posted November 17, 2006 10:46 AM         

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

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Beauty is not in the face, beauty is a light in the heart. - Kahlil Gibran

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If I know what love is, it is because of you. - Herman Hesse

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I believe that if I should die, and you were to walk near my grave, from the very depths of the earth I would hear your footsteps. - Benito Perez Galdos

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The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.

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When I first saw you I fell in love with you and you smiled because you knew.

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It's tough to walk away from something you love, but sometimes it's the only way.

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Look like an innocent flower, but be the serpent under it.

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Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.

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If you avoid pain, you avoid happiness.

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At the beginning and the end of love, the two lovers are embarassed to find themselves alone. - La Bruyere

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Oh, love is real enough, you will find it someday, but it has one archenemy, and that is life. - Jean Anouilh

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The bitterest thing in our today's sorrow is the memory of our yesterday's joy.

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And there's an empty room in my heart I'll keep here. And your memory will always be safe here. One dream I will never sell. But this time around, my friend, I wish you well. - Mary Karlzen

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When a man has once loved a woman he will do anything for her except continue to love her. - Oscar Wilde

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How lucky I am to have known someone who was so hard to say goodbye to.

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I always knew I'd look back at the tears and laugh, but I never thought that I'd look back at the laughs and cry.

posted November 17, 2006 11:15 PM         

quote:

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If you avoid pain, you avoid happiness.

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posted November 18, 2006 01:38 AM         

quote:

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I believe that if I should die, and you were to walk near my grave, from the very depths of the earth I would hear your footsteps. - Benito Perez Galdos

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posted November 18, 2006 04:17 AM         

quote:

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If I know what love is, it is because of you. - Herman Hesse

How lucky I am to have known someone who was so hard to say goodbye to.
...

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posted November 18, 2006 11:31 AM         

My friends, how desperately do we need to be loved and to love. When Christ said that man does not live by bread alone, he spoke of a hunger. This hunger was not the hunger of the body. It was not the hunger for bread. He spoke of a hunger that begins deep down in the very depths of our being. He spoke of a need as vital as breath. He spoke of our hunger for love.
Love is something you and i must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. We must have it because without it we become weak and faint. Without love our self-esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love we can no longer look out confidently at the world. We turn inward and begin to feed upon our own personalities, and little by little we destroy ourselves.
With it we are creative. With it we march tirelessly. With it, and with it alone, we are able to sacrifice for others.
- Chief Dan George

'Would you know your Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well. Love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Keep yourself therein and you shall know and understand more in the same. But you shall never know nor understand any other thing, forever.'
- Julian of Norwich

Here the ways of men part: If your desire is for happiness and peace of mind, believe; if you wish to know the truth, inquire. - Friedrich Nietzsche

The majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but, rather, to assure themselves that the life which they are living, and which is both habitual and agreeable to them, is the one that coincides with the truth. - Leo Tolstoy

As long as your desire is pleasure, and you cherish your desire, carry on playing like a child; you are not man enough for this. - Hakim Sanai

Ignorance is bliss. - Source Unknown

Consciousness is unrest. Arthur Schopenhauer

He who increaseth wisdom increaseth sorrow. - Ecclesiastes

Sorrow is knowledge, those that know the most must mourn the deepest; the tree of knowledge is not the tree of life. - Lord Byron

Does wisdom perhaps appear on the earth as a raven inspired by the smell of carrion? - Friedrich Nietzsche

Realists do not fear the results of their study. - Fyodor Dostoievsky

Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. - Andre Gide

One cannot reach the dawn except by the path of night. - Kahlil Gibran

The sage awakes to light in the night of all creatures. That which the world calls day is the night of ignorance to the wise. - The Bhagavad-Gita

Where there is suffering there is holy ground. - Oscar Wilde

Have pity on me; for the hand of God hath touched me. - Job

Suffering is the ancient law of love; there is no quest without pain; there is no lover who is not also a martyr. - Heinrich Suso

I found it hard. It's hard to find. Oh well, whatever, nevermind. - Kurt Cobain

Desperation is sometimes as powerful an inspirer as genius. - Benjamin Disraeli

What keeps most people from suffering very much is lack of imagination.... Everything great that we know has come from neurotics. It is they and only they who have founded religions and created great works of art. Never will the world be aware of how much it owes to them, nor, above all, how much they have sufferred in order to bestow their gifts upon it."
- Marcel Proust

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. - Virginia Woolf

Of all that is written, I love only what a person has written with his own blood - Friedrich Nietzsche

Nature shows that with the growth of intelligence comes increased capacity for pain, and it is only with the highest degree of intelligence that suffering reaches its supreme point. - Arthur Schopenhauer

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

I wish I was like you; easily amused. - Kurt Cobain

If any man come to me, and hate not his own life, he cannot be my disciple. Jesus of Nazareth

In the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one's interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn't a single morbid fibre in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors?
If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity. - William James

Yes, I have an ulcer! Of course, I have an ulcer! This is Kali Yuga, buddy. The Iron Age. Anybody without an ulcer by the age of sixteen is a ******* spy! - Zooey Glass (J.D. Salinger)

I want to love first, and live incidentally. - Zelda Fitzgerald

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. - Aldous Huxley

Much madness is divinest sense, to a discerning eye; much sense, the starkest madness. 'Tis the majority in this, as in all, prevails - assent and you are sane; demur, you're straightway dangerous and handled with a chain. - Emily Dickenson

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials. - Mark Twain

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. - Edgar Allen Poe

Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. - Solomon

There is no coming to consciousness without pain. - Carl Jung

We need very strong ears to hear ourselves judged frankly. - Michel de Montaigne

What good is a philosopher who offends no one? - Diogenes of Sinope

They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth. - Plato

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. - Lao Tzu

Be good and you will be lonely. - Mark Twain

[Despair] is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation. - Graham Greene

One may smile, and smile, and be a villain. - Shakespeare (Hamlet)

He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. - Samuel Johnson

We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity. - Albert Camus

Some amount of suffering is always necessary. A ship without ballast cannot go straight. - Arthur Schopenhauer

A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes, but to get into accord with them; they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world. - Sigmund Freud

Sorrow is better than laughter, for by the sadness of the face the heart is made better. - The Holy Bible

Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts; not amid joy. - Felicia D. Hemens

Great men have always been of a nature originally melancholy. - Aristotle

Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. - John Donne

The innocence that comes from a deep experience of life is childlike, but not childish. The innocence of children is beautiful, but ignorant. It will be replaced by mistrust and doubt as the child grows and learns that the world can be a dangerous and threatening place. But the innocence of a life lived fully has a quality of wisdom and acceptance of the ever-changing wonder of life. - Osho

Every angel is terrifying. - Rainer Maria Rilke

When I die
I will fly with angels.
And when I die to the angels,
What I shall become,
You cannot imagine.

--Rumi

posted November 18, 2006 11:36 AM         

Great thoughts are doorways onto otherworldy vistas.

"All is One,"...
There is nothing else worth knowing and understanding.
The rest are details, for the tourists!

Truth is context.

Nothing teaches, and nothing prejudices, like experience.

Silence is the wisdom of the foolish,
and the folly of the wise.

The words of a wise man never reach the ears of a fool.

Hatred of evil is the craftiest and least well-known of vices, so easily is it mistaken for love of good.

Judgement is the antithesis of understanding.

It is superfluous to judge a man if he is guilty in his own eyes, and ridiculous if he is not.

Crime may make a man a criminal, but only conscience can make him guilty.

If a man is unfit to judge himself, who is fit to judge him?

I will surely take responsibility for myself, but who will take responsibility for ME?

In order to know him, it is not enough to walk a mile or two in a man's shoes. One does not come to understand the nature of drunkenness after a single drink.

Humility works hard to satisfy its pride.

Patience isn't waiting for something.

Good men find their greatest pleasure in being virtuous,
while the rest of us find great pleasure a virtue.

Some people take the hint, and some people take the hit.

The tragedy of human existence is not that things change, but, that they change before we have an opportunity to get sick of them, and refuse to change long after we have.

Hope is always disappointed, but never disappointing.

Cause IS Correspondence.

Will is desire unimpeded;
where there's a way, there's a will.

Ignorance does not create error; error reveals ignorance. It is the same with a man and his actions; he does not create them, but they reveal him.

The miracle is not that God became a man (that happens every day), but, that a man became God; something far more rare.

To turn the other cheek is just to look the other way, but trading blow for blow is the worst kind of hypocrisy.

Who said, "There are no contradictions,"? He only spoke half-truths.

Every word is an abstraction.

All things are needful.
Words find the ears for them.

Only the inevitable is ever truly possible.

Some speak boldly for action,
and say "nothing comes from inaction".
But action comes from inaction,
and who can draw that thick grey line
where inaction ends and action begins?

What changes we've seen in a sudden instant
were prepared for ages underground.

The Sun is a brilliant light,
But light must be carried underground.
And only a candle can serve.

Have you been blinded in the darkest depths?
You will be blinded in the light, as well.
Look around you now.

Good men are not free to do evil,
and evil men are not free to do good;
A warm heart cannot fail to give warmth,
nor a cold heart chills.

To know the good is to will the good.

The moral sense is strong in some and weak in others. But, even in this, the strong still persecute the weak.

Fight to win the argument, and you will surely lose the peace.

We tend to lose sympathy for a person to the extent that their suffering, having quite overwhelmed them, begins to affect ourselves.

We generally reproach a man for the immodesty of his suffering when it is ourselves who will not bear so much as the suggestion of it.

There is a season to give,
and a season to receive...
Trying to cry on each other's shoulders,
you only end up butting heads.

Some resist the will of God, and some accept it, - but all obey.

Who is more unreasonable: The man who possesses no respect for human life, or the man who expects it of him?

A man who has never known great or prolonged suffering has no real claim upon his happiness. Who is to say it will not abandon him at the first scent of trouble? We are tried by suffering, baptized or burnt, and it is only having passed through its flames that we come to know what we are made of.

Equanimity, in itself, is not a virtue; more often it is the result of weak passions than strong wills. Only strong passions can give birth to strong wills.

The key to happiness?:
Demand nothing of yourself and settle for anything.

When we need a reason to forgive, a reason can always be found. The trick is not needing one.

Self-contempt is the highest form of pride.

Whether confident or insecure, self-rapport is the same in every man. The self to which we remain attached is always the self that detaches, and never the self from which it is detached.

The horizon recedes on the crest of an eternal dusk.

The beautiful is a stain on the sublime.

If suicide is cowardly, how much more so is the fear of death?

If a man is not slightly crazy, he is completely mad.

Christ said:
"I did not come for the righteous,
but to bring sinners to repentance;
For the well need not a physician, but them that are sick."
Still, people await the second coming, thinking that the righteous shall be delivered.
But the righteous (if indeed they are such) already have their reward.
It is the "sinners" who must be delivered!

Flesh is not merely the corruption of Spirit,
it is also the Divine Manifestation;
the Fall is also the Incarnation.
Herein lies distilled the mystery and essence of the Christian cosmo-conception.