User:Joshuastarlight

Student of Peace, Love, Understanding, Light, Life, Good, Health, Writing, Gardening, Food, Clean Land, Water, Air, Oceans, Planet Earth, Sun, Moon, Stars, Space, Self, World, & Universe

Favorite Quotations

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." - Kurt Vonnegut

“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” - Pablo Picasso

"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree... Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.

The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds..." - Albert Einstein

"Ultimately, humanity is one, and this small planet is our only home. If we are to protect this home of ours, each of us needs to feel a vivid sense of universal altruism. It is only this feeling that can remove the self-centered motives that cause people to deceive and misuse one another. If you have a sincere and open heart, you naturally feel self-worth and confidence, and there is no need to be fearful of others.

For the rest of your life to be as meaningful as possible, engage in spiritual practice if you can. It is nothing more than acting out of concern for others. If you practice sincerely and with persistence, little by little, step by step you will gradually reorder your habits and attitudes so as to think less about your own narrow concerns and more about others' – and thereby find peace and happiness yourself." - Dalai Lama

"A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves. This is a time of great danger, but our species is young, and curious, and brave. It shows much promise.

We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads. But to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact. The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature.

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.

We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants, it is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition or greed or stupidity we could plunge our world into a time of darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilisation and the Italian Renaissance. But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet.

As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky.

We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, un-available to us without such drugs.

...The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day.

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. Recently we have waded a little way out, and the water seems inviting.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere." - Carl Sagan

"It is only in the act of contemplation when words and even personality are transcended, that the pure state of the Perennial Philosophy can actually be known. The records left by those who have known it in this way make it abundantly clear that all of them, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Hebrew, Taoist, Christian, or Mohammedan, were attempting to describe the same essentially indescribable Fact.

The phenomenal world of matter and of individualized consciousness — the world of things and animals and men and even gods — is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be non-existent.

Human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.

Something inexpressively lovely and wonderful advances through the crystal, nearer, nearer. And, oh, inexpressively terrifying...

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.

Every man's memory is his private literature." - Aldous Huxley

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I offer you peace. I offer you love. I offer you friendship. I see your beauty. I hear your need. I feel your feelings. My wisdom flows from the Highest Source. I salute that source in you. Let us work together for unity and love.

Every moment of your life is infinitely creative, and the universe is endlessly bountiful. Just put forth a clear enough request, and everything your heart desires must come to you.

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.

Poverty is the worst form of violence." - Mahatma Gandhi

"Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing." - William Butler Yeats

"By Being, It Is." - Parmenides

"Without music, life would be a mistake.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"When the Earth is sick, the animals will begin to disappear; when that happens, The Warriors of the Rainbow will come to save them." - Chief Seattle

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

"As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart ... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach." - Carl Gustav Jung

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

The truth is that we live out our lives putting off all that can be put off; perhaps we all know deep down that we are immortal and that sooner or later all men will do and know all things.

There is a concept that is the corrupter and destroyer of all others. I speak not of Evil, whose limited empire is that of ethics; I speak of the infinite.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.” - Jorge Luis Borges

"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." - Rene Descartes

"We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on." - Richard Feynman

"Then he said 'Remember Bob, No Fear, No Envy, No Meanness'" "And I said 'hmmm, right.'" - Bob Dylan

"The reverse side also has a reverse side." - Japanese Proverb

"We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep." - William James

"If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do... How would I be? What would I do?" - Buckminster Fuller

"The most vital issue of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is to be governed by the modern economic and materialistic mind of the West or by a nobler pragmatism guided, uplifted and enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge...." - Sri Aurobindo

"The Self alone exists; and the Self alone is real. Verily the Self alone is the world, the I-I and God. All that exists is but the manifestation of the Supreme Being." - Ramana Maharshi

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

We have lost it, or we have never had it; and, because we do not know how to judge anything, we have been led here and pushed there, beaten up, driven, politically, religiously and socially. We don't know, but it is difficult to say we don't know". - Jiddhu Krishnamurti

"The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding." - Leonardo da Vinci

“No great thing is created suddenly.” Epictetus - Jiddu Krishnamurti

“All life is an experiment.

Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment.

I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” - Italo Calvino

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." - Laozi

"I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way." - Pablo Neruda

"A beginning is a very delicate time...." - Princess Irulan in Dune (film)

"Bless the Maker and all His Water. Bless the coming and going of Him, May His passing cleanse the world. May He keep the world for his people.~ Fremen saying, recited by Liet-Kynes, in the presence of Paul Atreides.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy. Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual (Frank Herbert, Dune)

"Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic."

“We are generalists. You can't draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.” - Pardot Kynes (Frank Herbert, Dune)

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one... I have been... and always shall be... your friend. Live long... and prosper." - Spock

“An idea is salvation by imagination.” - Frank Lloyd Wright

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away." - Maya Angelou

“I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” - Vincent van Gogh

"God is that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part. God alone exists truly. Man manifests Him in time, space and matter."

I know that most men — not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic, problems — can seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as obliges them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty — conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives.

The indubitable, eternal truth inherent in man, which is one and the same in all the great religions of the world. It will in due time emerge and make its way to general recognition, and the nonsense that has obscured it will disappear of itself, and with it will go the evil from which humanity now suffers.

We acknowledge God only when we are conscious of His manifestation in us.” - Leo Tolstoy

"The meaning of our self is not to be found in its separateness from God and others, but in the ceaseless realisation of yoga, of union." - Rabindranath Tagore

"Legends can be now and forever Teaching us to love for goodness sake. Legends can be now and forever Loved by the sun, loved by the sun." - Jon Anderson

"This that we are now ... The human body and the universe grew from this, not this from the universe and the human body.

Love said to me, there is nothing that is not me. Be silent.

Love is the ark appointed for the righteous, Which annuls the danger and provides a way of escape. Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment intuition.

Observe the wonders as they occur around you. Don't claim them. Feel the artistry moving through, and be silent.

Reason is like an officer when the King appears; The officer then loses his power and hides himself. Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.

If in thirst you drink water from a cup, you see God in it. Those who are not in love with God will see only their own faces in it.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about language, ideas, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense." - Mevlana Rumi

“Better than a thousand hollow words, is one word that brings peace.

All things appear and disappear because of the concurrence of causes and conditions. Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.” - Siddhartha Gautama Buddha

“Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” - Lao Tzu

"We're playing those mind games together Pushing the barriers, planting seeds Playing the mind guerrilla Chanting the mantra, Peace on Earth.

We all been playing those mind games forever Some kinda druid dudes lifting the veil. Doing the mind guerrilla, Some call it magic — the search for the grail.

Love is the answer and you know that for sure. Love is a flower, you got to let it — you got to let it grow.

Yes is the answer and you know that for sure. Yes is surrender, you got to let it, you got to let it go…

So keep on playing those mind games together Doing the ritual dance in the sun. Millions of mind guerrillas Putting their soul power to the karmic wheel.

I want you to make love, not war — I know you've heard it before." - John Lennon

"The truth is that my work — I was going to say my mission — is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire." - Miguel de Unamuno

"Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear, Or like a fairy trip upon the green, Or, like a nymph, with long dishevell'd hair, Dance on the sands, and yet no footing seen: Love is a spirit all compact of fire, Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.

Foul words and frowns must not repel a lover; What though the rose have prickles, yet 'tis pluck'd: Were beauty under twenty locks kept fast, Yet love breaks through and picks them all at last.

For where Love reigns, disturbing Jealousy Doth call himself Affection's sentinel; Gives false alarms, suggesteth mutiny.

This carry-tale, dissentious Jealousy, That sometime true news, sometime false doth bring.

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain.

Lo! here the gentle lark, weary of rest, From his moist cabinet mounts up on high, And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast The sun ariseth in his majesty." - William Shakespeare

“There are people that can't go to Fantastica. There are those who can but never return. And there are just a few who go to Fantastica and come back. And they make both worlds well again.” - Michael Ende

“Here is a doctrine at which you will laugh. It seems to me, Govinda, that Love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.

Love does not entreat; or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract.

One never reaches home. But whenever friendly paths intersect, the whole world looks like home for a time.” - Hermann Hesse

"It is the way of the superior man to prefer the concealment of his virtue, while it daily becomes more illustrious, and it is the way of the mean man to seek notoriety, while he daily goes more and more to ruin. It is characteristic of the superior man, appearing insipid, yet never to produce satiety; while showing a simple negligence, yet to have his accomplishments recognized; while seemingly plain, yet to be discriminating. He knows how what is distant lies in what is near. He knows where the wind proceeds from. He knows how what is minute becomes manifested. Such a one, we may be sure, will enter into virtue." - Confucius

"Activism is my rent for living on the planet." - Alice Walker

"God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is afoot. Magic is alive. Alive is afoot. Magic never died. God never sickened. Many poor men lied. Many sick men lied. Magic never weakened. Magic never hid. Magic always ruled. God is afoot. God was ruler though his funeral lengthened. Though his mourners thickened Magic never fled..." - Leonard Cohen

"I was still blind, but twinkling stars did dance Throughout my being's limitless expanse, Nothing had yet drawn close, only at distant stages I found myself, a mere suggestion sensed in past and future ages." - Novalis

"Grand is the seen, the light, to me — grand are the sky and stars, Grand is the earth, and grand are lasting time and space, And grand their laws, so multiform, puzzling, evolutionary; But grander far the unseen soul of me, comprehending, endowing all those, Lighting the light, the sky and stars, delving the earth, sailing the sea, (What were all those, indeed, without thee, unseen soul? of what amount without thee?) More evolutionary, vast, puzzling, O my soul! More multiform far — more lasting thou than they.

I stand as on some mighty eagle's beak, Eastward the sea absorbing, viewing, (nothing but sea and sky,) The tossing waves, the foam, the ships in the distance, The wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps -- that inbound urge and urge of waves...." - Walt Whitman

"I don't take drugs: I am drugs.

Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy - the joy of being Salvador Dalí - and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things this Salvador Dalí is going to accomplish today?

The sole difference between myself and a madman is the fact that I am not mad." - Salvador Dali

"Turn your wounds into wisdom." - Oprah Winfrey

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best." - Marilyn Monroe

"Our earth is round, and, among other things, that means that you and I can hold completely different points of view and both be right. The difference of our positions will show stars in your window I cannot even imagine. Your sky may burn with light, while mine, at the same moment, spreads beautiful to darkness. Still we must choose how we separately corner the circling universe of our experience. Once chosen, our cornering will determine the message of any star and darkness we encounter." - June Jordan

“People come and go all the time; the world has always been in movement.” - V. S. Naipaul

“One can’t build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.” – Anne Sexton

"Do not interrupt the flight of your soul; do not distress what is best in you; do not enfeeble your spirit with half wishes and half thoughts. Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer, for one may have known something many times, acknowledged it; one may have willed something many times, attempted it — and yet, only the deep inner motion, only the heart's indescribable emotion, only that will convince you that what you have acknowledged belongs to you, that no power can take it from you — for only the truth that builds up is truth for you." - Søren Kierkegaard

“He that loveth not, Knoweth not God; for God is Love. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us. God is Love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God and God in him.” - Yeshua (Jesus Christ)

“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world." - Howard Zinn

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out" - Vaclav Havel

"Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind." - John F. Kennedy