COMPASSION

Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live thoughtlessly and begins to devote himself to his life
with reverence in order to give it true value.
— Albert Schweitzer

8/11/2014

Quotes

“In order to forgive you must have blamed. If you don’t blame there is nothing to forgive.” - Wayne Dyer

“If you do not fling old ideas out of your mind, you cannot give birth to new ones.” - Peter Dunov

“Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional [or scholarly] writers.” - George Orwell “Politics and the English Language” 1946. (quoted)

“Nature is trying hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.” - Buckminster Fuller

“All things are difficult before they are easy.” - Thomas Fuller

“The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred” - George Bernard Shaw

“A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.” - Gandhi

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.” - Philip K. Dick

“Selfishness comes from poverty in the heart, from the belief that love is not abundant.” - Don Miguel Ruiz

“Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.” - Bertrand Russell

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.” - Marshall McLuhan

“Creativity arises out of the state of thoughtless presence in which you are much more awake than when you are engrossed in thinking.” - Eckhart Tolle

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” - Theodore Roosevelt

“Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.” - James Harvey Robinson

“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” - Buddha

“Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability to do it even if I didn’t have it in the beginning.” - Mahatma Gandhi

“We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.” - Bertrand Russell

“Dreams are the answers to questions that we haven’t yet figured out how to ask.” - Fox Mulder

“Your commitment to other people must be an extension of your commitment to yourself, not at odds with it.” - Paul Ferrini

“Stress is caused by being ‘here’ but wanting to be ‘there’.” - Eckhart Tolle

“He who experiences the unity of life, sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye.” - Buddha

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” - Henri Bergson

“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.” - George Bernard Shaw

“People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.” - Chinese Proverb

“When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” - Sinclair Lewis

“For as knowledges are now delivered, there is a kind of contract of error between the deliverer and the receiver; for he that delivereth knowledge desireth to deliver it in such a form as may be best believed, and not as may be best examined; and he that receiveth knowledge desireth rather present satisfaction than expectant inquiry.” - Francis Bacon

“Whatever people do, they do for a reason and they think that it meets their needs….by their perception.” - Anthony Robbins

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” - Plato

“When you stop projecting your anger & fear on the world, you can stand for truth without hurting others.” - Paul Ferrini

“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.” - William Blake

“To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it.” - Confucius

“If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.” - Henry Ford

“Language etches the grooves through which your thoughts must flow.” - Noam Chomsky

“There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.” - Anaïs Nin

“The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self-created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life.” - Eckhart Tolle

“Attention Deficit Disorder was coined by regularity chauvinists. Regularity chauvinists are people who insist that you have got to do the same thing every time, every day, which drives some of us nuts. Attention Deficit Disorder - we need a more positive term for that. Hummingbird mind, I should think.” - Ted Nelson (via Jake Elliott)

“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” - Epictetus

“Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.” - Alan J. Perlis

“Facts are God’s native tongue.” - Michael Dowd

“Our minds can shape the way a thing will be, because we act according to our expectations.” - Federico Fellini

“The deeper you surrender to existence, life, nature, the more loving, more understanding, more insightful you become.” - Osho

“The fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion.” - Arnold H. Glasow

“We criticize people for not giving us what we ourselves are afraid to ask for.” - Marshall Rosenberg

“You are not just a drop in the ocean, you the mighty ocean in the drop.” - Rumi

“The collective dream is the hypnosis of social conditioning. Only sages, psychotics & geniuses manage to break free.” - Deepak Chopra

“Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance.” - Will Durant

“There is nothing so practical as a good theory” - Phil Wadler

“Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.” - Norman Douglas

“Hell is just resistance to life.” - Pema Chödrön

“If you don’t have the right abstractions, you can make things artificially difficult. For example, if I was going to teach arithmetic and I only knew about Roman numerals, you might get the idea that multiplication is extremely difficult. Given the idea of Arabic numerals it becomes a lot easier. If we took Roman numerals, the Romans have no way to express zero. It was just a sort of concept that didn’t exist so a whole branch of mathematics was not only difficult, it was impossible. If we have the wrong abstractions, we can make things which are intrinsically rather simple very difficult. I think that’s what’s happened in parallel programming. We’re using the wrong abstractions and that’s making things artificially difficult.” - Joe Armstrong

“The amount of happiness that you have depends on the amount of freedom you have in your heart.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

“When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.” - Shunryu Suzuki

“I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.” - Kahlil Gibran

“Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what’s going on.” - Pema Chödrön

“Awareness is the key. Do we see the stories that we’re telling ourselves and question their validity?” - Pema Chödrön

“What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.” - Paul Valery

“The only real security in life lies in relishing life’s insecurity.” - M. Scott Peck

“A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” - Lao Tzu

“To put it concisely, we suffer when we resist the noble and irrefutable truth of impermanence and death.” - Pema Chödrön

“There must be a way of promoting human values without involving religion, based on common sense, experience and recent scientific findings.” - Dalai Lama

“Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that’s all that’s happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness—life’s painful aspect—softens us up considerably. Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody’s eyes because you feel you haven’t got anything to lose—you’re just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. We’d be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn’t have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.” - Pema Chödrön (Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living)

“Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person.” - Pema Chödrön

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” - Charles Mingus (via Garr Reynolds)

“Every problem contains within itself the seeds of its own solution.” - Stanley Arnold

“Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something.” - Plato

“If you believe it will work out, you’ll see opportunities. If you believe it won’t you will see obstacles.” - Wayne W Dyer

“Only the closed mind is certain.” - from the movie Dean Spanley

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