by various authors
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So what is this mind, what are these atoms with consciousness? Last
week's
potatoes! - Richard Feynman
* * *
hink that almost every word we speak to anyone is a way of trying to
explain to them who we are, and almost always we fail, and that is
why I
would rather not try. It is a great wonder to be able to speak a single
work, your name, and be believed. - Theodore Sturgeon
* * *
The days are gone when you could be only an intellectual, you could
be only
a soldier or a hero, you could be only a merchant or only a worker...
to
seek to perfect myself only in that line in which I am specially gifted
is
called specialisation. It is out of tune, out of temper with the times.
-
M.P. Pandit, 1974
* * *
The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent
of
its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human
life.
- Barry Lopez
* * *
othing
has ever so moved me as this realisation that a man could so
utterly forget time and place and the world. In that hour I grasped
the
secret of all art and of all earthly achievement-concentration, the
rallying of all one's forces for accomplishment of one's task, large
or
small; capacity to direct one's will, so often dissipated and scattered,
upon one thing. - Stefan Zweig, after visiting Rodin
* * *
Most of us are only intermittently aware, even in youth, and the occasions
on which adults see and feel and hear with every sense alert become
rarer
and rarer with the passage of years. - Dorothea Brande
* * *
It is a splendid thing to live in the environment of great students...
they
stir the waters. - Robert Henri
* * *
ow
glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! To behold this alone
is worth the pain of any excursion a thousand times over. The highest
peaks
burned like islands in a sea of liquid shade. Then the lower peaks
and
spines caught the glow, and long lances of light, streaming through
many a
notch and pass, fell thick on the frozen meadows. - John Muir
* * *
There are moments when something new has entered into us, a something
unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us
withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands
in
the midst of it and is silent. - Rainer Maria Rilke
* * *
Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon
a
distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort
the
fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares
and
the slavery of Home, one feels once more happy. The blood flows with
the
fast circulation of childhood... A journey, in fact, appeals to
Imagination, to Memory, to Hope, -the three sister graces of our moral
being. - Sir Richard Francis Burton, 1856
* * *
This is not a yoga in which abnormality of any kind, even if it be an
exalted abnormality, can be admitted as a way to self-fulfillment,
or
spiritual realisation...the experiencing consciousness must preserve
a calm
balance, an unfailing clarity and order in its observation, a sort
of
sublimated commonsense, an unfailing power of self-criticism, right
discrimination, coordination and firm vision of things; a sane grasp
on
facts and a high spiritualized positivism must always be there. - Sri
Aurobindo
* * *
What happened had to have happened. But it could have been much
better. -
Sri Aurobindo
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