If you try to look but you don’t touch
Then you won’t touch
And you’ll never feel
And if you don’t feel
You’ll never cry
And if you don’t cry
Then you’ll never heal.

Harry Chapin

Don’t let that little frankfurter run your life.

Bruce Jay Friedman

Before, during, or after marriage, happy or unhappy, I underwent hypnosis, had cell implants, diacutaneous fibrolysis, silicone injections, my nose bobbed and my eyelids lifted. I have tried aromatherapy, approached yoga, and still go to the best gymnasts. Facials and pedicures are normal routine, as are frequent hair and makeup changes. I will try anything new in beauty.

Princess Luciana Pignatelli, The Beautiful People’s Beauty Book

Why hast thou said, “I have sinned so much,
And God in his mercy has not punished my sins?”
How many times do I smite thee, and thou knowest not!
Thou art bound in my chains from head to foot.
On thy heart is rust on rust collected.
So that thou art blind to divine mysteries.
When a man is stubborn and follows evil practices,
He casts dust in the eyes of his discernment.
Old shame for sin and calling on God quit him;
Dust five layers deep settles on his mirror,
Rust spots begin to gnaw his iron,
The color of his jewel grows less and less.

Jalaluddin Rumi

We don’t know who discovered water, but we’re certain it wasn’t a fish.

John Culkin

The complexities of life situations are really not as complicated as we tend to experience them.

Chögyam Trungpa

“Yes, Siddhartha,” he said. “Is this what you mean? That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfalls, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future?” “That it is,” said Siddhartha, “and when I learned that, I reviewed my life and it was also a river, and Siddhartha the boy, Siddhartha the mature man and Siddhartha the old man were only separated by shadows, not through reality. Siddhartha’s previous lives were also not in the past, and his death and his return to Brahma are not in the future. Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence.”

Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

As long as we have some definite idea about or some hope in the future, we cannot really be serious with the moment that exists right now.

Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Live your questions now, and perhaps, even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Somebody was saying to Picasso that he ought to make pictures of things the way they are — objective pictures. He mumbled he wasn’t quite sure what that would be. The person who was bullying him produced a photograph of his wife from his wallet and said, “There, you see, that is a picture of how she really is.” Picasso looked at it and said, “She is rather small isn’t she? And flat?”

Gregory Bateson

Art is the lie that reveals truth.

Pablo Picasso

A wise man is never less alone than when he is alone.

Jonathan Swift

The purpose of discipline is to promote freedom. But freedom leads to infinity and infinity is terrifying.

Henry Miller

We are the living links in a life force that moves and plays through and around us, binding the deepest soils with the farthest stars.

Alan Chadwick

Civilized man has exchanged some part of his chances of happiness for a measure of security.

Sigmund Freud

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the winter time. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Crowfoot

I am malicious because I am miserable; if any being felt emotions of benevolence towards me, I should return them, a hundred and a hundred fold.

Frankenstein monster, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein