Quotes are definitive, overarching, vague and specific. They can define any and all aspects of life if you let them. I love quotes and I love being skeptical of them as well. Here are some of my favorites.
|
“The struggle for existence was remote. They sat in judgement of their fellows, judging not for morals, but for interest.” - Tortilla Flat
““The language we’ve inherited confuses this. We say "my” body and “your” body and “his” body and “her” body, but it isn’t that way. … This Cartesian “Me,” this autonomous little homunculus who sits behind our eyeballs looking out through them in order to pass judgment on the affairs of the world, is just completely ridiculous. This self-appointed little editor of reality is just an impossible fiction that collapses the moment one examines it.“” - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
As long as we are identified with some role or persona, we are not free to manifest the purity of God’s presence. Part of life is a process of dropping whatever role, however worthy, you identify with. It is not you. Your emotions are not you. Your body is not you. If you are not those things, who are you? That is the big question in the spiritual journey.
If we have not experienced ourselves as unconditional love, we have more work to do, because that is who we really are. - The Human Condition “And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.” - East of Eden
"Take note, dear person, of your immediate position, become for a second exactly identical with yourself, glimpse yourself removed from the fatuous habits of progress as well as from the tragic implications of destiny, and, instead, see that you are an eternal creature fixed against the wide grin of the horizon; having experienced, this, what it is like to be attuned to the infinite universe, return to the temporal world lightly and glad-hearted, knowing that all the art and science of the twentieth century cannot prevent this clock from striking again, and in no precisioned Swiss-made mechanisms can the reality of this kind of time be surpassed." - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
|
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. Was it better to be with her or to remain alone? There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. we live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?” -The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“I don’t want to come to find that all my years on earth were intended for me only to know safe love — the world’s version of love. If I am to receive and live a love that has a known a shape and form that doesn’t bend or break or bleed, that’s a real problem. A hindrance. Love isn’t plastic.
It’s not my resolve that equips me. My knees are busted open and blood-shod from falling in my pursuit of her heart. But in my weakest moments, I can know this love. Because of my weakest moments, I can know this love. The most beautiful part of my story these days is bloody. The person in our lives most challenging to love — the child in our home or the friend down the street or even our blood-kin — is the instrument for bringing us to the end of that plastic kind of love and the beginning of our own personal revelation of the cross as a doorway, not just a destination. They aren’t our greatest challenge, friends. They are our greatest asset. So, Go again. It’s in the going again that we wear our strength and find out from experience what we know in Word– that that tree was more about life than death. Though death was required.”- Go Again: Every Bitter Thing is Sweet "You don't need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Don't even listen, simply wait. Don't even wait. Be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you. To be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet." -Kafka
"Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment." - Rumi
|
