You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration.
~ James Allen
Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success, all material gain, all great discoveries and inventions, and of all achievement.
~ Claude M. Bristol
Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success.
~ Joyce Brothers
A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror.
~ Ken Keyes
When you believe and think “I can,” you activate your motivation, commitment, confidence, concentration and excitement – all of which relate directly to achievement.
~ Jerry Lynch
Every thought is a seed. If you plant crab apples, don’t count on harvesting golden delicious.
~ Bill Meyer
Change your thoughts and you change your world.
~ Norman Vincent Peale
It’s our attitude in life that determines life’s attitude toward us.”
~ Earl Nightingale
You are the way you are because that’s the way you want to be. If you really wanted to be any different, you would be in the process of changing right now.
~ Fred Smith
The more positive you are when you think and work toward your goals, the faster you achieve them.
~ Brian Tracy
* * * * *
If you think you are beaten, you are:
If you think you dare not, you don’t.
If, you like to win but think you can’t
It’s almost a cinch you won’t.
If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost:
For out in the world we find
Success begins with a fellow’s will:
It’s all in the state of mind.
If you think you are outclassed, you are:
You’ve got to think high to rise,
You’ve got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize.
Life’s battles don’t always go
To the stronger or faster man;
But soon or late the man who wins
Is the man who thinks he can.
~ Anonymous
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God cursed the snake, but it finds sustenance everywhere. God cursed the woman, but all men pursue her.
~ Talmud, Yoma, 75
Adams owed more to the American woman than to all the American men he ever heard of, and felt not the smallest call to defend his sex who seemed able to take care of themselves; but from the point of view of sex he flt much curiosity to know how far the woman was right, and, in pursuing this inquiry, he caught the trick of affirming that the woman was the superior. Apart from truth, he owed her at least that compliment.
~ Henry Adams in The Education of Henry Adams
Woman is the chain by which man is attached to the chariot of folly.
~ Bharitihari, in The Sringa Satak
Nothing enchants the soul so much as young women. They alone are the cause of evil and there is no other.
~ Bharitihari, in The Sringa Satak
Suffer women once to arrive at an equality with you, and they will from that moment become your superiors.
~ Marcus Porcius Cato
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
~ Scott Adams
A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
~ Theodore Adorno
It is curious that money, which is the most valuable thing in life, excepis excipiendis, should be the most fatal corrupter of music, literature, painting and all the arts. As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.
~ Samuel Butler
Nature is the Art of God.
~ Dante Alighieri in Monarchy
Art is a quest for the useless.
~ Gustave Flaubert
Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
~ Rollo May
But then no artist is normal; if he were, he wouldn’t be an artist. Normal men don’t create works of art. They eat, sleep, hold down routine jobs, and die. You are hypersensitive to life and nature; that’s why you are able to interpret for the rest of us. But if you are not careful, that very hypersensitiveness will lead you to your destruction. The strain of it breaks every artist in time.
~ Irving Stone, in Lust for Life
Art is not pleasure, or an amusement; art is a great matter.
~ Leo Tolstoy, in What Is Art?
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No man is religiously neutral in his knowledge of and his appropriation of reality.
~ Henry Zylstra, in Testament of Vision, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981, page 148
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Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better.
Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.
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That we do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
~ in Collected Essays
Under favorable conditions, practically everybody can be converted to practically anything.
~ in Brave New World Revisited
Chastity–the most unnatural of the sexual perversions.
~ in Eyeless in Gaza
Death … It’s the only thing we haven’t succeeded in completely vulgarizing.
~ in Eyeless in Gaza
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
~ in Music at Night
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
~ in Proper Studies
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.
~ in Texts and Pretexts
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
~ in Vedanta for the Western World
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political ideas.
Experience teaches only the teachable.
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.
A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention.
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
A fanatic is a man who consciously over compensates a secret doubt.
A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will’s freedom after it.
All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.
Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.
Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.
Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
Dream in a pragmatic way.
Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
Every man’s memory is his private literature.
Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
God isn’t compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.
Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
I can sympathize with people’s pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.
I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.
It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.’
It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.
It was one of those evenings when men feel that truth, goodness and beauty are one. In the morning, when they commit their discovery to paper, when others read it written there, it looks wholly ridiculous.
It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.
Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors.
Man is an intelligence, not served by, but in servitude to his organs.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.
Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself thinking.
My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.
My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.
Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.
One of the great attractions of patriotism – it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what’s more, with a feeling that we are profoundly virtuous.
Orthodoxy is the diehard of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget.
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.
Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?
Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them.
Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.
Several excuses are always less convincing than one.
So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.
Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
Specialized meaninglessness has come to be regarded, in certain circles, as a kind of hallmark of true science.
Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent.
That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.
The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.
The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love – almost as violent and much more mischievous.
The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.
The most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong. The next most distressing thing is to be proved right.
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
The proper study of mankind is books.
The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar… Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
There isn’t any formula or method. You learn to love by loving – by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.
There’s only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.
Those who believe that they are exclusively in the right are generally those who achieve something.
Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.
To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Uncontrolled, the hunger and thirst after God may become an obstacle, cutting off the soul from what it desires. If a man would travel far along the mystic road, he must learn to desire God intensely but in stillness, passively and yet with all his heart and mind and strength.
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look.
What is absurd and monstrous about war is that men who have no personal quarrel should be trained to murder one another in cold blood.
What we feel and think and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and viscera.
What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes – ah, they have all the necessary leisure.
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.
You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It’s one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.
Beauty for some provides escape, who gain a happiness in eying the gorgeous buttocks of the ape or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying.
The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.
Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?
Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful.
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Bibliography
The Burning Wheel (1916)
Jonah (1917)
The Defeat of Youth (1918)
Leda (1920)
Limbo (1920)
Crome Yellow (1921)
Mortal Coils (1922)
Antic Hay (1923)
On the Margin (1923)
Little Mexican / Young Archimedes (1924)
Those Barren Leaves (1925)
Along The Road (1925)
Essays New and Old (1926)
Two or Three Graces (1926)
Proper Studies (1927)
Jesting Pilate (1926)
Point Counter Point (1928)
Do What You Will (1929)
Arabia Infelix (1929)
Brief Candles (1930)
Vulgarity in Literature (1930)
The Cicadas (1931)
Music at Night (1931)
Brave New World (1932)
Texts and Pretexts (1932)
Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934)
Eyeless in Gaza
(1936)
The Olive Tree (1936)
Ends and Means (1937)
Jacob’s Hands; A Fable
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939)
Words and their Meanings (1940)
Grey Eminence (1941)
The Art of Seeing (1942)
Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
Science, Liberty and Peace (1946)
Ape and Essence (1948)
Themes and Variations (1950)
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1952)
The Devils of Loudun (1953)
The Doors of Perception (1954)
The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
Heaven and Hell (1956)
Adonis and the Alphabet (1956)
Collected Short Stories (1957)
Collected Essays
(1958)
Brave New World Revisited
Island (1962)
Literature and Science (1963)
The Crows of Pearblossom (1967)
The Travails and Tribulations of Geoffrey Peacock (1967)
Moksha: Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (1977)
The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959 (1977)
First Philosopher’s Song
Mortal Coils – A Play
The World of Light
The Discovery, Adapted from Francis Sheridan
Selected Letters (2007)
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Related Content
Reason is a light that God has kindled in the soul.
~ Aristotle
No one indeed believes anything unless he has first thought that it it to be believed.
~ Augustine of Hippo
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith; they keep faith alive and moving.
~ Frederick Buechner
A comprehended God is no God.
~ Dio Chrysostom
If reason be a gift of Heaven, and we can say as much of faith, Heaven has certainly made us two gifts not only incompatible, but in direct contradiction to each other. In order to solve the difficulty, we are compelled to say either that faith is a chimera or that reason is useless.
~ Denis Diderot, in A Philosophical Conversation
Reason is our Soules left hand, Faith is her right, …
~ John Donne
Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of awesome mystical power. We know this because hey manage to be invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions; the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can’t see them.
~ Steve Eley
The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.
~ T.S. Eliot, in his Introduction to Pascal’s Pensees
I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.
~ Galileo Galilei
Proof is only applicable to very rarefied areas of philosophy and mathematics…. For the most part we are driven to acting on good evidence, without the luxury of proof. There is good evidence of the link between cause and effect. There is good evidence that the sun will rise tomorrow. There is good reason to believe my mother loves me and is not just fattening me up for the moment when she will pop arsenic into my tea. And there is good reason to believe in God. Very good reason. Not conclusive proof, but very good reason just the same…. I believe it is much harder to reject the existence of a supreme being than accept it.
~ Michael Green, in Faith for the Non-religious
Some things have to be believed to be seen.
~ Ralph Hodgson
A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.
~ David Hume, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Concerning Human Understanding
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
~ Robert Jastrow, in God and the Astronomer
The more we know of God, the more unreservedly we will trust Him; the greater our progress in theology, the simpler and more childlike will be our faith.
~ J. Gresham Machen
Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration—courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and above all, love of the truth.
~ H. L. Menken
The faith that does not come from reason is to be doubted, and the reason that does not lead to faith is to be feared,
~ G. Campbell Morgan
Faith is reason at rest in God.
~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon
God cannot be understood by logical reasoning but only by submission.
~ Leo Tolstoy, in Wise Thoughts for Every Day
It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being. Religion is a necessary to reason, as reason is to religion.
~ George Washington
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Books on Faith & Reason
On the whole, the New Testament seemed, if not hostile, yet unmistakably cold to culture. I think we can still believe culture to be innocent after we have read the New Testament; I cannot see that we are encouraged to think it important.
~ C. S. Lewis, in Christian Reflections
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1. This image is just to warm-up with. Spot a problem?
2. Follow the instructions engraved on the image.
3. Are the purple lines straight or bent?
4. What do you see? Look again . . .
5. Do you see gray squares in between the lines? Now where did they come from?
6. Take a look at the following picture. It is not animated. Your eyes are making it move. To test this, stare at one spot for a couple seconds and everything will stop moving. Or look at the black center of each circle and it will stop moving. But move your eyes to the next black center and the previous will move after you take your eyes away from it…. Weird
Civilization built upon civilization. Layers upon layers of the remains of people. Why is it that throughout history people have continued to inhabit the same geographic spaces? An earthquake destroys a city and the city is rebuilt. A neighboring tribe tears down protective walls and burns the homes, and the walls and homes are reconstructed. Certainly some causality can be ascribed to the fact that cities tend to be built in locations conducive to survival — near water, strategically elevated, etc. However, a large part of the answer has to do with the fact that “there is no place like home.”
I moved away from Northeastern Oklahoma twenty-five years ago. But it is still home. When I make the trip back to be with family and friends I can physically feel the tension release its hold on my body as I enter the familiar spaces of my childhood. In the last year I lost my mother and oldest brother to death. My father’s mental condition has deteriorated to the point that when I talk with him on the phone I am not sure that he knows who I am. Even as I write these words the cherished possessions of my parents are being prepared for an estate sale and my childhood home is being sold. The school from which I graduated has closed and the city of my youth has been all but wiped from the face of the earth due to a tornado and environmental pollution. My childhood friends have scattered to distant locations; Houston, Dallas, Kansas City, and beyond. And yet, it is the place that I still think of as “home”.
Why? Why are people so inextricably tied to their place of birth?
The rabbis said that God gives grace to a place in the eyes of its inhabitants. Consider the following story drawn from the Talmud;
A Sophist said to the Emperor Diocletian that no man could be happy except in the place of birth; the same is true, he said, of animals. To substantiate his words, he sent marked stags to Phrygia, and after a few years they returned.
Rabbi Simeon ben Kakish was studying on a porch in Tiberias and he heard two women passers-by say: “How happy we are to leave this accursed climate.” Interested, he asked them whence they had come and whither they were going. “We came from Mazega and we are returning,” they said. Rabbi Simeon turned to his Disciples and remarked: “I was once in Mazega and found the climate there abominable. Yet the natives are convinced it is the very best of places. Blessed is God who giveth grace to a place in the eyes of its inhabitants.”
(Bereshit Rabbah, 34)
