Nov., 2013

“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.” ? Maya Angelou I prefer to be crazy and happy rather than normal and bitter - Paul Coelho Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible - Dalai Lama If you even dream of beating me you'd better wake up and apologise - Muhammad Ali "To shut your doors to errors shuts out truth". Ravindranath Tagore

When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? -- John Maynard Keynes

"To shut your doors to errors shuts out truth". Ravindranath Tagore

"Nationalism is good in its place, but it is an unreliable friend and an unsafe historian." - Nehru

A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it. — J.R.R. Tolkien

People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be - Lincoln

Not all those who wander are lost. ~J.R.R. Tolkien

The large print giveth, but the small print taketh away. ~Tom Waits

A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live -

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Aug 2013

“if you want to break the rules of grammar, first learn the rules of grammar.” - Kurt Vonnegut

Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder - Rumi

Those who are brutally honest are seldom so with themselves. ~Mignon McLaughlin

I can plod. That is my only genius. I can persevere in any definite pursuit. To this I owe everything.
- William Carey of Serampore

Luck has a peculiar habit of favoring those who don't depend on it. ~Author Unknown

Great minds discuss ideas. 
Average minds discuss events.
Small minds discuss people. -- Eleanor Roosevelt

A sneer is the weapon of the weak. -James Russell Lowell, poet, editor, and diplomat (1819-1891) 


Harry Potter quote: "It is our choices that truly show what we are, far more than our abilities".

"Before you embark upon a journey of revenge, dig two graves." -Confucius.

As I grow to understand life less and less, I learn to live it more and more. -Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910) 

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

"How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then rest afterward. -Spanish proverb"

Miguel de Unamuno, Spanish teacher, philosopher, and writer, wrote: "El hombre es un animal esencial, fundamental, constitucional y radicalmente haragán" (Man is an essentially, basically, constitutionally and radically a loafer) 

The only thing wrong with doing nothing is that you never know when you're finished. ~Author Unknown

Most of us can read the writing on the wall; we just assume it's addressed to someone else. ~Ivern Ball


A relationship becomes easier when you realize that you don't have to be the one at fault to be the one who's sorry. ~Robert Brault

Never fear shadows. They simply mean there's a light shining somewhere nearby. ~Ruth E. Renkel

July 2013

Never let your memories be greater than your dreams. ~Doug Ivester

If you are not enjoying the journey, you probably won't enjoy the destination. ~Author Unknown

Always forgive your enemies - nothing annoys them so much. ~Oscar Wilde

Don't be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards - Vladimir Nabokov

.......................................................
Try Try Again 
by T. H. Palmer

'Tis a lesson you should heed,
If at first you don't succeed,
Try, try again; 

Then your courage should appear,
For if you will persevere,
You will conquer, never fear
Try, try again;

Once or twice, though you should fail,
If you would at last prevail,
Try, try again; 

If we strive, 'tis no disgrace
Though we do not win the race;
What should you do in the case?
Try, try again

If you find your task is hard,
Time will bring you your reward,
Try, try again 

All that other folks can do,
Why, with patience, should not you?
Only keep this rule in view:
Try, try again.

..................................................


‘Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant ' -- Robert Louis Stevenson.’

“The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests. ” Epictetus

“Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go.” ~ William Feather

Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony. -- MK Gandhi

“If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.”  --- Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau wrote:

“When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” ? Ansel Adams

Everything is energy and that is all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy, this is physics. -- Albert Einstein

When men speak ill of you, live so that nobody may believe them - Plato

To whom much has been given, much is expected.

"Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it." ~Buddha

"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." -- Andy Warhol

"You can't calm the storm....so stop trying. What you can do is calm yourself. The storm will pass". - Timber Hawkeye

The harder I work, the luckier I get. ~Sam Goldwyn

If you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong - Groucho Marx

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now." -- Chinese Proverb

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matter compared to what lies within us." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears." -- Les Brown

"The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find our why." -- Mark Twain

"It is never too late to be what you might have been." --  George Eliot

"I would rather die of passion than of boredom." -- Vincent van Gogh

"Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs."  -- Farrah Gray

"What is money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do." -- Bob Dylan

"Dream big and dare to fail." -- Norman Vaughan

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do." -- Steve Jobs

"If you don't love something don't do it" -- Ray Bradbury

"Hard work is painful when life is devoid of purpose. But when you live for something greater than yourself and the gratification of your own ego, then hard work becomes a labor of love.” -- Steve Pavlina

"Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work." -- Aristotle

"Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” -- Theodore Roosevelt

"Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else." -- James Barrie (creator of Peter Pan)

"Happiness is not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.” -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Hard work is painful when life is devoid of purpose. But when you live for something greater than yourself and the gratification of your own ego, then hard work becomes a labor of love.” -- Steve Pavlina

"Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.” -- Marian Wright Edelman

"Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.” -- John R. Wooden

"Dream big and dare to fail." -- Norman Vaughan

"I would rather die of passion than of boredom"

Middle age is when your age starts to show around your middle. ~Bob Hope

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. ~T.S. Eliot

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us - Kafka

...

"You can't depend on your eyes if your imagination is out of focus." - Mark Twain

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
- Harry Lime in the Third Man (1949)

If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough. ~Mario Andretti\

"Be like melting snow...wash yourself of yourself." - Rumi

“The aim of education is not the acquisition of information, although important, or acquisition of technical skills, though essential in modern society, but the development of that bent of mind, that attitude of reason, that spirit of democracy which will make us responsible citizens.”
- Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

"Beware of still water, a still dog, and a still enemy." - Yiddish Proverb

The years teach much which the days never knew - Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's. -- Joseph Campbell

We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are. - The Talmud

"As there are women endowed with vidyasakti, so also there are women with avidyasakti. A woman endowed with spiritual attributes leads a man to God, but a woman who is the embodiment of delusion makes him forget God and drowns him in the ocean of worldliness. This universe is created by the Mahamaya of God. Mahamaya contains both vidyamaya, the illusion of knowledge, and avidyamaya, the illusion of ignorance. Through the help of vidyamaya one cultivates such virtues as the taste for holy company, knowledge, devotion, love, and renunciation. Avidyamaya consists of the five elements and the objects of the five senses—form, flavor, smell, touch, and sound. These make one forget God." -- The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna – P. 216

Chekov

Chekov on what it means to be "cultured":

"Cultured people must, in my opinion, satisfy the following conditions:

1. They respect human personality, and therefore they are always kind, gentle, polite, and ready to give in to others. They do not make a row because of a hammer or a lost piece of india-rubber; if they live with anyone they do not regard it as a favour and, going away, they do not say “nobody can live with you.” They forgive noise and cold and dried-up meat and witticisms and the presence of strangers in their homes.
2. They have sympathy not for beggars and cats alone. Their heart aches for what the eye does not see…. They sit up at night in order to help P…., to pay for brothers at the University, and to buy clothes for their mother.
3. They respect the property of others, and therefor pay their debts.
4. They are sincere, and dread lying like fire. They don’t lie even in small things. A lie is insulting to the listener and puts him in a lower position in the eyes of the speaker. They do not pose, they behave in the street as they do at home, they do not show off before their humbler comrades. They are not given to babbling and forcing their uninvited confidences on others. Out of respect for other people’s ears they more often keep silent than talk.
5. They do not disparage themselves to rouse compassion. They do not play on the strings of other people’s hearts so that they may sigh and make much of them. They do not say “I am misunderstood,” or “I have become second-rate,” because all this is striving after cheap effect, is vulgar, stale, false….
6. They have no shallow vanity. They do not care for such false diamonds as knowing celebrities, shaking hands with the drunken P., [Translator's Note: Probably Palmin, a minor poet.] listening to the raptures of a stray spectator in a picture show, being renowned in the taverns…. If they do a pennyworth they do not strut about as though they had done a hundred roubles’ worth, and do not brag of having the entry where others are not admitted…. The truly talented always keep in obscurity among the crowd, as far as possible from advertisement…. Even Krylov has said that an empty barrel echoes more loudly than a full one.
7. If they have a talent they respect it. They sacrifice to it rest, women, wine, vanity…. They are proud of their talent…. Besides, they are fastidious.
8. They develop the aesthetic feeling in themselves. They cannot go to sleep in their clothes, see cracks full of bugs on the walls, breathe bad air, walk on a floor that has been spat upon, cook their meals over an oil stove. They seek as far as possible to restrain and ennoble the sexual instinct…. What they want in a woman is not a bed-fellow … They do not ask for the cleverness which shows itself in continual lying. They want especially, if they are artists, freshness, elegance, humanity, the capacity for motherhood…. They do not swill vodka at all hours of the day and night, do not sniff at cupboards, for they are not pigs and know they are not. They drink only when they are free, on occasion…. For they want mens sana in corpore sano [a healthy mind in a healthy body]."

(Source: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/29/anton-chekhov-8-qualities-of-cultured-people/)

December 2012

A man too busy to take care of his health is like a mechanic too busy to take care of his tools. -Spanish proverb

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf and take an insect view of its plain. -Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)

For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him he must regard himself as greater than he is. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it - Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you make the whole trip that way. -E.L. Doctorow, writer (b. 1931)

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience - Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars - Jack Kerouac, On the Road

November 2012

Three-fourths of the miseries nd misunderstandings of the world will dissapear, if we step into the shoes of our adversaries and understand their standpoint.

When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong. -Richard Dawkins, biologist and author (b. 1941)

 “We are guilty of many crimes, but our worst sin is abandoning the child; neglecting the foundation of life. Many of the things we need can wait, the child can not. We can not answer Tomorrow, Her name is Today” -- Chilean Noble Prize winner poet and teacher Gabirela Mistral