Week 2017-34

[#understanding, #perception]
"When we want to understand something we cannot just stand outside and observe it. We have to enter deeply into it and be one with it in order to really understand." (Thich Nhat Hanh)

[#education, #growth]
"You have to start where people are, because their growth is going to be from there, not from some abstraction or where you are or someone else is." (Myles Horton)

[#flow, #choice]
"Stop choosing between chaos and order and live at the boundary between them where rest and action move together." (Rainer Maria Rilke)

[#understanding, #pain]
"[...] if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less." (James Baldwin)

[#detachment, #awareness]
"This is what Zen means by being detached - not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling is not sticky or blocked, and through whom the experiences of the world pass like the reflections of birds flying over water." (Alan Watts)

[#mind, #meditation]
"The mind has power over the body and speech, and therefore any training of body and speech must begin with the mind." (Dalai Lama, “Stages Of Meditation”)

[#change, #patience]
"To master change, nothing is more important than to know the time; to know the time, nothing is more important than to understand inner design; to understand inner design, nothing is more important than open calm." (Li Daoqun, “The Book of Balance and Harmony”)

[#patience, #acceptance]
"Patience is the calm acceptance that things can happen in a different order than the one you have in mind." (David G. Allen)

[#action, #impossible]
"Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible." (M. C. Escher)

[#self, #love]
"There is in fact no self which needs to be negated. We merely manifest self in terms of our affection and love for people and our willingness to work. When we manifest this way, the self that needs to be negated is already negated." (Kyozan Joshu Sasaki)

[#truth, #human nature]
"If the individual, or heretic, gets hold of some essential truth, or sees some error in the system being practised, he commits so many marginal errors himself that he is worn out before he can establish his point." (Ezra Pound)

Week 2017-33

"The more a man can forget, the greater the number of metamorphoses which his life can undergo, the more he can remember the more divine his life becomes." (Soren Kierkegaard)

"Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic." (Frank Herbert)

"Peaceful is the one who's not concerned with having more or less." (Rumi)

"Balance is the all-important factor in a fighter’s attitude or stance. Without balance at all times, he can never be effective." (Bruce Lee, “Tao of Jeet Kune Do”)

"Never fear the shadows. They simply mean that there's a light somewhere nearby." (Ruth E Renkel)

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware." (Martin Buber)

"Don’t search for heaven and hell in the future. Both are now present. Whenever we manage to love without expectations, calculations, negotiations, we are indeed in heaven. Whenever we fight, hate, we are in hell." (Shams Tabrizi)

"Non-action is the real action. One hundred acts are not as good as one moment of silence. One hundred exercises are not as good as one moment of standing still." (Wang Xiang Zhai)

"A problem is a question you haven't yet answered to a level that has fulfilled you." (Tony Robbins)

"The most important function of education at any level is to develop the personality of the individual and the significance of his life to himself and to others. This is the basic architecture of a life; the rest is ornamentation and decoration of the structure." (Grayson L. Kirk)

Week 2017-32

"A man must have a certain amount of intelligent ignorance to get anywhere." (Charles F. Kettering)

"There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something." (Henry Ford)

"The universe is a fractal. Whatever energy signature we carry will be repeated infinitely, again and again...until we change that vibration." (Paige Bartholomew)

"Unanticipated side effects arise because we too often act as if cause and effect were always closely linked in time and space." (John Sterman)

"Side effects are not a feature of reality but a sign that our understanding of the system is narrow and flawed." (John Sterman)

"Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively." (Dalai Lama)

"Renunciation is not giving up the things of this world, but accepting that they go away." (Shunryu Suzuki-roshi)

"In the age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still." (Pico Iyer)

"Words are not truth. Truth is like the moon, and words are like my finger. I can point to the moon with my finger, but my finger is not the moon." (Hui Neng)

"The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost." (G. K. Chesterton)

Week 2017-31

"As soon as you concern yourself with the 'good' and 'bad' of your fellows, you create an opening in your heart for maliciousness to enter. Testing, competing with, and criticizing others weakens and defeats you." (Morihei Ueshiba, "The Art of Peace", 1991)

"The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.
The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances." (Atisha)

"The root of compassion is compassion for oneself." (Pema Chodron)

"Happiness is the absence of the striving for happiness." (Chuang Tzu)

"Maybe you are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots." (Rumi)

"With love you don’t bargain. There, the choice is not yours. Love is a mirror, it reflects only your essence, if you have the courage to look in its face." (Rumi)

"Your knowledge should improve your heart and purge your ego." (Imam Al-Ghazali)

"When the heart is at peace for and against are forgotten." (Chuang Tzu)

"Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity." (Pema Chodron)

"[...] you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see." (Clive S Lewis, "The Abolition of Man", 1943)