…the matter and life which fill the world are equally within us; the forces which work in all things we feel within ourselves; whatever may be the inner essence of what is and what is done, we are of that essence. Let us then go down into our own inner selves: the deeper the point we touch, the strong will be the thrust which sends us back to the surface.

Life is a MMORPG. Grind. Level Up. Conquer the world.

[Evolution via natural selection] is, “almost a tautology,” and “not a testable scientific theory but a metaphysical research program… One ought to look for alternatives.”

Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence. True friendship is a plant of slow growth, and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to appellation.

At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; At 45 they are caves in which we hide.

The world is pretending the breakthrough is in technology, the bottleneck is really in art.

If I look at the range, you’ve got one [constraint] that is art school, I’m doing this for arts sake, Ratatouille and WALL-E clearly fall more on that side, the other is the purely commercial side, where you’ve got a lot of films that are made purely for following a trend, if you go entirely for the art side then eventually you fail economically. If you go purely commercially then I think you fail from a soul point of view… we’ve got these elements pulling on both sides, the art side and the commercial side… and the the trick is not to let one side win. That fundamentally successful companies are unstable. And where we have to operate is in that unstable place. And the forces of conservatism which are very strong and they want to go to a safe place. I want to go to the same place for money, I want to go and be wild and creative, or I want to have enough time for this, and each one of those guys are pulling, and if any one of them wins, we lose. And i just want to stay right there in the middle.

There are some people who are socially dysfunctional, but very creative. We get rid of them. Alright? If we don’t have a healthy group, then it isn’t going to work. There’s this illusion that there’s this person who’s creative and who’s got all this stuff… Well, the fact is, there are literally thousands of ideas involved in putting something together, and the notion of ideas as this singular thing is a fundamental flaw. There are so many ideas that what you need is that group behaving creatively. The person who’s got the vision I think is unique — there are very few people who’ve got that vision to put it together — but they’re actually drawing the best out of people. If they can’t draw the best out of people then they will fail.

“Words should be weighed, not counted.”

Although the West has its own contemplative tradition in the Catholic Church, the life of “sitting and look” has lost its appeal, for no religion is valued which does not “improve the world,” and it is hard to see how the world can be improved by keeping still.

Yet it should be obvious that action without wisdom, without clear awareness of the world as it really is, can never improve anything. Furthermore, as muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone, it could be argued that those who sit quietly and do nothing are making one of the best possible contributions to a world in turmoil.

The greatest achievement is selflessness.
The greatest worth is self-mastery.
The greatest quality is seeking to serve others.
The greatest precept is continual awareness.
The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.
The greatest action is not conforming with the worlds ways.
The greatest magic is transmuting the passions.
The greatest generosity is non-attachment.
The greatest goodness is a peaceful mind.
The greatest patience is humility.
The greatest effort is not concerned with results.
The greatest meditation is a mind that lets go.
The greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances.

My life is my message.

You either succeed, or you have a learning experience.

A naked woman’s body is a biological fact. A woman dressed to seduce is an inhabited beauty, a promise of pleasure, a flame from Heaven.

None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.

An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.

The trial never ends. We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind to new horizons. And for one brief moment, you did. For a fraction of a second, you were open to options you’d never considered. THAT is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebula, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence.

“Companions … the creator seeks, not corpses, not herds and believers. Fellow creators, the creator seeks—those who write new values on new tablets… Destroyers they will be called…”

“What can you do,” thought Winston, “against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?”

In the future world when computation and the things which can be constructed from it become freed how does that really change how things work? That’s a future challenge to figure out.

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Time by minutes slips away | first the hour and then the day | small
the daily loss appears| yet it soon amounts to years.

“By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.”

We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.

The principle of numbness comes into play with electric technology, as with any other. We have to numb our central nervous system when it is extended and exposed, or we will die. Thus the age of anxiety and of electric media is also the age of the unconscious and of apathy. But it is strikingly the age of consciousness of the unconscious, in addition.

No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.

In a world where education is predominantly verbal, highly educated people find it all but impossible to pay serious attention to anything but words and notions. There is always money for, there are always doctorates in, the learned foolery of research into what, for scholars, is the all-important problem: Who influenced whom to say what when? Even in this age of technology the verbal humanities are honored. The non-verbal humanities, the arts of being directly aware o the given facts of our existence, are almost completely ignored. A catalogue, a bibliography, a definitive edition of a third-rate versifier’s ipsissima verba, a stupendous index to end all indexes-any genuinely Alexandrian project is sure of approval and financial support. But when it comes to finding out how you and I, our children and grandchildren, may become more perceptive, more intensely aware of inward and outward reality, more open to the Spirit, less apt, by psychological malpractices, to make ourselves physically ill, and more capable of controlling our out autonomic nervous system–when it comes to any form of non-verbal education more fundamental (and more likely to be of some practical use) than Swedish drill, no really respectable person in any really respectable university or church will do anything about it. Verbalists are suspicious of the non-verbal; rationalists fear the given, non-rational fact; intellectuals feel that “what we perceive by the eye (or in any other way) is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply.” Besides, this matter of education in the non-verbal humanities will not fit into any of the established pigeonholes. It is not religion, not neurology, not gymnastics, not morality or civics, not even experimental psychology. This being so the subject is, for academic and ecclesiastical purposes, non-existent and may safely be ignored altogether or left, with a patronizing smile, to those whom the Pharisees of verbal orthodoxy call cranks, quacks, charlatans and unqualified amateurs.

We can throw stones, complain about them, stumble on them, climb over them, or build with them.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

There are three classes of men; lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.

Much of what happens over the networks is a metaphor - we chat without speaking, smile without grinning, and hug without touching. How sad to dwell in a metaphor without living the experience.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

To the Editor of the New York Times:

Re “When Will the Recession Be Over?” (Op-Ed, March 1):

Thank you for the wonderful collection of views on the timing of the recovery. While views differ on the timing of the recovery, no one questioned that a recovery is possible. This is largely because the current crisis is based on financial problems, the most superficial aspect of the economy.

How different it might be or will be (depending on what we do now) when we have a crisis based on the most foundational aspect of the economy, the ecosystem. When productivity falls not because of lack of credit or consumer confidence but because of reaching the earth limits of natural resources and ecosystem services, including climate stability, the question will not be when will the economy recover. We will be adjusting to a new reality.

We are wise to direct our resources to get out of the current crisis to prevent the next crisis, which could be more profound and far longer, if not eternal.

Maggie Winslow
El Cerrito, Calif., March 2, 2009

The writer is a professor of economics at the Presidio School of Management.

All truth is one. In this light may science and religion endeavor here for the
steady evolution of mankind. From darkness to light, from narrowness to
broad-mindedness, from prejudice to tolerance, it is the voice of life, which
calls us to come and learn.

“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

That’s one thing about a little education. It spoils you for actual work. The more you know the more you think somebody owes you a living.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.

One can have no smaller or greater mastery than master of oneself.

Though all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

So we’re lookin’ out on the world and what do we see
Another screen full of horror, another atrocity,
What can I do as simple man who wants to make a difference,
Wants to do what he can, not just talk about it.
Stone drops in a pond, stirs the sediment, sends ripples, to the edge of the world.

It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen

The world needs the inspiration of our undamaged instinctive love for the truth.

But it seems to me that most of the human beings whose lives have stirred us and whom we admire are people who dedicated themselves not to the elementary pleasures, but to something noble, something fine, something that reaches beyond. Some encounter with necessity is the ground of taking one’s life seriously. It’s the ground of being sensitive to all of the really beautiful things in the world. It’s the ground of being open to the call of something higher in which we have a chance to participate, whether it be perpetuation of our young, whether it be the future of our country, whether it be the arts or philosophy or music. And it’s the ground, really, of transforming what is otherwise a mere necessity into an occasion of something really splendidly human.

“But the people are to be taken in very small doses. If solitude is proud, so is society vulgar… Here again, as so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line. Solitude is impractical, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy. These wonderful horses need to be driven by fine hands. We require such a solitude as shall hold us to its revelations when we are in the street and in palaces…

…the one event which never loses its romance is the encounter with superior persons on terms allowing the happiest intercourse.

It may be laid down as a position which seldom deceives, that when a man cannot bear his own company, there is something wrong.