Sunbeams

Empires rise and fall like the abdomen of God. It’s just the universe breathing.

Scoop Nisker

The good and the wise lead quiet lives.

Euripides

People have the illusion that all over the world, all the time, all kinds of fantastic things are happening. When in fact, over most of the world, most of the time, nothing is happening.

David Brinkley

If you help others, you will be helped, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in 100 years, but you will be helped. Nature must pay off the debt . . . it is a mathematical law and all life is mathematics.

Gurdjieff

All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. The only happiness worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

By any precise definition, Washington is a city of advanced depravity. There one meets and dines with the truly great killers of the age, but only the quirkily fastidious are offended, for the killers are urbane and learned gentlemen who discuss their work with wit and charm and know which tool to use on escargots.

Russell Baker

Some people want to achieve immortality through their work or their descendants. I intend to achieve immortality by not dying.

Woody Allen

It is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.

Heine

Work is life. Not having something to do with one’s life, something important or unique to your talents or however you put it, is a bigger killer than cancer.

Ray Mungo

The deeper the sorrow, the less tongue it has.

Talmud

When you discover the management, there’s nothing to do but go to work for it.

Hugh Romney

You mustn’t force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex.

Mary McCarthy

Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans.

John Lennon

Turn your face to the sun and the shadows fall behind you.

Maori proverb

I believe that if you put fine food into a body with a crummy mind, you get a crummy body; but if you put crummy food into a body with expanded awareness, you get a fine body.

W. Brugh Joy

He was alone in the doorway, digging the street. Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness — everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being.

Jack Kerouac

If the Lord wrote reports like a bureaucrat, Moses would have suffered a terrible hernia lugging those tablets down from the mountain.

Joel Ponzer

Mind is liberated from matter not by ignoring it, but by penetrating it.

Jean Renoir, speaking of his father’s philosophy in Renoir My Father

Because demands build up when needs are not admitted, acknowledgement of my needs subjectively, as a factor of my humanity, my dependent creatureliness, will help to prevent these same needs from degenerating into demands for actual fulfillment upon the objective world. Demands ask for fulfillment, needs require only expression.

James Hillman

It is in encounter that the creation reveals its formhood; it does not pour itself into senses that are waiting but deigns to meet those that are reaching out.

Martin Buber