Hanging on the wall in my room.
- Live each day with courage.
- Take pride in your work.
- Always finish what you start.
- Do what has to be done.
- Be tough, but fair.
- When you make a promise, keep it.
- Ride for the brand.
- Talk less and say more.
- Remember that some things aren't for sale.
- Know where to draw the line.
"People should live up to their monogamous commitments, which, after all, have the form of a mutually-negotiated contract. But they should not expect anything unrealistic from themselves or each other, since such agreements, however binding, are unnatural. Sex will have its way with us one way or another—either by shaping our commitments to the form of its fulfillment or by making us miserable. For Aristotle, we are what we repeatedly do. For Dan Savage, we are what we enduringly desire." – Rules of Misbehavior by Benjamin J. Dueholm
A human being is part of a whole, called the 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. – Albert Einstein
Inner Light Ministries asks all of its participants to make certain that their words pass the "Four Sufi Gates": 1) Is it true? 2) Does it need to be said? 3) Can it be said out of love with kindness? 4) Does it need to be said by me? Keep praying until you can get through all of the gates.
There is unemployment, a brief and relatively routine transitional state that results from the rise and fall of companies in any economy, and there is unemployment—chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if is spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society's most noxious ill. – "How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America" by Don Peck in The Atlantic
Adyahanti, The End of Your World: "Ultimately, the whole of spirituality boils down to letting go of the illusion of the separate self, letting go of the way we think the world is and the way we think it should be."
"Your sadness, your anger will not solve the problem. More sadness, more frustration only brings more suffering for yourself ... No matter how tragic the situation, we should not lose hope." – Dalai Lama
"Learning is not attending, listening, or reading. Nor is it merely gaining knowledge. Learning is really about translating knowing what to do into doing what we know. It's about changing." => John G. Miller in The Question Behind the Question?
Lord Henry from Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray": There’s no such thing as good influence, Mr. Gray ... Why? Because the aim of life is self-development—to realize one’s nature perfectly. That’s what we’re here for. A man should devote his life fully and completely … give form to every feeding; expression to every thought; and reality to every dream.Every impulse that we express broods in the mind and poisons us. There is only one way to get rid of a temptation and that is to yield to it. Resist it and the soul grows sick and with longing for the things that is forbidden to itself. There is nothing to cure the soul, but the senses, just as there is nothing that can cure the senses but the soul.
Divyavadana: “What we have done will not be lost to all eternity. Everything ripens at its time and becomes fruit at its hour.”
Library of Congress Portal Inscription: Ignorance is the curse of God. Knowledge, the wing wherewith we fly to heaven. There is one only God, namely knowledge. And one only evil, namely ignorance.
Denver Artist Feile Case Reveals an Epiphany in Westword (09-03-98 Issue) “A lot of people tend to have a really large fear of their own power. That’s what people should be looking at—we should be embracing our own chaos, working with that rather than allowing that fear to control the big picture.”
Walter Cronkite in A Reporter’s Life: “Stories change with each retelling. Even a person really trying for the most faithful recital of events is almost invariably susceptible to slight modifications, certain little embellishments, with each recital. Accuracy of a story is in direct relation to how soon after the event it is recorded, and how frequently the story has been retold.”
Dr. Lonnie Kliever, SMU's Religious Studies Department Chair: “One religion's lunacy is another religion’s sanity. One religion's heresy is another religion's orthodoxy.”
Reinhold Niebuhr in The Irony of American History: “Let the righteous nation understand the divine judgment that waits on human pretension—and never forget ‘the depth of evil’ to which individuals and communities may sin, particularly when they try to play the role of God in history.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent . . . the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
Barry Goldwater, the Father of Conservatism: “The Constitution doesn’t say anything about gays . . . It gives us freedom of speech; it gives us freedom of association. It gives us other freedoms as long as the expression of those freedoms does not do any harm to anybody else. Now that’s a great thing to remember because I know there are people even today that want to question in this country whether or not we should be nice to people who are gay. I think that we should.”
American Biographer Catherine Drinker Bowen: “Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living. The writer experiences everything twice . . . once in reality and once in the mirror which waits always before or behind.”
Dialog Excerpt from Motorcycle Diaries
Silvia, a Leper at San Pablo’s Colony:
“Life is pain.”
Ernesto: “Yeah, it’s pretty screwed up. You gotta fight for every breath and tell death to go to hell.”
