Everyone post some favorite quotes!

[Junior Western Bacon Chi]

I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me Superman.

 

- Homer Simpson

[dust]

"Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar."

("Traveller, there is no path. The path is made by walking.")

 

-- Antonio Machado

[GrandmasterP]

THE EMPTY CHURCH

 

They laid this stone trap

for him, enticing him with candles,

as though he would come like some huge moth

out of the darkness to beat there.

Ah, he had burned himself

before in the human flame

and escaped, leaving the reason

torn. He will not come any more

to our lure. Why, then, do I kneel still

striking my prayers on a stone

heart? Is it in hope one

of them will ignite yet and throw

on its illumined walls the shadow

of someone greater than I can understand?

 

R.S. Thomas

Edited September 18, 2014 by GrandmasterP

[Tibetan_Ice]

You're allot stronger than you think you are!

Showering might help...

[zerostao]

"squandered youth in search of truth"

larry cordle

Edited September 23, 2014 by zerostao

[Marblehead]

"squandered youth in search of truth"

larry cordle

No one told me to seek the truth when I was young. I just lived the life I wanted to live. I'm still not sure there is any "real" truth.

[ThisLife]

*

If you don't know where you are going,

 

any road will take you there.

 

*

Edited September 25, 2014 by ThisLife

[silent thunder]

not all those who wander are lost... Tolkien

[Trash Filter]

I like the one with the buddha at enlightenment after so many years to effect of "I see the builder"

[C T]

I like the one with the buddha at enlightenment after so many years to effect of "I see the builder"

3.1

For ascetic practice, then, he left Kapilavāastu --

 

A teeming mass of horses, elephants and chariots,

 

Majestic, safe, loved by its citizens --

 

And started resolutely for the forest.

 

3.2

In the approach to ascetic practice of the various traditions,

 

And in the attachment of sages to various restraints,

 

He observed the miseries of thirsting for an object.

 

Seeing asceticism to be unreliable, he turned away from it.

 

3.3

Then Ārāda, who spoke of freedom,

 

And likewise Uḍraka, who inclined towards quietness,

 

He served, his heart set on truth, and he left.

 

He who intuited the path intuited: "This also is not it."

 

3.4

Of the different traditions in the world, he asked himself,

 

Which one was the best?

 

Not obtaining certainty elsewhere,

 

He entered after all into ascetic practice that was most severe.

 

3.5

Then, having ascertained that this was not the path,

 

He abandoned that extreme asceticism too.

 

Understanding the sphere of meditation to be supreme,

 

He ate good food in readiness to realise the deathless.

 

3.6

With his golden arms fully expanded and as if in a yoke,

 

With lengthened eyes, and bull-like gait,

 

He came to a fig tree, growing up from the earth,

 

With the will to awakening that belongs to the supreme method of investigation.

 

3.7

Sitting there, mind made up,

 

As unmovingly stable as the king of mountains,

 

He overcame the grim army of Māra

 

And awoke to the step which is happy, irremovable, and irreducible.

[C T]

 

What our present age lacks is a heuristic language. It only has a scientific language, and

outside of that it only has the reverse, an emotive language. But merely to have an emotive

language can only enable the person to crash about and hurtle along, ending in raving blindness.

Nor can technology resolve anything.

People of the present day put emphasis on technology, outside of which there is

only the feelings. As a result the person is completely exposed in the present age. If

the feelings continue to be thus exposed, the person will become an animal, which will be

ruinous. Once an animal, he will no longer have the ability to feel guilt, and without that he

will be depraved. Only the human being is able to feel guilt. The present-day person does

not have the ability to feel guilt; he only has technical problems. He has converted all

morality into technical problems, no longer concerned about moral right or wrong, but only

concerned about technical true or false, correct or incorrect.

The present-day person uses all kinds of excuses, all kinds of so-called scientific terms,

to get rid of the concept of guilt and to convert all concepts of right and wrong, good and bad,

into technical true or false. If I made a mistake in the technical task of installing an electric bulb,

you certainly wouldn’t be able to say that I sinned. God has no sense of guilt, neither do animals,

but the person cannot be without a sense of guilt. If we treat the person in his status as a person,

then the person without a sense of guilt would be a mass of depravity, and that is a serious problem

of the present day. --- Mou Zongsan

[iain]

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain. Time to die." (Roy) Bladerunner

[soaring crane]

I'd rather live 44 Steve Irwin years than 100 Pat Boone years --- some internet meme writer

[The Tao Of Alex]

Hi everyone. Lots of favorite quotes(many to live by). These two stick out:

'The whole world is you, yet you keep thinking there is something else' - Hsueh-Feng

'Be still like a mountain,and flow like a great river' - Lao Tsu (I quote this one to myself during the day when I find myself not in balance).

Alex

[The Tao Of Alex]

Thought I would add one more: ' I've met many great Zen Masters, and all of them were cats...'

Alex

[ThisLife]

Thought I would add one more: ' I've met many great Zen Masters, and all of them were cats...'

Alex

 

 

A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.

 

Maharishi Groucho Marx

Edited October 22, 2014 by ThisLife

[C T]

“We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
― Howard Zinn

[ThisLife]

.

Life can only be understood looking backwards, but alas, it must be lived looking forwards.

 

Albert Camus

 

.

Edited October 27, 2014 by ThisLife

[dust]

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”

 

“I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.”

 

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”

 

“There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers.”

 

“One farmer says to me, 'You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;' and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”

 

“The church is a sort of hospital for men's souls and as full of quackery as the hospital for their bodies.”

 

“As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.”

 

― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

 

 

I could quote the whole book... or simply suggest everyone reads it...

Edited October 30, 2014 by dustybeijing

[dust]

Couple more. I was searching for these. Reading it last week, it seemed that every page held 2 or 3 sentences that I wanted to quote to someone.

 

“No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes: yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.”

 

“It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields.”

 

“Here is life, an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me that they have tried it.”

 

“As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”

 

--ouch!!

Edited October 30, 2014 by dustybeijing

[Marblehead]

 

--ouch!!

Ouch indeed! But no less valid, IMO.

[dust]

Ouch indeed! But no less valid, IMO.

 

Sorry I don't follow..no less valid than what?

[Marblehead]

Sorry I don't follow..no less valid than what?

Sorry for my poorly selected words. How about: But none-the-less valid. Or maybe: But still valid.

[ThisLife]

.

 

“If you are depressed you are living in the past.

If you are anxious you are living in the future.

If you are at peace you are living in the present.”

Lao Tzu

Edited November 12, 2014 by ThisLife

[Marblehead]

I'm not sure Lao Tzu said that but it sounds good none-the-less.