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Past Thoughts of the Day from Interlude: An Internet Retreat

12/1/2008 to 5/31/2009




Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

Plato

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.

Yogi Berra

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

Emile Zola

I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble.

Rudyard Kipling

Hope is the physician of each misery.

Irish Proverb

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.

Mark Twain

For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.

Viktor E. Frankl

People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.

Barbara Kingsolver

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.

Anne Lamott

All you have shall some day be given; Therefore give now, that the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors.

Kahlil Gibran

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

Bertrand Russell

Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.

Leonard Nimoy

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

Albert Einstein

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.

R. Buckminster Fuller

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be one's own self.

Montaigne

If a man should conquer in battle a thousand and a thousand more, and another man should conquer himself, his would be the greater victory, because the greatest of victories is the victory over oneself.

The Dhammapada

Soft is stronger than hard, water stronger than rock, love stronger than violence.

Herman Hesse

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

Dag Hammarskjold

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.

Alan Watts

The key to happiness is in allowing whatever arises to be as spontaneous and joyful as possible, recognizing that whatever occurs is impermanent and nothing, no matter how painful or pleasurable, is going to last.

Fred Alan Wolf

Of the desires expressed the one which is most right is the desire to be 'master of oneself,' because without this nothing else is possible.

G. I. Gurdjieff

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make our world.

The Buddha

If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.

Nelson Mandela

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be.
The more weapons you have, the less secure people will be.

Lao Tzu

We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.

R. Buckminster Fuller

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.

Kahlil Gibran

The more intensely we feel about an idea or a goal, the more assuredly the idea, buried deep in our subconscious, will direct us along the path to its fulfillment.

Earl Nightingale

The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white.
Neither need you do anything but be yourself.

Lao Tzu

The burden of self is lightened when I laugh at myself.

Rabindranath Tagore

Disappointment to a noble soul is what cold water is to burning metal; it strengthens, tempers, intensifies, but never destroys it.

Eliza Tabor

It's common to say that trees come from seeds. But how can a tiny seed create a huge tree? Seeds do not contain the resources need to grow a tree. These must come from the medium or environment within which the tree grows. But the seed does provide something that is crucial : a place where the whole of the tree starts to form. As resources such as water and nutrients are drawn in, the seed organizes the process that generates growth. In a sense, the seed is a gateway through which the future possibility of the living tree emerges.

Peter Senge

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The most precious gift we can offer others is our presence. When mindfulness embraces those we love, they will bloom like flowers.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Thinking, or more precisely identification with thinking, gives rise to and maintains the ego, which, in our Western society in particular, is out of control. It believes it is real and tries hard to maintain its supremacy. Negative states of mind, such as anger, resentment, fear, envy, and jealousy, are products of the ego.

Eckhart Tolle

The sun and the moon are not mirrored in cloudy water. Thus the almighty cannot be mirrored in a heart that is obsessed by the idea of me and mine.

Ramakrishna

There is in the body a current of energy, affection and intelligence, which guides, maintains and energizes the body and mind. Discover that current and stay with it.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

My fine strong horse can pull a heavy plough and never tire.
Yet it can also gallop through a wild country.
I am working hard at love, with the wind in my hair.

José Morazán

The mind should be a vastness like the sky. Mental events should be allowed to disperse like clouds.

Longchenpa

This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all!

Rumi

First there must be order and harmony within your own mind. Then this order will spread to your family, then to the community, and finally to your entire kingdom.

Confucius

It is not the mountain that we conquer but ourselves.

Sir Edmund Hillary

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.

Henry David Thoreau

When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.

Helen Keller

This very moment is the perfect teacher, and it's always with us.

Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

Live more and more in the Present, which is ever beautiful and stretches away before and beyond the limits of the past and the future.

Meher Baba

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.

Carl Jung

Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.

Nicholas Murray Butler

Family life is too intimate to be preserved by the spirit of justice. It can be sustained by a spirit of love which goes beyond justice.

Reinhold Niebuhr

It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

Lewis Carroll

Good for the body is the work of the body, good for the soul is the work of the soul, and good for either is the work of the other.

Henry David Thoreau

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

Joseph Addison

We must all live so that our children do not have to pay for our deeds.

Andrejs Upits

The wise man does not lay up his treasures. The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own.

Lao-tzu

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

Winston Churchill

The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within.

Mahatma Gandhi

O Mother Earth, You are the earthly source of all existence. The fruits which you bear are the source of life for the Earth peoples. You are always watching over Your fruits as does a mother. May the steps which we take in life upon You be sacred and not weak.

Oglala Sioux prayer

All things are parts of one single system, which is called Nature; the individual life is good when it is in harmony with Nature.

Zeno of Citium (300-260 BC)

The door to the human heart can be opened only from the inside.

Spanish proverb

To develop understanding, you have to practice looking at all living beings with the eyes of compassion. When you understand, you love. And when you love, you naturally act in a way that can relieve the suffering of people.

Thich Nhat Hanh

True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment.

William Penn

In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.

Deepak Chopra

All beings are owners of their Karma. Whatever volitional actions they do, good or evil, of those they shall become their heir.

Gautama Buddha

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Evil (ignorance) is like a shadow--it has no real substance of its own, it is simply a lack of light. You cannot cause a shadow to disappear by trying to fight it, stomp on it, by railing against it, or any other form of emotional or physical resistance. In order to cause a shadow to disappear, you must shine light on it.

Shakti Gawain

We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

George Bernard Shaw

I'm erecting a barrier of simplicity between myself and the world.

Andre' Gide

A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But if that drop was not in the ocean, I think the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.

Mother Teresa

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.

James A. Baldwin

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.

Dr. Seuss

When you stand outside my thatched hut, could you guess how spacious it is inside? There is a galaxy of worlds in here. And space for as much love as I can find.

Ishikawa Jozan

When a deep injury is done us, we can never recover until we forgive.

Alan Paton

When you hear the words renunciation and austerity, they refer to this - the renunciation of the insanity of the ego. That's what has to be given up. And that's where true freedom is found.

Andrew Cohen

You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.

Maimonides

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

Philo

A man needs self-acceptance or he can't live with himself; he needs self-criticism or others can't live with him.

James A. Pike

The more I can love everything--the trees, the land, the water, my fellow men, women and children, and myself--the more health I am going to experience and the more of myself I am going to be.

Carl Simonton

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.

Jack Kornfield

Millions of items in the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind --without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.

William James, Principles of Psychology

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs pass, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.

William James

We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew....Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful...and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.

Desmond Tutu

Love is infallible; it has not errors, for all errors are the want of love.

Andrew Bonar Law

In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.

Deepak Chopra

A step in the wrong direction is better than staying on the spot all your life. Once you're moving forward you can correct your course as you go.Your automatic guidance system cannot guide you when you're standing still.

Maxwell Maltz

Most true happiness comes from one's inner life, from the disposition of the mind and soul. Admittedly, a good inner life is hard to achieve, especially in these trying times. It takes reflection and contemplation and self-discipline.

William L. Shirer

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall - think of it, ALWAYS.

Mahatma Gandhi

Enlightenment consciously chosen means to relinquish your attachment to past and future and to make the Now the main focus of your life.

Eckhart Tolle

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.

Denis Waitley

It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.

Arnold Bennett

The more willing you are to surrender to the energy within you, the more power can flow through you.

Shakti Gawain

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rainer Maria Rilke

It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

Ursula K. LeGuin

Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.

Benjamin Disraeli

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

Quentin Crisp

Truth alone will endure, all the rest will be swept away before the tide of time.

Mahatma Gandhi

The world is not to be put in order; the world is order, incarnate. It is for us to harmonize with this order.

Henry Miller

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Viktor Frankl - from Man's Search For Meaning

If it's never our fault, we can't take responsibility for it. If we can't take responsibility for it, we'll always be its victim.

Richard Bach

The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.

M. Scott Peck

Life without idealism is empty indeed. We must have hope or starve to death.

Pearl Buck

Kindness is more important than wisdom, and the recognition of this is the beginning of wisdom.

Theodore Isaac Rubin

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

Gustave Flaubert

When the moon is in the Seventh House
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius

The Age of Aquarius, from the musical Hair

Reportedly, this cosmic alignment occurs at dawn February 14, 2009


He does not seem to me to be a free man who does not sometimes do nothing.

Marcus T. Cicero

Perhaps a man's character was like a tree, and his reputation like its shadow; the shadow is what we think of it, the tree is the real thing.

Abraham Lincoln

Human beings who leave behind them no great achievements, but only a sequence of small kindnesses, have not had wasted lives.

Charlotte Gray

I have accepted fear as a part of life - specifically the fear of change . . .
I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says turn back.

Erica Jong

If you don't set a baseline standard for what you'll accept in life, you'll find it's easy to slip into behaviors and attitudes or a quality of life that's far below what you deserve.

Anthony Robbins

Quite often a flash of enlightenment will give you this message: Go back to where you started and learn to love it more.

Thaddeus Golas

I will love the light for it shows me the way. Yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.

Og Mandino

A life directed chiefly toward the fulfillment of personal desires will sooner or later always lead to bitterness.

Albert Einstein

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams

The intuitive part of our being is equally as significant, and from my point of view perhaps more significant, and the rational mind is a beautiful instrument to be used with wisdom and discriminately. But knowledge must be used with wisdom.

Ram Dass

When you possess light within, you see it externally.

Anaïs Nin

Someday perhaps the inner light will shine forth from us, and then we'll need no other light.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is.

Thomas Szasz

Your children will see what you're all about by what you live rather than what you say.

Wayne Dyer

Your difficulties are not obstacles on the spiritual path, they are the path.

Ezra Bayda

Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.

George Sand

If you are still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.

James Hillman

Nothing would be done at all if we waited until we could do it so well that no one could find fault with it.

John Henry Newman

As the blazing fire reduces wood to ashes, similarly, the fire of Self-knowledge reduces all Karma to ashes.

Bhagavad Gita

To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.

Plutarch

If we live in peace ourselves, we in turn may bring peace to others. A peacable man does more good than a learned one.

Thomas A Kempis

Without the human community one single human being cannot survive.

Dalai Lama

Confidence... thrives on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection and on unselfish performance. Without them it cannot live.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.

Langston Hughes

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crises. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

Abraham Lincoln

Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.

Lin Yutang

It is almost impossible for anyone, even the most ineffective among us, to continue to choose misery after becoming aware that it is a choice.

William Glasser

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.

Helen Keller

You'll acquire the vices and virtues of your closest associates. The fragrance of their lives will pervade yours.

John Maxwell

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Mark Twain

As long as you can admire and love, then one is young forever.

Pablo Casals

I don't like that man; I must get to know him.

Abraham Lincoln

We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.

Livy

We do not so much need the help of our friends as the confidence of their help in need.

Epicurus

Those who drink the water should remember with gratitude those who dug the well.

Chinese Proverb

Happiness is a butterfly which, if pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly may alight upon you.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

What is the best gift you ever received? Better still, what is the best gift you ever gave? Perhaps you will recall that in each instance, the best gift was one that was tied with the heartstrings of the giver, one that included a part of self.

Wanda Fulton

Many times a day I realise how much my own life is built upon the labours of others, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.

Albert Einstein

Always be a little kinder than necessary.

J.M. Barrie

Although you may spend your life killing, you will not exhaust all your foes. But if you quell your own anger, your real enemy will be slain.

Nagarjuna

Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.

Stefan Zweig

There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.

Meister Eckhart

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.

Maria Montessori

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.

Edith Lovejoy Pierce

I look for what needs to be done. After all, that's how the universe designs itself.

R. Buckminster Fuller

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once.

Albert Einstein

There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.

Marianne Williamson, incorrectly attributed to Nelson Mandela here and elsewhere on the Internet.

Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.

Chinese Proverb

When we are motivated by goals that have deep meaning, by dreams that need completion, by pure love that needs expressing, then we truly live life.

Greg Anderson

What is Christmas? It is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, hope for the future. It is a fervent wish that every cup may overflow with blessings rich and eternal, and that every path may lead to peace.

Agnes M. Pharo

You do not have to be rich to be generous. If you have the spirit of true generosity, a pauper can give like a prince.

Corinne U. Wells

I vow to offer joy to one person in the morning and to help to relieve the grief of one person in the afternoon.
I vow to live simply and sanely, content with just a few possessions, and to keep my body healthy.
I vow to let go of all worries and anxiety in order to be light and free.

Thich Nhat Hanh

To live at this time is an inestimable privilege, and a sacred obligation devolves upon you to make right use of your opportunities.

Grenville Kleiser

Optimism enables us to claim the future for ourselves and not abandon it to chance.

Ray Gatchalian

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

Alan Watts

All of you are perfect just as you are and you could use a little improvement.

Shunryu Suzuki

You are really rich when you enjoy yourself as you are, when you are contented with what you have.

Shanti

Valor grows by daring, fear by holding back.

Publilius Syrus

No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of it for another.

Charles Dickens

It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow man who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all humanfailures spring.

Alfred Adler

In the presence of eternity, the mountains are as transient as the clouds.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Like all other living things, we must make our descent into the darkness then wait for some new kind of wisdom to take root.

Valerie Andrews

Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a manner of traveling.

Margaret B. Runbeck

All your dreams are unreal, even the dream you call the waking state. The only reality is the screen on which they appear. When you identify with the screen and not the pictures, you will know what is real and what is unreal.

Sri Poonjaji

One must know oneself. If this does not serve to discover truth, it at least serves as a rule of life and there is nothing better.

Blaise Pascal

When you become more quiet you are more open, you are more able to hear, to listen and to love.

Huong Zu

Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.

Thornton Wilder

The mind denies that which it cannot understand. In valuing the mind as much as we do, we have a tendency to deny mystery, to deny the spiritual.

Rachel Naomi Remen

The secret of a good memory is attention, and attention to a subject depends upon our interest in it. We rarely forget that which has made a deep impression on our minds.

Tryon Edwards

Some people confuse acceptance with apathy, but there's all the difference in the world. Apathy fails to distinguish between what can and what cannot be helped; acceptance makes that distinction. Apathy paralyzes the will-to-action; acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens.

Arthur Gordon

You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.

Pearl S. Buck

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you will help them become what they are capable of becoming.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Those who seek the easy way do not seek the true way.

Dogen

Itis in giving oneself that one receives.

St. Francis of Assisi


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