Everyone post some favorite quotes!

[doc benway]

23 minutes ago, silent thunder said:

 

"Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity."

 

It’s like studying meditation… or like toasting sobriety.

[SirPalomides]

10 hours ago, Taomeow said:

Why do I want to conquer the world?  Because I dream of creating a world where a girl carrying a large dish of pure gold can walk for thousands of miles, from one end of the world to the other, without losing either her dish or her honor. -- Genghis Khan

 “No girls or goldware were harmed in the making of this empire.”

[Taomeow]

3 hours ago, silent thunder said:

 

The cognitive dissonance behind that statement is gobsmacking.

 

It reminds me of the observation made by George Carlin.

"Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity."

 

However, in terms of women's rights he (Genghis Khan, not George Carlin) was centuries ahead of his time.  Also, he said it was his dream, and dreams are born of frustration with reality.  (If reality was fine, who would need to escape into dreams?..)  Of course dreams of powerful men are usually more likely than not to make reality worse instead of better.  There were many dreamers-in-power in the history of this world whose dreams turned into nightmares for those tasked with making them come true...        

[Ajay0]

Do you know the ego feels its existence in negativity and in positivity the ego doesn't feel so strongly? The ego pulls the mind back to negativity to feel its existence. Go back to your past: how many bad events of life do you remember and how many good events? You will find 90% are bad and more clear. 10% are good but like in a fog. This is the great power of our ego. ~ Baba Hari Dass


In good things, the ego doesn't feel its strength of individuality as strongly as in doing bad things. If you do bad things, the ego is right there in the present. Then its memory which repeats in the past. Then its imagination of doing bad things in the future appears. If we look back in our own life, what do we remember the most? All bad things we did or people did to us. Memories of good things appear as if veiled by fog. ~ Baba Hari Dass



The tendency of the mind is to hold on to something negative. If ten compliments and one insult are given, the mind holds on to the negative - that one insult. So when we know this, we are already one step out of it.

Time and again, we must realize: 'I am going on a negative trip' and immediately come back to the here and now. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar



If we reflect on your past, you will notice that all bad things that happened to you appear as if they happened yesterday and the memory of good things appear as if in a fog.

Our ego feels its presence more deeply in pain or in pain causing events, thoughts, emotions. So we always think about such things which bring unhappiness. In that unhappiness, we feel 'its happening to me' even though it happened 10-20 years ago. So pain and suffering are the expressions of the ego caused by desires and attachments. ~ Baba Hari Dass



Desire to be happy is a natural thing in all human beings. But the mind likes to be in pain by bringing the past memories and not seeing any progress in the future.

If we dwell on the negative side of the mind, then we can't be happy in any situation. ~ Baba Hari Dass



Human ego is very attracted to negative qualities, so it needs much austerity to develop positive qualities. ~ Baba Hari Dass

[zerostao]

“Beware of overconcern for money, or position, or glory. Someday you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are.”

~~ Rudyard Kipling 

 

replace the words a man with someone and it gains power. Imo 

 

 

Edited June 21, 2023 by zerostao

[C T]

Not exactly a quote, but definitely share-worthy.

 

·
"Today I asked my body what she needed,
Which is a big deal
Considering my journey of
Not Really Asking That Much.

 

I thought she might need more water.
Or protein.
Or greens.
Or yoga.
Or supplements.
Or movement.

 

But as I stood in the shower
Reflecting on her stretch marks,
Her roundness where I would like flatness,
Her softness where I would like firmness,
All those conditioned wishes
That form a bundle of
Never-Quite-Right-Ness,
She whispered very gently:

Could you just love me like this?"

 

~ Hollie Holden

Edited June 23, 2023 by C T
Missed 1 "

[C T]

"It is man's intelligence that makes him so often behave more stupidly than the beasts. Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. Thus, no animal is clever enough, when there is a drought, to imagine that the rain is being withheld by evil spirits, or as punishment for its transgressions. Therefore, you never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. No horse, for example would kill one of its foals to make the wind change direction. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat's meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, intelligent enough. "

 

~ Aldous Huxley: Texts and Pretexts. 

 

[C T]

"We have a strange anxiety in us; that if we don't interfere, then it won't happen. Now, that's the root of an enormous amount of trouble." ~ Alan Watts

[zerostao]

Believe in yourself, even, when no one else will.

— Sasquatch 

[silent thunder]

The real problem with internet quotes, is determining their veracity.  ~ Abraham Lincoln

[C T]

Philosophy itself can be the disease for which it also pretends to be the cure. 

 

When one has no style, one can fit in with any style. 

 

~ Bruce Lee

[zerostao]

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, and passion.

 

—-Chinese fortune cookie

[zerostao]

“They fear love because it creates a world they can’t control.”

—-George Orwell

[zerostao]

The meaning of life is to give meaning to life.

—Victor Frankl

 

The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.

—Pablo Picasso 

[zerostao]

in a world where Death is the Hunter, my friend, there is no time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.

 

—Carlos Castaneda 

 

[whocoulditbe?]

"If one tethers one’s heart severely and imprisons it, one can give one’s spirit many liberties"

– the big F. N., Beyond Glue and Needle, Chapter 4

[Taomeow]

An established routine is akin to a magical ritual. Put your toothbrush in the wrong place -- and a butterfly will die somewhere. -- Mikhail Kharit

[Unota]

.

Edited February 3 by Unota

[Taomeow]

12 hours ago, Unota said:

 

Is there good power to such a ritual? Or is the schedule at which I brush my teeth a butterfly murder factory? ahaha. Maybe there is strength in normalcy.

 

Tongue-in-cheek use of literary allusions can be funny.  Funny is part of normal. 

If literary allusions were butterflies, sticking pins into them instead of letting them fly would indeed produce a butterfly murder factory.  

[Unota]

.

Edited February 13 by Unota

[silent thunder]

4 hours ago, Unota said:

Online doesn't seem to be a way to form meaningful connections.

I've had the opposite experience, having met a small tribes worth of people, some from around the globe and formed wonderfull friendships of two decades and more.  Multiple pen pals and several from this site who I consider as close as family and have met in person.

 

Seems to me, it depends heavily on the types of sites you contribute to and what folks are around to be connecting with and then... how you reach out.  My wife and I play an online game and have also made collective friends with plans to meet up in person when timing allows. 

 

Meaning and connection abound.

[whocoulditbe?]

5 hours ago, Unota said:

It is also funny that I should see this quote, because just before this, I have been looking for ways to deal with isolation. Meditation among other things are one way to deal with this. Online doesn't seem to be a way to form meaningful connections.

Very much my experience. Being online at a young age was a good way of filling my brain with evil nonsense of every kind from before I understood enough to see through the intentions of the people writing it, and ending up haunted by it all for life. But I have never had any long-term online friends.

[whocoulditbe?]

5 hours ago, Unota said:

The only suggestion I could find that was do-able for me was "routines," to create a sense of structure. I scoffed at it a bit. I didn't think it would help to that extent. Seeing this right after that felt like being shaken, as if to force me to pay attention. I found it very funny.

 

Here is another quote about daily rituals, draining the excess coffee grounds each morning.

 

"That, I think, is the power of ceremony: it marries the mundane to the sacred. The water turns to wine, the coffee to a prayer. The material and the spiritual mingle like grounds mingled with humus, transformed like steam rising from a mug into the morning mist.

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes a home."

-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

 

A good blog post about this I saw a while ago:

Quote

Ritual is pleasurable. It contextualizes and connects. But I am troubled by the fact that so many seem to want to manufacture it, or embrace it in the first place that it appears without examining what it may be connecting them to, without being critical of the contexts they’re entering. Submitting to the mystery means submitting to a way of being. Every ritual has rules, and every inherited history demands some way of acting. I’m not saying that freedom must be everyone’s priority, but I do think that by enshrining ‘ritual’ as an isolated, desirable thing, its contemporary adherents lose the point that ritual is necessarily connective and richly symbolic. It can’t be experienced in a vacuum. More people might ask themselves if they’re submitting to something unworthy of them just because it has a ritual component. 

 

[Unota]

.

Edited February 17 by Unota

[Ajay0]

Remember, and analyze your own life. Have you ever taken account of happy moments, of contents, of satisfactions, or blissful glimpses ? You have not taken any account, but you have taken every account of your pain, suffering, misery, and you go on accumulating. You are an accumulated hell, and this is your own choice. No one else is forcing you into this hell; this is your own choice. 

 

 The mind takes the negative, accumulates it and becomes negative itself. And this is a self-perpetuating misery. The more negatives you have within the mind, the more negative you become, the more negatives are accumulated.

The similar attracts the similar, and this has been for lives and lives. You miss everything because of your negative approach. ~ Osho

 

 

 You have never felt the positive ; you have always felt the negative. Life is not such a misery as we have made it; misery is just our interpretation.   Life is neither misery, nor is life bliss. Bliss and misery are our interpretations, our attitudes, our approaches, how we look at it. It is your mind - how it takes it. ~ Osho

 

 

Everything is just a window. If you become identified with a pain, you are looking from a window, and the window of pain, of suffering, opens only towards hell. If you are one with a satisfactory moment, a blissful moment, an ecstatic moment, you are opening another window. The existence is the same, but your windows are different. ~ Osho

 

We make very little progress when we strive to conquer baser instincts in a good mood. However, vast strides are possible when we are miserable and work with ourselves to replace our misery with joy and understanding. ~ Sivaya Subramuniyaswami

Edited August 17, 2023 by Ajay0