Tag Archives: Quotations

FIVE WISE LINES [December 2025]

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William Blake painting of Urizen praying to the world he created, an illustration from "Song of Los."
William Blake:
Urizen prays to the world he created (1795)
Song of Los

I must create a system
or be enslaved by another man’s…

william blake; Jerusalem: The emanation of the great albion

Saying Yoga exists to make one more flexible
is like saying that it exists to wring farts out of one’s body,
both will happen — neither is the primary objective.

Me

He that is without sin among you,
let him first cast a stone at her…

JESUS; John 8:7

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

FIVE WISE LINES [November 2025]

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Taken at Fo Guang Shan, near Kaohsiung in Southern Taiwan.

A thing is mighty big when time
and distance cannot shrink it.

Zora Neale hurston; Tell my horse

…if you want to be elected, it is better
to be Mean than to be Funny.

hunter s. thompson; Better than sex

And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile,
go with him twain.

jesus; Matthew 5:38-40

The only gamblers who will talk openly
are the ones who don’t make money.
The successful ones keep their mouths shut.

Kit chellel; lucky devils

To live a creative life,
we must lose our fear of being wrong.

joseph chilton pearce

FIVE WISE LINES [October 2025]

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Gwalior Fort on Gopachal Hill in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh, India

I had better never see a book
than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit,
and made a satellite instead of a system.

ralph waldo emerson; The american scholar

Free should the scholar be, — free and brave.

Ralph waldo emerson; The American Scholar

If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it is lethal.

Paulo coelho

What you’re supposed to do when you
don’t like a thing is change it.
If you can’t change it,
change the way you think about it.
Don’t complain.

Maya angelou

No man ever steps in the same river twice,
for it’s not the same river
and he’s not the same man.

Heraclitus

FIVE WISE LINES [September 2025]

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The aim of introduction is to conceal a person’s identity.

George Mikes, How To Be an Alien

From the beginning our philosophers have tried to teach us how to die,
and our poets have taught us that to contemplate death
is to learn to live.

Jonathan weiner, Long for this world

Nothing is harder to see into than people’s natures.

Zhuge liang [a.k.a. Kongming], The WAy of the General

To know how to eat is to know how to live.

Auguste Escoffier

Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.

Mark twain

FIVE WISE LINES [August 2025]

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Life has become immeasurably better
since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.

Hunter s. Thompson

If asked the nature of cha no yu*
Say it’s the sound of wind blow pines
In a painting.

Sen Sotan

*”Tea ceremony” in Japanese.

All rivers flow to the ocean.
Flow and let others flow too.

Sri ramakrishna quoted by Will durant

He who makes a beast of himself
gets rid of the pain of being a man.

Samuel johnson

…The Edge… There is no honest way to explain it
because the only people who really know where it is
are the ones who have gone over.

Hunter s. Thompson, Hell’s Angels

FIVE WISE LINES [July 2025]

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There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.

Josh billings

Everything in the universe is a jug
filled to the brim with wisdom and beauty.

Rumi, Masnavi

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Robert frost

“Travel and tell no one, live a true love story and tell no one,
live happily and tell no one, people ruin beautiful things.”

Kahlil gibran

Not all those who wander are lost.

J.r.r. Tolkien, The lord of the rings

FIVE WISE LINES [June 2025]

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…we should not be too confident in our belief of anything.

cicero; tusculan disputations

No matter what plans you make,
no matter what you acquire,
the thief will enter from the unguarded side.
Be occupied, then, with what you really value
and let the thief take something less.

Rumi; Mathnawi II

Very little is needed to make a happy life;
it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

Marcus aurelius; Meditations

I possess, but I am not possessed by her;
since the best thing is to possess pleasures
without being their slave,
not to be devoid of pleasures.

aristippus [according to Diogenes laertius in
lives of the eminent philosophers]

Do not fear the gods.
Do not fear death.
What is good is easy to attain.
What is painful is easy to endure.

philodemus; Herculaneum papyrus
[Often referred to as the four cures of epicurus]

FIVE WISE LINES [May 2025]

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It is a happy talent to know how to play.

Ralph waldo emerson

Just living is not enough… one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.

Hans christian andersen

Don’t abandon kindness, mercy, and sympathy in an emergency.

Qiānzì wén [千字文], Ch. 3

Logic will take you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

albert Einstein

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.

Henry david thoreau

FIVE WISE LINES FROM WILLIAM JAMES [Feb. 2025]

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Our view of the world is truly shaped
by what we decide to hear.

The greatest weapon against stress
is our ability to choose
one thought over another.

The art of being wise is
the art of knowing what to overlook.

We have grown literally afraid to be poor.
We despise anyone who elects to be poor
in order to simplify and save his inner life.

Whenever two people meet,
there are really six people present.
There is each man as he sees himself,
each man as the other person sees him,
and each man as he really is.

NOTABLE MENTIONS:

We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats
are in our libraries, seeing the books
and hearing the conversation,
but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

FIVE WISE LINES [January 2025]

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“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does not go away.”

Philip k. dick

“The Wu and the Yue peoples hate each other. But in the same boat in a storm, they work together like left and right hands.”

SunZi in The ART of War

“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks – on your body or on your heart – are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”

anthony bourdain

What allows great kings and generals to win, more frequently than ordinary men, is foreknowledge.
Foreknowledge cannot be attained by spirits or deduced or calculated.”

Sunzi in The ART of war

“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”

T. S. Eliot