A Collection of Thought and Reflections from Other Great Thinkers

Below you will find the insights that were added to the original composition book where I first collected reflections for School of Thought. I remove them in 1991 when I felt it was time to truly create my own personal School of Thought.  Ultimately, I believe that this is the point of School of Thought. Each of us must build our own individual philosophy, our own school of thought to live by, but it must truly be arrived at on our own.  We may use the words of others as sign posts to guide us by, but not as the stones and cement of road that we are to traveling on.  For if we do follow another's path, we will surely be lost.
 

Quotes from R. Bach's book Illusions

The Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul

Prospective -- Use It or Lose It.  If you turned to this page, you're forgetting that what is going on around you is not reality.

Think about that.

Learning is finding out what you already know.  Doing is demonstrating that you know it.  Teaching is reminding others that they know just as well as you.

You are all learners, doors, teachers.

Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself.  Being true to anyone else or anything else does not only impossible, but the mark of the fake messiah.

The simplest questions by the most profound.  Where were you board?  Where your home?  Where are you going?  What are you doing?  Think about these once awhile, and watch your answers change.

You teach best which most need to learn.

With never to be ashamed if anything you do or said it is published around a world -- even if what is published is not true.

Your friends will know you better in the first meet you meet than your acquaintances will know you and thousand years.

The best way to avoid responsibilities is to say, "I've got responsibilities."

You are lead for your lifetime by the inner learning creature the playful spiritual being that is your real self.  Don't turn away from possible futures before your certain you don't have anything to learn from them.  You're always free to change her mind into the different future, or different past.

There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands.  You seek problems because you need their gifts.

The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life.  Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, their yours.

Imagine the universe beautiful and just and perfect, then be sure of one thing: the Is has imagined it quite a bit better than you have.

A cloud is not know why it using just such a direction at such a speed, it feels an impulsion...this is the place to go down.  But the sky knows the reason and patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.

You are never given to wish without also been given the power to make it true.  You may have to work for it, however.

The world is your exercise book, the pages on which you do your sums.  It is not reality, although it can express reality there if you wish.  You're also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages.

The original saying is to limit the Is.  Don't.

Your conscience is your measure of the honesty of your selfishness.  Listen to it carefully.

Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have drawn them there.  What you choose to do with them is up to you.

The truth you speak has no past and no future.  It is, and that's all it needs to be.

Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you're alive, it is.

In order to live freely and happily, you must sacrifice boredom.  It is not always an easy sacrifice.

Don't be dismayed at goodbyes.  A farewell is necessary before you can meet again.  And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your believe in injustice and tragedy.  What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

Everything in this book may be wrong.

 

Other Quotes from Illusions

You don't do anything.  You see it done already, and it is.  Like walking, you wonder how it ever came hard for you to learn.

If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking.  That's all there is to it.

Learn what the magician knows and it's not magic anymore.

Believe you know all the answers, and you know all the answers.  Believe you are a master, and you are.

You just open it and whatever you need most is there.

There is no promise so big that you can't run away from.
 

Quotes from R. Bach's book Jonathan Livingston Seagull

There's a reason to life!  We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.  We can be free!  We can learn to fly!

We have a reason to live -- to learn, to discover, to be free!

We choose our next world through what we learn in this one.  Learn nothing, and the next world is the same is this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.

Heaven is not a place, and it is not a time.  Heaven is being perfect.

Perfection doesn't have limits.

Keep working on love.

The gull sees farthest who flies highest.

Each of us is in truth [] an unlimited idea of freedom.

Everything that limits us we have to put aside.

Break the chains of your thought, and you break chains of your body, too...

You have the freedom to be yourself, your true self, here and now, and nothing can stand in your way.

You are free.

You can fly!

Whatever stands against freedom must be set aside.

The only true law is that which leads to freedom.  There is no other.

The trick is to overcome our limitations in order, patiently.

The hardest thing in the world is to convince [someone] that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he'd just spend a little time practicing?  Why should that is so hard?

Like everything else, [ ]. practice.

You need to keep finding yourself, a little more each day.

No limits.

Quotes from many of L. Buscaglia's books and tapes

First of all the loving individual has to care about himself.

Real love is a very human phenomenon.

Love is he learned phenomenon, and I think the sociologists, the anthropologists, the psychologists, will tell us this with no hesitation.

You can only give away what you have.  That's the miracle.  If you have love, you can give it.  If you don't have it, you don't have to give.

Then this loving person must be one who recognizes responsibility.  There is no greater responsibility in the world than being human being, and you'd better believe it.

This loving person is a person who abhors waste -- waste of time, waste of human potential.

If you feel something, let people know that you feel it.

The loving person has no need to be perfect, only human.

And then, the lover, to learn and to change and to become, also needs freedom.

It's also the time we started listening to each other.

A loving person recognizes needs.

But man is always capable of growth and change, and if you don't believe this, you are in the process of dying.

Everything is in the process change, including you.

You can only be "real" on your path.  The hardest thing world is to be something you're not.

The easiest thing to be in the world to you.  The most difficult thing to be is what other people want you to be.

Now we're ready to share a trip into love.

Love lives in a moment; it's neither lost in yesterday nor does it crave for tomorrow.  Love is Now!

Love knows no age.

A total immersion in life offers the best classroom for learning to love.

Real love always creates, and never destroys.  In this, lies man's only promise.

One must never be satisfied with his ability to love.  There where he is, is always just a beginning.

Deterrents to love our man-made.  Love will not be deterred.  Love flows like the river; always itself, yet ever changing, recognizing no obstacles.

To love others you must first love yourself.

Since love is another thing, is not lost when given.

Love and the self are one and the discovery of either is the realization of both.

When man has love he is no longer at the mercy of forces greater than himself, for he, himself, becomes the powerful force.

To love you must free yourself of labels.

If one wishes to be a lover he must start by saying "YES" to love.

Love involves responsibility.

Man has no choice but to love.  For when he does not, he finds his alternatives lie in loneliness, destruction and despair.

In love, each man is his own personal challenge.

Love needs freedom.

Each man growing in love will find his own way, his own path to love.

To live in love is life's greatest challenge.