As mentioned in 011, my real education started in the early ’80s when I began reading every day.
It’s hard to describe the emptiness those words began to fill.
— 032 Perceptual Juice Cleanse
I made 13 boxes (12 for gifts) during a week-long epic quest. (See 011 for the backstory. The relentless parade of masculine pronouns is addressed in 030 and 032.)
The Asynchronous Daily Quests (019 and 020) were function without form (125 quests without content). It took me a few months to recognize the blatantly obvious solution.
If you’d like to experience the daily version, complete 011 to earn the Item that reveals the first Survival Kit Map. (Parts II and III will remain hidden until you earn their respective keys.)
For the second time in my life, I typed those 366 daily entries, savoring the beauty, hoping to correct more errors than I introduced (or missed), and cringing at a few clunkers. A solution presented itself when I encountered a longer version of Day 17 on Day 251. Mustn’t have duplicates.
A few substitutions (tagged #2025) will be pulled from what remains of the original sources.
For the record, each of these quotes were in my room—a tiny carriage house with a shower, toilet, sink, mini-fridge, microwave, bed, and drawing board—four walls, a Mr. Ed door, and three wonderful windows (one on the roof). Problem was, the quotes were sitting in books, liner notes, piles of notebooks, and random scraps of paper.
A friend gave me Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Artist Within for my 33rd birthday. It brimmed with quotes (like Hadamard’s small annoyance) that sang to my soul. The book was (and is) a life preserver. (One of many.)
— 003 An Audience of One
Full Disclosure: I’d been highlighting and collecting quotes for years. They were already a part of my real world survival kit. The first quote is a lie. It sounds good, but I was on deadline. A beginning is the time to begin. I typed Herbert’s version into the Panasonic word processor. One down. Who’s next?
(1) A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that balances are correct.
— Frank Herbert / Dune
(2) We are always getting ready to live but never living.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson / Selected Works
(3) The paradox has been apparent for some time, but it seems to be one of those things that looms so large and are so blatantly obvious that they are difficult to see.
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(4) Creativity, as had been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know…. Hence, to think creatively we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.
— George Kneller / The Art and Science of Creativity
(5) The Unconscious, though one cannot force it, will not produce new ideas unless it has been painstakingly stuffed full of facts, impressions, concepts, and an endless series of conscious ruminations and attempted solutions. On this we have the testimony of many creative people.
— Morton Hunt / The Universe Within
(6) What will it take to free us from the trap we have set for ourselves?
— Carl Sagan / The Common Enemy
(7) Follow your star, for if in all of the sweet life I saw one truth shine clearly, you cannot miss your glorious arrival.
— Dante Alighieri / Inferno
(8) Someday soon we’ll stop to ponder
What on Earth’s this spell we’re under
We made the grade and still we wonder
Who the hell we are
— Styx / The Grand Illusion
(9) In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.
— Richard Bach / Illusions
(10) New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed without any other reason but because they are not already common.
— John Locke / An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(11) The whole wide world an endless universe
Yet we keep looking through the eyeglass in reverse
— Rush / Territories
(12) The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
— Walter Bagehot
(13) Love me love you
Loving is the way to help me help you
Why must we be so cool so cool
Oh we’re such damn fools
— Supertramp / Hide in Your Shell
(14) It is impossible to undertake any kind of research without being perpetually made aware that the truth is plying us with suggestions, the past prodding us with hints, and if no benefits result from such assistance, it is not the fault of our heavenly helpers but of our all too human obtuseness.
— Cyril Connolly / Previous Convictions
(15) When men are unable to form an idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand. This axiom explains the inexhaustible source of all the errors about the principles of human nature. The errors are embraced by entire nations and by scholars.
— Giambattista Vico
(16) Seeing is an experience…. People, not their eyes see…. There is more to seeing than meets the eyeball.
— N.R. Hanson / Patterns of Discovery
(17) We pursue the thought, and find new meanings, new understanding, and often, new solutions to old problems.
— Morton Hunt / The Universe Within
(18) In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, there is, written small, the artist’s signature.
— Carl Sagan / Contact
(19) But is that really all there is to it? Can fortune be nothing more than an ability, a willingness to take the chances offered?
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(20) …a childlike playfulness which is one of the hallmarks of creativity. Consensus is rare in psychology, but most workers in the field agree that creative thinkers can be recognized by their ability to entertain wild ideas without feeling the usual need to pass judgment on them.
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(21) re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.
— Walt Whitman / Leaves of Grass
(22) Much of our failure to understand human nature arises from neglect of the need to have our faculties excited and our lives thereby enhanced. The human animal cannot be itself without this exciting enhancement. Excitement is not merely good, it is indispensable to a proper human life.
— Lancelot Law Whyte
(23) Part of the communication problem, as we shall see, is the strangeness of what is being found…. Very few people are synthesizing information being gathered in far-flung places.
— Marilyn Ferguson / The Aquarian Conspiracy
(24) All inquirers had the naïveté, and some had the boldness of amateurs.
— Danel J. Boostin / The Discoverers
(25) For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: “It might have been!”
— John Greenleaf Whittier / Maud Muller
(26) It is part of the cure to wish to be cured.
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca
(27) What will people say — in these words lies the tyranny of the world, the whole destruction of our natural disposition, the oblique vision of our minds. These four words hold sway everywhere.
— Berthold Auerbach / On the Heights
(28) Let no man imagine. that he has no influence. Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.
— Henry George / Social Problems
(29) Mourn not the dead in the cool earth lie….
But rather mourn the apathetic throng
The cowed and the meek
Who see the world’s great anguish and its wrong,
And dare not speak!
— Ralph Chapin / Bars and Shadows
(30) One day posterity will remember this strange era, these strange times, when ordinary common honesty was called courage.
— Yevgeny Yevtushenko
(31) If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them.
— C. Wright Mills
(32) He who does not bellow the truth when he know the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.
— Charles Peguy
(33) Ignorance is not bliss — it is oblivion.
— Philip Wylie / Generation of Vipers
(34) The chief cause of human errors is to be found in prejudices picked up in childhood.
— René Descartes / Principles of Philosophy
(35) Besides concealing the misdeeds of rulers, the doctrine that you can’t change human nature has a larger purpose: defense of the existing social arrangements.
— Barrows Dunham / Man Against Myth
(36) You’d better be home soon
— Crowded House
(37) But given its root in nature, there seems to be little that the combination of mind and matter, brain and body cannot accomplish. And given half a chance, it seems predestined to go a step beyond ordinary consciousness with its petty restrictions and into supersensory space. All it takes is a little help from our friends.
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(38) Poverty is the worst form of violence.
— Mahatma Gandhi
(39) We are asleep. Must we die before we wake?
— Near Universal Theme (Row row row your boat)
(40) The people is a beast of muddy brain
That knows not its own strength
— Tommaso Campanella
(41) After that final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future of the world depends
— Wallace Stevens
(42) Caught between the longing for love
And the struggle for the legal tender
He knows that all his hopes and dreams
Begin and end there
— Jackson Browne / The Pretender
(43) Is not the real business of the artist to seek for man’s salvation, and by understanding his ingredients to make himself less an outlaw to himself?
— Loren Eisley / The Star Thrower
(44) Koyaanisqatsi 1. Crazy life. 2. Life in turmoil. 3. Life out of balance. 4. Life disintegrating. 5. A state of life that calls for another way of living.
— Koyaanisqatsi (Movie)
(45) In all cases of perception, from the most basic to the most sophisticated, the meaning of the experience is recognized by the observer according to a horizon of expectation within which the experience will be expected to fall.
— James Burke / The Day the Universe Changed
(46) It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.
— Cesare Bonesana (c. 1780)
(47) The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
— William Blake / The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(48) You have only to wish it and you can have a world without hunger, disease, and toil—anything you wish, wish anything and it can be done. Or else, we can exterminate ourselves. Man is a very strange animal. In much of the world half the children go to bed hungry and we spend a trillion on rubbish—steel, iron, tanks. We are all criminals.
— Albert Szent-Györgyi
(49) It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies.
—Bertrand Russell / Portraits from Memory
(50) This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.
— Francis Bacon / Of Revenge
(51) That men do not learn much from the lessons of history is the most important of all lessons that history has to teach.
— Aldous Huxley
(52) An eye for an eye, leaving the world blind.
— Mahatma Gandhi
(53) Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.
— Albert Einstein
(54) Crazy, but that’s how it goes
Millions of people living as foes
Maybe it’s not too late
To learn how to love
And forget how to hate
— Crazy Train / Ozzy Osbourne
(55) Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
— Teilhard de Chardin
(56) The present world crisis can be solved only by a general human revolution agains outdated concepts…. Man is not a bloodthirsty animal, and war is only due to the greed and lust for power of relatively small groups, the conspiracy of the few against the many.
— Albert Szent-Györgyi
(57) The pattern of massive lethal violence, that phenomenon we call war, is maintained by a guilt-fear-hate syndrome which is transmitted much in the manner of a disease by social conditioning.
— Frank Herbert / The Godmakers
(58) “Learn what is true, in order to do what is right,” is the summing up of the whole duty of man.
— T.H. Huxley
(59) Ain’t it funny how you feel
When you’re finding out it’s real
— Neil Young / Sugar Mountain
(60) If you had just a minute to breathe
And they granted you one final wish
Would you ask for something
Like another chance
— Traffic / The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys
(61) The tragedy of man is what dies inside himself while he still lives.
— Albert Schweitzer
(62) The actors and jesters are here
The stage is in darkness and clear
For raising the curtain
And no one’s quite certain whose play it is….
Well, what is your costume today?
And who are the props in your play?
You’re acting a part which you thought
From the start was an honest one
Well, how do you plead?
An actor indeed! Go re-learn your lines
You don’t know what you’ve done
The finale’s begun
— Supertramp / Crime of the Century
(63) When we walk to the edge of all the light we have, and take that step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen—there will be something solid for us to stand on, or we will be taught to fly.
— From a slip of paper on Beth Blanchette’s wall
(64) Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
— H.G. Wells / The Outline of History
(65) Most people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.
— Herbert Marcuse
(66) All the people tell me so
But what do all the people know?
— The Monroes / All the People
(67) Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.
— Henri Bergson / Creative Evolution
(68) Growing up it all seems so one-sided
Opinions are provided
The future pre-decided
Detached and subdivided in the mass production zone
Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone
— Rush / Subdivisions
(69) Our past is not our potential.
— Marilyn Ferguson / The Aquarian Conspiracy
(70) Like a child in his fantasy
Punching holes in the walls of reality
All my life I wanted to fly
But I don’t have the wings and I wonder why
— Big Pig / Breakaway
(71) To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
— José Ortega y Gasset / The Revolt of the Masses
(72) For understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe that thou mayest understand.
— Augustine of Hippo
(73) A dream unthreatened by the morning light
Could blow this soul right through the roof of the night
— Pink Floyd / Learning to Fly
(74) Now I’ve gained some understanding of the only world that we see
Things that I once dreamed of have become reality
These walls that still surround me still contain the same old me
Just one more who’s searching for a world that ought to be
— Rush / Circumstances
(75) Kazantzakis has said that his Odyssey is “a new epical-dramatic attempt of the modern man to find deliverance by passing through all stages of contemporary anxieties and by pursuing the most daring of hopes.”
— Benet’s Readers Encyclopedia
(76) We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars…. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves, but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
— Carl Sagan / Cosmos
(77) Love and fear exclude each other.
— Macrobius
(78) The doors to Heaven and Hell are adjacent and identical.
— Nikos Kazantzakis / The Last Temptation of Christ
(79) Perhaps the imagination is on the verge of recovering its rights. If the depths of our minds conceal strange forces capable of augmenting or conquering those on the surface, it is in our greatest interest to capture them and later to submit them, should the occasion arise, to the control of reason.
— André Breton / Le Manifeste du Surréalisme
(80) Implicit in the theory is the assumption that harmonious, coherent states of consciousness are more nearly attuned to the primary level of reality—a dimension of order and harmony. Such attunement would be hampered by anger, anxiety, and fear, and be eased by love and empathy.
— Marilyn Ferguson / The Aquarian Conspiracy
(81) Stephen LaBerge has done something unusual—he has shown that what was once thought to be impossible in the realm of consciousness is in fact possible. He has proven scientifically that people can be fully conscious while remaining asleep and dreaming at the same time.
— Robert E. Ornstein
(82) We are in the midst of a knowledge revolution that shows signs of breakthrough: The researchers in human sciences are moving independently in converging lines toward common tangents; that they are disregarding traditional models of the cosmos and ourselves, of the nature of nature, and the nature of human nature.
— Max Learner
(83) Chance favors the prepared mind.
— Louis Pasteur
(84) Though all other animals are prone, and fix their gaze upon the earth, he gave to man an uplifted face and bade him stand erect and turn his eyes to Heaven.
— Ovid / Metamorphoses
(85) A thousand pictures can be drawn from one word
Only who is the artist
We got to agree
A thousand miles can lead so many ways
Just to know who is driving
What a help it would be
— Moody Blues / I’m Just a Singer
(86) The future of a civilization depends on our overcoming the meaningless and hopelessness which characterizes the thought of men today.
— Albert Schweitzer
(87) It’s a song of assassins, ringin’ in your ears
We got terrorist thinking, playing on fears….
I don’t think there are any Russians
And there ain’t no Yanks
Just corporate criminals
Playin’ with tanks
— The Call / The Walls Came Down
(88) If you want love
You’ve got to give a little
If you want faith
You’ve got to believe a little
If you want peace
Turn your cheek a little
You’ve got to give to live
— Van Halen / Give to Live
(89) There are times, after all, when one word is worth a thousand pictures.
— Professor Dom Dame / CSLB
(90) Nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.
— Hermann Hesse / Demian
(91) He ascends the highest pinnacle by his art and stands tested before all and says, “Be proud to be free and honor thy self-accomplishments as thou wouldst praise thy precious child for theirs.”
— Donna Prouancher / Misced Pieces
(92) To die for an idea, it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true.
— H.L. Mencken / Prejudices
(93) Us and them
And after all we’re just ordinary men
Me and you
God only knows it’s not what we would choose to do
With without
And who’ll deny it’s what the fighting’s all about
— Pink Floyd / Us and Them
(94) I as a boy
I believed the saying
The cure for pain is love
How would it be
If you could see the world through my eyes
— Supertramp / Hide in Your Shell
(95) Always the more beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.
— e.e. cummings
(96) Don’t accept that what’s happening
Is just a case of others’ suffering
Or you’ll find that you’re joining in
The turning away
— Pink Floyd / The Turning Away
(97) The imagination is, therefore, not a source of deception and delusion, but a capacity to sense what you do not know, to intuit what you cannot understand, to be more than you can know.
— William Irwin Thompson / Gaia: A Way of Knowing
(98) If everything was here, and everything was free, we could do anything. So, why do things cost money?
— Explained in 009
(99) Truth is best experienced, not explained, but experience tells me to try and explain it to you, to me…
— 121288 Journal Entry
(100) Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might surprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough. Will there be time?
— Lawrence Durrell / Justine
(101) The answer is often hiding right in front of us—right inside of us.
— 020588 Journal Entry
(102) Illusions multiply, and among them there is, I suppose, none more ubiquitous than the idea that you can’t change human nature. This ancient platitude might long ago have been relegated to a home for superannuated ideas were it not so constantly useful.
— Barrows Dunham / Man Against Myth
(103) Welcome to the Grand Illusion
Come on in and see what’s happening
Pay the price
Get your ticket for the show
— Styx / The Grand Illusion
(104) Drawing is full of paradox, as is creativity itself. And dealing with paradox requires that one be able to hold in the mind simultaneously two diametrically opposed ideas and, as novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, “not go mad.”
— Betty Edwards / Drawing on the Artist Within
(105) The nations who were to dominate European history organized their policies around the simple ideas that had confused economic thought from the beginning of history: All wealth was limited, one nation’s gain was another’s loss; your wealth could only be increased at the expense of another’s; the idea of a national economy and the hypnotic concept of “the balance of trade.”
— Daniel J. Boorstin / The Discoverers
(106) The paradox is the source of the thinker’s passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling; a paltry mediocrity.
— Søren Kierkegaard / Philosophical Fragments
(107) Query: What is the opposite of inspiration—expiration?
— Arthur C. Clarke / The Songs of Distant Earth
(108) The making of the illusions which flood our experience has become the business of America.
— Daniel J. Boorstin / The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America
(109) And so we’re told
This is the golden age
And gold is the reason
For the wars we wage
— U2 / New Year’s Day
(110) But what you see is just illusion
You’re surrounded by confusion
Saying life’s begun to cheat you
Friends are out to beat you
Grab on to what you can scramble for
— Supertramp / Hide in Your Shell
(111) Ah, communication. So difficult under the best of circumstances, so much more difficult from this frame of reference, unless—can you imagine—can you believe that I am about to tell you a true story?
— 120187 Journal Entry
(112) Just because the message may never be received does not mean it is not worth sending.
— Segaki
(113) And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.
— Geoffery Chaucer / The Canterbury Tales
(114) And they put it in front of everybody’s face, and we didn’t see it. There’s a reason congress begins with the word, con. It’s because con is the opposite of pro. So, congress must be the opposite of progress. Are you listening? It’s in the words. It is! Who’s gonna say it if it ain’t me?
— Gallagher
(115) I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.
— Abraham Lincoln
(116) It seems that, under conditions of disassociation, we have the chance to tune directly to some of the world’s basic rhythms, to become aware of the pattern behind the process, to know, in the words of Keats, that “what the imagination seizes as beauty, must be truth.”
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(117) Creative endeavors often start when one simply looks around with curiosity and interest, perhaps searching specifically for parts that are missing, that don’t fit, or that stand out in some way.
— Betty Edwards / Drawing on the Artist Within
(118) I think everything changed dramatically less than a human generation ago on the day when, like a monkey with a mirror, we saw ourselves for the first time in those shattering photographs of the whole Earth. Something happened then, something synaptic, making us a conscious part of the Gaian nervous system. It was the day the Earth became self-aware.
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(119) All the grown-ups were once children—although few of them remember it.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry / The Little Prince
(120) A great man is one who has not lost the child’s heart.
— Mencius
(121) At some point each had experienced a profound shift in perception, often at a time of personal trauma. Each was overtaken with deeper, more intense needs. Life became a spiritual quest, a joyful, mysterious search for meaning, marked in most cases by an accelerating occurrence of coincidences, events that seemed significant in their timing—synchronicities.
— Marilyn Ferguson / The Aquarian Conspiracy
(122) Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me” Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”
— Matthew 14:29-31
(123) A man’s mind, stretched by a new idea, can never go back to its original dimensions.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
(124) Forget what life used to be
You are what you chose to be
It’s whatever it is you see
That life will become
— Jackson Browne / The Fuse
(125) It’s up to you
It’s up to me
Each as free as we believe
As alive as we perceive
Every now and then and when we choose to live
We do
— 021286 Journal Entry
(126) They can because they think they can.
— Virgil
(127) For me, to treat you with respect and deal with you honestly, it seems I must imagine that you are a friend. And I must confess how little imagination is required for me to shift my frame of reference to this position.
— 020188 Journal Entry
(128) We are all functioning at a small fraction of our capacity to live fully in its total meaning of loving, caring, creating, and adventuring.Consequently, the actualizing of our potential can become the most exciting adventure of our lifetime.
— Herbert Otto
(129) A doctor says (to a patient who recovered due to unorthodox treatment), “Sir, it would be better to die according to the rules than to live in contradiction to the faculty of medicine.
— Moliére
(130) Aggressiveness is taught, as are all forms of violence which human beings exhibit…. Aggression is the expression of the frustrated expectation of love.
— Ashley Montagu / The Humanization of Man
(131) Together, we will see the concepts of doubt and fear tumble from their domain within our conscious minds.
— 041785 Journal Entry
(132) At some point in the process of creation, the creative product—whether painting, poem, or scientific theory—takes on a life of its own and transmits its own needs to its creator. It stands apart from him, and summons material from his subconscious. The creator then must know when to cease directing his work and when to allow it to direct him. He must know, in short, when his work is likely to be wiser than he.
— George Kneller / The Art and Science of Creativity
(133) An act that produces effective surprise—this I shall take as the hallmark of creative enterprise…. They have the quality of obviousness about them when they occur, producing a shock of recognition following which there is no longer astonishment.
— Jerome Bruner / The Conditions of Creativity
(134) Mind moves matter.
— Virgil
(135) We don’t know who discovered water, but we can be sure it wasn’t a fish. You have to be outside something, able to experience it from a distance before it makes any sense. Detachment provides perspective, which in turn permits a certain amount of pattern recognition…. The problem lies in the fact that the necessary gap is bridged by perception…. Perception is based, to a very large extent, on conceptual models, which are always inadequate, often incomplete, and sometimes profoundly wrong.
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(136) How could I not have seen it? A pointer toward the prize, but deeply hidden in language masked by language forms that had become so familiar I could no longer see them or be aware of what they signified.
— Betty Edwards / Drawing on the Artist Within
(137) It seems, then, to be one of the paradoxes of creativity that in order to think creatively, we must familiarize ourselves with the ideas of others.
— George Kneller / The Art and Science of Creativity
(138) Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?
— John Milton
(139) Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not believed.
— William Blake
(140) Fear is an expectation of evil.
— Zeno
(141) Free curiosity is of more value than harsh discipline.
— Augustine of Hippo
(142) Let us dare to read, think, speak, and write.
— John Adams
(143) The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.
— Cornelius Tacitus
(144) All punishment is mischief: all punishment in itself is evil. The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
— Jeremy Bentham / Principles of Morals and Legislation
(145) To kill someone for committing murder is a punishment incomparable worse than the crime itself.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
(146) To hold a pen is to be at war.
— Voltaire
(147) Probably, all laws are useless; for good men do not want laws at all, and bad men are made no better by them.
— Demonax
(148) And say not thou, “My country right or wrong,” nor shed thy blood for an unhallowed cause.
— John Quincy Adams
(149) Indifference and apathy have one name—betrayal.
— Salvatore Quasimodo
(150) Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.
— Richard Bach / Illusions
(151) Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
— Helen Keller
(152) I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, the truth of imagination. What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not.
— John Keats
(153) Adventure belongs to the essence of civilization.
— Alfred North Whitehead / Adventures of Ideas
(154) How can one learn the truth by thinking? As one learns to see a face better if one draws it.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
(155) The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
(156) There is no duty we underrate so much as the duty of being happy.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
(157) The truth is not only violated by falsehood; it may be equally outraged by silence.
— Henri Frédéric Amiel
(158) Another working day has ended
Only the rush hour hell to face
Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes
Contestants in a suicidal race
— The Police / Synchronicity II
(159) There is a fear of the self, an unwillingness to trust our deeper needs…. Suppose that we find out that what we really want of life is dangerously different from what we have.
— Marilyn Ferguson / The Aquarian Conspiracy
(160) Our lump of rock is anything but inert. It sizzles and crackles with energy; pulsing, itching, and breathing like a living thing; responding directly to changes in itself and in the environment.
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(161) There is something odd about the Earth. Quite a lot of things, acually, which together add up to a picture of a cosmic misfit—a planet that breaks all the rules.
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(162) May it [The Declaration of Independence] be to the world what I believe will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing man to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition has persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.
— Thomas Jefferson (shortly before his death)
(163) The suggestion that plants may communicate with the aid of hormones that drift through the air is nothing short of revolutionary…. The only thing that prevents us from being reasonable and honest, and classifying alders and willow as truly social creatures is the fact that they are incapable of running away.
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(164) There is good reason to presume, at least as a working assumption, that some kind of awareness is part of the experience of all living things.
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(165) “And what would you do,” the master said unto the multitude, “if God spoke directly to your face and said, ‘I command that you be happy in the world, as long as you live.’ What would you do then?”
And the multitude was silent.
— Richard Bach / Illusions
(166) Move the heart
Switch the pace
look for what seems out of place
— Peter Murphy / Cuts You Up
(167) High time we made a stand
And shook up the views of the common man
— Tears for Fears / Sowing the Seeds of Love
(168) Poverty borders on denial of God.
— The Rose Garden of Sa’di (Look this up. Conflicting information.)
(169) That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies;
That a lie which is all lie may be met and fought with outright;
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight
— Lord Tennyson / The Grandmother
(170) No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
— Booker T. Washington / Up from Slavery
(171) There is no truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the world.
— Thomas Jefferson
(172) The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.
— Antisthenes
(173) A hero is a man who does what he can.
— Romain Rolland
(174) Sound English common sense—the inherited stupidity of the race.
— Oscar Wilde
(175) Time is the extension of motion.
— Zeno
(176) When men are unable to form an idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand. This axiom explains the inexhaustible source of all the errors about the principles of human nature. The errors are embraced by entire nations and by scholars.
— Giambattista Vico
(177) Common sense is judgment without reflection, which is shared by an entire class, a people, a nation, or the whole human race.
— Giambattista Vico
(178) By words the mind is winged.
— Aristophanes
(179) Judging by common sense is merely another phrase for judging by first appearance…. The men who place implicit faith in their own common sense are, without any exception, the most wrong-headed and impracticable persons.
— John Stuart Mill
(180) I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
— Frank Herbert / Dune
(181) Dreams and restless thoughts came flowing to him from the river, from the twinkling stars at night, from the sun’s melting rays.
— Herman Hesse / Siddhartha
(182) There were human cultures that taught an afterlife of the blessed on mountaintops or on clouds, in caverns or oases, but she could not recall any in which if you were very, very good, when you died you went to the beach…. The seashore at the center of the galaxy.
— Carl Sagan / Cosmos
(183) My heart trembles like a poor leaf
The planets whirl in my dreams
The stars press agains my window
I rotate in my sleep
My bed is a warm planet
— Marvin Mercer / Fifth Grade, Harlem, New York
(184) I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.
— Albert Einstein / Ideas and Opinions
(185) Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?
— Vincent Van Gogh
(186) We are the children of the next transformation.
— Alvin Toffler / The Third Wave
(187) Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
— Gustave Flaubert / Madame Bovary
(188) So I walk uplands unbounded, and know that there is hope for that which thou didst mold out of dust to have consort with things eternal
— Dead Sea Scrolls
(189) It is necessary; therefore, it is possible.
— Giuseppe Antonio Borghese
(190) I will act as if what I do makes a difference.
— William James
(191) Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found it was ourselves
— Robert Frost
(192) I would like to be able to fly if everyone else did, otherwise, it would be kind of conspicuous.
— David Riesman (quoting a 12-year-old girl) / The Lonely Crowd
(193) If the nature of the work is properly appreciated and applied, it will stand in the same relation to the higher faculties as food is to the physical body.
— J. C. Kumarappa
(194) Each of us is responsible for everything to everyone else.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky
(195) Who will take responsibility now for these foolish children?
— David Brin / The Postman
(196) When you come to be sensibly touched, the scales will fall from your eyes; and by the penetrating eyes of love you will discern that which your other eyes will never see.
— François Fénelon
(197) You teach best what you most need to learn.
— Richard Bach / Illusions
(198) We look at the world through a tiny slit, and this narrow window on reality is even further restricted by censorship taking place between the eye and the brain.
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(199) The beginning of personal transformation is absurdly easy. We only have to pay attention to the flow of attention itself.
— Marilyn Ferguson / The Aquarian Conspiracy
(200) I found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts—because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting.
— Robert Heinlein / Stranger in a Strange Land
(201) Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, almighty God! I know not what course others will take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
— Patrick Henry / Virgina Convention
(202) Between the silence of the mountains
And the crashing of the sea
There lies a land I once lived in
And she’s waiting there for me
But in the grey of the morning
My mind becomes confused
Between the dead and the sleeping
And the road that I must choose
— The Moody Blues / Question
(203) It’s nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong
It’s nature’s way of telling you in a song
It’s nature’s way of receiving you
It’s nature’s way of retrieving you
It’s nature’s way of telling you
Something’s wrong
— Spirit / Nature’s Way
(204) On your journey ‘cross the wilderness from the desert to the well
You have strayed upon the motorway to hell
— Chris Rea / The Road to Hell
(205) The is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.
— Richard Bach / Illusions
(206) An experiment has results: We learn from it. Since it adds to our understanding and expertise, however it comes out, we have not lost.
— Marilyn Ferguson / The Aquarian Conspiracy
(207) There is one common flow, one common breathing, all things are in sympathy.
— Hippocrates
(208) With one breath
With one flow
You will know
Synchronicity
— The Police / Synchronicity
(209) Hold your fire
Keep it burning bright
Hold the flame
‘Til the dream ignites
A spirit with a vision
Is a dream with a mission
— Rush / Mission
(210) The nice thing about the new physics is this—everything which is not forbidden, occurs. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics have swept away the old concepts of space and time, and demonstrated that everyday understanding of reality have been badly misconceived.
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(211) …confiding, as Emerson, that his journals were full of disjointed dreams and all manner of rambling reveries and “audacities.”
— Loren Eiseley / The Star Thrower
(212) Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself
— Walt Whitman / Song of Myself
(213) You want to find the truth in life
Don’t pass music by
And you know I would not lie
— Eric Burdon and The Animals / Monterey
(214) Long as I remember
The rain’s been coming down
Clouds of mystery pouring
Confusion on the ground
— Creedence Clearwater Revival / Who’ll stop the rain
(215) The truth is not to be found in words.
— 113086 Journal Entry
(216) As we’ll see, the human transformative process, once it begins, is geometric. In a sense, the fourth dimension is just this: to see the other three with new eyes.
— Marilyn Ferguson / The Aquarian Conspiracy
(217) Though his mind is not for rent
Don’t put him down as arrogant
His reserve, a quiet defense
Riding out the day’s events
— Rush / Tom Sawyer
(218) Out of the chaos, two distinct patterns converge, align, and come into focus.
— 120187 Journal Entry
(219) I tried to be the perfect soldier
I tried to be what everyone said was expected
Somehow I was selected
Well, my hands were steady, my aim was true
But deep inside of my heart I knew
That I lacked the will
I just couldn’t shoot to kill
—Styx / She Cares
(220) Being true to oneself is the law of God. Trying to be true to oneself is the law of man.
— Tze-Sze (c. 300 BCE)
(221) The opportunity has presented itself at this particular moment for a reason.
— 120482 Journal Entry
(222) Are there really people starving still?
Look out beyond the walls of Babylon
How long will their needs go unfilled?
I wanna say right now I’m going to be around
When the walls and towers are crumbling
And I will tune my spirit to the gentle sound
Of the waters lapping on a higher ground
— Jackson Browne / The Fuse
(223) Such a person doesn’t always know himself what he could do, but he feels by instinct, I’m good for something, even so!
— Vincent Van Gogh / Letter to (his brother) Theo
(224) Twenty story buildings coming down on me
Mountain ranges sliding into the sea
Rivers of blood, running red
I got a broken heart and a broken head
I had a little accident
Nothing too serious
Take a look at this place, take a look at this mess
Nothing too serious
If you close your eyes it may go away
Nothing too serious
We could do it again some other day
Nothing too serious
— Icehouse / Nothing Too Serious
(225) Imagine what it would be like if we understood each other.
— 042585 Journal Entry
(226) Something calls to me
The trees are drawing me near
I have to find out why
Those gentle voices I hear
Explain it all with a sigh
— The Moody Blues / Tuesday Afternoon
(227) The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
— W. Sumerset Maugham / The Summing Up
(228) Incorrect conceptions frequently act a s barriers to understanding, thereby concealing possibilities from view…. We seem to attempt only what we assume to be possible.
— Robert E. Ornstein
(229) What if we really gave ourselves the opportunity to explore our imaginations—if we let go of prefabricated forms of creativity?
— Marilyn Ferguson / The Aquarian Conspiracy
(230) Children as a whole are usually more open to the true nature of things. Their experience, according to pioneer psychologist William James, is “a blooming, buzzing, confusion,” which only settles into formal patterns as we mature and learn to construct a personal view which is more socially acceptable.
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(231) He who is filled with Virtue is like a newborn child.
— Lao-Tzu
(232) So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be…. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.
— Martin Luther King, Jr. / Letter from Birmingham
(233) Those two fatal words, mine and thine.
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
(234) In a really just cause, the weak conquers the strong.
— Sophocles
(235) The whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.
— Bertrand Russell
(236) The majority of people believe in incredible things which are absolutely false. The majority of people day act in a manner prejudicial to their general well-being.
— Ashley Montagu
(237) Don’t be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.
— Richard Bach / Illusions
(238) Transformation, innovation, evolution—these are natural responses to crisis.
— Marilyn Ferguson / The Aquarian Conspiracy
(239) We have been forced to adapt, to make use of a new talent that was lurking in the wings of evolution. We have had to learn to make up our own minds.
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(240) And in fact, as the writing progressed it seemed somehow to take on a life of its own, leading me in my search rather than vice versa.
— Betty Edwards / Drawing on the Artist Within
(241) I blindly collided with this gift. Thanks, acceptance, contemplation, and utilization without doubt. That is why I struggle to capture the words on paper—to strengthen the reality and support the memory. Coincidence? Word/concept modified then redefined by lucid observation, experience, reflection, documentation.
— 121286 Journal Entry
(242) If your heart is in your dream
No request is too extreme
When you wish upon a star
As dreamers do
Like a bolt out of the blue
Fate steps in and sees you through
When you wish upon a star
Your dreams come true
— When You Wish Upon a Star
(243) Set your heart sail on the river
Look around you as you drift downstream — Hearing
Pouring souls into the ocean — Talking
Take account of all you’ve seen — Love you
— Yes / Hearts
(244) The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying.
— T. H. Huxley
(245) Flow—Perceive—Adapt—Accept—Grow
— 022586 Journal Entry
(246) A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson / Self-Reliance
(247) Just as an explorer penetrates into new and unknown lands, one makes discoveries in the everyday life, and the erstwhile mute surroundings begin to speak a language which becomes increasingly clear.
— Wassily Kandinsky / Point and Line to Plane
(248) Learned conventions can be windowless fortresses which exclude viewing the world in new ways.
— J. J. Gordon / Synectics
(249) Every creative act involves… a new innocence of perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief.
— Arthur Koestler / The Act of Creation
(250) The robot said, “I have been trying, friend Julius, to understand some remarks Elijah made to me earlier. Perhaps I am beginning to, for it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not be, that is, the destruction of what you people call evil, is less just and desirable than the conversion of this evil into what you call good.”
— Isaac Asimov / The Caves of Steel
(251) If the unlike things are really alike in some ways, perhaps they are so in others; that is the meaning of the analogy. We pursue the thought, and find new meanings, new understanding, and often new solutions to old problems.
— Morton Hunt / The Universe Within
(252) There is an underlying, hidden level of culture that is highly patterned—a set of unspoken, implicit rules of behavior and thought that controls everything we do. This hidden cultural grammar defines the way in which people view the world…. Most of us are either totally unaware or else only peripherally aware of this.
— Edward T. Hall / The Dance of Life
(253) We all have access to what Aldous Huxley called “mind at large,” but most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve of their own sense systems and becomes petrified in language.
— Lyall Watson / Beyond Supernature
(254) The first great waves of extinctions are only beginning to wash over the Earth. We can still save species by the millions. Should we not consider ourselves fortunate that we alone among generations are being given the chance to support the right to life of a large share of our fellow species and to safeguard the creative capacities of evolution itself.
— Norman Meyers
(255) Reaching out
Writing down
A plea shaped as commitment
Another day
Not as alone
Four words to mark the moment
Of reaching out
It’s written down
My words
Not the pretender’s
— 021286 Journal Entry
(256) All told, it is clear that the catastrophe we are facing is not the worst biological debacle since life began—the late Permian extinctions must be that—but it certainly vies for second place.
— Daniel Simberloff
(257) We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
— T. S. Elliot / Little Gidding
(258) We are the generation in the doorway. We are the first generation of the long goodbye. As we look around today, we see sky, hills, peaks, and waves with a peculiar attention. We stare, as if we were already looking back.
— Johnathan Weiner / Planet Earth
(259) Enlighten me, oh Muses, tenants of Olympian homes. For you are Goddesses, inside on everything, know everything, but we mortals hear only the news, and know nothing at all.
— Homer
(260) Once in a vision
I came on some woods
And stood at a fork in the road
My choices were clear
Yet I froze with the fear
Of not knowing which way to go
One road was simple
Acceptance of life
The other road offered sweet peace
When I made my decision
My vision became my release.
— Dan Fogelberg / Nether Lands
(261) Wyrd: The Anglo-Saxon concept of fate that manifests itself chiefly in a hero’s willingness to test fate by matching his courage against heavy odds.
— Benét’s Reader’s Encyclopedia
(262) And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that’s to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon
— Pink Floyd / Eclipse
(263) There behind the glass
There’s a real blade of grass
Be careful as you pass
Move along, move along
— Emerson, Lake & Palmer / Karn Evil 9
(264) There are only two kinds of immoral conduct. The first is due to indifference, thoughtlessness, failure to reflect upon what is for the common good. The second type of immorality is represented by “the unpardonable sin” of which Jesus spoke—deliberate refusal, after reflection, to follow the light when seen.
— Robert Millikan
2025: Unpardonable? One strike and you’re out? No second chances? Seems a little harsh.
(265) There is no escape—man drags man down, or man lifts man up. You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.
— Booker T. Washington / The American Standard
(266) If we couldn’t laugh we would all go insane
— Jimmy Buffett / Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes
(267) (If I could see something)
You can see anything you want, boy
(Well, I could be someone)
You can be anyone, celebrate, boy
(If I can do something)
You can do something
(If I could do anything)
But can you do something out of this world?
— Supertramp / Dreamer
(268) Speak out
You got to speak out against the madness
You got to speak your mind
If you dare
— Crosby, Stills & Nash / Long Time Gone
(269) You know doubt can make a strong man
Weak and under stress
And doubt can make a weak man
Totally worthless
God, it’s a pity
Doubt
— The Call / Doubt
(270) You can mend the wires
You can feed the soul apart
You can touch your life
You can bring your soul alive
It can happen to you
It can happen to me
It can happen to everyone eventually
— Yes / It Can Happen
(271) Wrath becomes the loving kindness
Heals the body and the soul
— The Call / Expecting
(272) Music holds the secret,
To know it can make you whole
It’s not just a game of notes,
It’s the sounds inside your soul
The magic of the melody
Runs through you like a stream
The notes that play flow through your head
Like a dream
— Triumph / Hold On
(273) Once there was a man
And his words became a song of love
And his song became the golden dream
— Pat Benatar / One Love
(274) What does it take to be a man?
The will to give and not receive
The strength to say what you believe
— Boston / To Be a Man
(275) Not very many of us are really, in the real sense of the word, alive and living fully…. I really believe most people are afraid of life. I don’t know why it is. We’re afraid to be what we are…. It’s a shame because if we really don’t live fully, we keep other people from living fully.
— Leo Buscaglia / Living, Loving & Learning
(276) Lost amid the struggles
Cached in canted rhythms
Beneficence still dwells
Cast from forgotten home
— Gregory Benford and David Brin / Heart of the Comet
(277) He that leaveth nothing to chance
Will do few things ill
But he will do very few things
— Halifax
(278) He was in search of an answer
The nature of what we are
He was trying to do it a new way
He was bright as a star
— Kansas / Portrait
(279) It might be unbelievable
But let’s not say so long
It might just be fantastic
Don’t get me wrong
— The Pretenders / Don’t Get Me Wrong
(280) How many words have I got to say
And how many times will it be this way
With your arms around the future
And your back up against the past
— The Moody Blues / The Voice
(281) Let the river run
Let all the dreamers wake the nation
— Carley Simon / Let the River Run
(282) All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers.
— François Fénelon
(283) Consciousness is that rainbow on the seashore of time; it is a potential which is always there, only needing all of the elements to come together to reveal itself to the wonder of the onlooker.
— Yatri / Unknown Man
(284) The invisibly tensive straws that can save us are those of individual human integrities—in daring to steer the individual’s course only by truth, strange as the realized truth may often seem—wherever and whenever the truths are evidenced to the individual—wherever they may lead, unfamiliar as the way may be.
— Buckminster Fuller / Critical Path
(285) In my experience, communication is a matter of patience, imagination.
— Captain Picard
(286) The odds are against us
They say we don’t stand a chance
But there’s no giving up, no giving in
When push comes to shove
You got to fight for what you love
You do what you must, do what you can
It’s not over ’til it’s over
It’s not over ’til we get it right
— Starship / It’s Not Over
(287) Fear of failure grows to anchor us securely in this ocean of reality.
— 120881 Journal Entry
(288) If we share
This nightmare
We can dream
Spiritus mundi
If you act
As you think
The missing link
Synchronicity
— The Police / Synchronicity I
(289) A million tons are rising
Across the cities of the plain
There’s no swimming in the heavy water
No singing in the acid rain
— Rush / Distant Early Warning
(290) I go checking out the reports
Digging up the dirt
You get to meet all sorts
In this line of work
Treachery and treason
There’s always an excuse for it
And when I find the reason
I still can’t get used to it
— Dire Straits / Private Investigations
(291) Who are these men
Of lust, greed, and glory
Rip off the masks
And let’s see
But that’s not right
Oh no, what’s the story
There’s you
And there’s me
— Supertramp / Crime of the Century
(292) But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.
— Dan Simmons / Hyperion
(293) When one is writing—really writing—it is as if one is given a fatline to the gods. No true poet has been able to explain the exhilaration one feels when the mind becomes an instrument as surely as does the pen or thought processor, ordering and expressing the revelations flowing in from somewhere else.
— Dan Simmons / Hyperion
(294) When that time comes, the treatment man receives from his superiors may well depend upon the way he has behaved towards the other creatures of his own world.
— Arthur C. Clarke / The Deep Range
(295) Forward, he cried from the rear
And the front rank died
And the general sat
And the lines on the map
Moved from side to side
— Pink Floyd / Us and Them
(296) There appeared a dark luminosity within each being. Yet at the same moment there was a strange feeling that they were no more than sleepwalking robots, utterly oblivious to that shining nature within themselves. The life force of each person was somehow entrapped within a dull dreaming shell…. What had gone wrong? What had happened to everyone?
— Yatri / Unknown Man
(297) Scientists, in their quest for certitude and proof, tend to reject the marvelous.
— Jacques Cousteau
(298) Break free from the chains you have forged upon yourself for you will be free when you are free of clay. The body is dark—the heart is shining bright; the body is mere compost—the heart a blooming garden.
— Hakim Sanai / The Walled Garden of Truth
(299) Have you not heard of the saying of Vivekananda, that if one but thinks a noble, selfless thought, even if in a cave, it sets up vibrations throughout the world and does what has to be done.
— Ramana Maharshi
(300) We can walk our road together
If our goals are all the same
We can run alone and free
If we pursue a different aim
Let the truth of love be lighted
Let the love of truth shine clear
Sensibility, armed with sense and liberty
With the Heart and Mind united in a single perfect sphere
— Rush / The Sphere: A Kind of a Dream
(301) Reach for truth and grasp it
Even if it is impossible to grasp
— 092681 Journal Entry
(302) Perhaps the strongest thing you can do as an observer is to find something that shows you need to learn more.
— Vera Rubin
(303) For these things tend still upward, progress is
The law of life, man is not Man as yet.
— Robert Browning / Paracelsus
(304) He’s haunted by the memory
Of a lost paradise
In his youth or a dream
He can’t be precise
He’s chained forever
To a world that’s departed
It’s not enough
It’s not enough
— Pink Floyd / Sorrow
(305) I’ve heard that before, but this time I was listening.
— 082287 Journal Entry
(306) In the process we develop an inner sense of worth that helps us achieve goals that improve the quality of life. We find ourselves striving for the survivor’s paradoxical goal—to have things work out well for ourselves and others.
— Bernie S. Siegel, MD / Love, Medicine & Miracles
(307) There’s a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
— Thornton Wilder / The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(308) Habit creates the appearance of justice; progress has no greater enemy than habit.
— José Martí
(309) Listen to your heart
Hold on to your dreams
— Triumph / Hold On
(310) For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by things that seem than by those that are.
— Niccolò Machiavelli
(311) We know more than we know we know.
— Michael Polanyi
(312) I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
— Isaac Newton
(313) The equivalent of twenty million books is inside the head of every one of us. The brain is a very big place in a very small space.
— Carl Sagan / Cosmos
(314) We had first touched in the most important of ways—by coincidence.
— Richard Bach / The Bridge Across Forever
(315) But like all dreamers, I confuse disenchantment with truth.
— Jean-Paul Sartre
(316) Dare to be wrong and to dream.
— Friedrich Schiller
(317) Every start upon an untrodden path is a venture which only in unusual circumstances looks sensible and likely to be successful.
— Albert Schweitzer
(318) It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.
— Cesare Beccaria
(319) Every society, by offering its automatic judgments, limits the vision of its members. From our earliest years we are seduced into a system of beliefs that becomes so inextricably braided into our experience that we cannot tell culture from nature.
— Marilyn Ferguson / The Aquarian Conspiracy
(320) I look to the sea
Reflections in the waves, spark my memory
Some happy, some sad
I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had
We lived happily forever
So the story goes
But somehow we missed out
On the pot of gold
But we’ll try, best that we can
To carry on
— Styx / Come Sail Away
(321) Wave of sorrow
Do not drown me now
I see the island
Still ahead somehow
I see the island
And its sands are fair
Wave of sorrow
Take me there
— Langston Hughes
(322) Pain and sickness and hunger and fighting—there’s no need for any of it.
— Robert A. Heinlein / Stranger in a Strange Land
(323) There is a space-between, a place not precisely at those places more commonly explored. Yet though it be not obvious, yet it is nevertheless of vital importance. It is neither found to the left nor the right, but may be found immediately below the center. There. Now scratch.
— Ellis Weiner / Doon (parody)
(324) Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation of principle is always a vice.
— Thomas Paine
(325) And I strive to discover how to signal my companions…. To say in time a simple word, a password, like conspirators: Let us unite, let us hold each other tightly, let us merge our hearts, let us generate for Earth a brain and a heart, let us give human meaning to this superhuman struggle.
— Nikos Kazantzakis
(326) He stripped off the armor of institutional friendships
To dedicate his soul
To the terrible deities of Truth and Beauty!
— Edgar Lee Masters
(327) Anticipate charity by preventing poverty.
— Maimonides (c. 1190)
(328) If you smile at me, I will understand
‘Cause that is something everybody everywhere does
In the same language
— Crosby, Stills & Nash / Wooden Ships
(329) There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it.
— William James
(330) One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(331) To be nobody—but yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
— e.e. cummings
(332) Opinion governs all mankind, like the blind’s leading of the blind.
— Samuel Butler
(333) Good can exist without evil, whereas evil cannot exist without good.
— Thomas Aquinas
(334) The fulcrum has yet to be found that shall enable the lever of love to move the world.
— Charles S. Peirce
(335) Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.
— Samuel Johnson
(336) Yet, Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying
Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind
— Lord Byron
(337) A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.
— Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
(338) There are no illegitimate children–only illegitimate parents.
— Leon R. Yankwich / Decision, Zipkin v. Mozon (1928)
(339) Genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
— William James
(340) The is strong archeological evidence to show that with the birth of human consciousness there was born, like a twin, the impulse to transcend it.
— Alan McGlashan
(341) To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.
— Søren Kierkegaard
(342) Man has a pretty static picture of the world, accidentally or forcibly imprinted upon him by means of chains of conditioned associations. Man believes his imprint board is reality.
— Timothy Leary
(343) And if I did not know for a certainty that the craziest sot in the village is my equal, and were not proud to have him walk with me as my friend, I would not write another word—for this is my strength.
— Edward Carpenter
(344) I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.
— Leo Rosten
(345) Breathe
Breathe in the air
Don’t be afraid to care
— Pink Floyd / Breathe
(346) We assume that reality is the box we’ve been put in, and it’s not, I assure you. Open the door sometime and look outside and see how much there is. The dream of today will be the reality of tomorrow. Yet, we’ve forgotten how to dream.
— Leo Buscaglia / Living, Loving & Learning
(347) But what we think is less than what we know: what we know is less than what we love: what we love is so much less than what there is. And to that precise extent we are so much less than what we are…. Who are we to decide it is hopeless?
— R. D. Laing
(348) I fight against the very thing I cry out for
But I am told that love is stronger than strong walls
And in this lies my hope
Please try to beat down those walls
With firm hands but with gentle hands
For a child is very sensitive
Who am I, you may wonder?
I am someone you know very well
For I am every man you meet
And I am every woman you meet
— Charles C. Finn / Please Hear What I’m Not Saying
(349) But it’s written in the starlight
And every line in your palm
We’re fools to make war
On our brothers in arms
— Dire Straits / Brothers in Arms
(350) All alone, or in twos
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down, outside the wall
Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands
The bleeding hearts and the artists make their stand
And when they’ve given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it’s not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall
— Pink Floyd / Outside the Wall
(351) Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen; Even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.
— Leonardo da Vinci
(352) Art is the revelation of man; and not merely that, but likewise the revelation of Nature, speaking through man.
— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(353) In every child who is born, under no matter what circumstances, and of no matter what parents, the potentiality of the human race is born again: and in him, too, once more, and of each of us, our terrific responsibility towards human life; towards the utmost idea of goodness, of the horror of error, and of God.
— James Agee and Walker Evans
(354) Who overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe.
— John Milton
(355) I think the proverb (thou will go most safely by taking the middle course) is one of the most mischievous, one of the most pernicious, one of the most foolish that ever was invented in the world. I believe very strongly in extremes; and am quite sure that all progress in the world, whether literary, or scientific, or religious, or political, or social, has been attained only with the assistance of extremes.
— Lafcadio Hearn / Lecture, University of Tokyo (c. 1900)
(356) No more turning away
From the weak and the weary
No more turning away
From the coldness inside
Just a world that we all must share
It’s not enough just to stand and stare
Is it only a dream that there’ll be
No more turning away?
— Pink Floyd / The Turning Away
(357) Whether a thought is spoken or not, it is a real thing and it has power.
— Frank Herbert / Dune
(358) The whole family of pride and ignorance are incestuous, and mutually beget each other.
—Charles Caleb Colton
(359) Energy is contagious
Enthusiasm spreads
Tides respond to lunar gravitation
Everything turns in synchronous relation
Laughter is infectious
Excitement goes to my head
Winds are stirred by planets in rotation
Sparks ignite and spread new information
Respond, vibrate, feed back, resonate
— Rush / Chain Lightning
(360) Hope is epidemic
Optimism spreads
Bitterness breeds irritation
Ignorance breeds imitation
Dreams are sometimes catching
Desire goes to my head
Love responds to your invitation
Love responds to imagination
Respond, vibrate, feed back, resonate
— Rush / Chain Lightning
(361) The absurd springs from this confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world.
— Albert Camus / The Myth of Sisyphus
(362) Education makes people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
— Henry Peter Brougham
(363) You must understand that peace is an internal matter. It has to be a self-discipline for an individual or for an entire civilization. It must come from within. If you set up an outside power to enforce peace, this outside power will grow stronger and stronger. It has no alternative…. When you create paired opposites, one will overwhelm the other unless they are in delicate balance.
— Frank Herbert / The Godmakers
(364) Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?
— Frank Herbert / Dune
(365) Man gets tired
Spirit don’t
Man surrenders
Spirit won’t
Man crawls
Spirit flies
Spirit lives when man dies
Man seems
Spirit is
Man dreams
The spirit lives
Man is tethered
Spirit is free
What spirit is, man can be
— The Waterboys / Spirit
(366) And in the end
On dreams we will depend
‘Cause that’s what love is made of
— Van Halen / Dreams