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God, grant me the serenity to accept
the things which I cannot change,
the courage to change those I can,
and the Wisdom to know the difference.

Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.

We are the ones who suffer when we hold on to past grievances.

Fate or destiny.
It is only our vanity or conceit
that makes us believe such a thing.

People often find it easier to be a result of the past than a cause of the future.

What is taken from you is given back another way, and it is up to you to know how and when to use it

(Web Ring “”)

Don't find fault, find solutions. Anyone knows how to complain.

Don't curse darkness; light a candle.

Small ills are the fountains of most of our groans. Men trip not on mountains, they stumble on stones.

Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of courage.

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.

You can think negatively or positively. If you are a positive thinker, you will base your decisions on faith, rather than fear.

Fear is the opportunity for courage; not proof of cowardice.

If you want anything said, ask a man. If you want anything done, ask a woman.

God could not be physically everywhere; so he created mothers.

Thank you, God, for pretending not to notice that one of your angels is missing and for guiding her to me. You must have known how much I would need her, so you turned your head for a minute and allowed her to slip away to me. Sometimes I wonder what special name you had for her. I call her “Mother.”

A vacation frequently means that the family goes away for a rest, accompanied by mother, who sees that the others get it.

Love is the mother of everything.

Through our scientific genius, we have made this world a neighborhood;
now through our moral and spiritual development, we must make of it a brotherhood.

As selfishness and complaint pervert and cloud the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.

Absence sharpens love, presence strengthens it.

Together we are strong

Demand much from yourself,
and expect little from others.

Unless life is lived for others, it is not worthwhile.

To love for the sake of being loved is human, but to love for the sake of loving is angelic.

One of the greatest gifts you can give others is opening to their love for you.

Do not confuse the pleasure of pleasing with the happiness of loving.

Happiness is caring and liking one another.

Each Internaut's voice is powerful and must be used for the Good of the entire Planet.

I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world; indeed it is the only thing that ever has.

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

The man who has no imagination has no wings.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

The world is but a canvas to our imaginations.

Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavor. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.

God does not play dice.

Nor is it our business to prescribe to God how He should run the world.

God not only plays dice, he also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.

God may be subtle. But He is not malicious.

You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.

The type of seeing that is involved in a reflection principle requires a mathematical insight that is not the result of the purely algorythmic operations that could be coded into some mathematical formal system.

Logicians have but ill defined
As rational the human kind
Logic, they say, belongs to man,
But let them prove it if they can.

Circular logic will only get you dizzy.

After a time, you may find that having a thing is not so pleasurable as wanting it. It is not logical, but it is often true.

Analysis kills spontaneity.

Analysis, with its reduction from complexity to simplicity, is traditionally a useful way of doing science. [...] Qualified reductionism therefore has its place, but when it pretends to offer an exhaustive account of nature, then misrepresentation and confusion result.

Absence of proof does not mean presence of disproof.

Every new idea is a joke, until someone comes and puts it into practice.

Great spirits have always encountered violent oppositions from mediocre minds.

When it is wrong today, we call them crazy; when it is right tomorrow, we call them a genius.

A man with a new idea is a crank, until the idea succeeds.

New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled, the humiliating question arises, “Why then are you not taking part in them?”

The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.

All truth passes through three stages:
first, it is ridiculed;
next it is violently attacked;
finally, it is held to be self-evident.

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.

We think too small. Like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.

The laws of our universe don't change, but the way we understand them and translate them into human accessible coding.

The history of scientific development, itself, is living evidence of the fact that what has once been viewed or accepted as dogma, remains so only until science moves a step forward and is able to assimilate it and integrate it within the scope of current scientific data, usually providing a fresh framework.

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.

True religion is the life we live, not the creed we profess.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

The map is not the territory.

I have realized that my real self is a greater entity than any possible post or title.

To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.

The great thing in this world is not so much where we are, but in what direction we are moving.

Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity, what it gains in intensity.

It is indeed obvious that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer, even though much of what is actually involved in mental activity might do so.

Love is space and time made directly perceptible to the heart.

If one life shines, the life next to it will catch the light.

Love the moment, and the energy of that moment will spread beyond all boundaries.

Some people see things as they are and wonder why.
I dream things that never were and say, why not?

Monkey, look at your tale!

You think Oedipus had a problem – Adam was Eve's mother.

(Referring to a glass of water) I mixed this myself. Two parts H, one part O. I don't trust anybody!

Everyone is unique, so we can never have two persons that are exactly alike. Everyone can have the same desease, but they cannot experience it in the same way, nor necessarily find cure in the same remedy.

()

Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow.

I was crying because I had no shoes, when I met a man who had no feet.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence

The neighbor's chicken is always fatter.

Scars are medals on the chest of heroes;
heroes are those who wear these medals without showing them off.

God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.

In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight--it's the size of the fight in the dog.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

A bad compromise is better than a good battle.

Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow, and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war.

An informed electorate is the basis for a sound democracy.

I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent it.

In time of war the laws are silent.

(Source: “” Mailing List)

War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.

(Source: “” Mailing List)

In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be guarded by a bodyguard of lies.

The mere absence of war is not peace.

Peace is more important than all justice; and peace was not made for the sake of justice, but justice for the sake of peace.

(Source: “” Mailing List)

A picture is worth ten thousand words.

Seeing it once is better than being told 100 times.

He who cannot dance puts the blame on the floor.

If I could put it into words I wouldn't have danced it.

[Take a ballet dancer] the meaning of whose gestures are contained in the whole movement. While it is possible to analyze the motion of a dancer’s body by means of photographs, it is clear that each element has its origin in the entire gesture and any static element is therefore incomplete.

At another time, she [Helen Keller] asked, What is a soul?  No one knows, I replied; but we know it is not the body, and it is that part of us which thinks and loves and hopes [. . . and] is invisible. But if I write what my soul thinks, she said, then it will be visible, and the words will be its body.

Living in a chronic state of unawareness can cause us to miss much of what is most beautiful and meaningful in our lives.

What makes life meaningful, I believe, is an ability to see pattern and significance in forms and events around us. Often this requires finding an appropriate focal length or contextual frame for viewing "this which is around us".

When people say England, they sometimes mean Great Britain, sometimes the United Kingdom, sometimes the British Isles - but never England.

The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not what he says about it.

In the real world, contingencies and individual events tend to impose their own unique characteristics on physical law so that tendencies can be revealed only by averaging over repeated, controlled experiments.

Life must be lived forwards, but it can only be understood backwards.

People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.

The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do.

In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary.

The real danger is the gradual erosion of individual liberties through the automation, integration, and interconnection of many small, separate record-keeping systems, each of which alone may seem innocuous, even benevolent, and wholly justifiable.

All bad precedents begin with justifiable measures.

A precedent embalms a principle.

Wit
The salt with which the American Humorist spoils his cookery
... by leaving it out.

Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous.
He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.

Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation or creed.

Cynics are made, not born.

I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power that can move the world.

To realize true happiness, erase the barriers between who you are and what you do.

Life is as beautiful as your thoughts will let it be.

(Source: “)

Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Beauty and happyness are byproducts.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

If music be the food of love, play on, play on, play on.

Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.

If you love something,
Set it free,
If it comes back it is yours,
If it doesn't, it never was...

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof; the work for which all other work is but preparation.

One must learn to love onself...with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam.

Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power.

It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself.

Life is short and we have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh be swift to love, make haste to be kind.

The milk of human kindness never curdles

The one characteristic that distinguishes man from the animal kingdom is the spirit of self-sacrifice.

It is one of the beautiful compensations of this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Doing something for someone else
Isn't really for someone else...
It does twice as much for you
As something you do
     Just for yourself !
 

The best way to cheer yourself up is to cheer somebody else up.

A candle loses nothing of its light when lighting another.

Blessed are those who can
give without remembering and
take without forgetting.

A grateful mind is a great mind which eventually attracts to itself great things.

Gratitude:
one of the most beautiful forms of Love, along with Compassion;
never demanding, entirely giving.

Two kinds of gratitude:
   the sudden kind
we feel for what we take;
   the larger kind
we feel for what we give

The best index to a person's character is  (a)  how he treats people who can't do him any good, and  (b)  how he treats people who can't fight back.

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.

It is not power that corrupts, but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts.

There is a real difference between failing and being a failure. The loser isn't the one who comes in last - it's the one who never entered the race.

Many a man fails because he never tries.

Character is much easier kept than recovered.

The price of greatness is responsibility.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

Take, for instance, a twig and a pillar, or the ugly person and the great beauty, and all the strange and monstrous transformations. These are all leveled together by Tao. Division is the same as creation; creation is the same as destruction.

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.

The first measure of a free society is not that its government performs the will of the majority. We had that in 1930s Germany and in the South until the '60s. The first measure of a free society is that its government protects the just freedoms of its minorities. The majority is quite capable of protecting itself.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt.

People are divided into two groups--the righteous and the unrighteous--and the righteous do the dividing.

All animals are equal, though some animals are more equal than others.

The defect of equality is that we only desire it with our superiors.

I hated the army more than anything I've ever hated. I was continually shouted at by people who had no gift for conversation.

There's more showbusiness in that presidency than there is in mine.

Half of the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don't mean to do harm
But the harm does not interest them.

People will forget what you said,
people will forget what you did,
but they will never forget how you made them feel.

Man usually avoids attributing cleverness to somebody else -- unless it is an enemy.

I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.

(Source: “” Mailing List)

Any group of people who possess physical means for destruction and still preserve infantile standards of evaluation become a menace to the culture of the whole race.

Serious rational criticism is so rare that it should be encouraged. Being too ready to defend oneself is more dangerous than being too ready to admit a mistake.

The best way out is always through.

A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Let him that would move the world, first move himself.

If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.

Even if the vilest of creatures punched me on the face, I'd not retribute the offense, but would ask him to forgive me for having provoked him.

(Note: cited from memory; I have not been able to locate
the original citation. If you have it, or know where I can
get hold of it, I'd greatly appreciate your letting me know!)

If only the bad chaps knew how ideal it is
the good one feels as one does good,
there would be no one left in the world
who albeit being bad would manage to do harm.

God, what a world, if men in street and mart
Felt that same kinship of the human heart
Which makes them, in the face of flame and flood,
Rise to the meaning of true Brotherhood!

We need to open our hearts in a deep and compassionate way. We need to learn to look at others not with the feeling of "what can I get?" but "what can I learn? what can I understand?" instead.

Kindness may evoke, in return...
      - self-gratifying joy,
  from good we feel compassionately
  moved to offer;
      - deep long lasting joy,
  from unconditional assistance
  we are thoughtfully motivated to provide.

We make a living by what we earn, but we make a life by what we give.

Happiness is not so much in having or sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

The quality of your life is in direct proportion with the amount of uncertainty that you can live with.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Security begins as a state of mind.

Fidelity: a virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.

Mr. Play-it-safe died of old age.

Our laws and institutions must go hand in hand with progress of the human mind.

It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use and authority of reason as to administer medication to the dead.

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.

Lots of people want to ride with you in the limo, but what you want is someone who will take the bus with you when the limo breaks down.

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time.

Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.

The road to
a friend's house
is never long

Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow.
Don't walk behind me, I may not lead.
Just walk beside me and be my friend.

A friend is
someone with whom
I can think aloud.

A friend is a gift you give to yourself.

A friend hears the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.

The only way to have a friend
is to be one.

    A joy shared
is a joy made double;
    a problem shared
is a problem made half.

A problem is a chance for you to do your best.

I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all.

What's important is invisible to the eye.

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.

It is possible to abstract causal regularities and forces which act piecewise [...]. It is only when causality is pushed to the limit that it is discovered that the actual context in which events take place must extend indefinitely.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

All that is worth knowing can be learnt but not necessarily taught.

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Fortunately for many of us commonsense is not as intellectually challenging as
geometry or algebra.
Otherwise there would be a lot less people living in the world today.

In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

The most serious case of blindness is found with those who refuse to see.

In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has.

Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than by the arguments of its opponents

We all know objective truth is not obtainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some God-eye version of what really happened.

We see the world as we are, not as it is; because it is the 'I' behind the 'eye' that does the seeing..

Everything you can imagine is real.

Words are but pictures of our thoughts.

What is reality, anyway? Just a collective hunch.

Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

Reality is an illussion caused by lack of alcohol.

All things appear incredible to us in proportion as they differ from known customs.

Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the world.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

History is a lie nobody contests.

The world wants to be cheated. So cheat.

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

We are not retreating; we are advancing in another direction.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.

What concerns me is not the way things are, but rather the way people think things are.

All is in synchronism with You
A wise observer sees all things from a neutral point of View.

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.

No one is so eager to gain new experience as he who doesn’t know how to make use of the old ones.

Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.

Where is Life we lost in living,
   Where is the Wisdom we lost in knowledge
      Where is the Knowledge we lost in information?

The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will occur not because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

No! No different! Only different in your mind. You must unlearn what you have learned.

The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.

I went to the bank and asked to borrow a cup of money. They said, What for? I said, I'm going to buy some sugar.

Reading unlocks doors.

When things are no longer distinguished and flow one into the other, chains of causality are no longer appropriate.

Once you know that you know, you cannot make yourself believe that you do not know. That is the difference between Knowing and Believing.

What other people's beliefs are is their own business, until
they make it mine.

All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten.

True knowledge is when one knows the limitations of one's knowledge.

If you know, to recognize that you know;
If you don't know, to realize that you don't know:
That is knowledge.

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.

Knowledge is a queer asset. For if
it broadens our horizons when acquired,
it may also limit our horizons, once acquired.