Favorite Quotes
The Seven Sins in the World (Mahatma Gandhi)
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.
(source unknown).
Sri Ramakrishna:
Do not seek illumination
unless you seek it
as a man whose hair is on fire
seeks a pond.
From Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion.
W.B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity...
From the poem: 'The Second Coming'.
Oceans
I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing. And nothing happens!
Nothing ... silence...waves...
-Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?
Jeluddin Rumi
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love by what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
...Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
...Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
...Don't go back to sleep.
from Open Secret: Versions of Rumi. Translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks. Threshold Books.
to be continued...