If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.
Marcus Aurelius,Meditations
Love is a travel. All travelers whether they want or not are changed. No one can travel into love and remain the same.
Shams Tabrizi
Two Days We Should Not Worry
There are two days in every week about which we should not worry,
two days which should be kept free from fear and apprehension.
One of these days is Yesterday with all its mistakes and cares,
Yesterday has passed forever beyond our control.
We cannot undo a single act we performed;
The other day we should not worry about is Tomorrow
Tomorrow's sun will rise,
This leaves only one day, Today.
It is not the experience of Today that drives a person mad,
Let us, therefore, Live but one day at a time.
Author Unknown
its faults and blunders, its aches and pains.
All the money in the world cannot bring back Yesterday.
we cannot erase a single word we said.
Yesterday is gone forever.
with all its possible adversities, its burdens,
its large promise and its poor performance;
Tomorrow is also beyond our immediate control.
either in splendor or behind a mask of clouds, but it will rise.
Until it does, we have no stake in Tomorrow,
for it is yet to be born.
Any person can fight the battle of just one day.
It is when you and I add the burdens of those two awful
eternities Yesterday and Tomorrow that we break down.
it is the remorse or bitterness of something which happened
Yesterday and the dread of what Tomorrow may bring.
Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.
Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
William Faulkner
The Dance
I have sent you my invitation, the note inscribed on the palm of my hand by the fire of living. Don’t jump up and shout, "Yes, this is what I want! Let’s do it!" Just stand up quietly and dance with me.
Show me how you follow your deepest desires, spiralling down into the ache within the ache. And I will show you how I reach inward and open outward to feel the kiss of the Mystery, sweet lips on my own, everyday.
Tell me a story of who you are,
And see who I am in the stories I am living. And together we will remember that each of us always has a choice.
I have heard enough warrior stories of heroic daring. Tell me how you crumble when you hit the wall, the place you cannot go beyond by the strength of your own will. What carries you to the other side of that wall, to the fragile beauty of your own humanness?
Take me to the places on the earth that teach you how to dance, the places where you can risk letting the world break your heart. And I will take you to the places where the earth beneath my feet and the stars overhead make my heart whole again and again.
Show me how you offer to your people and the world the stories and the songs you want our children’s children to remember, and I will show you how I struggle not to change the world, but to love it.
And when the sound of all the declarations of our sincerest intentions has died away on the wind, dance with me in the infinite pause before the next great inhale of the breath that is breathing us all into being, not filling the emptiness from the outside or from within.
Just take my hand and dance with me.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer
Don’t tell me you want to hold the whole world in your heart. Show me how you turn away from making another wrong without abandoning yourself when you are hurt and afraid of being unloved.
Don’t tell me how wonderful things will be . . . some day. Show me you can risk being completely at peace, truly OK with the way things are right now in this moment, and again in the next and the next and the next. . .
And after we have shown each other how we have set and kept the clear, healthy boundaries that help us live side by side with each other, let us risk remembering that we never stop silently loving those we once loved out loud.
Show me how you take care of business without letting business determine who you are. When the children are fed but still the voices within and around us shout that soul’s desires have too high a price, let us remind each other that it is never about the money.
Sit beside me in long moments of shared solitude, knowing both our absolute aloneness and our undeniable belonging. Dance with me in the silence and in the sound of small daily words, holding neither against me at the end of the day.
Don’t say, "Yes!"
Child
Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
Whose names you meditate ---
Stalk without wrinkle,
Not this troublous
Sylvia Plath
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.
Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it.
C.S. Lewis
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.
Ray Bradbury
I Sit And Think
I sit beside the fire and think
Of yellow leaves and gossamer
I sit beside the fire and think
For still there are so many things
I sit beside the fire and think
But all the while I sit and think
J.R.R Tolkien
of all that I have seen,
of meadow-flowers and butterflies
in summers that have been;
in autumns that there were,
with morning mist and silver sun
and wind upon my hair.
of how the world will be
when winter comes without a spring
that I shall ever see
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.
of people long ago,
and people who will see a world
that I shall never know.
of times there were before,
I listen for returning feet
and voices at the door.
To conceal anything from those to whom I am attached,
And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death. And O what a bright old song it is, that O 'tis love, 'tis love, 'tis love that makes the world go round!
I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.
I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.
You could draw me to fire, you could draw me to water, you could draw me to the gallows, you could draw me to any death, you could draw me to anything I have most avoided, you could draw me to any exposure and disgrace. This and the confusion of my thoughts, so that I am fit for nothing, is what I mean by your being the ruin of me.
But if you would return a favourable answer to my offer of myself in marringe, you could draw me to any good--every good--with equal force.
To the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!'
is not in my nature.I can never close my lips where
I have opened my heart.
Charles Dickens,Master Humphrey's Clock
Charles Dickens,Our Mutual Friend
Charles Dickens,David Copperfield
A silent look of affection and regard when all other eyes are turned coldly away--the consciousness that we possess the sympathy and affection of one being when all others have deserted us--is a hold, a stay, a comfort, in the deepest affliction, which no wealth could purchase,or power bestow.
Charles Dickens,The Pickwick Papers
And the voices in the waves are always whispering to Florence, in their ceaseless murmuring, of love - of love, eternal and illimitable, not bounded by the confines of this world, or by the end of time, but ranging still, beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the invisible country far away!
Charles Dickens,Dombey and Son
... Oh my soul, so may thy face be by me when I close my life indeed; so may I, when realities are melting from me, like the shadows which I now dismiss, still find thee near me, pointing upward!
Charles Dickens,David Copperfield
Never,never,before Heaven,have I thought of you but as the single, bright, pure, blessed recollection of my boyhood and my youth. Never have I from the first, and never shall I to the last, regard your part in my life, but as something sacred, never to be lightly thought of, never to be esteemed enough, never, until death, to be forgotten.
Charles Dickens,Dombey and Son
I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms.
Charles Dickens,The Mystery of Edwin Drood
There lives at least one being who can never change--one being who would be content to devote his whole existence to your happiness--who lives but in your eyes--who breathes but in your smiles--who bears the heavy burden of life itself only for you.
Charles Dickens,The Pickwick Papers
She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I don't know what she was - anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. I was swallowed up in an abyss of love in an instant. There was no pausing on the brink; no looking down, or looking back; I was gone, headlong, before I had sense to say a word to her.
Charles Dickens,David Copperfield
The unqualified truth is,that when I loved ... I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection.
Charles Dickens,Great Expectations
If I may so express it...I was not merely over head and ears in love with her, but I was saturated through and through. Enough love might have been wrung out of me, metaphorically speaking, to drown anybody in; and yet there would have remained enough within me, and all over me, to pervade my entire existence.
Charles Dickens,David Copperfield
I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul... and of this home made such a home by you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had died out of me. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever.
Charles Dickens,A Tale of Two Cities
You know what I am going to say. I love you. What other men may mean when they use that expression, I cannot tell; what I mean is, that I am under the influence of some tremendous attraction which I have resisted in vain, and which overmasters me.
Charles Dickens,Our Mutual Friend
You have been in every prospect I have ever seen since - on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings are made, are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and everywhere, and will be.
Charles Dickens,Great Expectations
We believe we can change things according to our wishes because
that's the only happy solution we can see. We don't think
of what usually happens and what is also a happy solution;
things don't change, but by and by our wishes change.
Marcel Proust
A small child has no ambitions, he has no desires. He is so absorbed in the moment - a bird on the wing catches his eye so totally; just a butterfly, its beautiful colors, and he is enchanted; the rainbow in the sky... and he cannot conceive that there can be anything more significant, richer than this rainbow. And the night full of stars, stars beyond stars... Innocence is rich, it is full, it is pure.
Osho
Love the whole tree
Love not the shapely branch,
Love the whole tree;
Ah, love Life in its fullness.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Nor place its image alone in your heart.
It dies away.
Then you will love the shapely branch,
The tender and withered leaf,
The shy bud and the full-blown flower,
The falling petal and the dancing night,
The splendid shadow of full love.
It knows no decay.
Temptations are as thick as the leaves of the forest, and no one can be out of the reach of temptation unless he is dead. The great thing is to make people intelligent enough and strong enough,not to keep away from temptation, but to resist it.
Robert Ingersoll
All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.
Immanuel Kant
All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?
Immanuel Kant
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Anais Nin
Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.
BERTRAND RUSSELL,Our Knowledge of the External World
The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.
Will Durant
Most of the human race, by one means or other, are prepossessed with principles opposed to the religion of reason.
ETHAN ALLEN,Reason: The Only Oracle of Man
There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses. Admirable gardens of absurd beliefs, forebodings, obsessions and frenzies. Unknown, ever-changing gods take shape there.
LOUIS ARAGON, Paris Peasant
Nothing does Reason more right, than the coolness of those that offer it. For truth often suffers more by the Heat of its defenders, than from the arguments of its opposers.
WILLIAM PENN, Some Fruits of Solitude
Never, never do violence to your rational nature. He who in any case admits doctrines which contradict reason, has broken down the great barrier between truth and falsehood, and lays open his mind to ever delusion.
WILLIAM E. CHANNING, Thoughts
Song of the Soul
In the depth of my soul there is
Khalil Gibran
A wordless song – a song that lives
In the seed of my heart.
It refuses to melt with ink on
Parchment; it engulfs my affection
In a transparent cloak and flows,
But not upon my lips.
How can I sing it? I fear it may
Mingle with earthly ether;
To whom shall I sing it? It dwells
In the house of my soul, in fear of
Harsh ears.
When I look into my inner eyes
I see the shadow of its shadow;
When I touch my fingertips
I feel its vibrations.
The deeds of my hands heed its
Presence as a lake must reflect
The glittering stars;
My tears reveal it, as bright drops of dew
Reveal the secret of a withering rose.
It is a song composed by contemplation,
And published by silence,
And shunned by clamor,
And folded by truth,
And repeated by dreams,
And understood by love,
And hidden by awakening,
And sung by the soul.
It is the song of love;
What Cain or Esau could sing it?
It is more fragrant than jasmine;
What voice could enslave it?
It is heartbound, as a virgin’s secret;
What string could quiver it?
Who dares unite the roar of the sea
And the singing of the nightingale?
Who dares compare the shrieking tempest
To the sigh of an infant?
Who dares speak aloud the words
Intended for the heart to speak?
What human dares sing in voice
The song of God?
Al-Nay (The Flute)
Give me the Nay and sing,
Khalil Gibran
The secret song of eternity.
The laments of the Nay will linger
Beyond the decline of existence.
Have you, like me,
Chosen the forest dwelling
Rather than the castle?
Have you followed the stream
And climbed the rocks?
Have you anointed your body
With fragrance distilled in light?
Have you been drunk with dawn
In the goblets full of pure air?
Have you, like me,
Sat down at dusk,
Among the glowing languor
Of vines laden with grapes?
Have you lain down on the grass at night
And covered yourself with heavens,
Opening your heart to the future,
Forgetful of the past?
Give me the Nay and sing,
The song in tune with hearts.
The laments of the Nay will linger
Beyond the fading of sins.
Give me the Nay and sing,
Unmindful of troubles and cures.
For each man
Is nothing more than a watercolor sketch.
