Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There are few positions in life in which difficulties have not to be encountered. These difficulties are, however, our best instructors, as our mistakes often form our best experience.
I highlight everything I find interesting, and then type out everything I've highlighted, and then print out everything I've typed, and reread these printed notes as often as possible.
When you invent something, you're drawing on reservoirs of knowledge that you already have. It's only when you're faithful to the truth that something can come to you from the outside.
Reading Epictetus, I realized that most of the pain in my life came not from any actual privations or insults but, rather, from the shame of thinking that they could have been avoided.
Someday you're gonna look back on this moment of your life as such a sweet time of grieving. You'll see that you were in mourning and your heart was broken, but your life was changing.
You know, why at the end of your life should you assemble thousands of pages of 'Why am I so sad, why am I so depressed?' Instead, assemble thousands of pages of why you're so content.
I would warn my brethren and sisters to never flatter persons because of their ability; for they cannot bear it. Self is easily exalted, and in consequence, persons lose their balance.
It is a fearful mistake for us to neglect the study of the Bible to investigate theories that are misleading, diverting minds from the words of Christ to fallacies of human production.
A loser doesn't know what he'll do if he loses, but talks about what he'll do if he wins, and a winner doesn't talk about what he'll do if he wins, but knows what he'll do if he loses.
At his heart, Shakespeare was a YA author. So many of his plays are set with high school-aged characters. He understood the passion, the confusion and drama that marks that life stage.
I don't believe in organized religion. I believe that people should try to connect with their own life force and let it lead them to do with their lives what they will find satisfying.
To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself.
My,' she said. 'We're lucky that you found the place.' We're always lucky,' I said and like a fool I did not knock on wood. There was wood everywhere in that apartment to knock on too.
It could be worse,' Passini said respectfully. "There is nothing worse than war." Defeat is worse." I do not believe it," Passini said still respectfully. "What is defeat? You go home.
How many people just get up on Monday and do the same thing they've done every single Monday - go to work and just turn on route automatic and no longer have any meaning in their life?
You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.
Dialogue has to show not only something about the speaker that is its own revelation, but also maybe something about the speaker that he doesn't know but the other character does know.
This dazzling, unput-downable debut novel proves beyond a doubt that Dan Wells has the gift. His teenage protagonist is as chilling as he is endearing. More John Wayne Cleaver, please.
The quiet life is by no means the greatest life. Some characters can only reach the highest standard of spirituality by the disturbings or displacings in the order of God's providence.
We're under some gross misconception that we're a good species, going somewhere important, and that at the last minute we'll correct our errors and God will smile on us. It's delusion.
Notoriously insensitive to subtle shifts in mood, children will persist in discussing the color of a recently sighted cement-mixer long after one's own interest in the topic has waned.
I have a double policy, which would also solve immigration: I would stand at the border of New York City and I would say, "You can come here to live, but you can't come here to visit."
If we are to remain mission focused, as we must be if we are to be relevant in an uncertain age, the abandoning those things that do not further the mission is a leadership imperative.
The thing that makes our friendships so short and changeable is that the qualities and dispositions of the soul are very hard to know, and those of the understanding and wit very easy.
The Greek makes the distinction between petros and petra simply because it is trying to preserve the pun, and in Greek the feminine petra could not very well serve as a masculine name.
When politics and religion are intermingled, a people is suffused with a sense of invulnerability, and gathering speed in their forward charge, they fail to see the cliff ahead of them
Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?
Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
What women have done is developed a survival mechanism, and it's a fascinating one and it's been effective and justified, in my opinion. That is the ability to manipulate men sexually.
The power that enables us to transform our awareness is the release of kundalini. All yoga, either directly or indirectly, all Buddhism, relates to the release of the kundalini energy.
I teach Zen, tantric mysticism, jnana yoga, bhakti yoga, Tibetan mysticism, occultism and psychic development. I also teach poetry and literature, film and many other different things.
The kundalini is the energy that opens up the bands of perception. It is also the power that allows us to travel mentally from one dimension to another, from one experience to another.
Instead of tryig to stop thought when you meditate, focus your attention on love. Suddenly you'll find your thoughts are slacking. Light is everywhere and suddenly there is no thought.
The effort to lift one's self into perfect enlightenment is a profound thing. It has nothing to do with individual will. It's a refraction of the cosmos. The cosmos delights in itself.
The role of the teacher is to make sure that the practice is pure. By guiding the student, you make sure that they are really going into the planes of light and not fooling themselves.
What is incarnation? Incarnation is self-reflection. The universe that we are in is constructed, is a reflection of ourselves. We picked the dimension according to our self-reflection.
In order not to lose your resolve and purpose, you need to unite with others of like mind and work with an advanced Teacher who is in touch with, and can transfer, knowledge and power.
In the old days, Zen was not really practiced so much in a monastery. The Zen Master usually lived up on a top of the mountain or the hill or in the forest or sometimes in the village.
The psychic does not have much to do with channeling. All you are doing is getting information from a source that may or may not be accurate and may or may not have underlying motives.
When we dream, we create. All of life is a dream or a series of waking dreams. We dream our surroundings. We dream our friends, our relations. We dream our bodies. We dream our dreams.
For some reason, the women in my life have always been extremely powerful. I've learned a great deal from that. I've learned that we're all women when we're complete and we're all men.
The training was rigorous, hundreds and thousands of hours of meditation, self-giving. But it was easy. I loved it. I would merge again and again with the superconscious in meditation.
Some of the films that I have really enjoyed include: The Fifth Element, The Crow, Toys, Seven, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, 12 Monkeys, Doctor Zhivago, Being There, and Trainspotting.
Some come to a teacher for power. They still have all the desires, angers and jealousies of an unevolved person. Consequently, they become destructive both to themselves and to others.
There are some great stories in The Second Ring of Power about how Don Juan and Don Genaro found their apprentices and what they went through to fool their students into seeking light.
Personal power is not the end of the process. It is a tool that you use to get someplace. The purpose of the car is not to live in the car, it is to drive you someplace you want to go.
If you lead a sloppy life, if you indulge in your emotions, if you're always upset, freaked out, stressful, and not happy, you are wasting power and your power level will get very low.
If you're in the tantric sex state of mind, what someone else experiences when they have sex is not what you'll experience. You won't even notice what your body is doing, particularly.
Certain drugs provide brief excursions into altered states of consciousness. The problem is that the perceptions and understandings that come from these experiences don't tend to last.
The toxic residue of humanity - you have to guard yourself, guard that sensitivity even more heavily because otherwise you can pick up so many pollutants that you'll become more toxic.