The best form is to worship God in every form.

Neemkaroli Baba

Don’t think twice, it’s alright.

Bob Dylan

I came from brilliancy
and return to
brilliancy.
What is this?

Zen poem

After the rain, good weather.
In the Wink of an eye, the universe
throws off its muddy clothes.

Ho Chi Minh

There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from unseen roots of all created being.

Thomas Merton

Without trust words become the hollow sound of a wooden gong. With trust, words become life itself.

John Harold

Siddhartha listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty, taking in everything . . . He could no longer distinguish the different voices — the merry voice from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice. They all belong to each other . . . They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life . . . when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his Self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity, then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om — perfection.

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

Live one day at a time.

Jesus

I want a dime, if you can spare a dime. I’ll go along my way peacefully — if you can’t I’ll go along my way peacefully — ya can’t win — ya can’t lose — and between here and Bismark, Idaho I got nothin’ but lost and lost and lost everything I had.

Jack Kerouac, Railroad Earth

The trouble with superheroes is what to do between phone booths.

Ken Kesey

When your mind becomes demanding, when you long for something, you will end up violating your own precepts: not to tell lies, not to steal, not to kill, not to be immoral, and so forth. If you keep your original mind, the precepts will keep themselves.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

The United States remains the most powerful country in the world not because of its wealth or its arsenal but because the Constitution and the Bill of Rights gave practical meaning to the possibilities of human aspiration. The society raised up on these foundations allowed men to free themselves from the tyranny of kings and priests. Joined with a democratic form of government, this freedom of initiative gave rise to the enormous expansions, in all spheres of human thought and endeavor, that have both created and defined the United States. The present generation of would-be statesmen apparently labors under the delusion that the price of liberty, once paid (preferably by man’s ancestors), can be written off as a nonrecurring debt. Unfortunately, the price of liberty must be paid every day. It requires people to renounce the pleasures of sadistic exploitation and self-aggrandizement and to work instead for the gradual process of evolutionary change. This is never easy, but it becomes all but impossible if people confuse the power of money with the power of the mind and the imagination.

Lewis H. Lapham, writing in Harper’s, March 1979

Your end, which is endless, is as a snowflake dissolving in the pure air.

Buddhist saying

Keep on sowing your seed, for you never know which will grow — perhaps it all will.

Ecclesiastes

Vision brings a new appreciation of what there is, it makes a person see things differently, rather than see different things. After all nobody can ever escape Being, least of all his own being. It is the vision that gives meaning to our experiences and our actions by making us face the problem, and therefore also vision alone gives man a sense of direction and enables him to sketch a map which will guide him in his task of finding himself rather than running away from himself.

Herbert Guenther

The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.

Dhammapada

Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

Emerson

Make a bigger space in the universe for your head to live in and it will grow to fill the space.

David Crosby

A man needs a little madness or else he never dares to cut the rope and be free.

Zorba, in Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek

Friend . . . GOOD.

Frankenstein monster, in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein