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Past Thoughts of the Day from Interlude: An Internet Retreat

6/1/19 to 11/30/19



Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

Edwin H. Chapin

Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be willing to have it so; acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

William James

Enjoy each moment. Appreciate what is. Be completely here and now. That is where eternity is found.

Peter McWilliams

The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but reveal to them their own.

Benjamin Disraeli

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

John Steinbeck

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring.

Edward Abbey

When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.

Peace Pilgrim

Through meditation and by giving full attention to one thing at a time, we can learn to direct attention where we choose.

Eknath Easwaran

If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.

Eleonora Duse

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

George Bernard Shaw

We don't stop playing because we grow old; We grow old because we stop playing.

George Bernard Shaw

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.

Yasutani Roshi

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.

Alan Cohen

We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.

Alan Watts

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

Thomas Carlyle

I look upon all creatures equally; none are less dear to me and none more dear. But those who worship me with love live in me, and I come to life in them.

Bhagavad Gita

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

Mark Twain

We must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.

Indira Gandhi

All the masters tell us that the reality of life—which our noisy waking consciousness prevents us from hearing—speaks to us chiefly in silence.

Karlfried Graf Durckheim

The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

Albert Einstein

I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross

I relax my body completely, relax my mind completely, and then imagine myself at a level where anything can happen.

Richard Bach

The sage seeks freedom from desire. He does not collect precious things. He learns not to hold on to ideas. He brings men back to what they have lost.

Lao Tzu

When I talk about having good hearing, I don't mean just listening, but listening to yourself. When I talk about good eyesight, I don't mean just looking, but looking at yourself.

Chuang Tzu

When you locate good in yourself, approve of it with determination. When you locate evil in yourself, despise it as something detestable.

Xun Zi

Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy.

Chogyam Trungpa

Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.

Chuang Tzu

As a rock remains unmoved by a storm, so the wise man remains unmoved by praise or blame.

The Dhammapada

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn't you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are.

Rachel Naomi Remen

We are all cells in the same body of humanity.

Peace Pilgrim

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

Winston Churchill

It reduces itself to this. You have to be in the right place at the right time, but when it comes, you better have something on the ball.

Groucho Marx

Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent.

Krishnamurti

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

Rabbinical Saying

Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Samuel Butler

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.

Dorothy Day

The realization of Truth is brought about by perception, and not in the least by ten millions of facts.

Sankara

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

R. Buckminster Fuller

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

Zeno The Stoic

Contrary to what the politicians and religious leaders would like us to believe, the world won't be made safer by creating barriers between people.

Michael Palin

To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is disease.

Lao Tzu

We are what our thoughts have made us; so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.

Swami Vivekananda

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

Lin Yutang

Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't.

Pete Seeger

The key to wisdom is this -- constant and frequent questioning ... for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.

Peter Abelard

You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.

J. Krishnamurti

That which one wants to hide most are one's own faults, but on the contrary, they should not be hidden but rather acknowledged, if one has any real desire to be free from them. By acknowledging one's faults, one destroys them or finds a way to improve on them.

Hazrat Inayat Khan

Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away.

Elvis Presley

Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.

Blaise Pascal

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.

John Lubbock

Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.

William Shakespeare

Everything is dependent on everything else, everything is connected, nothing is separate. Therefore everything is going in the only way it can go. If people were different everything would be different. They are what they are, so everything is as it is.

G.I. Gurdjieff

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

Krishnamurti

The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.

Tacitus

Peace is not a relationship of nations. It is a condition of mind brought about by a serenity of soul. Peace is not merely the absence of war. It is also a state of mind. Lasting peace can come only to peaceful people.

Jawaharlal Nehru

When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely-- the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears-- when you give your whole attention to it.

Krishnamurti

The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.

Theodore Isaac Rubin

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.

e.e. cummings

Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.

Mary Wollstonecraft

I realise that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.

Edith Cavell

Life is a long lesson in humility.

James M. Barrie

If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing.

Zimbabwe proverb

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud became more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Anais Nin

Abundance is not something we acquire. It is something we tune into.

Wayne Dyer

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.

Eden Phillpotts

Look at everything as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time. Then your time on earth will be filled with glory.

Betty Smith

I must learn to love the fool in me--the one who feels too much, talks too much, takes too many chances, wins sometimes and loses often, lacks self-control, loves and hates, hurts and gets hurt, promises and breaks promises, laughs and cries.

Theodore Isaac Rubin

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Aristotle

If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.

Chinese Proverb

Vision is not enough, it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.

Vaclav Havel

A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.

Jean De La Fontaine

Since love grows within you, so beauty grows. For love is the beauty of the soul.

Augustine of Hippo

Don't judge each day by the harvest that you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

Robert Louis Stevenson

True happiness is...to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere.

Frank A. Clark

When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive---to breath, to think, to enjoy, to love.

Marcus Aurelius

Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.

Edwin H. Chapin

Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be willing to have it so; acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

William James

We must always seek to ally ourselves with that part of the enemy that knows what is right.

Mahatma Gandhi

Enjoy each moment. Appreciate what is. Be completely here and now. That is where eternity is found.

Peter McWilliams

The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but reveal to them their own.

Benjamin Disraeli

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

John Steinbeck

High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring.

Edward Abbey

When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.

Peace Pilgrim

Through meditation and by giving full attention to one thing at a time, we can learn to direct attention where we choose.

Eknath Easwaran

If the sight of the blue skies fills you with joy, if a blade of grass springing up in the fields has power to move you, if the simple things of nature have a message that you understand, rejoice, for your soul is alive.

Eleonora Duse

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

George Bernard Shaw

We don't stop playing because we grow old; We grow old because we stop playing.

George Bernard Shaw

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.

Yasutani Roshi

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.

Alan Cohen

We are sick with fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas. Meditation is therefore the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for a time, somewhat as a courteous audience will stop talking when a concert is about to begin.

Alan Watts

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

Thomas Carlyle

I look upon all creatures equally; none are less dear to me and none more dear. But those who worship me with love live in me, and I come to life in them.

Bhagavad Gita

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

Mark Twain

We must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose.

Indira Gandhi

All the masters tell us that the reality of life---which our noisy waking consciousness prevents us from hearing---speaks to us chiefly in silence.

Karlfried Graf Durckheim

The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth, dwelling deeply in the present moment and feeling truly alive.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

Albert Einstein

I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross

I relax my body completely, relax my mind completely, and then imagine myself at a level where anything can happen.

Richard Bach

Be not afraid of growing slowly, be afraid only of standing still.

Chinese Proverb

Compassion automatically invites you to relate with people because you no longer regard people as a drain on your energy.

Chogyam Trungpa

Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free: Stay centered by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate.

Chuang Tzu

As a rock remains unmoved by a storm, so the wise man remains unmoved by praise or blame.

The Dhammapada

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn't you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are.

Rachel Naomi Remen

We are all cells in the same body of humanity.

Peace Pilgrim

Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.

Winston Churchill

It reduces itself to this. You have to be in the right place at the right time, but when it comes, you better have something on the ball.

Groucho Marx

The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.

George Sheehan

Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

Carl Jung

Without freedom from the past, there is no freedom at all, because the mind is never new, fresh, innocent.

Krishnamurti

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

Rabbinical Saying

Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Samuel Butler

Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

Martin Luther King Jr.

The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.

Marty Feldman

Love casts out fear, but we have to get over the fear in order to get close enough to love them.

Dorothy Day

The realization of Truth is brought about by perception, and not in the least by ten millions of facts.

Sankara

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

R. Buckminster Fuller

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

Zeno The Stoic

Contrary to what the politicians and religious leaders would like us to believe, the world won't be made safer by creating barriers between people.

Michael Palin

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

Robert Frost

We are what our thoughts have made us: so take care about what you think. Words are secondary. Thoughts live; they travel far.

Swami Vivekananda

As irrigators lead water where they want,
as archers make their arrows straight,
as carpenters carve wood,
the wise shape their minds.

Buddha

Happiness is not a reward--it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment--it is a result.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

William James

The world is a spell, an enchantement, an amazement, an arabesque of such stunning rhythm and a plot so intriguing that we are drawn by its web into a state of involvement where we forget that it is a game.

Alan Watts

Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.

Alan Keightly

Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.

Marion Wright Edelman

Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.

Marcus Aurelius

We find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without obstacles to conquer and goals to achieve.

Maxwell Maltz

The key to wisdom is this - constant and frequent questioning, for by doubting we are led to question and by questioning we arrive at the truth.

Peter Abelard

Revolution is an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.

Ambrose Bierce

If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.

Epicurus

Nothing is harder to direct than a man in prosperity; nothing more easily managed than one in adversity.

Plutarch

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.

Antisthenes

Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness.

Shakti Gawain

We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.

Blaise Pascal

Observation, not old age, brings wisdom.

Publilius Syrus

Do good to thy Friend to keep him, to thy enemy to gain him.

Benjamin Franklin

Just as a picture is drawn by an artist, surroundings are created by the activities of the mind.

Buddha

Do not follow the ideas of others, but learn to listen to the voice within yourself. Your body and mind will become clear and you will realize the unity of all things.

Dogen

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

Carl Gustav Jung

It has been my philosophy of life that difficulties vanish when faced boldly.

Isaac Asimov

When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.

Alexander Graham Bell

Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself.

Walter Anderson

If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.

Calvin Coolidge

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinion at all.

Georg Christoph Litchenberg

As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.

Henry Van Dyke

There is only one reason
We have followed God into this world:
To encourage laughter, freedom, dance
And love.

Hafiz

When you're finally up on the moon, looking back at the earth, all these differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you're going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people?

Frank Borman

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

Helen Keller

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

Albert Einstein

The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.

Kay Redfield Jamison

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

Carl Sagan

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they're yours.

Richard Bach

Your duty is to be; and not to be this or that.

Sri Ramana Maharishi

We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.

Marian Wright Edelman

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.

King Whitney Jr.

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.

W. Edwards Deming

Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach their objectives despite all obstacles and barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder them, but impossible to stop them.

Jose Marti



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