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MORE GOLDEN MOMENTS
And the Spooky Ladies
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YOU COMING?
Wonderfully expand what you can think, feel, become.
__________
There are honest journalists like there are honest politicians. When bought they stay bought.
Bill Moyers
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William Arthur Ward
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
___________
Ayn Rand
It only stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.
___________
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W. C. Fields
Start every day off with a smile
and get it over with.
___________
Plato said the unexamined life is not worth living. The opposite is also true.
Young Woman
___________
Open-minded people tend to be interested in Buddhism because Buddha urged people to investigate things - he didn't just command them to believe.
Dalai Lama
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Dreams will get you nowhere, a good kick in the pants will take you a long way.
Baltasar Gracian
___________
It may be the cock that crows,
but it is the hen that lays the eggs.
Margaret Thatcher
___________
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind the suffocation of a new bureaucracy.
Frantz Kafka
___________
A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory.
Steven Wright
___________
When you read descriptions like “associated with”, “largely”, “consistent with”, “may”, “supports”, “could”, “might”, “implies”, “suggests”, “nearly”, “tends to”, “trending”, “as many as”, “virtually”, “essentially”, “up to”, “to a great extent”, “linked to”, “surges”, “self evident”, in a report that purports to be scientific, be very sure it is not science. You are reading propaganda.
Old Man
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When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.
Alfred North Whitehead
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Old Man
The battles between the two political parties are elaborate games, played by the rich. Sometimes they stage good theater, but mostly they just steal your money.
___________
All mathematical and philosophical arguments are either false or incomplete.
Alfred North Whitehead
___________
More than at any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to make the correct choice.
Woody Allen
___________
But who prays for Satan?
Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity
to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?
Mark Twain
___________
Toss wisdom and holiness onto the garbage heap,
Everyone will be better off.
Lao Tzu
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Frederick Douglass
It is not light that we need, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.
___________
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed—and hence clamorous to be led to safety—by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken
___________
There’s a whole different reality to explore as a coyote and what is reality to a cat or butterfly? Awareness of Reality on our planet is always created by sensory systems and neural structures.
Then what is Reality with a big R? Kant’s noumena of course, but naming only gives the illusion of knowledge.
I guess all my philosophy classes are pretzeling my brain a little more than I thought.
Young Woman
___________
Reality is just a crutch
for people who can't cope with drugs.
Robin Williams
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C. S. Lewis
What I call my 'self' now is hardly a person at all. It's mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils.
___________
The myths of the people of the world whether those of the Celts of long ago or the Navajo of today are their science, psychology and philosophy.
We are being naïve if we think the science, psychology and philosophy of our own day are not also myths and will not be so regarded by future generations.
Seth
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The Truth
For an engineer to keep his job, he has to be brutally correct and honest---all the time. Products and reality don’t lie.
For a scientist to keep his job, he has to obtain funding. This is generally accomplished by convincing politicians that something you want to study is important, and frequently involves exaggeration and/or fabrication.
Real Science
___________
I think that I am better
than the people who are trying to reform me.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
___________
The biggest mistake most people make is to confuse being horny with being in love. What they call love is located just a bit lower than their belly button.
Old Man
___________
The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made. It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.
Jean Giraudoux
___________
H. L. Mencken
Q. “If you find so much that is unworthy of reverence in the US, why do you stay?”
A. “Why do men go to zoos?”
___________
People go to discussion groups to have their biases and prejudices massaged and reinforced. And sometimes to actually have thoughtful discussions, although as William James put it, “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
Old Man
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William Butler Yeats
Come Fairies, take me out of this dull world,
for I would ride with you upon the wind
and dance upon the mountains like a flame!
___________
Women might be able to fake orgasms,
but men can fake a whole relationship.
Sharon Stone
___________
The average man’s opinion is much less foolish than they would be if he thought for himself.
Bertrand Russell
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Arthur Schopenhauer
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision
for the limits of the world.
___________
The follies which a man regrets most in his life are those which he didn’t commit when he had the opportunity. Experience: a comb life gives you after you lose your hair.
Helen Rowland
___________
Still round the corner there may wait,
A new road or a secret gate.
J. R. R. Tolkien
___________
There's no way to remove the observer - us - from our perceptions of the world.
Stephen Hawking
___________
Whatever one of us blames in another,
each one will find in his own heart.
Seneca
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Alfred Korzybski
Don’t confuse things with their names.
The map is not the territory.
___________
I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.
Alice Walker
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Under democracy, each party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule, and both easily succeed.
H. L. Mencken
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Kurt Vonnegut
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around,
and don't let anybody tell you different.
___________
No matter what science says about certain values being outside of its frame of reference, science implies that those values are therefore without basis. The reasoning qualities of the mind are directed away from any exploration that might bring about any acceptable scientific evidence for such values, therefore.
The fact is that man lives by those values that science ignores.
Seth
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Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
___________
Virtue is insufficient temptation,
George Bernard Shaw
___________
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge
is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
Albert Einstein
___________
Better run for the hills Mable,
and cover the eyes of the young'uns.
It's gonna git ugly.
___________
A gaffe is just truth slipping out.
Michael Kinsley
___________
We are the captives of the ideas we have created.
Friedrich Hayek
___________
You are nothing but a set of obsolete responses.
T. S. Eliot
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A BLASPHANOUS EVALUATION
The Devil rebelled against a narcissistic, tyrannical god who demanded instant and continual obedience. And wanted every creature to sing his praises. What a narcissist. And for those who did not obey? Eternal, yes forever, eternal damnation in the burning fires of Hell. His own children. I cannot think of anything more horrible. Yes, and from a god who loudly proclaims himself all loving, all forgiving.
The Devil was right to rebel. And his continued resistance shows that this god is not as almighty as he claims. Just another petty, sadistic, tyrannical control freak.
___________
A diplomat is someone who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip.
Caskie Stinnett
___________
You do not need a parachute to skydive.
You only need a parachute to skydive twice.
___________
I didn't say it was your fault.
I said I was blaming you.
___________
The last thing I want to do is hurt you.
But it's still on my list.
___________
Groucho Marx
Who you gonna believe?
Me or your lying eyes?
___________
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
H. L. Mencken
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Blaise Pascal
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
___________
…this latest stage of the post-enlightenment. If your facts plainly contradict someone else’s orthodox beliefs, then you are simply being “unhelpful” or even “harmful” and should therefore be suppressed. That’s to be done not by logical refutation or counter argument, but intimidation, bullying, shunning, character assassination and threats to a person’s career or livelihood.
Basically, the gloves come off and you get mobbed by a gang of like-minded thugs. Destroy the person, not the argument.
Pointman
___________
I find it harder and harder every day
to live up to my blue china.
Oscar Wilde
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Georgia O’Keeffe
I decided to start anew,
to strip away what I had been taught.
___________
Whatever universe a professor believes in must at any rate be a universe that lends itself to lengthy discourse. A universe definable in two sentences is something for which the professorial intellect has no use. No faith in anything of that cheap kind!
William James
___________
Most people are not aware of the extent to which their mind automatically interprets things. They think they are perceiving things as they are.
Charles T. Tart
___________
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I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.
Vincent van Gogh
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The promise given was a necessity of the past:
the word broken is a necessity of the present.
Niccolo Machiavelli
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Jim Morrison
The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.
___________
Propaganda 101:
Muzzle the other side by any means necessary, and then celebrate the overwhelming consensus.
Old Man
___________
Objectivity is the delusion
that observations can be made without an observer.
Shunyata
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Without a narrative there isn't any possibility of interpreting the "facts" as presented to us.
Shunyata
___________
I respect faith, but doubt is what gives you an education.
Wilson Mizner
___________
God gave men both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply to run both at the same time.
Robin Williams
___________
Serious thinkers want to have their opinions challenged by competent and forceful proponents of opposing views.
Let me know if you find one.
Old Man
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Old Pioneer Woman
All them gunfights happened in the bars and whorehouses over ta the other side of the tracks. How Hollywood ever glorified all that low-life trash is beyond me.
___________
If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: 'President Can't Swim.'
Lyndon B. Johnson
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My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.
Albert Einstein
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F. Scott Fitzgerald
At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.
___________
Every important question has at least two valid points of view, fully supported by data, logic, and many, many unacknowledged biases and assumptions.
Old Man
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Zsa Zsa Gabor
“How many husbands have I had?
You mean apart from my own?”
___________
Is man one of God's blunders?
Or is God one of man's blunders?
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Trying to understand the worms made me remember that great passage at the beginning of Goethe’s Faust. Faust tells the Devil he feels a kinship, an understanding. The Devil squashes the poor doctor flat with a great putdown. “The spirit thou doest comprehend is like thyself, not me.”
Young Woman
___________
Jonathan Swift
Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies,
but let wasps and hornets break through.
___________
The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.
Montaigne
___________
Man's limitations are also visible in his gods. Yahweh seems to have had His hands full with the Devil from the start. His plans for Adam and Eve went to pot, and He failed again with Noah.
His worst failure came when He sent His only-begotten Son into the world to rescue man from sin. It would be hard to imagine any scheme falling further from success.
H. L. Mencken
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Oscar Wilde
I think that God in creating Man
somewhat overestimated his ability.
___________
We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees.
Jason Kidd
___________
If there is a God, it's going to be a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more incomprehensible than anything that any theologian of any religion has ever proposed.
Richard Dawkins
___________
There are people who, instead of listening to what is being said to them, are already listening to what they are going to say themselves.
Albert Guinon
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All truth passes through three stages.
First, it is ridiculed.
Second, it is violently opposed.
Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
___________
Everything that irritates us about others
can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Carl Jung
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Henry Miller
The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.
___________
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Voltaire
___________
I have great faith in fools;
self-confidence my friends call it.
Edgar Allan Poe
___________
Tension is who you think you should be.
Relaxation is who you are.
Lao Tzu
___________
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing.
If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
Groucho Marx
___________
Carefully consider what you want to be said at your funeral. You will find your definition of success.
Stephen covey
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You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird.
I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
Richard Feynman
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I begin by taking. I shall find scholars later to demonstrate my perfect right.
Frederick the Great
___________
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.
James Branch Cabell
___________
The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head.
Jean Cocteau
___________
Not only do I not know what's going on, I wouldn't know what to do about it if I did.
George Carlin
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Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.
Sir Winston Churchill
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Timothy Leary
Science is all metaphor.
___________
The respected intellectuals
are those who conform and serve power interests
Noam Chomsky
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If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.
If you get too cold, I’ll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.
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___________
The towels were so thick there
I could hardly close my suitcase.
Yogi Berra
___________
I can hardly contain my indifference.
Philip Markham
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“Alice, I need your help. Dennis and Patricia his girlfriend went to Mt. Shasta yesterday. He went off hiking by himself this morning and never came back. I’m driving up and would be very grateful if you would come with me.”
“Of course. Let me go do a few things and I’ll be right back.”
Yes, a basic truth about reality, rarely mentioned. All the lovely heroines, in all the books and movies you have ever read or seen, have all had to go do a few things. Yes, and more than once a day.
Young Woman
___________
If you only listen to people who agree with you,
ignorance is guaranteed.
Old Man
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There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
Alexis de Tocqueville
___________
I hate to be pessimistic but I keep remembering the writing on a wall in old Pompeii: “If we get rid of this bunch of scoundrels we just get another bunch of scoundrels.”
Old Man
___________
Do not take the Buddha for the Ultimate.
As I look at him,
he is still like the hole in the privy.
Lin Chi
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Men have become the tools of their tools.
Henry David Thoreau
___________
One cannot learn from one’s mistakes if there are none.
Old Man
___________
Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.
Albert Einstein
___________
Atheists are usually just as narrow-minded as fundamentalist Christians, and a whole lot more arrogant.
Young Woman
___________
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself
—and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard Feynman
___________
The more people chant about their freedom and how free they are, the more loudly I hear their chains rattling.
George Orwell
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We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.
J Robert Oppenheimer.
___________
I think I lived those years very impersonally. It was almost as though I had erected someone outside myself who was the president's wife. I was lost somewhere deep down inside myself. That is the way I felt and worked until I left the White House.
Eleanor Roosevelt
___________
It’s dangerous to mind read.
You are usually reading your own.
Old Man
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Mark Twain
Those who do not read the paper are uninformed, while those who read the paper are misinformed.
___________
If you tell the truth,
you'll eventually be found out.
Mark Twain
___________
A politician’s loyalty is not for sale.
Just for rent until a higher bidder comes along.
Old Man
___________
The United States of American has two great capitols of illusion: Hollywood and Washington.
Old Man
___________
Becoming the most hypocritical politician in America
is not an easy goal to achieve.
Milton Wolf
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I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan like as to put to rout all that was not life.
Henry David Thoreau
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I will not let anyone walk through my mind
with their dirty feet.
Mahatma Gandhi
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There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anaïs Nin
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“Why do people immediately dislike me so much?"
"Saves time."
___________
Aristotle
The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
___________
The worst men often give the best advice.
Francis Bacon
___________
Experts often possess more data than judgment.
Colin Powell
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Science without religion is lame,
religion without science is blind.
Albert Einstein
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Robert Louis Stevenson
When I am grown to man's estate
I shall be very proud and great.
And tell the other girls and boys
Not to meddle with my toys.
___________
So when you are listening to somebody, completely, attentively, then you are listening not only to the words, but also to the feeling of what is being conveyed, to the whole of it, not part of it.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
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Colleges are places where pebbles are polished
and diamonds are dimmed.
Robert Green Ingersoll
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The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
Henry Miller
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Prison life, fortunately, I spent a lot of years, about 18 years with other prisoners, and, as I say, they enriched your soul.
Nelson Mandela
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William Makepeace Thackeray
People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.
___________
She is a peacock in everything but beauty.
Oscar Wilde
___________
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Victor Frankl
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
___________
I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize.
Steven Wright
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You think everything in the world is simple to understand because everything you do is a routine that is simple to understand.
Carlos Castaneda
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Billy Sunday
Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car.
___________
Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
Ronald Reagan
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Albert Einstein
This firm belief in a superior mind that reveals itself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God.
___________
If you want small changes in your life, work on your attitude. But if you want big and primary changes, work on your paradigm.
Stephen Covey
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Dictums such as “the survival of the fittest” or “might is right” emphasize the most obvious instances of seeming inequality among men, justify the fiercest competition in all areas of private and public life and between nations, and visualize government as the natural human extension of nature’s own ”cruel” weeding-out processes as perceived through evolutionary dogma.
Signs of animal cooperation and biological graciousness are ignored or minimized; yet whenever man downgrades the animals or the gods, he minimizes the dimensions of his own consciousness, since his existence lies so obviously between the thematic structure of those seeming opposites.
Seth
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To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.
Albert Einstein
___________
The mistakes of the fool are known to the world, but not to himself. The mistakes of the wise man are known to himself, but not to the world.
Charles Caleb Colton
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Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
Timothy Leary
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Franz Kafka
Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty
never grows old.
___________
A pair of powerful spectacles
has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love.
Friedrich Nietzsche
___________
While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.
Henry Kissinger
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The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought
is its massive proof that God is a bore.
H. .L. Mencken
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We usually see only the things we are looking for- so much so that we sometimes see them where they are not.
Eric Hoffer
___________
Let us speak no more of a conscious or unconscious self. There is ONE self and it focuses its attention in various dimensions. In the waking state it focuses in physical reality. In the dream state it is focused within a different reality.
Seth
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The child, laughing with joy and awe at the sight of the first violet, understands far more in the deepest terms than a botanist who has long since forgotten the experience of perceiving one violet, though he has at his mental fingertips the names and classifications of all the world’s flowers.
Information is not knowledge or comprehension.
Seth
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Joseph Campbell
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
___________
Tecumseh
When the legends die,
the dreams end;
there is no more greatness.
___________
Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch.
E. M. Forster
___________
A beginning is the time
For taking the most delicate care
That the balances are correct.
Frank Herbert
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Te Shan
When you hear that some great Master has appeared in the world to liberate all beings, immediately clap your hands over your ears. If you don’t know for yourself, you are just swallowing other peoples’ spit.
Those who really have it live like ordinary men.
___________
Let me die having an organism.
I want to come and go at the same time.
Richard Pryor
___________
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Zen proverb
___________
Our present crop of politicians appear to have mistaken Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World for instruction manuals.
Old Man
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J. R. R. Tolkien
Not all those who wander are lost.
___________
If you can’t explain it simply,
you don’t understand it well enough.
Albert Einstein
___________
Do women compete for the favors of men?
Yes. They've spent 5,000 years competing.
Gloria Steinem
___________
I'm a huge karaoke person even though I have the worst singing voice. When you love doing something, who cares?
Hoda Kotb
___________
Let us not be too particular;
it is better to have old secondhand diamonds
than none at all.
Mark Twain
___________
After the game,
the King and the pawn go into the same box.
Italian proverb
___________
If you aren't in over your head,
how do you know how tall you are?
T. S. Eliot
___________
You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.
Harry S. Truman
___________
Now, while it seems that your world contains more and more information all the time, your particular brand of science is a relatively narrow one, in that it accepts as valid only specific areas of speculation. The areas outside of its boundaries become taboo.
The unknown is more feared by science than it ever was by religion.
Seth
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Zsa Zsa Gabor
I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house.
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Andy Warhol
I am a deeply superficial person.
___________
Always go to other people’s funerals,
otherwise they won’t come to yours.
Yogi Berra
___________
All creatures of whatever degree have their own appreciation of esthetics. Many such creatures merge their arts so perfectly into their lives that it is impossible to separate the two: the spider’s web, for example, or the beaver’s dam, and there are endless other examples.
This is not “blind instinctive behavior” at all, but the result of well-ordered spontaneous artistry. Art is not a specifically human endeavor, though man likes to believe that this is so.
Seth
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Did you ever see the customers in health - food stores? They are pale, skinny people who look half - dead. In a steak house, you see robust, ruddy people. They're dying, of course, but they look terrific.
Bill Cosby
___________
To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
Pablo Picasso
___________
The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.
Ayn Rand
___________
A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.
Nikos Kazantzakis
___________
We are here and it is now.
Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.
H. L. Mencken
___________
Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.
Winston Churchill
___________
Heraclitus
Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.
___________
What is my loftiest ambition? I've always wanted to throw an egg at an electric fan.
Oliver Herford
___________
Bob Hope
You know you’re getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.
___________
Few people have the imagination for reality.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
___________
No matter how cynical you get,
it’s impossible to keep up.
Lily Tomlin
___________
Sometimes the road less traveled
is less traveled for a reason.
Jerry Seinfeld
___________
How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?
Dwight Eisenhower
___________
It's a good thing to be foolishly gay once in a while.
Horace
___________
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so aim above morality.
Henry David Thoreau
___________
In Hollywood a girl's virtue
is much less important than her hairdo.
Marilyn Monroe
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All of science, in your time, has been set up to promote beliefs that run in direct contradiction to the knowledge of man’s heart. Science has denied emotional truth and firmly believes that knowledge can only be acquired from the outside, from observation.
You are taught not to trust your subjective experience, which means that you are told not to trust your initial and primary connection with reality.
Seth
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You’re not making it, fella.
Learn to cover your lies better.
Old Man
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Carl Jung
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
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I remember the first time I had sex.
I kept the receipt.
Groucho Marx
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What was once called the objective world is a sort of Rorschach ink blot, into which each culture, each system of science and religion, each type of personality, reads a meaning only remotely derived from the shape and color of the blot itself.
Lewis Mumford
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The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality. Reality is above all else a variable. With a firm enough commitment, you can sometimes create a reality which did not exist before.
Margaret Halsey
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Dogmas--religious, political, scientific--arise out of erroneous belief that thought can encapsulate reality or truth. Dogmas are collective conceptual prisons. And the strange thing is that people love their prison cells because they give them a sense of security and a false sense of "I know."
Eckhart Tolle
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I believe in something. But I don't believe that anything can hold a grudge for long enough to condemn its creation to eternal punishment. Nobody can hold a grudge that long, even God.
Chuck Palahniuk
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Plutarch
The mind is not a vessel to be filled
but a fire to be kindled.
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Consciousness is unquantifiable, a ghost in the machine, barely considered real at all, though in a sense this flickering mosaic of awareness is the only true reality that we can ever know.
Alan Moore
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Arthur Schopenhauer
Talent hits a target no one else can hit;
Genius hits a target no one else can see.
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You appear to be under the impression that the well worn paths and random firings in your brain indicate intelligence and good judgment.
Old Man
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There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.
Carl Sandburg
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W. Clement Stone
What contemptible scoundrel
has stolen the cork to my lunch?
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Too much of what is called 'education' is little more than an expensive isolation from reality.
Thomas Sowell
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Half the time the medical industrial complex is a huge benefit to humanity, treating the sick, repairing the maimed, reducing pain, enhancing quality of life, and many other wonderful things.
The other half of the time, it feeds on the vulnerable, especially the elderly.
Old Man
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Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs.
Paulo Coelho
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Beyond the fiction of reality,
there is the reality of the fiction.
Slavoj Zizek
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Bob Dylan
Here's the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don't find it anywhere else.
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Once conform, once do what others do because they do it, and a kind of lethargy steals over all the finer senses of the soul.
Montaigne
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Bruce Lee
Conditioning obstructs our view of reality. We do not see IT in its suchness because of our indoctrination, crooked and twisted.
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As our circle of knowledge expands, so does the circumference of darkness surrounding it.
Albert Einstein
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I'm interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that appears to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road toward freedom.
Jim Morrison
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The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge.
Albert Einstein
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I'm always chasing rainbows,
Watching clouds drifting by.
My schemes are just like all my dreams,
Ending in the sky.
Why have I always been a failure?
What can the reason be?
I wonder if the world is to blame.
I wonder if it could be me.
Joseph McCarthy Harry Carroll
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Science without debate is propaganda.
Old Man
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H. L. Mencken
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
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Shortages and inefficient use of resources are the legacy of price controls and socialism.
Old Man
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Bertrand Russell
Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
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THE SPOOKY LADIES
The Bene Gesserit are the spooky ladies from Frank Herbert’s Dune series. I first read the books when a young lad. The sayings of the Gesserit changed my life. They opened my mind to an awareness of levels of meaning, and the awareness that there are often equally valid differences of opinion.
Years later I was talking to a good friend and mentioned my experience reading Dune. He had the same experience as a young man.
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Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class — whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
_____________________
If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true of false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.
_____________________
These are illusions of popular history which a successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumphs; a good deed is its own reward; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness.
_____________________
All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.
_____________________
We witness a passing phrase of eternity. Important things happen but some people never notice. Accidents intervene. You are not present at episodes. You depend on reports. And people shutter their minds. What good are reports? History in a news account? Preselected at an editorial conference, digested and excreted by prejudice? Accounts you need seldom come from those who make history. Diaries, memoirs and autobiographies are subjective forms of special pleading. Archives are crammed with such suspect stuff.
_____________________
We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose.
_____________________
Religion (emulation of adults by the child) encysts past mythologies: guesses, hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, pronouncements made in search of personal power, all mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always an unspoken commandment: Thou shalt not question! We break that commandment daily in the harnessing of human imagination to our deepest creativity.
_____________________
Humans are born with a susceptibility to that most persistent and debilitating disease of intellect: self-deception. The best of all possible worlds and the worst get their dramatic coloration from it. As nearly as we can determine, there is no natural immunity. Constant alertness is required.
At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.
_____________________
Quite naturally, holders of power wish to suppress wild research. Unrestricted questing after knowledge has a long history of producing unwanted competition. The powerful want a “safe line of investigations,” which develop only those products and ideas that can be controlled and, most important, that will allow the larger part of the benefits to be captured by inside investors. Unfortunately, a random universe full of relative variables does not insure such a “safe line of investigations.”
_____________________
Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?
_____________________
People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.
_____________________
Perceptions rule the universe.
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Hatred is as dangerous an emotion as love. The capacity for either one is the capacity for its opposite.
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What is this Love that so many speak of with such apparent familiarity? Do they truly comprehend how unattainable it is? Are there not as many definitions of Love as there are stars in the universe?
_____________________
The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.
_____________________
Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power all mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is “Thou shalt not question!” But we do anyway. We break that commandment as a matter of course. The work to which we hae set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, the harnessing of imagination to humankind’s deepest sense of creativity.
_____________________
The Unknown surrounds us at any given moment. That is where we seek knowledge.
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There is no reality — only our own order imposed on everything.
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There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments.
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When we try to conceal our innermost drives, our entire being screams betrayal.
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The less we know, the longer the explanation.
_____________________
The human body is a storehouse of relics from the past — the appendix, thymus, and (in the embryo) a gill structure. But the unconscious mind is even more intriguing. It has been built up over millions of years and represents a history throughout its synaptic traces, some of which do not appear to be useful in modern times. It is difficult to find everything that is there.
_____________________
There are no facts— only observational postulates in an endlessly regenerative hodgepodge of predictions. Consensus reality requires a fixed frame of reference. In a multilevel, infinite universe, there can be no fixity; thus, no absolute consensus reality. In a relativistic universe, it appears impossible to test the reliability of any expert by requiring him to agree with another expert. Both can be correct, each in his own inertial system.
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Politics is the art of appearing candid and completely open, while concealing as much as possible.
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We could be dreaming all the time, but we do not perceive those dreams while we are awake because consciousness (like the sun obscuring stars during the day) is much too brilliant to allow the unconscious content so much definition.
_____________________
Diplomats are chosen for their ability to lie.
_____________________
It is astonishing how foolish humans can be in groups, especially when they follow their leaders without question.
_____________________
Other memory is a wide, deep ocean. It is available to help the members of our order, but only on its own terms. A Sister invites trouble when she tries to manipulate the internal voices to her own needs. It is like trying to make the sea one’s own personal swimming pool — an impossibility, even for a few moments.
_____________________
Humans are different in private than in the presence of others. While the private persona merges into the social persona in varying degrees, the union is never complete. Something is always held back.
_____________________
We depend entirely upon the benevolent cooperation of the unconscious mind. The unconscious, in a sense, invents the next moment for us.
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All proofs inevitably lead to propositions that have no proof. All things are known because we want to believe in them.
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May you have a life of love and joy
discovery and wonder.
