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It may be true that the unexamined life is not worth living-but neither is the unlived life worth examining.
We can live without religion and meditation, but we cannot survive without human affection.
Ignorance is no excuse once we know that ignorance is the only possible excuse.
When you think everything is someone else's fault, you will suffer a lot. When you realize that everything springs only from yourself, you will learn both peace and joy.
The only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.
I have come to the conclusion that whether or not a person is a religious believer does not matter. Far more important is that they be a good human being.
A good friend who points out mistakes and imperfections and rebukes evil is to be respected as if he reveals the secret of some hidden treasure.
When you talk you are only repeating something you already know. But, if you listen you may learn something new.
It is a fallacy of the old schools to divide man into parcels, elements, thoughts, emotions, intuitions, etc. All human faculties consist of an interconnected whole.
Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for human survival.
All suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their own happiness or satisfaction.
Happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors.
The journey is what brings us happiness not the destination.
In order to disprove the assertion that all crows are black, one white crow is sufficient.
The self has the characteristic that it is an object to itself, and that characteristic distinguishes it from other objects and from the body.
One problem with our current society is that we have an attitude towards education as if it is there to simply make you more clever, make you more ingenious… Even though our society does not emphasize this, the most important use of knowledge and education is to help us understand the importance of engaging in more wholesome actions and bringing about discipline within our minds. The proper utilization of our intelligence and knowledge is to effect changes from within to develop a good heart.
When you lose, don't lose the lesson.
If someone were to analyze current notions and fashionable catchwords, he would find "systems" high on the list. The concept has pervaded all fields of science and penetrated into popular thinking, jargon and mass media.
Mentality on our approach simply comes in when the organism is able to point out meanings to others and to himself. This is the point at which mind appears, or if you like, emerges…. It is absurd to look at the mind simply from the standpoint of the individual human organism; for, although it has its focus there, it is essentially a social phenomenon; even its biological functions are primarily social.
The true hero is one who conquers his own anger and hatred.
The aim of management science is to display the best course of action in a given set of circumstances, and this must include all the circumstances.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Whether you believe in God or not does not matter much, whether you believe in Buddha or not does not matter so much; as a Buddhist, whether you believe in reincarnation or not does not matter so much. You must lead a good life.
The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
It is amusing to discover, in the twentieth century, that the quarrels between two lovers, two mathematicians, two nations, two economic systems, usually assumed insoluble in a finite period should exhibit one mechanism, the semantic mechanism of identification - the discovery of which makes universal agreement possible, in mathematics and in life.
A sense of concern for others gives our lives meaning; it is the root of all human happiness
Science in the past (and partly in the present), was dominated by one-sided empiricism. Only a collection of data and experiments were considered as being ‘scientific’ in biology (and psychology); forgetting that a mere accumulation of data, although steadily piling up, does not make a science.
Everyone tells you what's good for you. they don't want you to find your own answers. they want you to believe theirs.
Free speech is not just another value. It's the foundation of Western civilization.
It is also true that the less competent a person is in a given domain, the more he will tend to overestimate his abilities. This often produces an ugly marriage of confidence and ignorance that is very difficult to correct for.
The way to overcome negative thoughts and destructive emotions is to develop opposing, positive emotions that are stronger and more powerful.
It is now no mystery that some quite influential 'philosophers' were 'mentally' ill.
It isn't where you came from; it's where you're going that counts.
Freedom from mental distraction equals power.
If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.
What people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things.
The characteristic of the organism is first that it is more than the sum of its parts and second that the single processes are ordered for the maintenance of the whole.
The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervor with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.
If you can cultivate the right attitude, your enemies are your best spiritual teachers because their presence provides you with the opportunity to enhance and develop tolerance, patience and understanding.
Love and Compassion are the true religions to me. But to develop this, we do not need to believe in any religion.
My main hope is eventually, in modern education field, introduce education about warm-heartedness, not based on religion, but based on common experience and a common sort of sense, and then scientific finding.
Allow rather than resist what arises in the present moment-inside or out. Let it be interesting rather than good or bad.
If you don't get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don't want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can't hold on to it forever.
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion..
Without technology humanity has no future, but we have to be careful that we don’t become so mechanised that we lose our human feelings.
Choice means saying no to one thing so you can say yes to another.
I learned how to dig a hole in the ground and bury myself so the fire would burn over me. Never had to use it since, but I'm ready.
Unless we can explain the mind in terms of things that have no thoughts or feelings of their own, we'll only have gone around in a circle.
The important thing is that men should have a purpose in life. It should be something useful, something good.
You wouldn't be normal if you didn't react in an abnormal way.
We see what we see because we miss all the finer details.
I care not so much what I am to others as what I am to myself. I will be rich by myself, and not by borrowing.
People are not machines, but in all situations where they are given the opportunity, they will act like machines.
Given the scale of life in the cosmos, one human life is no more than a tiny blip. Each one of us is a just visitor to this planet, a guest, who will only stay for a limited time. What greater folly could there be than to spend this short time alone, unhappy or in conflict with our companions? Far better, surely, to use our short time here in living a meaningful life, enriched by our sense of connection with others and being of service to them.
We do as we have been done by.
The creatures that inhabit this earth-be they human beings or animals-are here to contribute, each in its own particular way, to the beauty and prosperity of the world.
If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.
If you want a real meaning, and you can’t find one, it’s all very well to make one up — but I don’t see how that solves any problems. ... Unless you say how God works, saying that God exists doesn’t explain anything.
The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink.
While some of us act without thinking, too many of us think without acting.
If I am only happy for myself, many fewer chances for happiness. If I am happy when good things happen to other people, billions more chances to be happy!
The word ‘consciousness’ is a clever trick that we use to keep from thinking about how thinking works. We take a lot of different phenomena and we give them all the same name, and then you think you’ve got it.
You don't have to control your thoughts; you just have to stop letting them control you.
If you can keep your head when all around you have lost theirs, then you probably haven't understood the seriousness of the situation.
The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.
We are not retreating - we are advancing in another direction.
The map is not the territory... The only usefulness of a map depends on similarity of structure between the empirical world and the map...
It is easier to stay out than get out.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.
There are living systems; there is no living "matter." No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell.
Nowadays, we are confronted by a huge gap between rich and poor. This is not only morally wrong, but practically a mistake. It leads to the rich living in anxiety and the poor living in frustration, which has the potential to lead to more violence. We have to work to reduce this gap. It's truly unfair that some people should have so much while others go hungry.
There is nothing I can't live without. I learned this attitude when I was a child.
No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.
Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.
Concepts like those of organization, wholeness, directiveness, teleology, control, self-regulation, differentiation, and the like are alien to conventional science. However, they pop up everywhere in the biological, behavioral, and social sciences and are, in fact, indispensable for dealing with living organisms or social groups. Thus, a basic problem posed to modem science is a general theory of organization. General Systems Theory is, in principle, capable of giving exact definitions for such concepts.
Non-violence means dialogue, using our language, the human language. Dialogue means compromise; respecting each other’s rights; in the spirit of reconciliation there is a real solution to conflict and disagreement. There is no hundred percent winner, no hundred percent loser—not that way but half-and-half. That is the practical way, the only way.
Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.
I will act as if what i do makes a difference.
Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
I have no need for good souls: an accomplice is what I wanted.
A genuine, affectionate smile is very important in our day-to-day lives.
Sleep is the best meditation.
No finite point has meaning without an infinite reference point.
Logic doesn't apply to the real world.
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance-that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
The existentialist declares willingly that man is anguish.
In a work of psychiatry, only the patients' remarks interest me; in a work of criticism, only the quotations.
Those who have little interest in spirituality shouldn’t think that human inner values don’t apply to you. The inner peace of an alert and calm mind are the source of real happiness and good health. Our human intelligence tells us which of our emotions are positive and helpful and which are damaging and to be restrained or avoided.
Just as ripples spread out when a single pebble is dropped into water, the actions of individuals can have far-reaching effects.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.
Progress is only possible by passing from a state of undifferentiated wholeness to differentiation of parts.
I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men.
Humans can be literally poisoned by false ideas and false teachings. Many people have a just horror at the thought of putting poison into tea or coffee, but seem unable to realize that, when they teach false ideas and false doctrines, they are poisoning the time-binding capacity of their fellow men and women. One has to stop and think! There is nothing mystical about the fact that ideas and words are energies which powerfully affect the physico-chemical base of our time-binding activities. Humans are thus made untrue to "human nature." … The conception of man as a mixture of animal and supernatural has for ages kept human beings under the deadly spell of the suggestion that, animal selfishness and animal greediness are their essential character, and the spell has operated to suppress their REAL HUMAN NATURE and to prevent it from expressing itself naturally and freely.
There was no doubt that this poor man [William Blake] was mad, but there is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.
We all have to live together, so we might as well live together happily.
You are a dynamic whole greater than the sum of your parts. By integrating your body, mind, and emotions through training, you reshape your life.
Weather forecast for tonight: dark.
There is no path to Happiness. Happiness is the path. There is no path to Love. Love is the path. There is no path to Peace. Peace is the path.
I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
Meditation is a valuable exercise, but eventually you have to open up your eyes and look around.
Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce...in the same individual, we have the best possible conditions for the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such men do not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideas posses them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or their age.
I hate Disneyland. It primes our kids for Las Vegas.
Wisdom is the best guide and faith is the best companion.
As our own peace of mind grows, so the atmosphere around us becomes more peaceful.
Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
Nobody is always stupid, but everyone is stupid sometimes.
The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual's own reason and critical analysis.
I'd always believed that a life of quality, enjoyment, and wisdom were my human birthright and would be automatically bestowed upon me as time passed. I never suspected that I would have to learn how to live - that there were specific disciplines and ways of seeing the world I had to master before I could awaken to a simple, happy, uncomplicated life.
Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.
Whenever you can, count.
I also know that one must do what one can do. No matter how little it is, it is nonetheless a human testimony and human testimonies, as long as they are not based on greed or personal ambition for power, can have unexpected positive effects. ...I believe in local action and in small dimensions. It is only in such environments that human creativity and meaningful identities can truly surface and flourish.
Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.
With realization of one's own potential and self-confidence in one's ability, one can build a better world.
When everything is done, the mornings are sad.
There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
Social psychology has, as a rule, dealt with various phases of social experience from the psychological standpoint of individual experience. The point of approach which I wish to suggest is that of dealing with experience from the standpoint of society, at least from the standpoint of communication as essential to the social order. Social psychology, on this view, presupposes an approach to experience from the standpoint of the individual, but undertakes to determine in particular that which belongs to this experience because the individual himself belongs to a social structure, a social order.
The future of mankind is going to be decided within the next two generations, and there are two absolute requisites: We must aim at a stable-state society [with limited population growth] and the destruction of nuclear stockpiles. … Otherwise I don't see how we can survive much later than 2050.
If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favor of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted.
Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace.
As words are not the things we speak about, and structure is the only link between them, structure becomes the only content of knowledge. If we gamble on verbal structures that have no observable empirical structures, such gambling can never give us any structural information about the world. Therefore such verbal structures are structurally obsolete, and if we believe in them, they induce delusions or other semantic disturbances.
Also the principle of stress, so often invoked in psychology, psychiatry, and psychosomatics, needs some reevaluation. As everything in the world, stress too is an ambivalent thing. Stress is not only a danger to life to be controlled and neutralized by adaptive mechanisms; it also creates higher life.
Your fears are not walls, but hurdles. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the conquering of it.
The more we think of others, the happier we are. The more we think of ourselves, the more suffering we feel.
God may forgive your sins, but your nervous system won't.
I do not want anything over again. Not even a mother.
There is an almost universal tendency, perhaps an inborn tendency, to suspect the good faith of a man who holds opinions that differ from our own opinions. … It obviously endangers the freedom and the objectivity of our discussion if we attack a person instead of attacking an opinion or, more precisely, a theory.
My favorite thing is to go where I've never been.
In the 300 years of the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course, of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions, to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.
Management problems are not respecters of the company organization, nor of the talents of the people appointed to solve them.
Don't cut what you can untie.
Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.
Never lend books -- nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me. 
Any organism must be treated as-a-whole; in other words, that an organism is not an algebraic sum, a linear function of its elements, but always more than that. It is seemingly little realized, at present, that this simple and innocent-looking statement involves a full structural revision of our language...
Imagery is not past but present. It rests with what we call our mental processes to place these images in a temporal order.
Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. We are monkeys with money and guns.
We are seeking for another basic outlook - the world as organization. This would profoundly change the categories of our thinking and influence our practical attitudes. We must envision the biosphere as a whole with mutually reinforcing or mutually destructive interdependencies.
Modern science is characterized by its ever-increasing specialization, necessitated by the enormous amount of data, the complexity of techniques and of theoretical structures within every field. Thus science is split into innumerable disciplines continually generating new subdisciplines. In consequence, the physicist, the biologist, the psychologist and the social scientist are, so to speak, encapusulated in their private universes, and it is difficult to get word from one cocoon to the other.
Non c'è dubbio che questo poveraccio [William Blake] fosse pazzo, ma c'è qualcosa nella sua pazzia che attira il mio interesse più dell'equilibrio di Lord Byron e Walter Scott.
SUBURBIA: A place where the developers bulldoze all of the trees -- then name the streets after them.
Young children, who for whatever reason are deprived of the continuous care and attention of a mother or a substitute-mother, are not only temporarily disturbed by such deprivation, but may in some cases suffer long-term effects which persist.
The lion and the calf shall lie down together, but the calf won't get much sleep.
The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself.
It will happen but it will take time.
You can't achieve anything without getting in someone's way.
Remember that sometimes not getting what you want is a wonderful stroke of luck.
Non arrenderti mai, perché quando pensi che sia tutto finito, è il momento in cui tutto ha inizio.
When you realize you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
At times I want to be found.
Life is a series of moments. The quality of attention and action that we bring to each moment determines the quality of our lives.
One can live without ever having seen oneself, without knowing the color of one’s skin.
In our considerations we started with a general definition of "systems" defined as a "set of elements standing in interrelations... No special hypothesis or statement were made about the nature of the system, of its elements or the relations between them. Nevertheless from this purely formal definition of "system" many properties follow which in part are expressed in laws well-known in various fields of science, and in part concern concepts previously regarded as anthropomorphic, vitalistic. or metaphysical. The parallelism of general conceptions or even special laws in different fields therefore is a consequence of the fact that those are concerned with "systems" and that certain general principles apply to systems irrespective of their nature.
Two starving men cannot be twice as hungry as one; but two rascals can be ten times as vicious as one.
The topic of compassion is not at all religious business; it is important to know it is human business, it is a question of human survival.
If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.
Any object of thought is both 'more than what we think, and different'.
Second order effects, such as belief in belief, makes fanaticism.
When I'm right no one remembers, when I'm wrong no one forgets.
Once a year go somewhere you have never been before.
World belongs to humanity, not this leader, that leader or that king or prince or religious leader. World belongs to humanity.
The earth is not my home, I'm just passing by
We cannot learn real patience and tolerance from a guru or a friend. They can be practiced only when we come in contact with someone who creates unpleasant experiences. According to Shantideva, enemies are really good for us as we can learn a lot from them and build our inner strength.
Today, the fundamental global objective of all education aspiring not only to progress but to the survival of humanity is to Civilize and Unify the Earth and Transform the human species into genuine humanity The education of the future should teach an ethics of planetary understanding.
Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.
We are told that when Jehovah created the world he saw that it was good. What would he say now?
We have a responsibility to look after our planet. It is our only home.
If we agree on everything, only one of us is necessary.
Forget the failures. Keep the lessons.
The time is now, the place is here. Stay in the present. You can do nothing to change the past, and the future will never come exactly as you plan or hope for.
If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone.
I have done one thing that I think is a contribution: I helped Buddhist science and modern science combine. No other Buddhist has done that. Other lamas, I don't think they ever pay attention to modern science. Since my childhood, I have a keen interest.
Words don't mean, people mean.
Whatever you might say the object "is", well it is not.
There is direction but there is no destination.
We discover our character through decisions under pressure.
Our view of the world is truly shaped by what we decide to hear.
Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.
I have an existential map; it has 'you are here' written all over it.
So consider carefully, what prevents you from living the way you want to live your life?
Money is neither my god nor my devil. It is a form of energy that tends to make us more of who we already are, whether it's greedy or loving.
The characteristic of life does not lie in a distinctiveness of single life processes. [Lebensvorgänge], but rather in a certain order among all the processes.
True change is within; leave the outside as it is.
We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.
Existence precedes and rules essence.
What we see depends mainly on what we look for
Calm mind brings inner strength and self-confidence, so that's very important for good health.
The purpose of a system is what it does. There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.
The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses.
General system theory, therefore, is a general science of "wholeness...The meaning of the somewhat mystical expression, "The whole is more that the sum of its parts" is simply that constitutive characteristics are not explanable from the characteristics of the isolated parts. The characteristics of the complex, therefore, appear as "new" or "emergent.
If you ask, then, where directly in your own experience the “I” comes in, the answer is that it comes in as a historical figure. It is what you were a second ago that is the “I” of the “me.” It is another “me” that has to take that rôle. You cannot get the immediate response of the “I” in the process.
You are just an insecure little girl in desperate need of attention.
Society is unity in diversity.
If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.
You're a prisoner of your own illusions - about yourself and about the world.
Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the wealth they owe to science, our societies are still trying to practice and to teach systems of values already destroyed at the roots by that very science. Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence which he has emerged by chance. His duty, like his fate, is written nowhere.
You must not hate those who do wrong or harmful things; but with compassion, you must do what you can to stop them — for they are harming themselves, as well as those who suffer from their actions.
What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful.
History isn’t a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are also choosing to silence others.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
A truly compassionate attitude toward others does not change even if they behave negatively or hurt you.
The certainty of death and the uncertainty of the hour of death is a source of grief throughout our life.
Two thousand years of monotheistic brainwashing have caused most Westerners to see polytheism as ignorant and childish idolatry. This is an unjust stereotype.
World peace must develop from inner peace. Peace is not just mere absence of violence. Peace is, I think, the manifestation of human compassion.
A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody,that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen.
How can we encourage other human beings to extend their moral sympathies beyond a narrow locus? How can we learn to become mere human beings, shorn of any more compelling national, ethnic, or religious identity? We can be reasonable. It is in the very nature of reason to fuse cognitive and moral horizons. Reason is nothing less than the guardian of love.
The more you are motivated by Love, The more Fearless & Free your action will be.
The present non-aristotelian system is based on fundamental negative premises; namely, the complete denial of 'identity.'
No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology.
Nothing that is complete breathes.
I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.
Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is... The only problem in your life is your mind's resistance to life as it unfolds.
Biological communities are systems of interacting components and thus display characteristic properties of systems, such as mutual interdependence, self-regulation, adaptation to disturbances, approach to states of equilibrium, etc.
Whatever we may say will not be the objective level, which remains fundamentally un-speakable. Thus, we can sit on the object called 'a chair', but we cannot sit on the noise we made or the name we applied to that object.
Liberals tend to understand that a person can be lucky or unlucky in all matters relevant to his success. Conservatives, however, often make a religious fetish of individualism. Many seem to have absolutely no awareness of how fortunate one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, physically healthy, and not bankrupted in middle age by the illness of a spouse.
A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
Neither a space station nor an enlightened mind can be realized in a day.
Life is not a private affair. A story and its lessons are only made useful if shared.
No one can be perfectly free till all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.
Wisdom is the use of knowledge
You have to lose your mind in order to regain your senses.
All things living are in search of a better world.
A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn't.
If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.
We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.
To use words to sense reality is like going with a lamp to search for darkness.
It is necessary to study not only parts and processes in isolation, but also to solve the decisive problems found in organization and order unifying them, resulting from dynamic interaction of parts, and making the the behavoir of the parts different when studied in isolation or within the whole...
We need to learn how to want what we have NOT to have what we want in order to get steady and stable Happiness.
Don't ever mistake my silence for ignorance, my calmness for acceptance or my kindness for weakness. Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength.
What we call progress consists in coordinating ideas with realities.
Man lives in a world of meaning.
Someone else’s action should not determine your response.
Anything that contradicts experience and logic should be abandoned.
Wholeness [Ganzheit], Gestalt, is the primary attribute of life.
Home is where you feel at home and are treated well.
Out of 6 billion humans, the troublemakers are just a handful.
Sports and sex and movies are not inherently bad - But for you they're addictions, not enjoyments. You use them to distract you from what you know you should do. Break free!
Fiction is life with the dull bits left out.
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Peace does not mean an absence of conflicts; differences will always be there. Peace means solving these differences through peaceful means; through dialogue, education, knowledge; and through humane ways.
I tell you in truth: all men are Prophets or else God does not exist.
Only an idiot could think there is a point to any of this.
If babies held the same tendency toward self-criticism as adults, they might never learn to walk or talk. Can you imagine infants stomping, 'Aarggh! Screwed up again!' Fortunately, babies are free of self-criticism. They just keep practicing.
You almost never get the pleasure of seeing that you won the argument in real time. People just don't like to publicly change their minds. They change their minds in private.
The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation.
When educating the minds of our youth, we must not forget to educate their hearts.
Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline, that's important. Self-discipline with awareness of consequences.
It is your attitude more than your aptitude that will determine your altitude!
It's better to make a mistake with the full force of your being than to timidly avoid mistakes with a trembling spirit. Responsibility means recognizing both pleasure and price, action and consequence, then making a choice.
Modern societies accepted the treasures and the power offered them by science. But they have not accepted - they have scarcely even heard - its profounder message: the defining of a new and unique source of truth, and the demand for a thorough revision of ethical premises, for a complete break with the animist tradition, the definitive abandonment of the 'old covenant', the necessity of forging a new one. Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the riches they owe to science, our societies are still trying to live by and to teach systems of values already blasted at the root by science itself.
We find systems which by their very nature and definition are not closed systems. Every living organism is essentially an open system. It maintains itself in a continuous inflow and outflow, a building up and breaking down of components, never being, so long as it is alive, in a state of chemical and thermodynamic equilibrium but maintained in a so-called steady state which is distinct from the latter.
Whether one believes in a religion or not, and whether one believes in rebirth or not, there isn't anyone who doesn't appreciate kindness and compassion.
When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don't care if they are shot themselves.
Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.
Pragmatism asks its usual question. "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?
SWEATER: A garment worn by child when it's mother is feeling chilly.
The Observer is the Observed.
We can also say: While we can conceive of a sum being composed gradually, as system as total of parts with its interrelations has to be conceived of as being composed instantly.
An open heart is an open mind.
Although you may not always be able to avoid difficult situations,you can modify the extent to which you can suffer by how you choose to respond to the situation.
A multiple personality is in a certain sense normal.
Psycho-galvanic experiments show clearly that every emotion or thought is always connected with some electrical current.
Those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.
Thoughts naturally arise. The point of meditation is not to banish thoughts but to make peace with them by realizing their lack of substance.
It is very rare or almost impossible that an event can be negative from all points of view.
What you are the world is. And without your transformation, there can be no transformation of the world.
The concept of man as mass robot was both an expression of and a powerful motive force in industrialized mass society. It was the basis for behavioural engineering in commercial, economic, political and other advertising and propaganda; the expanding economy of the 'affluent society' could not subsist without such manipulation. Only by manipulating humans ever more into Skinnerian rats, robots buying automata, homeostatically adjusted conformers and opportunists (or, bluntly speaking, into morons and zombies) can this great society follow its progress toward ever increasing gross national product.
Therefore, general systems theory should be, methodologically, an important means of controlling and instigating the transfer of principles from one field to another, and it will no longer be necessary to duplicate or triplicate the discovery of the same principles in different fields isolated from the other.
Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.
Each part of the brain knows a little bit about what’s happening in some other [parts], but there’s no single place that knows everything. ... It’s like a big corporation.
Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, 'This is the real me,' and when you have found that attitude, follow it.
We are confronted with problems of organized complexity... organization runs through all levels of reality and science.
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.
I have a respect for manners as such, they are a way of dealing with people you don't agree with or like.
When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.
Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
You wound and you will wound again. Because you wound and then you go away. You do not stay with the wound.
The important and the unimportant are the same only at the start.
The greater the level of calmness of our mind, the greater our peace of mind, the greater our ability to enjoy a happy and joyful life.
Never have your wallet with you onstage. It's bad luck. You shouldn't play the piano with money in your pocket. Play like you need the money.
I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.
The habit of spending nearly every waking moment lost in thought leaves us at the mercy of whatever our thoughts happen to be. Meditation is a way of breaking this spell.
I don’t know whether the universe, with its countless galaxies, stars and planets, has a deeper meaning or not, but at the very least, it is clear that we humans who live on this earth face the task of making a happy life for ourselves. Therefore, it is important to discover what will bring about the greatest degree of happiness.
To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.
A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure.
The only link between the verbal and objective world is exclusively structural, necessitating the conclusion that the only content of all "knowledge" is structural. Now structure can be considered as a complex of relations, and ultimately as multi-dimensional order. From this point of view, all language can be considered as names for unspeakable entities on the objective level, be it things or feelings, or as names of relations. In fact... we find that an object represents an abstraction of a low order produced by our nervous system as the result of a sub-microscopic events acting as stimuli upon the nervous system.
The shadows: some hide, others reveal.
The organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self may be called “the generalized other.” The attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the whole community. Thus, for example, in the case of such a social group as a ball team, the team is the generalized other in so far as it enters—as an organized process or social activity—into the experience of any one of the individual members of it.
General Systems Theory... possibly the model of the world as a great organization can help to reinforce the sense of reverence for the living which we have almost lost.
The behaviour of an individual can be understood only in terms of the behavior of the whole social group of which he is a member, since his individual acts are involved in larger, social acts which go beyond himself and which implicate the other members of that group.
What do you do from morning to night? I endure myself.
Consistency is the playground of dull minds.
When something needs to be done in the world to rectify the wrongs, if one is really concerned with benefiting others, one needs to be engaged, involved. This is action out of compassion.
A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
My life is like an air-traffic controller's: moments of boredom broken up by moments of sheer terror.
My words will either attract a strong mind or offend a weak one.
Such as contribute most to human progress and human enlightenment — men like Gutenberg, Copernicus, Newton, Leibnitz, Watts, Franklin, Mendeleieff, Pasteur, Sklodowska-Curie, Edison, Steinmetz, Loeb, Dewey, Keyser, Whitehead, Russell, Poincaré, William Benjamin Smith, Gibbs, Einstein, and many others — consume no more bread than the simplest of their fellow mortals. Indeed such men are often in want. How many a genius has perished inarticulate because unable to stand the strain of social conditions where animal standards prevail and "survival of the fittest" means, not survival of the "fittest in time-binding capacity," but survival of the strongest in ruthlessness and guile — in space-binding competition!
You can change your life with a simple shift of attention. But to make that simple shift, you have to find your heart. It's the only way. Accept yourself, then transcend yourself.
What every genuine philosopher (every genuine man, in fact) craves most is praise although the philosophers generally call it recognition!
The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.
It's not good enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what's required.
The world is not something separate from you and me; the world, society, is the relationship that we establish or seek to establish between each other. So you and I are the problem, and not the world, because the world is the projection of ourselves, and to understand the world we must understand ourselves. That world is not separate from us; we are the world, and our problems are the world's problems.
Inner peace is the key: if you have inner peace, the external problems do not affect your deep sense of peace and tranquility…without this inner peace, no matter how comfortable your life is materially, you may still be worried, disturbed, or unhappy because of circumstances.
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.
There are times to let things happen, and times to make things happen. Now is that time. You will either make things happen, watch what happens, or wonder what happened.
Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.
We're only as needy as our unmet needs.
If you want a quality, act as if you already had it.
Ultimately, fear of failure generates a vicious circle that creates what is most feared. To break this cycle, you need to make peace with failure. It isn't enough to merely tolerate it; you need to appreciate the failure and use it ...
I will not propose to you that my way is best. The decision is up to you. If you find some point which may be suitable to you, then you can carry out experiments for yourself. If you find that it is of no use, then you can discard it.
We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.
Sooner or later I'm going to die, but I'm not going to retire.
A great rock is not disturbed by the wind; the mind of a wise man is not disturbed by either honor or abuse.
I always tell people that religious institutions and political institutions should be separate. So while I'm telling people this, I myself continue with them combined. Hypocrisy!
The intelligence of the lower forms of animal life, like a great deal of human intelligence, does not involve a self.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
In life, stress happens when you resist what arises.
Many of those who tried to enlighten were hanged from the lampposts.
I think governments can't do much.
Don't let a little dispute injure a great relationship.
I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including Marxism have tried to derive the 'ought' from the 'is.' My point of view is that this is impossible; this is a farce.
A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
One of the great problems of philosophy is the relationship between the realm of knowledge and the realm of values. Knowledge is what is; values are what ought to be.
Entities of an essentially new sort are entering the sphere of scientific thought. Classical science in its diverse disciplines, be it chemistry, biology, psychology or the social sciences, tried to isolate the elements of the observed universe - chemical compounds and enzymes, cells, elementary sensations, freely competing individuals, what not -- expecting that, by putting them together again, conceptually or experimentally, the whole or system - cell, mind, society - would result and be intelligible. Now we have learned that for an understanding not only the elements but their interrelations as well are required...
Look at situations from all angles, and you will become more open.
Unless someone truly has the power to say no, they never truly have the power to say yes.
If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
When you release your expectations that the world should fulfill you, your disappointments vanish.
Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.
STATISTICIAN: Someone who can put his head in the oven and his feet in the freezer and tell you, "on average, I feel just fine."
I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.
Irrespective of whether we are believers or agnostics, whether we believe in God or karma, moral ethics is a code which everyone is able to pursue.
Different ‘philosophies’ represent nothing but methods of evaluation, which may lead to empirical mis-evaluation if science and empirical facts are disregarded.
We find things that do not fit into familiar frameworks hard to understand – such things seem meaningless.
True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.
Who rules our symbols, rules us.
There is a fundamental confusion between the notion of the older 'semantics' as connected with a theory of verbal 'meaning' and words defined by words, and the present theory of 'general semantics' where we deal only with neuro-semantic and neuro-linguistic living reactions of Smith, Smith, etc., as their reactions to neuro-semantic and neuro-linguistic environments as environments.
Most people use social media not to open their horizons wider, but to lock themselves in a comfort zone.
Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.
It seems evident that everything which exists in nature, is natural, no matter how simple or complicated a phenomenon it is; and on no occasion can the so-called 'supernatural' be anything else than a completely natural law, though it may, at the moment, be above and beyond the present understanding.
I have an almost religious zeal... not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up.
Better to be disliked than pitied.
I defeat my enemies when I make them my friends.
A person does what he does because he sees the world as he sees it.
The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe's unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about things, small people talk about other people.
"Say whatever you choose about the object, and whatever you might say is not it." Or, in other words? "Whatever you might say the object "is", well it is not." This negative statement is final, because it is negative.
There are two types of people who will tell you that you cannot make a difference in this world: those who are afraid to try and those who are afraid you will succeed.
You've got to have a map: to know where you came from, where you are, where you want to be, and how to get there.
In our struggle for freedom, truth is the only weapon we possess.
The goal is not to be better than the other man, but your previous self.
Special-interest publications should realize that if they are attracting enough advertising and readers to make a profit, the interest is not so special.
In this century we have made remarkable material progress, but basically we are the same as we were thousands of years ago. Our spiritual needs are still very great.
Sapiens rule the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination. This web allows humans alone to organise crusades, socialist revolutions and human rights movements.
Do not allow your dreams of a beautiful world to lure you away from the claims of men who suffer here and now. Our fellow men have a claim to our help; no generation must be sacrificed for the sake of future generations, for the sake of an ideal of happiness that may never be realised.
Too much self-centered attitude, you see, brings, you see, isolation. Result: loneliness, fear, anger. The extreme self-centered attitude is the source of suffering.
If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it’s not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.
Let us imagine that the aboriginal-original human specimen was one of two brother apes, A and B; they were alike in every respect; both were animal space-binders; but something strange happened to B; he became the first time-binder, a human. … He had thus a new faculty, he belonged to a new dimension; but, of course, he did not realize it; and because he had this new capacity he was able to analyze his brother "A"; he observed "A is my brother; he is an animal; but he is my brother; therefore, I AM AN ANIMAL." This fatal first conclusion, reached by false analogy, by neglecting a fact, has been the chief source of human woe for half a million years and it still survives. … He [then] said to himself, "If I am an animal there is also in me something higher, a spark of some thing supernatural."
The root of happiness is altruism - the wish to be of service to others.
Fear and trust cannot go together.
Because of lack of moral principle, human life becomes worthless. Moral principle, truthfulness, is a key factor. If we lose that, then there is no future.
Before you can see the Light, you have to deal with the darkness.
Do not go where the path may lead; instead go where there is no path and leave a trail.
Never give up. No matter what is happening, no matter what is going on around you, never give up.
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
Not only do I not know what's going on, I wouldn't know what to do about it if I did.
Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis – they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths.
The purpose of our lives is to be happy.
We human beings are social beings. We come into the world