Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.
The true saint lives in the midst of other people. He rises in the morning; he eats and sleeps when needed. He buys and sells in the marketplace just like everyone else. He marries, has children, and meets with his friends. Yet never for an instant does he forget God.
To the dull mind nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.
Someday, somewhere, a guy is going to come to you and show you a nice, brand-new deck of cards on which the seal has never been broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that the jack of spades will jump out of this deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not bet him, for as sure as you do you are going to get an ear full of cider.
I’m glad I’ve got delusions of grandeur. It makes me feel a lot better about myself.
If an Arab in the desert were suddenly to discover a spring in his tent, and so would always be able to have water in abundance, how fortunate he would consider himself — so, too, when a man, who as a physical being is always turned toward the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him; not to mention his discovery that the source is his relation to God.
So Harry says, “You don’t like me anymore. Why not?” And he says, “Because you are so terribly pretentious.” And Harry says, “Pretentious? Moi?”
Once, many years ago in Berkeley at a concert, while a Brahms symphony was being played, I happened to sit next to the composer Darius Milhaud. In the midst of it, he said to me, “They think because it is long it is deep.”
Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
We started off trying to set up a small anarchist community, but people wouldn’t obey the rules.
He felt with the force of a revelation that to throw up the clods of earth manfully is as beneficent as to revolutionize the world. It was not the matter of the work, but the mind that went into it that counted — and the man who was not content to do small things well would leave great things undone.
There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world’s champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world’s most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.
To put it rather bluntly, I am not the type who wants to go back to the land; I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel.
Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.
Come back soon. We weren’t shooting at you.
