Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I continue to say that I wish we had another word other than magic. It no longer means what we are doing or we are attempting to do. We have to find another terminology. Magic is first and foremost a way of belief.
The richness and endless variety of human relationships ... that's what authors, even the finest and greatest, only succeed in hinting at. It's a hopeless business, like trying to dip up the ocean with a tea-spoon.
Having recorded his first album, 'Tapestry,' in 1969, in Berkeley, California, during the student riots, McLean, a native New Yorker, became a kind of weather vane for what he called the 'generation lost in space.'
Each of us must live off the fruit of his thoughts in the future, because what you think today and tomorrow, next month and next year, you will mold your life and determine your future. You are guided by your mind.
We have a lot of controlling people who are trying to tell us how to live our lives, and a lot of co-dependent people around us. We bump up against these people, too, when we're trying to get on the spiritual path.
As you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life. It means fear is no longer a dominant factor in what you do and no longer prevents you from taking action to initiate change.
Be aware that what you think, to a large extent, creates the emotions that you feel. See the link between your thinking and your emotions. Rather than being your thoughts and emotions, be the awareness behind them.
When I'm with people, I'm a spiritual teacher. That's the function, but it's not my identity. The moment I'm alone, my deepest joy is to benobody, to relinquish the function of a teacher. It's a temporary function.
You simply have to surrender to the present moment. Be alert. Watch something in a state of alertness. Always, continuously, bring that into everyday life, not spirituality here and getting on with your life there.
True change happens within, not without. Find the Now within. Everybody you come in contact with will be touched by your presence and affected by the peace that you emanate, whether they are conscious of it or not.
The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.
Fence straddlers have no balls. In compensation, however, they enjoy a comfortable seat and can retreat swiftly, when danger threatens, to either side of the fence. There is something to be said for every position.
Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broom-tailed horses.
You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.
To be rich is to give; to give nothing is to be poor; to live is to love; to love nothing is to be dead; to be happy is to devote oneself; to exist only for oneself is to damn oneself, and to exile oneself to hell.
I try to create a challenge for myself in each book. And sometimes, believe me, I just kick myself afterwards, and say, 'Why on earth did you ever attempt this, you idiot!' But I'm always better for the experience.
I don't know if I have a memory of not thinking I was a writer - it goes that far back. I went to law school because I didn't know how to earn a living otherwise. I tried to ignore the pull, but it wouldn't let me.
We need no fanciful teaching regarding the personality of God. What God desires us to know of Him is revealed in His word and His works. The beautiful things of nature reveal His character and His power as Creator.
Whenever we love or care for anything in our lives we're willing to respond with care and with compassion, but if something that we love or someone we love is threatened, we're also willing to respond with courage.
Normally, we think of the religious as people who care more, not less than the rest of us. This is not true, not exactly. The truly religious care more deeply about fewer things and do't give a hoot about the rest.
When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you... Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.
Anything great that has been accomplished in the history of humanity has started with one small thought. We all have those thoughts; few people do anything with theirs, however. What do you intend to do with yours?
That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it.
I don't know how it is with other writers, but most of the time when I finish [reading] a story or novel, I may be pleased, I may even be impressed, but somewhere in the back of my mind I'm thinking, I can do that.
All mothers love their own children as best they can, according to their temperament and circumstances, and all mothers should have done better, in their children's eyes, when the going gets tough for the children.
While it is undeniably true that people love a surprise, it is equally true that they are seldom pleased to suddenly and without warning happen upon a series of prunes in what they took to be a normal loin of pork.
The fondness or indifference that the philosophers expressed for life was merely a preference inspired by their self-love, and will no more bear reasoning upon than the relish of the palate or the choice of colors.
A world is supported by four things: the learning of wise, the justice of great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing without a ruler who knows the art of ruling.
Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero... Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.
If you burn yourself out in two years of intense selfless giving, what good is that if you could have given 20 years? Set yourself up well. Get the things you want - God exists in the material and in the spiritual.
A child is imprinted not by simply teaching. But their attention is like soft clay. The attention field of adults is stratified. They are like hard clay and we push them on each side of the child's attention field.
Most teachers of self-discovery have two types of students. They have students they deal with in a more exoteric way than the esoteric students. Esoteric truths are presented to usually a smaller group of students.
Because someone is a lama or is part of a monastic order or claims to be part of a succession, doesn't really mean they know anything. Always examine the individual's consciousness, their ability to transmit light.
The study of Zen is the study of energy, power, knowledge and balance. It is the science of energy conservation and control. We use energy to aid others, to see beauty, to discover love where we saw no love at all.
There is something very fragile about the beginning stages of psychic development. Eventually, one becomes very strong and the cushioning isn't as necessary. It's still logical because we live in an abrasive world.
One of the greatest mistakes that people make who pursue self-discovery is they neglect to develop their careers. There is a popular notion that those who seek enlightenment should abandon the things of this world.
There is only black light between the stars. It may seem that it's darkness, but it's really black light. There is no such thing as darkness. Darkness is a human concept. There's only black light between the stars.
Entities have died, but what they seek is life again. They miss it. They want to experience food again, basic things. They are low on the evolutionary scale. They want to experience the joy of destroying something.
Inside you is eternity. A human being is not so simple. We're told that we're Ted or Sally or Willie or whatever and that we grow up and have experiences. That has nothing to do with what life is. You are eternity.
Reality does appear to exist, there does appear to be birth, youth, people appear to have children. But all of it's a dream. These are isolated moments that are only connected by perception. There is no separation.
Whatever you focus on during meditation, you psychically travel to and touch. In meditation, when you think of somebody, you actually go into their aura. That is the issue. Keep your meditation pristine, unalloyed.
We call someone a saint in a world in which everyone is abnormal. The normal person becomes extraordinary. But there's nothing extraordinary about being a saint, that's just someone who's somewhat online with life.
Christmas time - an Enlightened Teacher came into the world, taught, and died. His message was simple: Forgive. While the human beings of this planet have still not absorbed this simple Truth, it remains the Truth.
You work many hours. It is the major activity of your life. You can lose a lot of energy or gain a lot of energy from it. Put your full attention into it and do a good job, because it is part of your impeccability.
The mantra is a very preliminary exercise for the student to begin to grasp a sense of focus. When they are used by persons who have reached very high levels of attention, they can open up doorways to other worlds.
Humor is not about problems with airline luggage handlers. It's about our lives in America and it's about the ends of our lives and it's about everything that happens after that and everything that happened before.
Over the long haul, many of those people [in a difficult marriage] will begin to reciprocate, because you are meeting a basic need in their life, the need for love, and they know they don't deserve love many times.
The number of teachers and guides that a soul has depends upon what it seeks to accomplish and its level of awareness. Souls that take upon themselves projects of more magnitude bring to themselves more assistance.
There was a hole in Washington fiction, I felt, when I started out. Most D.C. novels were about politics or the federal city or people who lived in Georgetown or Chevy Chase - it was definitely a very narrow focus.
For good reasons, there are no ties during the Stanley Cup season. Somebody needs to win so the lads can get out to their cottages on the lakes, where all hockey players spend their summers, or so I have been told.