Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.
Spring comes: the flowers learn their colored shapes.
A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to philosophers to be obviously progress — though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.
The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert, and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them: the mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.
Perched on the loftiest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our own behind.
Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.
Memories are short; appetites for power and glory are insatiable. Old tyrants depart. New ones take their place. It is all very baffling and trying.
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record — while, on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks.
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, cooperation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. . . . He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.
Do not despair of life. Think of the fox, prowling in a winter night to satisfy his hunger. His race survives; I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide.
Many could forgo heavy meals, a full wardrobe, a fine house, et cetera; it is the ego they cannot forgo.
To seek freedom is the only driving force I know. Freedom to fly off into that infinity out there. Freedom to dissolve; to lift off; to be like the flame of a candle, which, in spite of being up against the light of a billion stars, remains intact, because it never pretended to be more than what it is: a mere candle.
Some people just don’t seem to realize, when they’re moaning about not getting prayers answered, that no is the answer.
The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.
God don’t make no mistakes. That’s how He got to be God.
