Maya has collected
"The next best thing to being clever is being able to quote someone who is." --Mary Pettibone Poole
"Nothing else but our inborn need for self-love and for intimacy with others can sustain us and every other living thing on our planet. There, in our heartfelt connections we find the sacred mystery that births us all in a cosmic dance of erotic power." --Nakashima Brock, Journeys By Heart
"When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same... then you will enter the Kingdom of God." --Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas
"In the presence of a person who is real, you take off your veils of illusion. The other person doesn't have to tear them off. You just automatically drop them, either that, or you have to get out of their presence.This is what I want from my relationships. I want the freedom to be who I am and I want you to be free to be who you are, and I'm not going to try to push you into thinking or feeling the way I do... It's soul meeting soul. And that's what I'm after: getting closer and closer to that essence, taking away veil after veil." --a woman interviewed in The Feminine Face of God
"When you lose the rhythm of the drumbeat of God, you are lost from the peace and rhythm of life." --a Cheyenne saying
"The illusory body merges with clear light
Like clouds dissolving into space.
The fire of innate wisdom arises
And consumes the seed of grasping at a self." --The 7th Dalai Lama
"The shaman seers of the Fourth World generally agree that those who tenaciously cling to the past will fall into mass insanity. The serpent power of the Aquarian Age is upon us. The Kundalini of Gaia is about to awaken. No one can avoid being affected. Most human beings may go out of their minds; others will go beyond mind." --John Hogue
"The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand."--Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
"Although ecology may be treated as a science, its greater and overriding wisdom is universal. That wisdom can be approached mathematically, chemically, or it can be danced or told as a myth... It is manifest, for example, among pre-Classical Greeks, in Navajo religion and social orientation, in romantic poetry of the eighteenth and nine teenth centuries, in Chinese landscape painting of the eleventh century, in current Whiteheadian philosophy, in Zen Buddhism, in the worldview of the cult of the Cretan Great Mother, in the ceremonials of Bushman hunters, and in the medieval Christian metaphysics of light. What is common among all of them is a deep sense of engagement with the landscape, with profound connections to surroundings and to natural processes central to all life."--Paul Shepard, The Subversive Science, (1969)
"Spiritual growth, or unfolding, begins when we cease to understand or see ourselves as isolated and narrow competing egos and begin to identify with other humans from our family and friends to, eventually, our species. But the deep ecology sense of self requires a further maturity and growth, an identification which goes beyond humanity to include the nonhuman world. We must see beyond our narrow contemporary cultural assumptions and values, and the conventional wisdom of our time and place, and this is best achieved by the meditative deep questioning process."--Deep Ecology
"Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth."--Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
"Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know that so it goes on flying anyway." --Mary Kay Ash
"The cells of our body are dying, the neurons in our brain are decaying, even the expressions on our face are always changing, depending on our mood. What we call our basic character is only a 'mindstream,' nothing more. Today we feel good because things are going well; tomorrow we feel the opposite. Where did that good feeling go? What could be more unpredictable than our thoughts and emotions: Do you have any idea what you are going to think and feel next? The mind, in fact, is as empty, as impermanent, and as transient as a dream. Look at a thought: It comes, it stays, and it goes. The past is past, the future is not yet risen, and even the present thought, as we experience it, becomes the past. The only thing we really have is nowness, is now." --Sogyal Rinpoche
"It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye."
--The Fox in The Little Prince by Saint Exupery
"Don't knock masturbation, it's sex with someone I love." --Annie Hall
"When you're following your energy and doing what you want all the time, the distinction between work and play dissolves." --Shakti Gawain, Living in the Light
"But warm, eager, living life - to be rooted in life - to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing else. That is what I must try for." --Katherine Mansfield
"The reason why the hippies and people like myself got interested in [computers], is that they are model worlds, small universes. They are ways to recreate civilization. We get to ask the great questions of all time: What is life? What is human? What is civilization? And you ask it not in the way the old philosophers asked it, sitting in armchairs, but by actually trying it. Let's try and make life. Let's try and make community." -- an interviewee from the New York Times Magazine
"As a net is made up of a series of ties, so everything in this world is connected by a series of ties. If anyone thinks that the mesh of a net is an independent, isolated thing, he is mistaken. It is called a net because it is made up of a series of interconnected meshes, and each mesh has its place and responsibility in relation to other meshes." -- Buddha
"The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat." --Lily Tomlin
"Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it." --Anais Nin
"Your body is the ground metaphor of your life, the expression of your existence... So many of us are not in our bodies, really at home and vibrantly present there. Nor are we in touch with the basic rhythms that constitute our bodily life. We live outside ourselves - in our heads, our memories, our longings - absentee landlords of our own estate. My way back into life was ecstatic dance. I reentered my body by learning to move my self, to dance my own dance from the inside out, not the outside in." --Gabrielle Roth
"The caribou love it. They rub against it and they have babies. There are more caribou in Alaska than you can shake a stick at." --George Bush (speaking of the Alaska pipeline)
"I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore." --Georgia O'Keeffe
"First, let us light the torch of our awareness and learn again how to drink tea, eat, wash dishes, walk, sit, drive, and work in awareness. We do not have to be swept along by circumstances. We are not just a leaf or a log in a rushing river. With awareness, each of our daily acts takes on a new meaning, and we discover that we are more than machines, that our activities are not just mindless repetitions. We find that life is a miracle, the universe is a miracle, and we too are a miracle."
--Thich Nhat Hanh
"Life becomes precious and more special to us when we look for the little everyday miracles and get excited about the privileges of simply being human." --Tim Hansel
"Sometimes the most urgent thing you can possibly do is take a complete rest." --Asleigh Brilliant
"The length of your education is less important than its breadth, and the length of your life is less important than its depths." --Marilyn vos Savant
"...Drifting downstream in a row boat doesn't count against your life span." --James Patterson
"The greatest revelation is stillness." --Lao-Tzu
"She believes in basics: in cozy bedrooms with perfect reading lamps." --Barbara Raskin
"I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for contradictions." --Maxine Hong Kingston
"If we listened to our intellect, we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go into business,because we'd be cynical. Well, that's nonsense. You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down." --Ray Bradbury
"Jazz will endure as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains." --John Phillip Sousa
"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened." --Douglas Adams, The Restaurant At the End of the Universe
"You can't really be strong until you see a funny side to things." --Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
"As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." --Albert Einstein
"No day is so bad it can't be fixed with a nap." --Carrie Snow
"Let tears flow of their own accord: their flowing is not inconsistent with inward peace and harmony." --Lucius A. Seneca
"The time is always right to do what is right." --Martin Luther King
"A woman is a full circle. Within her is the power to create, nurture, and transform. A woman knows that nothing can come to fruition without light. Let us call upon woman's voice and woman's heart to guide us in the age of planetary transformation." --Diane Mariechild
"And let your best be for your friend/If he would know the ebb of your tide/Let him know its flood also." --Gibral
"We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality." --Albert Einstein
"Reflect upon your present blessings - of which every man has many - not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some." --Charles Dickens
"Practice random acts of kindness and senseless beauty." --anonymous
"Say what you mean, mean what you say, nothing more, nothing less." --J.R.Boyd
"Courage is not the towering oak that sees storms come and go; it is the fragile blossom that opens in the snow." --Alice MacKenzie Swaim
"Do not cut lose from your longings - for what are we without our longings?" --Amos Oz
"Life is short and we never have enough time for gladdening the hearts of those who travel the way with us. Oh, be swift to love! Make haste to be kind." --Hermi Frederic Amiel
"High expectations are the key to everything." --Sam Walton
"Remember even though the outside world might be raining, if you keep on smiling the sun will soon show its face and smile back at you." --Anna Lee
"The art of living is to know when to hold fast and when to let go." --Alexander M.Schindler
"When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before." --Mae West
"Information is the currency of democracy." --Thomas Jefferson
"All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love." --Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
"When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school I wonder how I can think at all" --Paul Simon
"If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing" --Anatole France
"Everyone has the right to make an ass of themselves sometimes. You can't let the world judge you too much." --Maude (from the movie, Harold & Maude)
". . . Balance is not to be sought by association with others; it must exist within one's self." --Anais Nin
"If you want something bad enough the whole world conspires to help you get it." --Madonna
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever does." --Margaret Mead
"It is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are many silences to be broken." --Audre Lorde
"When you fall in love, you feel like a missing piece of a puzzle that's been found." --David Byrne
"Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity." --Oprah Winfrey
"The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain." --Dolly Parton
"I'm suggesting we call sex something else, and it should include everything from kissing to sitting close together." --Shere Hite
"In search of my mother's garden I found my own." --Alice Walker
"My favorite thing is to go where I've never been." --Diane Arbus
"Kissing power is stronger than will power." --Abigail Van Buren
"...We should rejoice that a chocolate dessert can bring so much innocent pleasure, even when a little wickedness is insinuated." --Marcel Desaulniers (creator of the "Death by Chocolate" dessert)
"Something should remind us once more that the great things in this universe are things that we never see." --Martin Luther King, Jr.
"You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you think you cannot do." --Eleanore Roosevelt
"Life is short, but it's wide." --Spanish proverb
"There are places I'll remember all my life, though some have changed, some forever... All these places had their moments." --The Beatles ("In My Life")
"Miracles are unexpected joys, surprising coincidences, unexplainable experiences, astonishing beauties... absolutely anything that happens in the course of my day, except that at this moment I'm able to recognize its special value." --Judith M. Knowlton
"Laughter can be more satisfying than honor; more precious than money; more heart-cleansing than prayer." --Harriet Rochlin
"One must, of course, have one's entire experience behind one and not have lost the freshness of instinct." --Henri Matisse (on how to achieve freedom in painting)
"Every ripple on the ocean / Every leaf on every tree / Every sand dune in the desert / Every power we never see / There is a deeper wave than this / Swelling in the world..." --Sting (from the album, "The Dream of the Blue Turtles")
"When men have killed joy, I do not believe they still live." --Sophocles
"Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels." --Faith Whittlesey
"So you see, imagination needs moodling -- long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering." --Brenda Veland
"Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
"You may have to live in a crowd, but you do not have to live like it." --Henry Van Dyke
"If Levi Strauss's mom hadn't named him Levi, would we be wearing Freds?" --T.F.
"We are creatures, creatures of love... From the sleep of reason, a life is born... Little creatures of love." --Talking Heads
"[A woman's place in society is] wherever her talents, energies and determination will carry her." --L.D. Wilder (Gov. of Virginia)
"Let it rain, let it rain, let God's water feed me. The water of life mentally rinsing me, physically drenching me... Every drop that hits me, fills me with an unmeasurable amount of security... It's raining revolution." --From Arrested Development's song, "Raining Revolution"
"It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it." -- Vice President Dan Quayle
"Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations." --George Bernard Shaw
"Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right." --Henry Ford
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." --Niels Bohr
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." --Mark Twain
"The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C', the idea must be feasible." --A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)
"What would you attempt to do if you knew you would not fail?" --Dr. Robert Schuller
"Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads." --Erica Jong
"To change one's life: 1. Start immediately, 2. Do it flamboyantly, 3. No exceptions." --William James
"Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." --William Faulkner
"One sign of maturity is the ability to be comfortable with people who are not like us." --Virgil A. Kraft
"The omnipresent process of sex, as it is woven into the whole texture of our man's or woman's body, is the pattern of all the process of our life." --Havelock Ellis
"You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do." --Olin Miller
"Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved." -- William Jennings Bryan
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." --Sigmund Freud
"Well I believe in the soul... the cock...the pussy... the small of a woman's back... the hangin' curveball... high fiber... good scotch... that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent overrated crap... I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a Constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve, and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days. Goodnight." --Crash Davis (from Bull Durham)
"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty." --Albert Einstein
"We are not born all at once, but by bits. The body first, and the spirit later... Our mothers are racked with the pains of our physical birth; we ourselves suffer the longer pains of our spiritual growth." --Mary Antin
"All my life I've known better than to depend on the experts. How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?" --President John F. Kennedy (in conversation with Theodore C. Sorensen concerning the Bay of Pigs)
"You can be just as faithful to a place or a thing as you can to a person. A place can really make your heart skip a beat, especially if you have to take a plane to get there." --Andy Warhol
"Consciousness creates the body. Our bodies are made up of dynamic energy systems that are affected by our diets, relationships, heredity, and culture and the interplay of all these factors and activities... We cannot hope to reclaim our bodily wisdom and inherent ability to create health without first understanding the influence of our society on how we think about and care for our bodies." --Christiane Northrup, M.D., in Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom
"Bread, which often becomes a private tyranny in the rhythm of three daily meals eaten together, has more power in Italian lives than any law proposed by a politician. It calls people home. It is part of identity. Yet, like mushroom hunting for the big porcini mushrooms with the twig-green velvet gills that once were free for the finding and now require a license to collect, like village churches in the foothills that were open all day long and now are locked until the rotating priest arrives for a weekly mass, bread, inasmuch as it is linked to the woman, is finding its roots exposed and dug up in Parma." --Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, in An American Life in Italy: Mother Tongue
"When we stop learning in our relationship, whether we are studying, playing or whatever we are doing, and merely act from the knowledge we have accumulated, then disorder comes." --J. Krishnamurti
"Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us." --Meister Eckhart
"Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence." --Louis Althusser
"Ultimately, since the heart is the site of the deepest fears, hatreds, and self-centered distortions of reality, the opennes, mutual transparency, and total trust required by the yoga of union make it an ideal discipline to bring the negative emotions to awareness and transform their poison into the ambrosia of enlightened awareness." --Miranda Shaw
"Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?" --Leonardo da Vinci
"Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives." --William Dement
"Our dreams are firsthand creations, rather than residues of waking life. We have the capacity for infinite creativity; at least while dreaming, we partake of the power of the immanent Spirit, the infinite Godhead that creates the cosmos." --Gorden Globus