The Zoo Fence

Here's A Thought!

Year 2013 Archive

Can I go home, please!
The Way Home

Here we archive “Here’s A Thought” items from the year 2013.
To return to the current year, click here.
Addional years’ archives are also accessible from the same page.

December 29, 2013

I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life.

Pope Francis
quoted in The New Yorker, December 23 & 30, 2013

December 22, 2013

A Christmas Poem

I opened my heart
in search of food –
and found a feast of gratitude.
It felt like a sea of liquid prayer,
And in its midst –
I saw you there.

Elsa Joy Bailey

December 15, 2013

Dare to know.
Sapere aude.

Immanuel Kant

December 8, 2013

It is not life and wealth and power that enslave men,
but the cleaving to life and wealth and power.

Buddha

December 1, 2013

The mind can prove as true anything it wants to believe, as false anything it doesn’t like.
Thus, of what use to a seeker is the mind’s proof?

SCN

November 24, 2013

God bless the whole world.
Without exception.

Bumper sticker seen in Bangor, Maine

November 17, 2013

As long as I continue to take myself seriously, how can I consider myself a saint? How can I consider myself a contemplative? For the self I bother about does not really exist, never will, never did – except in my own imagination.

Thomas Merton

November 10, 2013

Knowing others is wisdom
Knowing the self is enlightenment.
Mastering others requires force;
Mastering the self needs strength.

He who knows he has enough is rich.
Perseverance is a sign of will power.
He who stays where he is endures.
To die but not to perish is to be eternally present.

Tao Te Ching, 33
trans. Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English

November 3, 2013

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

October 27, 2013

I must entreat thee further to explain
Why copy from its pattern goes awry,
For on my own I ponder it in vain.

udir convienmi ancor come l’essemplo
e l’essemplare non vanno d’un modo,
ché io per me indarno a ciò contemplo

Dante Alighieri
Paradiso 28:55-57
trans. Dorothy L Sayers & Barbara Reynolds

October 20, 2013

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

Friedrich Nietzsche

October 13, 2013

When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery. He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.

Thornton Wilder

October 6, 2013

Don’t try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist; use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are.

Dalai Lama

September 29, 2013

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Henry David Thoreau

September 22, 2013

I never found out much listening to myself.

In the movie Out Of The Past

September 15, 2013

A rule of thumb: If you come across a form of address for God that makes you uncomfortable, it is probably time to adopt it.

SCN

September 8, 2013

One religion is as true as another.

Robert Burton
in Anatomy of Melancholy

September 1, 2013

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical questions – are like that.

C. S. Lewis
quoted in C. S. Lewis, A Biography by A. N. Wilson

August 25, 2013

“If I Am Infinite, who are you?”

The Sacred Riddle

August 18, 2013

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.

Richard Buckminster Fuller

August 11, 2013

Jesus said, “Love your enemies.” Why should we? Because our enemies – those people and those things to which we attach the label “enemy” – are indicators to us of what cleansing work we still need to do on ourselves. As the cartoon character Pogo used to say, “I have met the enemy, and he is us.” If you and I wish to have peaceful lives, we must make peace with ourselves within ourselves.

SCN

August 4, 2013

Gratitude helps you to grow and expand; gratitude brings joy and laughter into your life and into the lives of all those around you.

Eileen Caddy

July 28, 2013

Don’t believe everything you think.

Bumper sticker seen in Belfast, Maine

July 21, 2013

Consciousness is the Self of which everyone is aware. No one is ever away from the Self, and therefore everyone is in fact Self-realized; only – and this is the great mystery – people do not know this, and want to realize the Self. Realization consists only in getting rid of the false idea that one is not realized. It is not anything new to be acquired. It must already exist or it would not be eternal, and only what is eternal is worth striving for.

Sri Ramana Maharshi
in The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi

July 14, 2013

What we are has no name.

SCN

July 7, 2013

In his will is our peace.
E 'n la sua volontade è nostra pace.

Dante Alighieri
Divine Comedy: Paradiso III.85
quoted in Dante In Love

June 30, 2013

The resting place of the mind is the heart. The only thing the mind hears all day is clanging bells and noise and argument, and all it wants is quietude. The only place the mind will ever find peace is inside the silence of the heart. That’s where you need to go.

Elizabeth Gilbert

June 23, 2013

All paths lead nowhere. So choose a path that has heart.

Movie Backwards

June 16, 2013

Crying is one of the highest devotional songs. One who knows crying, knows spiritual practice. If you can cry with a pure heart, nothing else compares to such a prayer. Crying includes all the principles of Yoga.

Kripalvanandji

June 9, 2013

The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.

Rob Bell

June 2, 2013

If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

Albert Einstein

May 26, 2013

When you have completed ninety-five percent of your journey,
you are only halfway there.

Japanese Proverb

May 19, 2013

Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

May 12, 2013

The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated.
It isn’t true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.

Ram Dass

May 5, 2013

Father
May your name be hallowed.
May your will be done
On earth
As it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts
As we have forgiven those indebted to us.
And lead us not into temptation.

“Lord’s Prayer”
Gospel of Q
As suggested in The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man

April 28, 2013

I believe; help my unbelief!

Mark 9:24

April 21, 2013

Return to Me, and I will return to you.

Malachi 3:7

April 14, 2013

I do not believe in God, and I am not an atheist.

Albert Camus

April 7, 2013

We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

March 31, 2013

I would no more quarrel with a man because of his religion than I would because of his art.

Mary Baker Eddy

March 24, 2013

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

G. K. Chesterton

March 17, 2013

I have been all things unholy. If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.

Francis of Assisi

March 10, 2013

There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

Søren Kierkegaard

March 3, 2013

We recognize that there are no trivial occurrences in life if we get the right focus on them.

Mark Twain

February 24, 2013

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

George Bernard Shaw
in “Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant”

February 17, 2013

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.

George Santayana

February 10, 2013

We come to understand that we are in a living relationship with Christ which requires us to learn the one true rule of the Master – the law of love. We learn how to apply this law to every situation. “Love God first, then love your neighbor as yourself.”

Theodore Bobosh

February 3, 2013

I don’t know if the vicar knows any more about God than I do.

Television series Downton Abbey

January 27, 2013

To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.

John Locke

January 20, 2013

Religion is not talk or doctrine or theories, nor is it sectarianism. Religion cannot live in sects and societies. It is the relation between the soul and God.

Vivekananda
see also here

January 13, 2013

We have just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love one another.

Jonathan Swift

January 6, 2013

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

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