“You’re living in a dream world, a simulation, nothing is real.”
Can’t really change anything (see: Novikov Self-Consistency Principle) and I don’t believe people can enact wisdom until they are ready (i.e. whispering wise words in the ear will not make a wiser person,) and so I’m left with fucking with ourself.
One can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge,
Michel de montaigne
but one cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.
Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and one must begin anew.
Julio Cortázar
Experience is not what happens to you,
Aldous Huxley
it’s what you do with what happens to you.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T.s. Eliot
If we do not possess a ‘sense’ for a given energy -form,
Robert E. Ornstein in The psychology of consciousness [As quoted in the Bihar School edition of Hatha Yoga Pradipika]
we do not experience its existence.
Trust in Allah, but tether your camel.
Sufi Saying
[S]ome day you will be old enough to
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe
start reading fairy tales again.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel proust
Live as if you were to die tomorrow.
Mahatma gandhi
Learn as if you were to live forever.
It took me four years to paint like Raphael,
Pablo Picasso
but a lifetime to paint like a child.
Just because a message has merit does not mean there is benefit in its delivery. For example, telling a person who is on fire and mad with itching not to scratch or telling a person to not be a jackass when their core nature is jackass. Saying such things will not nudge the state of the world and can only release the puff of hot air that creates chaos — like Edward Lorenz’s proverbial butterfly in Brazil that causes a tornado in Texas.
When I was younger I could remember anything,
Mark twain
whether it had happened or not;
but my faculties are decaying now and soon
I shall be able to remember only the things
that never happened.
“The mind is not a vessel to be filled,
Plutarch [paraphrased]
but a fire to be kindled.”
Judge a man by his questions
Voltaire
rather than his answers.
Resist much, obey little.
Walt whitman; “To the states“
People don’t take trips —
John steinbeck
trips take people.
All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.
Ernest hemingway; A Moveable feast
Friends do not live in harmony…, but in melody.
Henry david thoreau
Avoid adjectives of scale, you will love the world more and desire it less.
Robert Hass’ paraphrasing of Bashō [National Geographic; Feb 2008]
Do not hurry; do not rest.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Be careful of your words,
Lieh Tzu
for someone will agree with them.
Kung Fu Panda, Kung Fu Hustle, and The Matrix. Together, they contain the sum of all wisdom.
the fixed boulder
makes great shelter;
rolling boulders
make monkey paste:
how do baby monkeys know?
I must create a system
william blake; Jerusalem: The emanation of the great albion
or be enslaved by another man’s…
Saying Yoga exists to make one more flexible
Me
is like saying that it exists to wring farts out of one’s body,
both will happen — neither is the primary objective.
He that is without sin among you,
JESUS; John 8:7
let him first cast a stone at her…
The best government is that which governs least.
Henry david thoreau, Civil Disobedience
Gods always behave like the people who make them…
zora neale hurston; Tell my horse
Tiger Riding for Beginners 