Ignorance and Blindness
“Ignorance is a lack of self-awareness; and knowledge is ignorance when there is no understanding of the ways of the self. Understanding of the self is freedom from knowledge.”
J.Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living
“If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we wouldn’t.”
Emerson Pugh
“What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.”
Thomas Henry Huxley, On the Natural Inequality of Man
“We stumble and fall constantly even when we are most enlightened. But when we are in true spiritual darkness, we do not even know that we have fallen.”
Thomas Merton
“One who knows the Self puts death to death.”
The Dhammapada, The Path of Perfection
“You cannot carve your way to heaven’s throne if you sit locked in vanity alone. You need a skillful guide; you cannot start this ocean voyage with blindness in your heart.”
Faid Un Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds
Possibility
“To get started, I will accept anything that occurs to me.”
William Stafford
“How do I know what to think until I see what I say?”
E.M.Forster
“Believe, that you may understand.”
Medieval Latin saying: crede, ut intelligas (attributed to St. Augustine)
“I have heard speakers… use the phrase, ‘I can say without fear of contradiction….’ Anyone who says this in a modern democracy, or to the shareholders of a modern company, should see the doctor.”
Lord Chandos, Memoirs of Lord Chandos: An Unexpected View from the Summit (1963)
“Infinite Spirit: Give us, we pray, the will and capacity to grow, the sensitivity and receptivity to see in new ways, and the humility to understand how little we yet have grown and how little we yet have seen.”
Dr. James Killiam, Cosmopolitan (1958)
Personal Reality
“Your intellect may be confused but your emotions will never lie to you.”
Roger Ebert
“My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true.”
D.H. Lawrence, Collected Letters, letter to Ernest Collins 1/17/1913
“Alas, after a certain age, every man is responsible for his own face.”
Albert Camus, The Fall
“There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.”
Charles, Baron deMontesquieu, Letters persones
“There are few men who would dare publish the prayers they make to almighty God.”
Michel de Montaigne, Essays
“Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that’s printed about him.”
Orson Welles, 1956
Patterns
“When you see a good man, try to emulate his example, and when you see a bad man, search yourself for his faults.”
Confucius
“The constant assertion of belief is an indicator of fear.”
J. Krishnamurti, The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader
“Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
Alan Watts, 1961
Self-Worth
“How a man feels about himself is often more critical to his success than what he is objectively.”
Harry Levinson, M.D.
“When I say, ‘Love yourself,’ this is for those who have never gone inside, because they can always…. They are bound to understand only a language of duality. Love yourself– that means you are dividing yourself in two, the lover and the loved. You may not have thought about it, but if you go inside you will not love yourself, you will be love.”
Osho, Discourses
“The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can’t ignore it, top it; if you can’t top it, laugh at it; if you can’t laught at it, it’s probably deserved.”
Russell Lynes, Reader’s Digest UK, Dec 1961
“Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.”
Gene Fowler, Skyline, 1961
Towards Enlightenment
He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.”
La-Tzu, Tao Te Ching
“The inner voice– the human compulsion when deeply distressed to seek healing counsel within ourselves, and the capacity within ourselves both to create this counsel and receive it.”
Alice Walker, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down
“Consciousness is the inner light kindled in the soul… a music, strident or sweet, made by the friction of existence.”
George Santayana, The Realm of Trust
“Above the senses is the mind. Above the mind is the intellect. Above the intellect us the ego. Above the ego is the unmanifested seed, the Primal Cause. And verily beyond the unmanifested seed is the self, the unconditioned knowing whom one attains to freedom and achieves immortality.”
The Upanishads, Katha Upanishad
“Man is the only significant link between the physical order and the spiritual one. Without man the universe is a howling wasteland contemplated by an unseen Deity.”
Morris West, The Shoes of the Fisherman
“The easiest person to deceive is one’s own self.”
Edward George Bulwer Lytton, The Disowned
“It is the individual who knows how little he knows about himself who stands a reasonable chance of finding out something about himself before he dies.”
S.L. Hayakawa, Symbol, Status and Personality, 1963