Showing posts with label quotations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label quotations. Show all posts

Sunday, November 16, 2008

The Sovereign Individual by Davidson and Rees-Mogg - Quotations

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. 1997.


Frederick C. Lane
… one of the most distinctive characteristics of governments is their attempt to create law and order by using force themselves and by controlling through various means the use of force by others.

Chinese Proverb
Of all the thirty-six ways to get out of trouble, the best way is – leave.

Alan Greenspan
The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.

Christopher Lasch
Ambitious people understand, then, that a migratory way of life is the price of getting ahead.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

The Art of Pilgrimage by Phil Cousineau - Quotations Part 3

The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred. Phil Cousineau. 1998. ISBN 1573245097

Richard R. Niebuhr
Pilgrims are persons in motion – passing through territories not their own – seeking something we might call completion, or perhaps the word clarity will do as well, a goal to which only the spirit's compass points the way.

Flannery O'Connor
No matter what form the dragon may take, it is the mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will be concerned to tell.

Peace Pilgrim
A pilgrim is a wanderer with a purpose.

Huston Smith
The object of pilgrimage is not rest and recreation – to get away from it all. To set out on a pilgrimage is to throw down a challenge to everyday life. Nothing matters now but this adventure.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Callings by Gregg Levoy - Quotations Part 5

Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. Gregg Levoy. 1997. ISBN 051775699

M. Scott Peck
The unconscious is always one step ahead of the conscious mind – the one that knows things – so it’s impossible to know for sure. But if you’re willing to sit with ambiguity, to accept uncertainties and contradictory meanings, then your unconscious will always be a step ahead of your conscious mind in the right direction. You’ll therefore do the right thing, although you won’t know it at the time.

Roman Proverb
The fates lead those who will. Those who won’t they drag.

P.L. Travers
Be still long enough, I though, and the trees would take no notice of me and continue whatever it was they were doing or saying before I happened upon them.

Michael Ventura
Unless you have the talent of the room, your other talents are worthless. Writing is something you do alone in a room, and before any issues of style, content, or form can be addressed, the fundamental questions are: How long can you stay in that room? How many hours a day? How do you behave in that room? How often can you go back to it? How much fear (and, for that matter, how much elation) can you endure by yourself? How many years – how many years – can you remain in a room?

Sunday, November 9, 2008

The Art of Pilgrimage by Phil Cousineau - Quotations Part 2

The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred. Phil Cousineau. 1998. ISBN 1573245097

Alexander Eliot
Personal answers to ultimate questions. That is what we seek.

Theophile Gautier
The pleasure of traveling consists in the obstacles, the fatigue, and even the danger. What charm can anyone find in an excursion, when he is always sure of reaching his destination, of having horses ready waiting for him, a soft bed, an excellent supper, and all the ease and comfort which he can enjoy in his own home! One of the great misfortunes of modern life is the want of any sudden surprise, and the absence of all adventures. Everything is so well arranged, so admirably combined, so plainly labeled, that chance is an utter impossibility.

Michael Guillen
Bring home an aspect from every journey for your altar at home. Make it part of your altar at home. What's important to me is this is the domestic part of Latino life; our altars protect our home. So bring something home to re-create the altar – a smooth mineral, a touchstone. This is an important part of pilgrimage, the recreating of memory rituals to help remember people you lost. Another way for me is to remember others and to remember myself honestly.

Soren Kierkegaard
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Callings by Gregg Levoy - Quotations Part 4

Part 4:
Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. Gregg Levoy. 1997. ISBN 0-517-7-569-9

Gary Kowalski
Everyone needs a spiritual guide. My own wise friend is my dog. He has deep knowledge to impart. He makes friends easily and doesn’t hold a grudge. He enjoys simple pleasures and takes each day as it comes. Like a true Zen master, he eats when he’s hungry and sleeps when he’s tired. He’s not hung up about sex. Best of all, he befriends me with an unconditional love that human beings would do well to imitate.

Norman Mailer
With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance.

Eric Maisel
A less than belligerent commitment is a curse.

Joseph Chilton Pearce
Nothing so upsets the bishop as the rumor of a saint in his parish.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

The Art of Pilgrimage by Phil Cousineau - Quotations Part 1

The Art of Pilgrimage: The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred. Phil Cousineau. 1998. ISBN 1573245097

Gautama Buddha
You cannot travel the path until you have become the path.

Helder Camara
When your ship, long moored in harbor, gives you the illusion of being a house … put out to sea! ... save your boat's journeying soul, and your own pilgrim soul, cost what it may.

Joseph Campbell
The ultimate aim of the quest, if one is to return, must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.

Rene Daumal
To return to the source, one must travel in the opposite direction.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Callings by Gregg Levoy - Quotations Part 3

Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. Gregg Levoy. 1997. ISBN 051775699

Wayne Dyer
Have you really lived ten thousand or more days, or have you lived one day ten thousand or more times?

Gustav Flaubert
Be regular and orderly in your daily affairs that you may be violent and original in your work.

Billie Holiday
You’ve got to have something to eat and little love in your life before you can hold still for any-damn-body’s sermon on how to behave.

Sam Keen
Enter each day with the expectation that the happenings of the day may contain a clandestine message addressed to you personally. Expect omens, epiphanies, casual blessings, and teachers who unknowingly speak to your condition.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Dark Ages America by Morris Berman - Quotations

Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire. Morris Berman. 2006. ISBN 0-393-05866-2

Samuel Huntington
The West won the world not by its superiority in its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

H.L. Mencken
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more clearly, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Emmanuel Todd
Theatrical military activism against inconsequential rogue states … is a sign of weakness, not of strength … This is classic for a crumbling system … The final glory is militarism.

Polly Toynbee
God’s chosen people, uniquely blessed, nurture a self-image almost as deranged in its profound self-delusion as the old Soviet Union. The most advanced … nation on earth knows nothing of itself, irony-free and blind to the world around it.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Callings by Gregg Levoy - Quotations Part 2

Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. Gregg Levoy. 1997. ISBN 051775699

Frederich Buechner
We shy away from introspection because, however fearful the surface seems, we fear the depths still more. And we are right. There is much to fear there. If there is terror about darkness because we cannot see, there is also terror about light because we can see. Would rather not see.

Helder Camara
When your ship, long moored in harbor, gives you the illusion of being a house … put out to sea! Save your boat’s journeying soul, and your own pilgrim soul, cost what it may.

Joan Didion
We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget what we whispered and what we dreamed. We forget who we were.

Annie Dillard
The way we spend our days is the way we spend our lives.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Crisis Investing by Douglas Casey - Quotations

Crisis Investing for the Rest of the '90s. Douglas Casey. 1995. ISBN 978-0806516127

Lord Byron
Ready money is Aladdin's Lamp.

Jean-Francois Revel
Authoritarian socialism has failed almost everywhere, but you will not find a single Marxist who will say it has failed because it was wrong or impractical. He will say it has failed because nobody went far enough with it. So failure never proves a myth is wrong.

Paul Samuelson (Nobel laureate, in 1989)
The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive.

Mark Skousen
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state is a complete failure of civilization, while a totally voluntary society is its ultimate success.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Callings by Gregg Levoy - Quotations Part 1

Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life. Gregg Levoy. 1997. ISBN 051775699

Anonymous
The successful artist is someone who continues to make art and isn’t more than 50 percent bitter about the rest of life.

John Berryman
Artists are extremely lucky who are presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill them. Beethoven’s deafness, Goya’s deafness, Milton’s blindness, that kind of thing. Among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. I hope to be nearly crucified.

David Bayles and Ted Orland
Fears about yourself dig into your ability to do your best work, while fears about what others will think of you compromise your ability to do your own work.

Wendell Berry
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Awe by Paul Pearsall - Quotations

Awe: The Delights and Dangers of Our Eleventh Emotion.
Paul Pearsall. 2007. ISBN 978-0757305856

Editor, Publisher’s Weekly
Nobody ever went broke overestimating the desperate unhappiness of the American public.

Wallace Stevens
The imagination is man’s power over nature.

Fritz von Unruh
The dog is the only being that loves you more than you love yourself.

Thorstein Veblen
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Against the Odds - Quotations

Against the Odds: The Remarkable Story of Risk. Peter L. Bernstein. 1998. ISBN 978-0471295631

Gilbert Keith Chesterton
The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

John Maynard Keynes
Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

Amos Tversky
Probably the most significant and pervasive characteristic of the human pleasure machine is that people are much more sensitive to negative than to positive stimuli ... think about how well you feel today, and then try to imagine how much better you could feel ... there are a few things that would make you feel better, but the number of things that would make you feel worse is unbounded.

Amos Tversky
The major driving force is loss aversion. It is not so much that people hate uncertainty – but rather, they hate losing.

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Health, Humor, Academia, Age Quotations

HEALTH
Seneca
It is a part of the cure to wish to be cured.

HUMOR
Jean Paul Richter
No one is more profoundly sad than he who laughs too much.

ACADEMIA
Rockefeller Brothers Fund
A degree is not an education, and the confusion on this point is perhaps the gravest weakness in American thinking about education.

AGE
Leo Rosenberg
First you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down.

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Writing, Wealth, Go For It, Age Quotations

WRITING
Dorothy Parker
If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It’s going to be the best thing you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you.

WEALTH
John Wicker
Wealth is not in making money, but in making the man while he is making money.

GO FOR IT
Jonathan Winters
I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it.

AGE
Oscar Wilde
To get back one’s youth, one merely has to repeat one’s follies.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

100 Ways to Motivate Yourself - Quotations

100 Ways to Motivate Yourself: Change Your Life Forever. Steve Chandler. 2004.

Robert Fritz
When your life itself becomes the subject matter of the creative process, a very different experience of life opens to you – one in which you are involved with life at its very essence.

Napoleon Hill
The great master key to riches is nothing more or less than the self-discipline necessary to help you take full and complete possession of your own mind. Remember, it is profoundly significant that the only thing over which you have complete control is your own mental attitude.

Arnold Schwartzenegger
It’s the same process I used in bodybuilding. What you do is create a vision of who you want to be, and then live into that picture as if it were already true.

Colin Williams
When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by the world, but by a million possible worlds.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Self, Religion, Degradation, Marriage Quotations

SELF
Jean Rostand
To be adult is to be alone.

RELIGION
Oscar Wilde
When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

DEGRADATION
Simone Weil
A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

MARRIAGE
Oscar Wilde
Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Perception, Freedom, Attitude, Friends Quotations

PERCEPTION
Anais Nin
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

FREEDOM
Marina Tsvetayeva
Freedom – a drunken whore sprawling in a power-maddened soldier’s arms.

ATTITUDE
Booker Taliaferro Washington
If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.

FRIENDS
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh
We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for our ability to amuse them.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Zen, Work, Goals, Conversation Quotes

ZEN
Mevlani Rumi
Sell all your cleverness and purchase bewilderment.

WORK
Barbara J. Winter
For the few who are passionate in their work, that passion is basic to their emotional well-being – and to their financial success.

GOALS
David Viscott
Your ultimate goal in life is to become your best self. Your immediate goal is to get on the path that will lead you there.

CONVERSATION
Ludwig Wittgenstein
One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.

Sunday, September 28, 2008

More Quotes from The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.
Timothy Ferriss. 2007. ISBN 978-0-307-35313-9

Steve Jobs
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

Anne Lamott
To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass.

George Bernard Shaw
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Oscar Wilde
Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.