Year 2003 Archive
Here we archive
"Here's A Thought" items from the year 2003.
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December 28, 2003
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.
December 21, 2003
If we only knew deeply, absolutely, that our smallest act, our smallest thought, has such far-reaching effects; setting forces in motion; reaching out to the galaxy; how carefully we would act and speak and think. How precious life would become in its integral oneness.
December 14, 2003
Half our mistakes in life arise from feeling where we ought to think and thinking where we ought to feel.
December 7, 2003
As men [and women] of various natures offer their devotion to Me in different ways, so do I variously respond, according to their heart's desire, their degree of understanding, and their manner of worship. All beings, regardless of their mode of seeking, wend their way to Me.
Bhagavad Gita,
IV.11
trans. Paramahansa Yogananda
November 30, 2003
I will not let anyone walk through my mind with their dirty feet.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
November 23, 2003
If a triangle could speak, it would say that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular.
November 16, 2003
There is no spoon.
The Matrix,
the movie
November 9, 2003
His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
November 2, 2003
All that is gold does not glitter; not all those that wander are lost.
J.R.R.
Tolkien
The Lord
of The Rings
October 26, 2003
When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.
October 19, 2003
My age is none of my business.
October 12, 2003
To have doubted one's own first principles is the mark of a civilized man.
October 5, 2003
The road uphill and the road downhill are one and the same.
September 28, 2003
Perfect love is rare indeed -- for to be a lover will require that you continually have the subtlety of the very wise, the flexibility of the child, the sensitivity of the artist, the understanding of the philosopher, the acceptance of the saint, the tolerance of the scholar and the fortitude of the certain.
September 21, 2003
If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.
September 14, 2003
It's like tonight. We'll go out with Tony and Bea and we'll argue about which restaurant to go to -- as if it was important -- and then we'll all be very clever, and have a lot of snappy answers, and then we'll discuss and compare the food we're eating and the food we've had this week and the food we're planning to eat and the movie reviews in the Times, and then we'll go home and everything will be the same as it was until the next time we meet to talk about restaurants and movies.
September 7, 2003
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the idea is quite staggering.
August 31, 2003
We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
August 24, 2003
God, to me, it seems, is a verb, not a noun, proper or improper.
August 17, 2003
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism.
August 10, 2003
Perplext in faith, but pure in deeds,
At least he beat his music out.
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds.
He fought his doubts and gather'd strength.
He would not make his judgment blind.
He faced the specters of the mind
And laid them; thus he came at length
To find a stronger faith his own,
And power was with him in the night,
Which makes the darkness and the light,
And dwells not in the light alone.
Alfred,
Lord Tennyson
In Memoriam
August 3, 2003
No one has ever become poor by giving.
July 27, 2003
Shall I not inform you of a better act than fasting, alms, and prayers? Making peace between one another. Enmity and malice tear up heavenly rewards by the roots.
July 20, 2003
No man is an Island, entire of itself,
every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were;
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind;
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
July 13, 2003
Simplicity doesn't mean to live in misery and poverty. You have what you need, and you don't want to have what you don't need.
July 6, 2003
Thou art all, everywhere, and in all, and this body which acts is Thy own body, just as is the visible universe in its entirety.
June 29, 2003
Realization
is seeing, not experiencing seeing,
hearing, not experiencing hearing,
being, not experiencing being.
TZF
June 22, 2003
How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.
June 15, 2003
Without these Truths, and the others that fill out the pattern of a man's [woman's] days, we are underfed weaklings, starving waifs, paralyzed in our living not only by lack of strength but even more by lack of light. To live, a man [woman] must move by the steps of his [her] heart; and how can he [she] move until he [she] can see and be drawn by the beauty of Goodness and Truth?
Thomas Aquinas
in "My Way of Life"
(The Summa Simplified)
June 8, 2003
Meditate.
Live purely.
Be quiet.
Do your work, with mastery.
Buddha
in "Teachings of Buddha"
(Shambhala)
June 1, 2003
It is easy enough to be friendly to one's friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
I don't know, and I can't find out.
TZF
May 18, 2003
I believe that the first test of a truly great man is his humility. I do not mean by humility, doubt of his own powers. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not in them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.
May 11, 2003
To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.
May 4, 2003
The more we live by our intellect,
the less we understand the meaning of life.
April 27, 2003
Keep on keeping on.
April 20, 2003
When you have to make a choice and don't make it, that is in itself a choice.
William James
April 13, 2003
Do you love me because I'm beautiful, or am I beautiful because you love me?
Oscar Hammerstein II
April 6, 2003
Use the difficulty.
Michael Caine
on "Parkinson" BBC
America
March 30, 2003
Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
March 23, 2003
Don't judge by appearances;
judge by what is right.
John 7:24
March 16, 2003
O, God, protect me, Thy sea is so great, and my
boat is so small.
Protogez moi, mon Seigneur, ma barque est si petite, et votre mer est si grande.
Breton Sailor's Prayer
March 9, 2003
The spirituality we've inherited from patriarchy is laced with a denial of the natural. Patriarchal spirituality becomes a flight from earth, flesh, temporality, and the present. But Sacred Feminine consciousness seizes us by the shoulders, looks in our eyes, and tells us with passion and simplicity: If you don't get anything else, get this. This is your life, right now, on this changing earth, in this impermanent body, among these excruciatingly ordinary things. This is it. You will not find it anywhere else.
Sue Monk Kidd
The
Dance of The Dissident Daughter
March 2, 2003
We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them.
Kahlil Gibran
February 23, 2003
Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.
Rabindranath Tagore
February 16, 2003
If I am not for myself, who will be?
If I am not for others, what am I?
And if not now, when?
February 9, 2003
It's a poor sort of memory that only works backward.
February 2, 2003
Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.
January 26, 2003
In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
January 19, 2003
No man is useless who has a friend, and if we are loved we are indispensable.
January 12, 2003
Our journey, the journey of the soul, is through different regions of thought, and to each its own vocabulary. As soon as we hear a new vocabulary from our own, at once we exaggerate the alarming differences, -- account the man [woman] suspicious, a thief, a pagan, and set no bounds to our disgust or hatred, and, late in life, perhaps too late, we find he [she] was loving and hating, doing and thinking the same things as we, under his [her] own vocabulary.
January 5, 2003
The spiritual process is about merging the illusion that I am some body (and that you are some body else) into the reality that God is all there is.
