James Frey, 2003
The Tao:
Live and let live. Do not judge.
Take it as it comes. Deal with it.
Everything will be okay. pg 180
from What Men Live By
Leo Tolstoy,
[short story about angel God sent to earth to learn three lessons.]
first lesson, What is given to men?
Then I knew that love has been given to men, to dwell in their hearts.
second lesson, What is not given to men? It is not given to men to know their own needs.
third lesson, What men live by:
I learnt that man does not live by care for himself, but by love for others.
God wishes men to live together united, and therefore has revealed to them that they are needful to each other’s happiness. pgs 54-57
from Letters and Papers from Prison
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1953
Later I discovered and am still discovering up to this very moment that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe…..How can success make us arrogant or failure lead us astray, when we participate in the sufferings of God by living in this world.”
written July 21, 1944.
[On April 9, 1945, Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis at Flossenbürg, Germany.]
from Sartor Resartus, “Everlasting Yea”
Thomas Carlyle, 1833
‘Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except by Action.’ On which ground, too, let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this other precept well to heart, which to me was of invaluable service: ‘Do the Duty which lies nearest thee, which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.’
[two quotes from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, 1795]
from Issa:
Oh snail,
Climb Mount Fujii
But slowly, slowly
some quotes from Epictitus:
Difficulties are things that show
what men are.
Whatever you would make habitual, practice it.
And if any is unhappy,
remember that he is for himself;
for God made all men to enjoy felicity and peace.
from Abraham Lincoln:
Determine that the thing can and shall be done and then find the way.
unknown:
One ship sails west, another east, by the selfsame winds that blow.
‘Tis the set of the sail and not the gale that determines the way she’ll go.
Admiral Jacoby:
All Blow, no go.
A man’s desk is like his mind.
Do it now.
from Cell 202 Sing Sing
quoting Captain Pete:
“Everywhere I found men and women searching for something they knew not what, struggling for life and with life. They were chained and shackled to unmeaning traditions. Chains and shackles that mutilated them and narrowed their horizons.
“You will find as I have found that freedom should not be measured by physical standards. Freedom is vision. The man whose mind can reach out beyond self, that man will never feel the pinch of an iron bracelet; walls will crumble before him.”
from Markings
Dag Hammarskjőld
Not to brood over my pettiness with masochistic self disgust, not to take a pride in admitting it – but to recognize it as a threat to my integrity of action the moment I let it out of my sight.
He broke fresh ground – because, and only because, he had the courage to go ahead without asking whether others were following or even understood.
A closed mind is a weakness, and he who approaches persons or painting or poetry without the youthful ambition to learn a new language and so gain access to someone else’s perspective on life, let him beware.
Henri David Thoreau's Walden (especially the Introduction and Conclusion)
from Henri David Thoreau’s Walden
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