Quotes

[SMM]

In order to maintain some of the simplicity of the way of life of the first followers of Islam, an early Sufi named Hatin al-Asamm established four key principles of Sufi life: to remember that no other person eats your bread for you; that no one but you performs your actions; that death is coming, so you should address your life in readiness for it; and that you are under the eye of God."

- Philip Wilkinson, Religions.

 

[Rich]

“Life is at its best when everything has fallen out of place, and you decide that you're going to fight to get them right, not when everything is going your way and everyone is praising you.”

― Thisuri Wanniarachchi

 

[Palinurus]

Falsehood always seeks to imitate the truth.

Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, 86

 

[RflctnOfU]

Something I've been saying for at least 15 years, can't recall if I heard it or if it is original

The dancing man looks the fool, to all those who cannot hear the music.

 

[SMM]

This we know.
All things are connected
like the blood
which unites one family...

Whatever befalls the earth,
befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.
Man did not weave the web of life;
he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web,
he does to himself.

~ Ted Perry.

 

[mimimari]

I was recently rereading some of the Dot Connector Magazines and a couple of quotes jumped out at me that I had missed during the first read through. The first quote is by John Fitzgerald Kennedy:

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myth allows the comfort of opinion without the the discomfort of thought”

The second is by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

“Take care of your body with steadfast fidelity. The soul must see through these eyes alone, and if they are dim, the whole world is clouded”

 

[Mal7]

From the book Fuhrers Must Fall: A Study of the Phenomenon of Power from Caesar to Hitler by Michael Osten (translated into English by E. W. Dickes). London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1942. "Michael Osten is the pseudonym of the distinguished journalist on pre-Hitler Germany's great liberal newspaper - the Vossische Zeitung." - from dust wrapper blurb.

His [Julius Caesar’s] fame has endured through nearly 2,000 years, and to-day shines more brightly than ever. It depends partly on his memoirs, written more or less in self-defence, which, apart from their remarkable story of achievements, are works of the highest literary rank. The man who was the hero and the historian of these events is traditionally described as of almost feminine charm. He moved with perfect freedom on the peaks of the culture of his day; he knew how to win and to retain affection; there was no friend whom he had given up for another, no woman whom he had deserted, although he himself suffered both these misfortunes; he charmed by the fascination of his talk and the grace of his largesse. His mind was free from superstition and intolerance; he knew neither fear nor hatred; he did not use his dictatorship for the extermination of his political opponents, and if there was anything that he could not forgive the narrow and self-righteous Cato, a man for whom he had a deep dislike, it was Cato’s premature death, which robbed the successful ruler of the opportunity of punishing his impotent opponent by his generosity. It is no wonder that the echo of the mourning over his early and violent end is heard to this day.

-pp. 44-45.

Caesar’s memory is illuminated as that of no other ruler by the claim that, if it had been granted him to work with unrestricted power, he would have led the whole of the known world to happiness; that he would have given it the best form accessible to the wisest, strongest, most kindly, best educated, and spiritually wealthiest of men; that he had both the ability and the will to do this. The ability he certainly had: he had no less intelligence than Napoleon, and when he came into power he was not faced like Napoleon with the hopeless task of continually overthrowing one Great Power after another. Would he have had the will? He was spared the test, perhaps to the misfortune of humanity, perhaps for the good of his own memory.

It is justifiable to have our doubts even of Caesar, difficult though it may be to withhold our homage to his sceptical superiority. Behind the genius of Caesar as soldier and statesman, behind his personal attractiveness, his wide reading, his artistic receptivity, his literary gift, his wit, his generosity, and his goodness, lurked all the characteristics of obsession with power. What would he have done, with what cunning, with what mercilessness, with what disregard of the happiness and misery of human beings and of all humanity, if the power he had won had been challenged from any quarter? That is the test question.

-pp. 110-111.

 

[SMM]

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm. But the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it. Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of & serve themselves.

 

[Zadius Sky]

The devil tempts all other men, but idle men tempt the devil

 

[ggen]

"You can send a message around the world in one fifth of a second, yet it may take years for it to get from the outside of a man's head to the inside." - Charles F. Kettering

 

[CelticWarrior]

"You can send a message around the world in one fifth of a second, yet it may take years for it to get from the outside of a man's head to the inside." - Charles F. Kettering

An incredibly apt observation. There's nothing quite more annoying or frustrating than those who won't listen. For anyone to really listen one must have the ability to truly hear - consciously and collectively - with a thinking cap on additionally.

 

[Mal7]

"It's not the people around you who are at fault," he [don Juan] said. "They cannot help themselves. The fault is with you, because you can help yourself, but you are bent on judging them, at a deep level of silence. Any idiot can judge. If you judge them, you will only get the worst out of them. All of us human beings are prisoners, and it is that prison that makes us act in such a miserable way. Your challenge is to take people as they are! Leave people alone."

"You are absolutely wrong this time, don Juan," I said. " Believe me, I have no interest whatsoever in judging them, or entangling myself with them in any way."

"You do understand what I'm talking about," he insisted doggedly. "If you're not conscious of your desire to judge them," he continued, "you are in even worse shape than I thought. This is the flaw of warrior-travelers when they begin to resume their journeys. They get cocky, out of hand."

- Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity, (1998), pp. 208-209.

 

[Tristan]

"We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploration, will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time"-- T.S. Elliot

 

[Mal7]

“On that journey I had my first intuition of what Isiah Berlin calls 'contradictory truths'. It was in Santa Maria de Nieva, a small village where a mission had been set up in the 1940s. The nuns opened a school for girls of the tribes. But because they would not attend voluntarily, they were brought in with the help of the Civil Guard. After a spell in the mission, some of the girls lost all contact with their family world and could not go back to the life that they had been taken from. What happened to them, therefore? They were entrusted to the representatives of 'civilization' who came through Santa Maria de Nieva – engineers, soldiers, traders – who took them as servants. What was really extraordinary was that the missionary nuns did not realize the consequences of the whole operation, and that, furthermore, they demonstrated true heroism in order to carry it out. The conditions in which they lived were very difficult and they were almost totally isolated in the months when the river rose. That with the best intentions in the world, and at a cost of limitless sacrifice, they could cause so much damage is a lesson that I have never forgotten. It has taught me how vague the line is that separates good from evil and how prudent one must be in judging human actions and deciding the answers to social problems if one is to avoid the cure being worse than the illness.”

- Mario Vargas Llosa, in the essay “The Country of a Thousand Faces” (1983), published in the collection of his essays Making Waves, edited and translated by John King (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).

 

[Mal7]

“Eloquence was most flourishing at Rome when affairs were in the worst condition, and agitated by the storm of civil wars; as a free and untamed field bears the most lusty herbs. From which it would appear that monarchal governments are less in need of it than others: for the stupidity and credulity we find in the common people, which renders them liable to be handled and twisted by the ears by the sweet sound of this harmony, without weighing and knowing the truth of things by the force of reason: this credulity, I say, is not so readily found in an individual, who is more easily safeguarded, by good education and advice, against the influence of that poison. There was never any orator of renown known to come out of Macedon or Persia.”

- Montaigne, in the essay “The Vanity of Words” (1595 edition), translated by E. J. Trechmann.