Fount of Truth
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Some favorite quotations
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring constrasts of poverty and wealth. A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” A nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reorienting our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.-- Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967)
The rate of depression is indeed ever increasing. . . . And how do I think major depression will fare in the next fifty years? Unfortunately, I suspect that this medical disaster is not about to disappear and could well become more prevalent.
Why this conclusion? To begin with, it is critical to understand the connections between stress and depression, and also the particular ways our lives have become more stressful. We (and our bodies) are more likely to consider some external challenge unbearably stressful if we lack a sense of control over it. Or if we lack predictive information as to when it is coming and how bad it’s going to be. Or if we lack social support, including outlets for the frustrations that arise as a result of it. An extraordinarily useful model of depression was developed in the 1970s by the psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania. It is called “learned helplessness,” and builds upon these variables. Confronted by a psychological stressor, most of us can put it in context, put a perimeter around it, realize that this stressor is not the whole world: We cope. Depression is a failure of that perimeter, a globalizing of the experience, producing the distorted conclusion that “not only is this development something awful that I have no control over: Everything is awful, and there is nothing left in my life that I have any control over.” The sufferer has learned to be helpless. While stress of a sufficient severity pushes virtually anyone to that conclusion, individuals who are biologically at risk for depression have a lower threshold. On some biological level, major depression is a failure to re-equilibrate after a stressor, instead succumbing to a permeating sense of helplessness which then takes on a life of its own.
-- Robert Sapolsky, Stanford U. primatologist, from his essay “Will We Be Sad Fifty Years from Now?” in The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century, ed. John Brockman, p. 107.
“Lord, make me a channel of thy peace—that where there is hatred, I may bring love—that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness—that where there is discord, I may bring harmony—that where there is error, I may bring truth—that where there is doubt, I may bring faith—that where there despair, I may bring hope—that where there are shadows, I may bring light—that where there is sadness, I may bring joy. Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than be comforted—to understand, than to be understood—to love, than to be loved. For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life. Amen.”
—St. Francis of Assissi
Since all things are naked, clear and free from obscurations,
there is nothing to attain or realize. The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions. And to all people -- experiencing everything totally without reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes onto oneself.
- Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
“I am breathing in and liberating my mind. I am breathing out and liberating my mind.” One practices like this.-The Sutra on Full Awareness of Breathing, translated by Thich Nhat Hanh
"The helmsmen have found out how to disturb the peace of others, to
profane the guardian spirits of other countries, to mix what prudent
nature separated, to redouble men's wants by commerce, to add the vices
of one people to those the other, to propogate new follies by force and
set-up unheard-of lunacies where they did not exist before, and finally
to give out the stronger as the wiser. They have shown men new ways, new instruments, and new arts by which to tyrannize over and assassinate one another. Thanks to such deeds a time will come when the othr poeple, having learned from the injuries they have suffered, will know how and will be able, as circumstances change, to pay back to us, in similar forms or worse ones, the consequences of these pernicious inventions."
-- Giordano Bruno, from Hans Blumenberg's Genesis of the Copernican World published by MIT
Press.
A name is imposed on what is thought to be a thing or a state and this divides it from other things and other states. But when you pursue what lies behind the name, you find a greater and greater subtlety that has no divisions. Atoms of dust are not really atoms of dust but are merely called that. In the same way, a world is not a world but is merely called that. --Visuddhi Magga, From "Buddha Speaks," edited by Anne Bancroft, 2000.
Reality as it is becomes the right view of the meditator. Thinking of it as it is becomes the right thought. Awareness of it as it is becomes the right awareness. Concentration on it as it is becomes the right concentration. Actions of the body and speech are then aligned to reality as it is. In this way the meditator develops and is fulfilled. -Majjhima Nikaya From "Buddha Speaks," edited by Anne Bancroft, 2000. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Boston, www.shambhala.com.
"Any idiot can face a crisis. It's the day-to-day living that wears you out." - Anton Chekhov
“Unpredictability in every field is the result of the conquest of the whole of the present world by scientific power. This invasion of active knowledge tends to transform man’s environment and man himself—to what extent, with what risks, what deviations from the basic conditions of existence and of the preservation of life we simply do not know. Life has become, in short, the object of an experiment of which we can say only one thing—that it tends to estrange us more and more from what we were, or what we think we are, and that it is leading us . . . we do not know and can by no means imagine where.”
-- Paul Valéry
It might be a familiar progression on many worlds – a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges, which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish.”
-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1994)
There won’t be demand for more than a few dozen computers.”
-- Thomas Watson, former president of IBM
“Predicting the automobile was easy; anticipating the traffic jam was another matter.”
-- Arthur C. Clarke
"...A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress..."
-- Walter Benjamin
“Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing. . . . In such as situation man becomes what he ought. He sees his species, not with the inhuman eye of a natural enemy, but as a kindred.”
-- Tom Paine
“The duty of journalism is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” – Mavis Doyle (fmr. Dean of the Vermont press corps)
"Enlightenment is on the side of those who turn their spotlight on our blinkers." – Pierre Bourdieu
Whoever knows himself knows God. – Muhammed
Always search for your innermost nature in those you are with. -- Rumi
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. And as we let our own light shine, we unconditionally give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fears, our presence automatically liberates others.
-- Nelson Mandela, 1994
Inaugural speech
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionaryact." -- George Orwell
I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals aday for their bodies, education for their minds, and dignity, equality, andfreedom for their spirits. I believe what self-centered men have torn down,other-centered men can build up. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages:May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust,Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair,Show an affirming flame." -- W.H. Auden
Good writing is administering a series of tiny astonishments.
— E. M. Forester
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world. Speak or act with an impure mind, and trouble will follow you as the wheel follows the ox that draws the carriage.
— Shakyamuni Buddha
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted forms, like cuttlefish squirting out ink.
— George Orwell
Be prudent whenever you open your mouth.
Your every utterance should be outstanding,
so that the mighty men who listen to you will say:
“How beautiful are the words that fly from his lips!”
— Ptahhotep
History is a race between education and catastrophe.
— H. G. Wells
True Reality: Of this there is no acadmic proof in the world;
for it is hidden, and hidden, and hidden.
— Sufi sage
I am a ripe turd, and the world is my asshole.
— Martin Luther
Peace is more than just the absence of war. It’s the presence of justice.
— Martin Luther King
If we want to discover what man amounts to, we can only find it in what men are—and what men are, above all other things, is various. It is in understanding that variousness . . . that we shall come to construct a concept of human nature that, more than a statistical shadow and less than a primitivist dream, has both substance and truth.
Becoming human is becoming individual, and we become individual under the guidance of cultural patterns . . . which give form, order, point, and direction to our lives . . . [But] we must . . . descend into detail, past the misleading tags, past the metaphysical types, past empty similarities to grasp firmly the essential character of not only the various cultures but the various sorts of individuals within each culture, if we wish to encounter humanity face to face.
— Clifford Geertz
The Interpretation of Culture
We have to make ourselves as perfect as we can.
— Sonny Rollins ¶ 1:02 PM 0 Comments
We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring constrasts of poverty and wealth. A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” A nation that continues year after year to spend more on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reorienting our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.-- Martin Luther King, Jr. (1967)
The rate of depression is indeed ever increasing. . . . And how do I think major depression will fare in the next fifty years? Unfortunately, I suspect that this medical disaster is not about to disappear and could well become more prevalent.
Why this conclusion? To begin with, it is critical to understand the connections between stress and depression, and also the particular ways our lives have become more stressful. We (and our bodies) are more likely to consider some external challenge unbearably stressful if we lack a sense of control over it. Or if we lack predictive information as to when it is coming and how bad it’s going to be. Or if we lack social support, including outlets for the frustrations that arise as a result of it. An extraordinarily useful model of depression was developed in the 1970s by the psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania. It is called “learned helplessness,” and builds upon these variables. Confronted by a psychological stressor, most of us can put it in context, put a perimeter around it, realize that this stressor is not the whole world: We cope. Depression is a failure of that perimeter, a globalizing of the experience, producing the distorted conclusion that “not only is this development something awful that I have no control over: Everything is awful, and there is nothing left in my life that I have any control over.” The sufferer has learned to be helpless. While stress of a sufficient severity pushes virtually anyone to that conclusion, individuals who are biologically at risk for depression have a lower threshold. On some biological level, major depression is a failure to re-equilibrate after a stressor, instead succumbing to a permeating sense of helplessness which then takes on a life of its own.
-- Robert Sapolsky, Stanford U. primatologist, from his essay “Will We Be Sad Fifty Years from Now?” in The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century, ed. John Brockman, p. 107.
“Lord, make me a channel of thy peace—that where there is hatred, I may bring love—that where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness—that where there is discord, I may bring harmony—that where there is error, I may bring truth—that where there is doubt, I may bring faith—that where there despair, I may bring hope—that where there are shadows, I may bring light—that where there is sadness, I may bring joy. Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than be comforted—to understand, than to be understood—to love, than to be loved. For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life. Amen.”
—St. Francis of Assissi
Since all things are naked, clear and free from obscurations,
there is nothing to attain or realize. The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions. And to all people -- experiencing everything totally without reservations and blockages, so that one never withdraws or centralizes onto oneself.
- Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
“I am breathing in and liberating my mind. I am breathing out and liberating my mind.” One practices like this.-The Sutra on Full Awareness of Breathing, translated by Thich Nhat Hanh
"The helmsmen have found out how to disturb the peace of others, to
profane the guardian spirits of other countries, to mix what prudent
nature separated, to redouble men's wants by commerce, to add the vices
of one people to those the other, to propogate new follies by force and
set-up unheard-of lunacies where they did not exist before, and finally
to give out the stronger as the wiser. They have shown men new ways, new instruments, and new arts by which to tyrannize over and assassinate one another. Thanks to such deeds a time will come when the othr poeple, having learned from the injuries they have suffered, will know how and will be able, as circumstances change, to pay back to us, in similar forms or worse ones, the consequences of these pernicious inventions."
-- Giordano Bruno, from Hans Blumenberg's Genesis of the Copernican World published by MIT
Press.
A name is imposed on what is thought to be a thing or a state and this divides it from other things and other states. But when you pursue what lies behind the name, you find a greater and greater subtlety that has no divisions. Atoms of dust are not really atoms of dust but are merely called that. In the same way, a world is not a world but is merely called that. --Visuddhi Magga, From "Buddha Speaks," edited by Anne Bancroft, 2000.
Reality as it is becomes the right view of the meditator. Thinking of it as it is becomes the right thought. Awareness of it as it is becomes the right awareness. Concentration on it as it is becomes the right concentration. Actions of the body and speech are then aligned to reality as it is. In this way the meditator develops and is fulfilled. -Majjhima Nikaya From "Buddha Speaks," edited by Anne Bancroft, 2000. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Boston, www.shambhala.com.
"Any idiot can face a crisis. It's the day-to-day living that wears you out." - Anton Chekhov
“Unpredictability in every field is the result of the conquest of the whole of the present world by scientific power. This invasion of active knowledge tends to transform man’s environment and man himself—to what extent, with what risks, what deviations from the basic conditions of existence and of the preservation of life we simply do not know. Life has become, in short, the object of an experiment of which we can say only one thing—that it tends to estrange us more and more from what we were, or what we think we are, and that it is leading us . . . we do not know and can by no means imagine where.”
-- Paul Valéry
It might be a familiar progression on many worlds – a planet, newly formed, placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of creatures evolves; intelligence emerges, which, at least up to a point, confers enormous survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through, place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of perils. Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish.”
-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1994)
There won’t be demand for more than a few dozen computers.”
-- Thomas Watson, former president of IBM
“Predicting the automobile was easy; anticipating the traffic jam was another matter.”
-- Arthur C. Clarke
"...A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress..."
-- Walter Benjamin
“Freedom had been hunted round the globe; reason was considered as rebellion; and the slavery of fear made men afraid to think. But such is the irresistible nature of truth that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing. . . . In such as situation man becomes what he ought. He sees his species, not with the inhuman eye of a natural enemy, but as a kindred.”
-- Tom Paine
“The duty of journalism is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” – Mavis Doyle (fmr. Dean of the Vermont press corps)
"Enlightenment is on the side of those who turn their spotlight on our blinkers." – Pierre Bourdieu
Whoever knows himself knows God. – Muhammed
Always search for your innermost nature in those you are with. -- Rumi
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you. And as we let our own light shine, we unconditionally give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fears, our presence automatically liberates others.
-- Nelson Mandela, 1994
Inaugural speech
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionaryact." -- George Orwell
I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals aday for their bodies, education for their minds, and dignity, equality, andfreedom for their spirits. I believe what self-centered men have torn down,other-centered men can build up. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies;Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of lightFlash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages:May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust,Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair,Show an affirming flame." -- W.H. Auden
Good writing is administering a series of tiny astonishments.
— E. M. Forester
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world. Speak or act with an impure mind, and trouble will follow you as the wheel follows the ox that draws the carriage.
— Shakyamuni Buddha
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted forms, like cuttlefish squirting out ink.
— George Orwell
Be prudent whenever you open your mouth.
Your every utterance should be outstanding,
so that the mighty men who listen to you will say:
“How beautiful are the words that fly from his lips!”
— Ptahhotep
History is a race between education and catastrophe.
— H. G. Wells
True Reality: Of this there is no acadmic proof in the world;
for it is hidden, and hidden, and hidden.
— Sufi sage
I am a ripe turd, and the world is my asshole.
— Martin Luther
Peace is more than just the absence of war. It’s the presence of justice.
— Martin Luther King
If we want to discover what man amounts to, we can only find it in what men are—and what men are, above all other things, is various. It is in understanding that variousness . . . that we shall come to construct a concept of human nature that, more than a statistical shadow and less than a primitivist dream, has both substance and truth.
Becoming human is becoming individual, and we become individual under the guidance of cultural patterns . . . which give form, order, point, and direction to our lives . . . [But] we must . . . descend into detail, past the misleading tags, past the metaphysical types, past empty similarities to grasp firmly the essential character of not only the various cultures but the various sorts of individuals within each culture, if we wish to encounter humanity face to face.
— Clifford Geertz
The Interpretation of Culture
We have to make ourselves as perfect as we can.
— Sonny Rollins ¶ 1:02 PM 0 Comments
