"It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born." — Jack Kerouac

 "Your solitude will be a support and a home for you." - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

"Take love as an illustration. The one who truly loves does not love once and for all. Nor does he use a part of his love, and then again another part. For to change it into small coins is not to use it rightly. No, he loves with all of his love. It is wholly present in each expression. He continues to give it away as a whole, and yet he keeps it intact as a whole, in his heart. Wonderful riches! When the miser has gathered all the world's gold in sordidness—then he has become poor. When the lover gives away his whole love, he keeps it entire—in the purity of the heart." - Sören Kierkegaard (Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing)

‘We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.’ – Marcel Proust

We are made to exaggerate the importance of what work we do; and yet how much is not done by us!- Henry David Thoreau, Economy, Walden.

"There ought to be no such thing as Fate. As long as we use this word, it is a sign of our impotence and that we are not yet ourselves." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (Journal Entry, April 1842)

The great successful men of the world have used their imagination . . . they think ahead and create their mental picture in all its details, filling in here, adding a little there, altering this a bit and that a bit, but steadily building – steadily building. – Robert Collier

Have so many favorites when it comes to Mary Oliver.. but because of the lines excerpted below, In Blackwater Woods has to be one of my favorite poems of Mary Oliver!

 

 

An entertainment is something which distracts us or diverts us from the routine of daily life. It makes us for the time being forget our cares and worries; it interrupts our conscious thoughts and habits, rests our nerves and minds, though it may incidentally exhaust our bodies. Art, on the other hand, though it may divert us from the normal routine of our existence, causes us in some way or other to become conscious of that existence. - Sir Herbert Read, British critic and poet in To Hell with Culture, ch. 13 (1963).

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The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal. - George Santayana (1863-1952), U.S. philosopher and poet in Reason in Art, ch. 8, The Life of Reason (1905-1906, rev. edition 1953)

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoicating as possibility?

        - Soren Kierkegaard, the famous Danish philosopher wrote in his book Either/Or:

The great teachings unanimously emphasize that all the peace, wisdom, and joy in the universe are already within us; we don't have to gain, develop, or attain them. We're like a child standing in a beautiful park with his eyes shut tight. We don't need to imagine trees, flowers, deer, birds, and sky; we merely need to open our eyes and realize what is already here, who we really are --Anon

"You can't build up a reputation on what you are going to do." - Henry Ford

  

  “All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out otheir dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” - T. E. Lawrence

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggression. - Sigmund Freud

"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." -- Albert Camus

Three more quotes from Camus:

"Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it."

"Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth"

"The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth."

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” - T. S. Eliot

Pascal said a lot of amazing things... but here are a few illustrative quotes.    

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.      


Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.     


Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.     


Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.      


A trifle consoles us, for a trifle distresses us.   

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’” -- Jack Kerouac, On The Road

Other Kerouac quotes that I like:

“Maybe that's what life is...a wink of the eye and winking stars.”

“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.”

“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.”

“Mankind is like dogs, not gods - as long as you don't get mad they'll bite you - but stay mad and you'll never be bitten. Dogs don't respect humility and sorrow.”

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. - Anais Nin.

Nin certainly led a full life, as outlined by her in her diaries - Vol 1 through Vol 7 - and a recent biography.

"Time is all you have, and you might have less than you think!”

"Brick walls are there for a reason. They let us prove how badly we want things."

Those two quotes are by Randy Pausch, the "dying man who taught America how to live". He died on July 25, 2008.

 

Enjoy his "Last Lecture" and more of his musings from the last few years of his life at his blog.

We needed to stop asking ourselves about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life-daily and hourly. . . . Therefore, it was necessary for us to face up to the full amount of suffering, trying to keep moments of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum. But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. - Viktor Frankl

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare. — Guy de Maupassant

And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past - The final sentence of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears". - Gertrude Stein

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” - Albert Einstein