Quote collection
499 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others. They do not belong to particular persons any more than the sun, moon and stars."
"People become concerned with being more humble than other people."
"So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at another level."
"We identify in our exerience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us."
"And although our bodies are bounded with skin, and we can differentiate between outside and inside, they cannot exist except in a certain kind of natural environment."
"The hostile attitude of conquering nature ignores the basic interdependence of all things and events--that the world beyond the skin is actually an extension of our own bodies--and will end in destroying the very environment from which we emerge and upon which our whole life depends."
"Our pleasures are not material pleasures, but symbols of pleasure – attractively packaged but inferior in content."
"The mundane and the sacred are one and the same."
"The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings, the past and the future are not as real, but rather more real than the present."
"I owe my solitude to other people."
"A chest of gold coins or a fat wallet of bills is of no use whatsoever to a wrecked sailor alone on a raft."
"Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social enviornment."
"Change is an illusion because we're always at the place where any future can take us."
"You can't get wet from the word 'water.'"
"Sexual love is a troubled and problematic relationship in cultures where there is a strong sense of man's separation from nature, especially when the realm of nature is felt to be inferior or contaminated with evil."
"One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious, and the same may be said of guilt."
"Nothing fails like success—because the self-imposed task of our society and all its members is a contradiction: to force things to happen which are acceptable only when they happen without force."
"Like too much alcohol,self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we make the double image for two selves - mental and material, controlling and controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering."
"Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use - which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing - for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound."
"I too realize that the less I preach the more likely I am to be heard."