“The same boiling water that hardens the egg softens the potato.”
– Russian Proverb
“The same boiling water that hardens the egg softens the potato.”
– Russian Proverb
“Come back my soul,
How much longer will
You linger in the garden of deceit?
I have sent you a hundred messages
I have shown you a hundred ways
Either you never read them
Or you ignore my advice.
Come back my soul, do not waste
Time with the cold-hearted
They do not know your worth.
Why do you seek water
When you are the stream?
Have you forgotten?
You are the king’s falcon,
You are a ray of the Beloved,
A divine wonder!”
– Rumi
“You will never find the same person twice. Not even in the same person.”
– Unknown
“Your ignorance about something is not an argument against it.”
– Unknown
“Whatever we may wish to think, we are creatures of Earth our life is part of the life of the Earth; and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter are as essential to it as spring and summer, and rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more than to the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestrial life. The human body has been adapted through the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the festival of Easter.
I have seen a boy of two years old, who had been kept in London, taken out for the first time to walk in green country. The season was winter, and everything was wet and muddy. To the adult eye there was nothing to cause delight, but in the boy there sprang up a strange ecstasy; he kneeled in the wet ground and put his face in the grass, and gave utterance to half-articulate cries of delight. The joy that he was experiencing was primitive, simple and massive. The organic need that was being satisfied is so profound that those in whom it is starved are seldom completely sane.
Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling and drink as a good examples, have in them no element of this contact with Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he knows not what. Such pleasures bring nothing that can truly be called joy. Those, on the other hand, that bring us into contact with the life of the Earth have something in them profoundly satisfying; when they cease, the happiness that they have brought remains, although their intensity while they existed may have been less than that of more exciting dissipations.
The two-year-old boy whom I spoke of a moment ago displayed the most primitive possible form of union with the life of Earth. But in a higher form the same thing is to be found in poetry. What makes Shakespeare’s lyrics supreme is that they are filled with this same joy that made the two-year- old embrace the grass. Consider “Hark, hark, the lark”, or “Come unto these yellow sands”; you will find in these poems the civilized expression of the same emotion that in our two-year-old could only find utterance in inarticulate cries.
Or, again, consider the difference between love and mere sex attraction. Love is an experience in which our whole being is renewed and refreshed as is that of plants by rain after drought. In sex intercourse without love there is nothing of this. When the momentary pleasure is ended, there is fatigue, disgust, and a sense that life is hollow. Love is part of the life of Earth; sex without love is not. The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth. It makes life hot and dusty and thirsty, like a pilgrimage in the desert. A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.“
— Bertrand Russell
“Our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.”
– Alan Watts
“A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions, and the roots spring up and make new trees.”
– Amelia Earhart
“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.”
— James Baldwin
“Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”
– Albert Einstein
“There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable.”
– Lucius Annaeus Seneca
“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you’re not allowed to criticise.”
– Voltaire
“Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life.”
– Robin Sharma
“Your failure says nothing about your worth as a person. Embrace failure, and learn from it, and you will progress faster than those that simply avoid doing things that they might fail at.”
– Unknown
“You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themself into.”
– Unknown