- John F. Kennedy

If you cannot find peace within yourself, you will never find it anywhere else.
- Marvin Gaye

But more than that, no unloving words were ever spoken, and everything was held up as another small piece of proof that it can be this way, it doesn’t have to be that way; if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler’s felt so that we should never hear it.

Love me, because love doesn’t exist, and I have tried everything that does.
- Jonathan Safran Foer

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Life is either a daring adventure.. or nothing.
- Helen Keller

The sacred heart is a secret heart.
- Swami Satchidananda

When your thoughts, speech and actions all go together, then they will bear fruit.
- Integral Yoga

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
- Henry David Thoreau

Today, the values of democracy, open society, respect for human rights, and equality are becoming recognized all over the world as universal values. To my mind there is an intimate connection between democratic values, such as transparency, the rule of law and freedom of information, and the fundamental values of human goodness.
- Dalai Lama

Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats dominate our political, economic and cultural systems.
- Cornel West

The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world’s JOY.
- Henry Ward Beecher

Better than a thousand hollow words is one word that brings peace.
- Siddhartha Gautama Buddha

Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.
- Adlai E. Stevenson

If you cannot find peace within yourself, you will never find it anywhere else.
- Marvin Gaye

If it’s natural to kill, how come men have to go into training to learn how?
- Joan Baez

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
- Howard Zinn

We always have a choice: we can limit our perception so that we close off vastness, or we can allow vastness to touch us.
- Chögyam Trungpa

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.
- Louis D. Brandeis

Nothing happens unless first we dream.
- Carl Sandburg

The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.
- Basho

The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it, seems to me the deepest root of all that is evil in the world.
- Max Born (Born December 11, 1882)

The classical Greeks were not influenced by the classical Greeks.
-Principia Discordia

When you forgive, you in no way change the past – but you sure do change the future.
- Bernard Meltzer

A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.
- Thomas Carlyle

Love as much as you can from wherever you are.
- Thaddeus Golas

Let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose falsehood as his PRINCIPLE.

Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand one who’s cold?

I believe that world literature has it in its power to help mankind, in these its troubled hours, to see itself as it really is, notwithstanding the indoctrinations of prejudiced people and parties.

They were mistaken, and will always be mistaken, who prophesy that art will disintegrate, that it will outlive its forms and die. It is we who shall die — art will remain.

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.

I am of course confident that I will fulfil my tasks as a writer in all circumstances — from my grave even more successfully and more irrefutably than in my lifetime. No one can bar the road to truth, and to advance its cause I am prepared to accept even death. But may it be that repeated lessons will finally teach us not to stop the writer’s pen during his lifetime? At no time has this ennobled our history.

One should never direct people towards happiness, because happiness too is an idol of the market-place. One should direct them towards mutual affection. A beast gnawing at its prey can be happy too, but only human beings can feel affection for each other, and this is the highest achievement they can aspire to.

It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes. It may even lie on the surface; but we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions — especially selfish ones.

At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church — none of them has been able to stop it. And don’t succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state’s essential functions. … War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses — but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction — and that is war.
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Born December 11, 1918)

I have never been especially impressed by the heroics of people convinced that they are about to change the world. I am more awed by those who struggle to make one small difference after another.

I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right.

Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can’t even describe and aren’t even aware of.

Values are not trendy items that are casually traded in.

When we describe what the other person is really like, I suppose we often picture what we want. We look through the prism of our need.

You can fire your secretary, divorce your spouse, abandon your children. But they remain your co-authors forever.
- Ellen Goodman

Our All is at Stake, and the little Conveniencys and Comforts of Life, when set in Competition with our Liberty, ought to be rejected not with Reluctance but with Pleasure.

In all our associations; in all our agreements let us never lose sight of this fundamental maxim — that all power was originally lodged in, and consequently is derived from, the people.
- George Mason (Born December 11, 1725)

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
- Jean Cocteau

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
William James

Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.
- Vincent Van Gogh

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
- Aristotle

For attractive lips, speak words of kindness. For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
- Audrey Hepburn

You really can change, your reality is based on the way you think.
- Oprah

The real friendship is like fluorescence, it shines better when everything has darken.
- Rabindranath Tagore

Go in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.
- Henry David Thoreau

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.
- Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Born December 11, 1931)

If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.
- Peace Quotes

http://twitter.com/peacequotes

“Explanation: Created as planet Earth sweeps through dusty debris from mysterious, asteroid-like, 3200 Phaethon, the annual Geminid Meteor Shower should be the best meteor shower of the year. The Geminids are predicted to peak on the night of December 13/14, but you can start watching for Geminid meteors this weekend. The best viewing is after midnight in a dark, moonless sky, with the shower’s radiant constellation Gemini well above the horizon – a situation that favors skygazers in the northern hemisphere. In this picture from the 2009 Geminid shower, a bright meteor with a greenish tinge flashes through the sky over the Mojave Desert near Barstow, California, USA. Recognizable in the background are bright stars in the northern asterism known as the Big Dipper, framing the meteor streak.”

Amplify’d from www.nasa.gov

The Greatest Stars

The small open star cluster Pismis 24 lies in the core of the NGC 6357 nebula in Scorpius, about 8,000 light-years away from Earth. The brightest object in the center of this image is designated Pismis 24-1 and was once thought to weigh as much as 200 to 300 solar masses. This would not only have made it by far the most massive known star in the galaxy, but would have put it considerably above the currently believed upper mass limit of about 150 solar masses for individual stars.

However, Hubble Space Telescope high-resolution images of the star show that it is really two stars orbiting one another that are each estimated to be 100 solar masses.

In addition, spectroscopic observations with ground-based telescopes further reveal that one of the stars is actually a tight binary that is too compact to be resolved even by Hubble. This divides the estimated mass for Pismis 24-1 among the three stars. Although the stars are still among the heaviest known, the mass limit has not been broken due to the multiplicity of the system.

The images of NGC 6357 were taken with Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 in April 2002.

ImageCredit: NASA, ESA, and J. Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain)

Read more at www.nasa.gov

 

Reflecting Merope – Erich Fromm, Erica Jong, Roy Croft, Sophocles, Aldous Huxley, Herodotus, Dalai Lama, Dr. West

You were created from ecstasy; you were created out of LOVE & LIGHT. It is your birthright.
- Bashar

Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves.
- James Matthew Barrie

Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.
- Mahatma Gandhi

You’ll never find rainbows if you’re looking down!
- Charlie Chaplin

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
- William Shakespeare

The purpose of our lives is to give birth to the best which is within us.
- Marianne Williamson

Keep alert, stand firm in your faith; be courageous, be strong, let all that you do be done in LOVE.
- Corinthians

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!
- William Shakespeare

People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.
- Albert Einstein

Never injure a friend, even in jest.
- Cicero

To truly give charity, you must be free of selfishness!
- Mother Teresa

You were born from a ray of God’s majesty and have ALL the blessings of a good star.
- Rumi

Everybody wants to eat at the government’s table, but nobody wants to do the dishes.
- Werner Finck

Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depends on simplicity.
- Plato

A ship has a soul.
- John Rhodes

Follow your HEART
- ♡

Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.
- Rumi

If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees.
- Hal Borland

Come, come again, whoever you are, come!
Heathen, fire worshipper or idolatrous, come!
Come even if you broke your penitence a hundred times,
Ours is the portal of hope, come as you are.
- Rumi

It takes awareness to remember that life is a gift, don’t feel overwhelmed by other thoughts. Feel joy as spirit reflects back onto you.
- Deepak Chopra

The minute I heard my first love story I started
looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally
meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.
- Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi

Looking at American prisons in our day, we see primarily poor people, disproportionately but not exclusively black & brown.
- Cornel West

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
- Anne Frank

The Great Vehicle path requires the vast motivation of a Bodhisattva, who, not seeking just his or her welfare, takes on the burden of bringing about the welfare of all sentient beings.

All living beings are believed to possess the nature of the Primordial Buddha Samantabhadra, the potential or seed of enlightenment, within them.

For as long as space endures, and for as long as living beings remain, until then may I, too, abide to dispel the misery of the world.

As time passes I have firmed my conviction that all religions can work together despite fundamental differences in philosophy. Every religion aims at serving humanity. Therefore, it is possible for the various religions to work together to serve humanity and contribute to world peace.

When we reach beyond the confines of narrow self-interest, our hearts become filled with strength.

Only the inner protection of patience can keep us from experiencing the turmoil of negative thoughts and emotions.

Always embrace the common humanity that lies at the heart of us all.

By developing a sense of concern for others’ well-being, then no matter what others’ attitudes are, you can keep inner peace.

No matter what activity or practice we are pursuing, there isn’t anything that isn’t made easier through constant familiarity and training.

If you make your best effort to be kinder, nurture compassion, make the world a better place, then you can say ‘At least I’ve done my best’.

Certain desires are positive: a desire for happiness; for peace; for a more harmonious and friendlier world.
- Dalai Lama

In awarding the Peace Prize to H.H. the Dalai Lama we affirm our unstinting support for his work for peace, and for the unarmed masses on the march in many lands for liberty, peace and human dignity.
- Egil Aarvik, Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee

There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
- Erich Fromm

Peace is more precious than a piece of land.
- Anwar Sadat

No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace – in peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.
- Herodotus

All that happens means something; nothing you do is ever insignificant.
- Aldous Huxley

My sun sets to rise again.
- Robert Browning

Grace was in all her steps, Heav’n in her Eye, In every gesture dignity and love.
- John Milton (Born December 9, 1608)

Without labor nothing prospers.
- Sophocles

I love you,
Not only for what you are,
But for what I am
When I am with you.

I love you,
Not only for what
You have made of yourself,
But for what
You are making of me.
I love you
For the part of me
That you bring out;
I love you
For putting your hand
Into my heaped-up heart
And passing over
All the foolish, weak things
That you can’t help
Dimly seeing there,
And for drawing out
Into the light
All the beautiful belongings
That no one else had looked
Quite far enough to find.

I love you because you
Are helping me to make
Of the lumber of my life
Not a tavern
But a temple;
Out of the works
Of my every day
Not a reproach
But a song.

I love you
Because you have done
More than any creed
Could have done
To make me good
And more than any fate
Could have done
To make me happy.
You have done it
Without a touch,
Without a word,
Without a sign.
You have done it
By being yourself.
Perhaps that is what
Being a friend means,
After all.
- Roy Croft

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.
- Erica Jong

Immature love says: ‘I love you because I need you.’
Mature love says: ‘I need you because I love you.’
- Erich Fromm

The Search for Truth is a Search for Identity, that in finding Truth, we find Ourselves.
- Neil Sutton

Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero

Amplify’d from www.nasa.gov

Reflecting Merope

In the well known Pleiades star cluster, starlight is slowly destroying this wandering cloud of gas and dust. The star Merope lies just off the upper left edge of this picture from the Hubble Space Telescope. In the past 100,000 years, part of the cloud has by chance moved so close to this star–only 3,500 times the Earth-Sun distance–that the starlight itself is having a very dramatic effect. Pressure of the star’s light significantly repels the dust in the reflection nebula, and smaller dust particles are repelled more strongly. As a result, parts of the dust cloud have become stratified, pointing toward Merope. The closest particles are the most massive and the least affected by the radiation pressure. A longer-term result will be the general destruction of the dust by the energetic starlight.

Image Credit: NASA

Read more at www.nasa.gov

 

M81 & Arp’s Loop – John Milton, Peter Kropotkin, Grace Hopper, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Robert Louis Stevenson

A poet soaring in the high reason of his fancies, with his garland and singing robes about him.

The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

Freely we serve,
Because we freely love, as in our will
To love or not; in this we stand or fall.

Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to my conscience, above all liberties.

- John Milton (Born December 9, 1608)

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Milton

One single war — we all know — may be productive of more evil, immediate and subsequent, than hundreds of years of the unchecked action of the mutual-aid principle may be productive of good.

All belongs to all. All things are for all men … All is for all!

A different conception of society, very different from that which now prevails, is in process of formation. … Acknowledging, as a fact, the equal rights of all its members to the treasures accumulated in the past … it seeks to establish a certain harmonious compatibility in its midst — not by subjecting all its members to an authority that is fictitiously supposed to represent society, not by trying to establish uniformity, but by urging all men to develop free initiative, free action, free association.

Man is appealed to to be guided in his acts, not merely by love, which is always personal, or at the best tribal, but by the perception of his oneness with each human being. In the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support not mutual struggle — has had the leading part.

We take men for what they are worth — and that is why we hate the government of man by man, and that we work with all our might — perhaps not strong enough — to put an end to it.

- Peter Kropotkin (Born December 9, 1842)

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Kropotkin

A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for. Sail out to sea and do new things.
- Grace Hopper

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong. I do not say give them up, for they may be all you have, but conceal them like a vice lest they spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
- Robert Louis Stevenson

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/December#9

Change is inevitable, growth optional. Choose Wisel
- Cory Booker

Grant that we may not so much seek to be understood as to understand.
- Saint Francis of Assisi

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.
- Joseph Campbell

The life of inner peace, being harmonious and without stress, is the easiest type of existence
- Norman Vincent Peale

Love helps break down barriers.
- Cornel West

Peace is liberty in tranquility.
- Cicero

The most compassionate form of giving is done with no thought or expectation of reward, and grounded in genuine concern for others.

I look at people from a positive angle, seeking positive aspects. This immediately creates a feeling of affinity, a kind of connectedness.

When we ignore the question of the impact our actions have on others’ well-being, inevitably we end up hurting them.

By studying others’ viewpoints, it is possible for us to discover new and refreshing perspectives on the world – including our own life.

I think that ethical behavior is another feature of the kind of inner discipline that leads to a happier existence.
- Dalai Lama

Amplify’d from apod.nasa.gov
M81 and Arp’s Loop
Image Credit &
Copyright:

R Jay GaBany -
Collaboration:
A. Sollima
(IAC),

A. Gil de Paz
(U. Complutense Madrid)
D. Martínez-Delgado (IAC,
MPIA),
J.J. Gallego-Laborda
(Fosca
Nit Obs.
),
T. Hallas
(Hallas Obs.)

Explanation:
One of the brightest galaxies in planet Earth’s sky and similar in size
to the Milky
Way
, big, beautiful spiral M81
lies 11.8 million light-years away in the northern constellation
Ursa Major.
This
deep image
of the region reveals
details in the bright yellow core, but at the
same time follows fainter features along the galaxy’s gorgeous blue
spiral arms and sweeping dust lanes.
It also follows the expansive, arcing feature, known
as Arp’s loop, that seems to rise from the galaxy’s disk at the right.
Studied in the 1960s, Arp’s loop has been thought to be a
tidal tail,
material pulled out of M81 by gravitational interaction with its large
neighboring galaxy M82.
But a recent investigation
demonstrates that much of Arp’s loop likely lies within our own galaxy.
The loop’s colors in visible and
infrared light
match the colors of pervasive
clouds of dust, relatively
unexplored
galactic cirrus
only a few hundred light-years above the plane of the Milky Way.
Along with the Milky Way’s stars, the dust clouds lie in
the foreground of this remarkable view.
M81′s dwarf companion galaxy,
Holmberg IX,
can be seen just above and left of the large spiral.
On the sky, this image spans about 0.5 degrees,
about the size of the Full Moon.

Read more at apod.nasa.gov

 

Supernova Remnant- John Muir, John Lennon, Osho, Aristotle, Dalai Lama, & Siddhartha Buddha (Bodhidharma Day) <3

Everyone needs beauty as well as bread, places to play and pray, where nature heals and give strength to body and soul alike
- John Muir

A small body of determined spirits, fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission, can alter the course of history
- Mahatma Gandhi

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion
- Dalai Lama

Very little is needed to make a happy life. It is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
- Marcus Aurelius

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.

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

The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.

Bling bling with no end and no aim is nothing but a form of idolatry.

Non-marketplace values, like LOVE, struggle against a market-driven culture.

LOVE can change the world.

Freedom fighters keep track of the indescribable scars & bruises but refuse to be victims.

FYI: Black women are going to be the crucial part of the next wave of our collective leadership.
- Cornel West

As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

We are but the instrument of heaven. Our work is not design but destiny.
- Owen Meredith ♡

Peace begins with a smile.
- Mother Theresa

Beauty is being in harmony with what you are.
- Peter Nivio Zarlenga

There is no brilliant single stroke that is going to transform the water into wine or straw into gold.
- Coleman Young

Anything that you can imagine is yours to be or do or have.
- Abraham Hicks

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship’s captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
- Guy de Maupassant

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
- Mahatma Gandhi

Even modern medical researchers have come to the conclusion that peace of mind is vital for good health.

Once you encourage the thought of compassion in your mind, once it becomes active, then your attitude towards others changes automatically.
- Dalai Lama

Sometimes if you want to see a change for the better, you have to take things into your own hands.
- Clint Eastwood

Poetry is a sort of homecoming.
- Paul Celan

Where thou art, that is home.
- Emily Dickinson

A day without laughter is a day wasted.
- Charlie Chaplin

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

The great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in this, that man and maid, freed of all false feelings and reluctances, will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will come together as human beings.

We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.
- Rainer Maria Rilke

Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one; I hope some day you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.
- John Lennon

It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.

The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself, but in so doing, he identifies himself with people — that is, people everywhere, not for the purpose of taking them apart, but simply revealing their true nature.
- James Thurber (born 8 December 1894)

May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
- Delmore Schwartz (Born 8 December 1913)

A hero is someone who rebels or seems to rebel against the facts of existence and seems to conquer them. Obviously that can only work at moments. It can’t be a lasting thing. That’s not saying that people shouldn’t keep trying to rebel against the facts of existence. Someday, who knows, we might conquer death, disease and war.
- Jim Morrison (Born 8 December 1943)

I am not bound over to swear allegiance to any master; where the storm drives me I turn in for shelter.
- Horace

Better than a thousand hollow words
Is one word that brings peace.
Better than a thousand hollow verses
Is one verse that brings peace.
Better than a hundred hollow lines
Is one line of the law, bringing peace.

We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts.
With our thoughts we make the world.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage… If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.

Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.

Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love. This is the eternal rule.
- Gautama Buddha
in
Dhammapada
(Bodhi Day a traditional date of celebration of his enlightenment)

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/December#8

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go!
- T.S. Eliot

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, “Truth is the daughter of Time.”
- Abraham Lincoln

When the heart is innocent & the walls have disappeared, you are bridged with infinity
- Osho

As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. JUMP.. It’s not as wide as you think.
- Joseph Campbell

The essence of spiritual practice is your attitude toward others. When you have a pure, sincere motivation, then you have right attitude toward others based on kindness, compassion, love and respect.

Once you encourage the thought of compassion in your mind, once it becomes active, then your attitude towards others changes automatically.

Looking at the pattern of our existence from birth to death, we can see the way in which we are fundamentally nurtured by other’s affection.

Looking at various means of developing compassion, I think empathy is an important factor: the ability to appreciate others’ suffering.

I think that ethical behavior is another feature of the kind of inner discipline that leads to a happier existence.

We must insist on the observation that my right to happiness carries no more weight than others’ similar right.

I am convinced that everyone can develop a good heart and a sense of universal responsibility with or without religion.

All the major religious traditions carry the message of love, compassion and forgiveness.

The ultimate factor determining whether we have a healthy mind and a healthy body lies within.
- Dalai Lama

Give what you want to receive.
- Russell Simmons

All we are saying is give peace a chance.
- John Lennon

There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers.
- Erich Fromm

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
- Chinese Proverb

Violence just hurts those who are already hurt…Instead of exposing the brutality of the oppressor, it justifies it.
- César Chávez

We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while.
- Willa Cather

The life of inner peace, being harmonious and without stress, is the easiest type of existence
- Norman Vincent Peale

It is more difficult to organize a peace than to win a war; but the fruits of victory will be lost if the peace is not organized.
- Aristotle

Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. There is nothing to do but be.
- Stephen Levine

When the mind has thus vanished, you realize eternal Peace.
- Ramana Maharshi

That’s all nonviolence is – organized love.
- Joan Baez

Human Beings, indeed all sentient beings, have the right to pursue happiness and live in peace and freedom.
- The XIVth Dalai Lama

The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.
- Desiderius Erasmus

Treasure each empty moment of the experience. Something sacred is about to be born!
- Osho

It is every man’s obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it.
- Albert Einstein

Amplify’d from www.nasa.gov

Supernova Remnant

In the nearby galaxy known as the Small Magellanic Cloud, a massive star has exploded as a supernova and begun to dissipate its interior into a spectacular display of colorful filaments, reminiscent of fireworks display.

The supernova remnant (SNR), known as “E0102″ for short, is the greenish-blue shell of debris just below the center of this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This delicate structure, glowing a multitude of lavenders and peach hues, resides in the upper right of the image.

Determined to be only about 2,000 years old, E0102 is relatively young on astronomical scales and is just beginning its interactions with the nearby interstellar medium. Young supernova remnants like E0102 allow astronomers to examine material from the cores of massive stars directly. This in turn gives insight on how stars form, their composition, and the chemical enrichment of the surrounding area. As well, young remnants are a great learning tool to better understand the physics of supernova explosions.

The Small Magellanic Cloud is a nearby dwarf galaxy to our own Milky Way. It is visible in the Southern Hemisphere, in the direction of the constellation Tucana, and lies roughly 210,000 light-years distant.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) and J. Green (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Read more at www.nasa.gov