Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Climbing is actually a great sport for blind people and that carried me on to climbing bigger and bigger mountains, snowy mountains, ice faces, and developing different techniques to be able to do that.
To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, . . . to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want.
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write.
The history of God's people is not a record of God searching for courageous men and women who could handle the task, but God transforming the hearts of cowards and calling them to live courageous lives.
Politicians are already exaggerated. They're bigger than life in every way - their appetites, their ambitions, their personalities, their failings, their magnetism. In a sense, they're made for fiction.
For the source of the short story is usually lyrical. And all writers speak from, and speak to, emotions eternally the same in all of us: love, pity, terror do not show favorites or leave any of us out.
For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.
Sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them - their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.
No one should be allowed to give back the gift of life, unless they are very old and full of tears, when the body outlives the spirit, when they should be allowed to join the others who've already gone.
Presently it appears that people are mainly concerned with being well rested. Those capable of uninterrupted sleep are much admired. Unconsciousness is in great demand. This is the day of the milligram.
We do not lack strength so much as the will to use it; and very often our imagining that things are impossible is nothing but an excuse of our own contriving, to reconcile ourselves to our own idleness.
The blindness of men is the most dangerous effect of their pride; it seems to nourish and augment it; it deprives them of knowledge of remedies which can solace their miseries and can cure their faults.
A readiness to believe ill of others, before we have duly examined it, is the effect of laziness and pride. We are eager to find aculprit, and loath to give ourselves the trouble of examining the crime.
The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche.
Selfless giving reminds us that there is an eternally present spirit in all of us, that when revealed, liberates us from both the transitory and the eternal - both of which ultimatly can be attachments.
Buddhists understand that today and all other days have turned out the way they have because of karma. The interconnection of one moment with another moment, of one action with another action, is karma.
Astrologically, at that age, you experience a Saturn return. It is considered an auspicious time to "reboot" your life. It's a chance to have a clean start and move forward into something very exciting.
Chakras really are dimensions. We think of them as objects, but they're not really. They're dimensional access points, whereby we can enter into different levels of mind, and that happens automatically.
To have the detached eye of the occultist, to look outward, to not be so self-reflective and to learn to step through the various viewpoints of consciousness - that we call occultism - leads to freedom.
Focusing on an enlightened teacher is a doorway. It is not a person. We are focusing on the light that passes through them. We are moving through them into the planes of light and eventually to nirvana.
Karmic progression implies that we are kind of alliterating steps to life. There's alliteration, a kind of rhythmic structure. Once we're in time and space, the variable structures are somewhat limited.
You can lie to yourself and fool yourself and rationalize that the choice you're making is what is right and what is true and what leads to liberation, when it's actually only the fulfillment of desire.
The ashram is where everyone lives in the same building or on the same grounds. You feel that it's selfish for you to devote your life to one person. You don't just love the one, you love the many also.
If, at the office or in different exchanges in daily living, you have to spend time with people who are at lower power levels, then you have to be aware of that and keep your awareness very much within.
There is a difference between willing and forcing. Willing something simply means you are not being lazy. Forcing something means you are trying to do something inappropriate or in an inappropriate way.
During the time of Atlantis, members of the Mystery Schools discovered and developed specific concentration exercises that they found would radically increase and sharpen their innate psychic abilities.
Naturally, along the way, there are beings and forces that will challenge you. They want to try and get some of your power, take it away from you, all this nonsense, and of course, you just defeat them.
There are many universes, countless universes, and many of them are invisible. We call these the astral planes, but they are as real as this world is and they're filled with beings that have life spans.
Within you there are thousands of rings of luminosity, bands, and each one is a universe of perception. In the average person's lifetime, they might just open up two or three, maybe four of those bands.
When you live in a psychic state of mind, you are happy. You don't have to do anything. Life is always beautiful, but we don't see it when we enter into lower states of mind that are, in effect, cloudy.
You're composed of an aggregate of different forms and energies, the samskaras. These are lines within your own being. When you go into samadhi, these lines dissolve gradually so you become less formed.
The good news is that we don't last. Thank heavens! Because to continue the drama of who you are, is boring, ultimately. The universe is our friend because it kills us - and that's what friends are for.
There are people I feel in other parts of the world who will never meet me or hear my name. They are probably better off. I help them inwardly. I feel their souls seeking light, and I help all who come.
I know I'm never going to probably see the Taj Mahal or, you know, climb Mt. Everest, but I can still maybe influence peoples' way of thinking by a story that I do, by something I learn about the world.
I love rhymes; I love to write a poem about New York and rhyme 'oysters' with 'The Cloisters.' And 'The lady from Knoxville who bought her brassieres by the boxful.' I just feel a sort of small triumph.
I can write anywhere. I write in airports. I write on airplanes. I've written in the back seats of taxis. I write in hotel rooms. I love hotel rooms. I just write wherever I am whenever I need to write.
So what if man's body evolved from the monkeys? Whether he came from monkeys or fish is unimportant. The important idea is that when the body became "human" enough, the first human soul slipped into it.
..there is hope. That's the marvelous thing about being human. We can change our future. We need not be enslaved by the experiences of the past. We can learn to love even when we have not received love.
Typically, we get annoyed when our spouses complain. We get defensive. But, really, when your spouse complains, he or she is giving you wonderful information about what would make him or her feel loved.
When our grandchildren ask us where we were when the voiceless and the vulnerable in our era needed leaders of compassion and purpose, I hope we can say that we showed up, and that we showed up on time.
There must be something here for me to get or to share or to do. So I have the duty that I do, the dharma that I do - which I love - with my teaching, with my family, my son, my students, my girlfriend.
Only human beings can look directly at something, have all the information they need to make an accurate prediction, perhaps even momentarily make the accurate prediction, and then say that it isn't so.
I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word "doctrine," as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory.
Pennant races drain the energy from the best of them. Old-fashioned baseball races are to me the most grueling daily test in any sport. Gotta keep coming out, every day, in the face of looming disaster.
[Pope Francis]sees a world in need of the Gospel, and of friendship with Jesus Christ, as an antidote to the self-absorption and loneliness that are eating away at the solidarity of the human community.
Optimism and pessimism are mere matters of optics, of how you look at things, and that can change from day to day, or with a new prescription for your glasses - or with a new set of ideological filters.
Whenever we see anyone in a high or low position, male or female, they differ only in appearance, dress, behavior, and status. In essence they are all equal--they all experience problems in their lives.
If you could be happy, really happy, for just a while, but you knew from the start that it would end in sadness, and bring pain afterwards, would you choose to have that happiness or would you avoid it?
We all want to get along well with other people, and one way to do this is to help people feel good about themselves. If you make a person feel smart and insightful, that person will enjoy your company.
Good people hire people better than themselves. So A players hire A+ players. But others hire below their skills to make themselves look good. So B players hire C players. C players hire D players, etc.