Words from other sources

For many moons, I’ve been a compulsive internet user and also a seeker. In my travels on the internet, as well as all over scholarly texts and who knows what, every now and again, I happen upon a few words that seem to strike a chord with me. For whatever reason, the words hit deeper than common language, and speak to the centre of me. Normally, I can’t even pinpoint entirely why. I guess I use these as a sort of compass to get to know myself a little better, and often to remind myself of what’s important to me. I try to read the list every other week or so, and it always takes me on quite the roller coaster.

As I was looking through them, I thought why not share? So, here’s the list as of the end of May 2011. I’m no longer sure how long I’ve kept this list, but it’s an ongoing project. Wherever I know, I’ve credited the speaker. If you happen to know any I don’t, or can correct any I’ve gotten wrong, do let me know. I hope I don’t reveal too much of myself using these people’s words.

• Many films diminish us. They cheapen us, masturbate our senses, hammer us with shabby thrills, diminish the value of life. Some few films evoke the wonderment of life’s experience, and those I consider a form of prayer. Not prayer “to” anyone or anything, but prayer “about” everyone and everything. I believe prayer that makes requests is pointless. What will be, will be. But I value the kind of prayer when you stand at the edge of the sea, or beneath a tree, or smell a flower, or love someone, or do a good thing. Those prayers validate existence and snatch it away from meaningless routine.-Roger Ebert (review for the film “Tree of Life”)
• “Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.” -C. S. Lewis
• “There’s an alternative. There’s always a third way, and it’s not a combination of the other two ways. It’s a different way.” – David Carradine
• “Doubt is not the opposite of faith. The opposite of faith is certainty.” – Annie Lamont
• “In the world to come, each of us will be called to account for all the good things god put in the world that we never bothered to enjoy.” – Talmudic teaching.
• “Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.” -Epicurus, 341 BCE.
• “There are two ways to be rich: One is by acquiring much, and the other is by desiring little.” – Jackie French Koller.
• “We are all a little weird, and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it ‘love’.” – Dr. Suess
• “The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.”~Epictetus
• “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go…” — Dr. Seuss (Oh, the Places You’ll Go!)
• The only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell. – CS Lewis
• “Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you -– all of the expectations, all of the beliefs -– and becoming who you are.”~Rachel Naomi Remen
• The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it. – Machiavelli
• “The presence of fear is a sure sign you’re trusting in your own strength.”~A Course in Miracles
• “Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
• “My memory of you is better than you.” – Lao Tzu
• “Sometimes my life seems to be a never-ending succession of unhappy women” – Nietzsche
• “You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.” – Pema Chodron
• “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” – Mahatma Gandhi
• “An internet user and his leisure time are soon parted.” – Author Unknown
• “Don’t think you’re on the right road just because it’s a well-beaten path.” – Author Unknown
• “And the day came where the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”- Anais Nin
• People are often unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered; Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; Be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; Succeed anyway.If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; Be honest and frank anyway. What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; Build anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; Be happy anyway. The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough; Give the world your best anyway. You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God; It was never about them anyway.
• “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”-Dr. Seuss
• “Tension is who you think you should be, Relaxation is who you are” -Chinese Proverb
• “Nature always follows the path of least resistance.”
• “Finish every day and be done with it…You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it…serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson.
• “Make a “career” of living a happy life rather than trying to find work that will produce enough income that you can do things with your money that will then make you happy.” -Abraham-Hicks
• “…and forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet, and the winds long to play with your hair.” ~ Kahlil Gibran
• When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other. ~Chinese Proverb
• To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.~Emily Dickinson
• Be Patient. You will write many more failures than successes. Say to yourself, I accept failure as the condition of this life, this work. I freely accept it as my destiny. Then go on and do the work. You never ask yourself anything beyond “Did I work today?”
• “I can give you the shirt off my back…I can get another one. I can give you the money in my pocket…I can get some more. Yet when I give you my time, you know how much I really love you…because, you see, it’s the only thing I can’t get more of.”– Shep Lampkin
• “There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.”
• “You see this goblet?” asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master. “For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”- Mark Epstein Thoughts Without a Thinker
• Everybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is preoccupied with many things—eloquence cannot, nor the liberal studies—since the mind, when distracted, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn.
• It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. -Lucius Annaeus Seneca
• “Don’t cry because it’s over. smile because it happened.” -Dr. Seuss
• “A thousand candles may be lit by a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” – The Buddha
• I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ. ~ Mohandas Gandhi
• I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. -Mark Twain
• “The early bird may get the worm, but the late mouse gets the cheese.” -Steven Wright
• Why should I be worried about dying? It’s not going to happen in my lifetime.” -Raymond Smullyan
• Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another. -George Bernard Shaw
• Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.~ Eleanor Roosevelt
• When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.~ Lao Tzu
• Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means that you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections.
• All misery derives from the inability to sit in a quiet room alone.
• Happiness for a reason is a form of misery because the reason can be taken away from you at any time. To be happy for no reason is the happiness you want to experience.
• Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.~ Mahatma Gandhi
• Life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely, in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting “Holy shit, what a ride!”~ Mavis Leyrer
• If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, “thank you,” that would suffice. ~ Meister Eckhart
• Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually’, just do it and correct course along the way. ~ Tim Ferriss
• “Normal” is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it. ~ Ellen Goodman
• The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. ~ Elbert Hubbard
• Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.~ Steve Jobs
• If we don’t take charge of life’s direction, our life will be controlled by the outside to serve the purpose of some other agency. ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• May you live every day of your life. ~ Jonathan Swift
• Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: “I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today, I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it. ~ Groucho Marx
• The things you own end up owning you. – Tyler Durden
• Television connects viewers to nothing except the assumption of being connected to something. – Michael Arlen, TV Critic
• “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.” – Richard Dawkins
• Alice asked the Chesire Cat, who was sitting in a tree, “What road do I take?”The cat asked, “Where do you want to go?” “I don’t know”, Alice answered. “Then,” said the cat, “it really doesn’t matter, does it?” -Alice in Wonderland, LEWIS CARROLL
• “Once the game is over, the King and the Pawn go back in the same box.” – Italian Proverb
• I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. -Sagan
• the infinite possibilities each day holds should stagger the mind. the sheer number of experiences i could have is uncountable, breathtaking, and I’m sitting here refreshing my inbox. We live in trapped loops, reliving a few days over and over, and we envision only a handful of paths laid out ahead of us. We see the same things each day, we respond the same way, we think the same thoughts, each day a slight variation of the last, every moment smoothly following the the gentle curves of societal norms. we act like if we just get through today, tomorrow our dreams will come back to us.and no, I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know how to jolt myself into seeing what each moment could become. But I do know one thing: the solution doesn’t involve watering down my every little idea and creative impulse for the sake of some day easing my fit into a mold. it doesn’t involve tempering my life to better fit someone’s expectations. It doesn’t involve constantly holding back for fear of shaking things up. This is very important, so I want to say it as clearly as I can: Fuck. That. Shit. –xkcd
• “Have no fear of perfection. You’ll never reach it.” -Salvador Dali
• “It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.” -Chuck Palahniuk
• Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. -Oscar Wilde
• “Everything will be alright in the end, if it´s not alright, its not the end.”
• Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. -Marianne Williamson
• “My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.” – Michael J. Fox
• I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the sidewalk. It’s so fuckin’ heroic.– George Carlin
• “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” – Oscar Wilde
• All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. ~Anatole France
• It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not. ~ James Gordon
• After you’ve done a thing the same way for two years, look it over carefully. After five years, look at it with suspicion. And after ten years, throw it away and start all over.  ~Alfred Edward Perlman
• When it’s over and you look in the mirror, did you do the best that you were capable of? -John Wooden
• A bore, Travis, is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with companionship. – John D. McDonald
• “When there is no enemy within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.” ~African proverb
• Be still, and know that I am God. – Psalm 46:10