Blog
 

Past & Present Wisdom

Before in my blog, I’ve given you a handful of quotes, since I’m an avid collector of them.  Because they’re so pithy and punchy, they sometimes carry more weight than a pageful of prose.  Today, I give you more.

I’m in the midst of sorting things out in my mind and am not able to assimilate them into printable thought right now.  So if you were looking for an enlightening (or enraging) discourse today, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Here are my gifts to you–on this sunny, melty day.

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” –Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“In a pond koi can reach lengths of eighteen inches.  Amazingly, when placed in a lake, koi can grow to 3 feet long.  The metaphor is obvious.  You are limited by how you see the world.”  –Vince Poscente, Olympian (1961-)

“There are three truths: my truth, your truth, and the truth.”  –Chinese proverb

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions but in having few wants.”  –Esther de Waal

“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”  –Noam Chomsky

“This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.”  –Rumi

“Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.”  –Graham Greene

“The opposite of talking isn’t listening.  The opposite of talking is waiting.”  –Fran Lebowitz

“What’s done to children, they will do to society.”  –Karl A. Menninger

“And that was what now she often felt the need of–to think; well, not even to think.  To be silent; to be alone.  All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself….When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.”  –Virginia Woolf, from To the Lighthouse

“True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess.”  –Louis Nizer, lawyer

“It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be.  I do not think I would.”  –Edna St. Vincent Millay

“You can outdistance that which is running after you, but not what is running inside you.”  –Rwandan proverb

“Compassion isn’t simply opening a spigot and coating everything in a treacly, all-purpose goo.  It requires a gut hunch that whatever I do unto others, I do unto myself.  It calls for appreciating not only what comforts us but what pierces us….It’s why the sweetest people are often those who have been the most wounded by life.  They know what it feels like and almost can’t help but care.”  –Marc Ian Barasch, Field Notes on the Compassionate Life

“A happy marriage is the union of two forgivers.”  –Robert Quillen, journalist & cartoonist (1887-1948)

“Once upon a time a man whose ax was missing suspected his neighbor’s son.  The boy walked like a thief, looked like a thief, and spoke like a thief.  But the man found his ax while digging in the valley, and the next time he saw his neighbor’s son, the boy walked, looked, and spoke like any other child.”  –Lao-tzu, philos0pher (6th century BCE)

“You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.”  –Moses ben Maimon, philosopher (1135-1204)

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”  –Zora Neale Hurston

“The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly.”  –Charles Reznikoff, poet (1894-1976)

“You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers.  You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.”  –Naguib Mahfouz, writer (1911-)

“The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined.”  –John N. Bahcall, astrophysicist (1935-2005)

“We either make ourselves happy or miserable.  The amount of work is the same.”  –Carlos Castenada, mystic and author (1925-1998)

“We want the spring to come and the winter to pass.  We want whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss–we want more and more and then more of it.  But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living….”  –Marie Howe, from “What the Living Do”

“When you blame others, you give up your power to change.”  –Douglas Noel Adams

“The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.”  –Lorraine Hansberry, playwright and painter (1930-1965)

“Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.”  –Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)

“Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.”  –John Maynard Keynes, economist (1883-1946)

“Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.”  –Louis L’Amour

“If you do not give right attention to the one you love, it is a kind of killing.  When you are in the car together, if you are lost in your thoughts, assuming you already know everything about her, she will slowly die.”  –Thich Nhat Hanh

“The world is a skirt I want to lift up.”  –Hanif Kureishi, author (1954-)

And there you have it.  Little pearls of wit and wisdom, to read and mull over in the spaces of your day.

[Post image: Me, sitting in the Louvre, in front of an amazing sort of other wisdom and thought, 2004]

Leave a Reply