How many times have you tried to shield yourself by reading the newspaper, watching television, or just spacing out? That is the $64,000 question: how much have you connected with yourself at all in your whole life?
Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them — never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?
As long as you are trying to be something other than what you actually are, your mind merely wears itself out. But if you say, “This is what I am, it is a fact that I am going to investigate, understand,” then you can go beyond.
Occupy the space you occupy.
The tragedy in the lives of most of us is that we go through life walking down a high-walled lane with people of our own kind, the same economic station, the same national background and education and religious outlook. And beyond those walls, all humanity lies, unknown and unseen, and untouched by our restricted and impoverished lives.
In the presence of fire, man never feels alone. The flames keep him company.
Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.
The truth is more important than the facts.
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
The besetting sin of most clever people is that it is much easier to say clever things than true ones.
All our final resolutions are made in a state of mind which is not going to last.
Sighs are air, and go to the air; tears are water, and go to the sea. Tell me, fair one, if you know: when love is forgotten, where can it go?
Any time that is not spent on love is wasted.
The disease of Tomorrow.
The truth about our childhood is stored up in our body, and although we can repress it, we can never alter it. Our intellect can be deceived, our feelings manipulated, our perceptions confused, and our body tricked with medication. But someday the body will present its bill, for it is as incorruptible as a child who, still whole in spirit, will accept no compromises or excuses, and it will not stop tormenting us until we stop evading the truth.
There is another world, but it is in this one.
Why tell lies when one is going to die?
I’m going to turn on the light and we’ll be two people in a room looking at each other and wondering why on earth they were afraid of the dark.
No objects are mysterious. The mystery is in your eye.
You phone the Time Lady and listen to her tell the minutes and seconds. . . . She distinctly names the present moment, never slipping into the past or sliding into the future.
I wish I could have known earlier that you have all the time you need right up to the day you die.
