A . VERY . INCOMPLETE . LIST . OF . INTERESTING . QUOTES

When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.  ---KIKUYU PROVERB

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.  ---MEISTER ECKHART

If you don’t find God in the next person you meet, it’s a waste of time looking for him further.  ---MOHANDAS K. GANDHI

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf. ---JACK KORNFIELD

Tu Fu is not religious at all. But for me his response to the human situation is the only kind of religion likely to outlast this century: “Reverence for life.” ---KENNETH REXROTH

Simplifying our lives does not mean sinking into idleness, but on the contrary, getting rid of the most subtle aspect of laziness: the one which makes us take on thousands of less important activities. ---MATTHIEU RICARD

It would imply the regeneration of mankind, if they were to become elevated enough to truly worship sticks and stones. ---HENRY DAVID THOREAU

To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem is capable of love because he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. ---ANN RAND

Infinitely more important than the answers are the questions, the choice of them, the inner form of them. ---OSWALD SPENGLER

The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all. ---PABLO CASALS

Waste is what's left over after the good stuff gets done! ---DAVID WALKER

The buds swell imperceptibly without hurry or confusion, as if the short spring day were an eternity.  ---HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake.  ---WALLACE STEVENS

Taking his coffee, he walked to the lake and stood at the water’s edge watching the morning light turn the water’s surface to glass, reflecting trees and mountains that surrounded it.  God taking a look at himself, his mother had called it, for his mother believed God had better judgment than to take on the resemblance of man.  God would be a tree, if he need to be anything at all.  ---TERRY KAY, “The Valley of Light ”, p. 62

The high note is not the only thing. ---PLACIDO DOMINGO

And though poor stones have neither
     speech nor tongue,
While active winds and streams both
     run and speak,
Yet stones are deep in admiration.
---HENRY VAUGHAN

Shadow owes its birth to light. ---JOHN GAY

The establishment of inner harmony is to be attained neither in the past nor in the future, but where the past and future meet, which is the now. When you have attained that point, neither future nor past, neither birth nor death, neither time nor space exist. It is that NOW which is liberation, which is perfect harmony, to which the men of the past and the men of the future must come. ---R. H. BLYTH

And do not change. Do not divert your love from visible things. But go on loving what is good, simple and ordinary; animals and things and flowers, and keep the balance true. ---RAINER MARIA RILKE

Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control—these three alone lead to sovereign power.  ---ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far into the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.  ---RAINER MARIA RILKE

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men . . . trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true; but our own little comings and goings are only little more than tree-wavings—many of them not so much.  ---JOHN MUIR

How strange that nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!  ---EMILY DICKINSON

Think sideways!  ---EDWARD DE BONO

I have been asked many questions in my life about poetry, religion, life, and I have given precisely the same number of answers, but I have never, I repeat, never, satisfied a single interlocuter. Why? Because all questioning is a way of avoiding the real answer, which, as Zen tells us, is really known already. Every man is enlightened, but wishes he wasn’t. Every man knows he must love his enemies, and sell all he has and give to the poor, but he doesn’t wish to know it—so he asks questions.  ---R. H. BLYTH

Forget not that the earth likes to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair. ---KAHLIL GIBRAN

God builds his temple in the heart on the ruins of churches and religions.  ---RALPH WALDO EMERSON

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.  ---JEANETTE WINTERSON (spoken by Henri while in prison)

The knowledge of the ancients was perfect. How perfect? At first they did not know that there were things. This is the most perfect knowledge—nothing can be added. Next, they knew that there were things, but did not make distinctions between them. Next they made distinctions, but did not pass judgment. When they started to pass judgment, the Tao was destroyed.  ---CHUANG-TZU

You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.  ---NAGUIB MAHFOUZ

As naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done.  ---HENRY DAVID THOREAU

In your heart, you already know.  ---ZEN SAYING

I embrace emerging experience. I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. ---WILLIAM STAFFORD

Why abandon a seat in your own home to wander in vain through dusty regions of another land? If you make one false step, you miss what is right before your eyes.  ---DŌGEN

Shake off this sadness, and recover your
     spirit;
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is the man in
     whom life is abundant.

---MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

We must learn to see the world anew. ---ALBERT EINSTEIN

In happiness or unhappiness, living is a duty, and must be done thoroughly.   ---Ellis Peters, The Rose Rent

It is said, and could not be unsaid.  The word, once launched, has a deadly permanence.    ---Ellis Peters, The Heritics Apprentice

There is in the end no remedy but truth.  It is the one course that cannot be evil.  ---Ellis Peters, The Potter’s Field

I believe art---even at its most beautiful---is at the core, motivated by pain.  That is because art is made by human beings and as human beings, pain is what motivated everything we do.  We are either causing it or running from it or facing it, but pain is always there, bracketing what we do.  To get more mystical, we are born of pain, we live in pain, and we die in pain.  There is, in my opinion, no wat to make authentic art and in our case, pure and moving photographs, without feeling and showing pain---sometimes ours and sometimes that of our subjects.  ---Earlene Fowler, Broken Dishes (Photographer Isaac’s words)

There is no one who cannot be hated, against whatever odds.  Nor anyone who cannot be loved, against all reason.   ---Ellis Peters, The Summer of the Danes

A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense, and is, thereby, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.   ---Ansel Adams

Already I am practicing utter calm and relaxation which one must exhibit while inhaling the music?”  ---Elizabeth Kloecker

PURE ART
Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mockingbirds aren’t content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that served no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art.   ---From the novel, Skinny Legs and All, by Tom Robbins

In the desert where no one comes, the sage sings a song of joy in the voice of thunder.   ---unknown

Seeing is never from memory.
It has no memory.
It is looking now.
The total organism is involved in seeing,
not thinking about what is said from memory,
but listening and looking openly now. ---Toni Packer

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how men would believe and adore!  ---Ralph Waldo Emerson

And so, for the first time in my life perhaps I took the lamp, and went down to my inmost self. But as I moved further and further from the conventional certainties, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent a new person was disclosed within me . . . and when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and out of it came—arising I know not whence—the current which I dare to call my life.  ---Teilhard de Chardin

To be awake is to be alive. I have never met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face? We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn.  ---Henry David Thoreau

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble. We have to learn to live happily in the present moment, to touch the peace and joy that are available now.  ---Thich Nhat Hanh

An old Hasidic rabbi asked his pupils how to tell when night ended and the morning began, which is the time for certain holy prayers.
“Is it when you see an animal in the distance and know whether it’s a sheep or a dog?”
“No,” the rabbi answered.
“Is it when you can look at a tree and tell whether it’s a fig tree or a pear tree?”
“No,” the rabbi answered again.
After a few more tries, the pupils said, “Then tell us, what is it?”
“It is when you can look on the face of any man or woman and know that they are your sister or brother. Until then, it is still night.”
 ---Hasidic Mondo

He who can take no great interest in what is small will take false interest in what is great.  ---John Ruskin

I do not seek, I find.  ---Pablo Picasso

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he must forget all the roses that were ever painted.  ---Henri Matisse

The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no “meaning,” they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.  ---Peter Matthiessen

Zen is not about nonmovement. . . . Sitting is a centered, strong position in the midst of movement. When you get a top spinning just right, even though it’s going very fast, it’s so stable that it doesn’t even look as if it’s moving. If it’s slightly off balance, it wobbles. It has to be centered and moving very fast in order to be stable. That’s what Zen is all about.   ---Bernie Glassman

That which has been successfully defined has been successfully killed. ---Christmas Humphreys

Now, what is poetry? If you say it is simply a matter of words, I will say a good poet gets rid of words. If you say it is simply a matter of meaning, I will say a good poet gets rid of meaning. “But,” you ask, “without words and without meaning, where is the poetry?” To this I reply, “Get rid of words and get rid of meaning, and still there is poetry.”  ---Yang Wan-Li

When the word of the poet ceases, a great light begins. ---George Steiner

Though deaf to understanding, we listen anyway. --- David Walker

And once when she saw him pick up a bird that had stunned itself against a wire, she had realized another world, silent, where each creature is alone in its own aura of silence, the mystery of power. ---D. H. LAWRENCE

There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself. ---HERMANN HESSE

Come back to square one, just the minimum bare bones. Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time—that is the basic message.  ---PEMA CHÖDRÖN

My nature is subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand. ---WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Nothing is permanent:
The sun and the moon rise and
    then set,
The bright clear day is followed
    by the deep, dark night.
From hour to hour, everything
    changes.
---KALU RINPOCHE

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities crept in. Forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you should begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense. ---RALPH WALDO EMERSON

It is like archers. If they start out competing, they’ll never become marksmen. It is only long after practice, with no thought of winning or losing, that they can hit the target. Same with the study of the Way. If even a single thought of winning or losing appears, you will be chained by winning and losing. ---YING-AN

Let us dig our gardens and not be elsewhere;
Let us take long walks in the open air...
Let us bathe in the rivers and lakes...
Let us indulge in games...
Let us be more simple: simple and true in our gestures, in our words, and simple and true in our minds above all. Let us be ourselves.
---ROBERT LINSSEN

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet. ---FRANZ KAFKA

The best things in life are nearest. Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. ---ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn. ---RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small it takes time—we haven’t time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time. ---GEORGIA O’KEEFFE

I shut my eyes in order to see. ---PAUL GAUGUIN

You see the hut, yet you ask, “Where shall I go for shelter?” ---WEST AFRICAN PROVERB

If only we could pull out our brain and use only our eyes. ---PABLO PICASSO

Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered; it is something molded. ---ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY

The life of contemplation in action and purity of heart is, then, a life of great simplicity and inner liberty. One is not seeking anything special or demanding any particular satisfaction. One is content with what is. One does what is to be done, and the more concrete it is, the better. One is not worried about the results of what is done. One is content to have good motives and not be too anxious about making mistakes. In this way one can swim with the living stream of life and remain at every moment in contact with God, in the hiddenness and ordinariness of the present moment with its obvious task. ---Thomas Merton