Year 2009 Archive
Here we archive
"Here's A Thought" items from the year 2009.
To return to the current year, click here.
Addional years' archives are also accessible from the
same page.
December 27, 2009
Do not bite at the bait of pleasure till you know there is no hook beneath it.
December 20, 2009
Life is a jest, and all things show it,
I thought so once, and now I know it.
December 13, 2009
What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.
December 6, 2009
Do not take as truth what men say, but know the truth, and then judge men by what they say about about it. Then you will know who is truthful.
Imam Ali
quoted in The Other Islam by Stephen Schwartz
November 29, 2009
Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.
November 22, 2009
Nature never duplicates a path. Listen to the wisdom of men like Christ, then make your own footprints. That is precisely what every authentic teacher urges.
November 15, 2009
Nothing is more humbling than to look with a strong magnifying glass at an insect so tiny that the naked eye sees only the barest speck and to discover that nevertheless it is sculpted and articulated and striped with the same care and imagination as a zebra. Apparently it does not occur to nature whether or not a creature is within our range of vision, and the suspicion arises that even the zebra was not designed for our benefit.
November 8, 2009
Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?
Chico Marx
in the movie Duck Soup
November 1, 2009
Buddha is not a man, but a state. I have found the way. Enter, all of you.
Vivekananda
in The Yogas & Other Works
October 25, 2009
Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
October 18, 2009
Wine is sunlight held together by water.
October 11, 2009
Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.
October 4, 2009
If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.
September 27, 2009
Our creator is the same and never changes despite the names given him by people here and in all parts of the world.
September 20, 2009
Look for Buddha outside your mind,
and Buddha becomes the devil.
Dogen Zenji
quoted in Zen Wisdom
September 13, 2009
What is most contrary to salvation is not sin but habit.
September 6, 2009
There is a very good saying that if triangles
invented a god,
they would make him three-sided.
August 30, 2009
There is no solution, for there is no problem.
August 23, 2009
There is God. There is only God. All there is,
is God.
Father is God. Jahweh is God. Allah is God. Brahman is God. Buddha Nature is
God. Christ Consciousness is God.
"I don't know" is God.
"There is no god" is God.
TZF
August 16, 2009
Doubt everything at least once, even the proposition that two times two equals four.
August 9, 2009
Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.
August 2, 2009
There was a time when I too would meditate on God with my eyes closed. Then I said to myself: “Does God exist only when I think of Him with my eyes closed? Doesn’t He exist when I look around with my eyes open?” Now, when I look around with my eyes open, I see that God dwells in all beings. He is the Indwelling Spirit of all — men, animals, and other living beings, trees and plants, sun and moon, land and water.
July 26, 2009
Prayer is not an old woman's idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.
If your drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
Original German: Ist dir Trinken bitter, werde Wein.
Rainer
Maria Rilke
in Sonnets
To Orpheus.
Here translated by a member of TZF's
Open Forum
July 12, 2009
To be nobody but myself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
We do not have the "originals" of any of the books that came to be included in the New Testament, or indeed of any Christian book from antiquity. What we have are copies of the originals or, to be more accurate, copies made from copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. Most of these surviving copies are hundreds of years removed from the originals themselves.
Bart D.
Ehrman
in Lost Christianities
June 28, 2009
The world is a story we tell ourselves about the world.
June 21, 2009
In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.
June 14, 2009
Wherever I go, there he is.
He is no other than my self, but I am not him.
Dosan
in Zen
Wisdom
June 7, 2009
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
May 31, 2009
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
May 24, 2009
Holy ground is not a place of pilgrrimage; it is where you are when God finds you.
May 17, 2009
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.
May 10, 2009
There is no disguise that can for long conceal love where it exists or simulate it where it does not.
May 3, 2009
I like my life on this unexplored shore. It’s new, exciting and full of possibilities.
William
Lobdell
in Losing
My Religion
April 26, 2009
We either make ourselves happy or miserable. The amount of work is the same.
April 19, 2009
In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.
April 12, 2009
Our very eyes are sometimes like our judgments, blind.
William
Shakespeare
in Cymbeline,
Act IV, Scene ii.
April 5, 2009
Wonder at the things that are before you,
making this the first step to further knowledge.
Gospel
According to Matthias
reported by Clement of
Alexandria
quoted in Lost
Christianities
March 29, 2009
Know the difference between the color of the wine and the color of the glass.
Jalaluddin Rumi
in The Sufis by Idries Shah
March 22, 2009
Some of the worst things in my life never happened.
March 15, 2009
It is vital to challenge ourselves over the spiritual ideas we entertain, or they too can settle down to an unproductive rigidity. What’s needed is a jolt, a challenge, and not a comfortable acceptance of an idea that seems to have a cozy place in our current thought structure.
Tom Russell
in Super Wisdom eZine
March 8, 2009
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
March 1, 2009
The very purpose of religion is to control yourself, not to criticize others. Rather, we must criticize ourselves. How much am I doing about my anger? About my attachment, about my hatred, about my pride, my jealousy? These are the things which we must check in daily life.
February 22, 2009
We hate some persons because we do not know them; and we will not know them because we hate them.
February 15, 2009
You should know that the masters of insight never see a thing without seeing God along with it.
Al-Ghazali
in The
Niche of Lights
February 8, 2009
The knowledge of the other world can be obtained only by losing some of that intelligence which is necessary for this world.
Immanuel
Kant
in Dreams
of A Spirit-Seer …
February 1, 2009
If you believe in it, it is a religion or perhaps "the" religion; and if you do not care one way or another about it, it is a sect; but if you fear and hate it, it is a cult.
January 25, 2009
Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.
January 18, 2009
I see that sensible men and conscientious men
all over the world were of one religion,
— the religion of well-doing and daring, men of sturdy truth, men of integrity
and feeling for others.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
January 11, 2009
I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or non-believer, or as anything else you choose. We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might some day force theirs on us.
January 4, 2009
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart.
