Sixty-six times
have these eyes beheld
the changing scenes of Autumn.
I have said enough about moonlight,
Ask me no more.
Only listen to the voices of pines
and cedars, when no wind blows.
- Ryo-Nen
A violent man does not die a natural death. This is the basis of my teaching.
-Lao-Tsu, Tao Te Ching
The men and women who founded our country knew, by experience, that there are times when the free person's answer to oppressive government has to be delivered with a bullet. Thus, the right to bear arms is not a freedom, it's the mother of all freedoms.
- Eric S. Raymond
Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; heat and cold, in male and female. An inevitable dualism bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another thing to make it whole, as spirit, matter; man, woman; yea, nay. The law of compensation rules human life: You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong... For everything you gain you have missed something else, and for everything you gain you lose something. If the gatherer gathers to much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his chest; swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use- silence, exile, and cunning.
-James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man
You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.
- Charles Austin Beard
look, you know i don't wanna come on ungrateful, but that warren report, you know as well as me, just didn't make it. You know, like they might as well have asked some banana salesman from des moines, who was up in toronto on the big day, if he saw anyone around looking suspicious/...
- Bob Dylan, Tarantula
The truth
was obscure, too profound and too pure, to live it you had to explode.
In that last
hour of need, we entirely agreed, sacrifice was the code of the road.
- Bob Dylan, "Where Are You Tonight"
I am not greatly interested in the strange country through which my broom stick mind is flying me...
- Robert Graves, White Goddess
When the
immense drugged universe explodes
In a cascade of unendurable colour
And leaves us gasping naked,
This is no more than the ectasy of chaos:
Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love
Which alone, as we know certainly, restores
Fragmentation into true being.
- Robert Graves, "Ecstasy of Chaos"
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
- George Orwell
In the growing gap, the top 1 percent of households now have more wealth than the bottom 95 percent.
- Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe, 4/15/99
The birds
they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
- Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"
Subatomic particles do not exist but rather show 'tendencies to exist', and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show 'tendencies to occur'.
- Fritjof Capra, Tao of Physics
Everyone
I have lost
in the closing of a door
the click of the lock
is not forgotten, they
do not die but remain
within the soft edges
of the earth, the ash
of house fires and cancer
in sin and forgiveness
huddled under old blankets
dreaming their way into
my hands, my heart
closing tight like fists.
- Sherman Alexie, "Indian Boy Love Song #1"
It's much like riding an ox in search of an ox.
- Po-Chang, on searching for Buddha
Were Freud right and sex supreme, we should live almost in Eden.
- Aldous Huxley, Eyesless in Gaza
Love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love.
- William Law
All men live
in suffering,
I know as few can know,
Whether they take the upper road
Or stay content on the low,
Rower bent in his row-boat
Or weaver at his loam,
Horseman erect upon horseback
Or child hid in the womb.
_______________Daybreak and a candle-end.
That some
stream of lightning
From the old man in the skies
Can burn out that suffering
No right taught man denies.
But a course old man am I,
I choose the second best,
and forget it all awhile
Upon a womans breast.
_______________Daybreak and a candle-end.
-W.B. Yeats, from "The Wicked Old Man"
How skillful to tax the middle class to pay for the relief of the poor, building resentment on top of humiliation! How adroit to bus poor black youngsters into poor white neighborhoods, in a violent exchange of impoverished neighborhoods, while the schools of the rich remain untouched and the wealth of the nation, doled out carefully where children need free milk, is drained for billion dollar aircraft carriers.
- Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
Let us be utopian for a moment so that when we get realistic again it is not that "realism" so useful to the Establishment in its discouragement of action, that "realism" anchored to a certain kind of history empty of surprise. Let us imagine what radical change would require of us all.
- Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States
Thus shall you think of all
this fleeting world:
A
star at dawn, a bubble in a stream;
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud;
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.
- from the Diamond Sutra
Do you have quotes that I could post? Feedback on any of the quotes you see here? Mail me.