“remove the veil of maya is to uncover the secret of creation. He who thus denudes the universe is the only true monotheist. All others are worshipping heathen images. So long as man remains subject to the dualistic illusions of Nature, the Janus-faced Maya is his goddess; he cannot know the one true God. The world illusion, maya, manifests in men as avidya, literally, “not-knowledge,” ignorance, delusion. Maya or avidya can never be destroyed through intellectual conviction or analysis, but solely through attaining the interior state of nirbikalpa samadhi.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi
“the lust for power is not rooted in strength but in weakness. It is the expression of the inability of the individual self to stand alone and live. It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking. The word power has a twofold meaning. One is the possession of power over somebody, the ability to dominate him; the other meaning is the possession of power to do something, to be able, to be potent. The latter meaning has nothing to do with domination; it expresses mastery in the sense of ability.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
“To be a warrior a man has to be, first of all, and rightfully so, keenly aware of his own death. But to be concerned with death would force any one of us to focus on the self and that would be debilitating. So the next thing one needs to be a warrior is detachment. The idea of imminent death, instead of becoming an obsession, becomes an indifference.
Now you must detach yourself; detach yourself from everything. Only the idea of death makes a man sufficiently detached so he is incapable of abandoning himself to anything. Only the idea of death makes a man sufficiently detached so he can’t deny himself anything. A man of that sort, however, does not crave, for he has acquired a silent lust for life and for all things of life. He knows his death is stalking him and won’t give him time to cling to anything, so he tries, without craving, all of everything.”
― Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan
“From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.”
― Hokusai
“To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
“And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too.”
― Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
“Do Not Lie to Yourself
We have to be honest about what we want and take risks rather than lie to ourselves and make excuses to stay in our comfort zone.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka
“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
“The Volunteers” Legends of the 21st century Humans.
“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.”
― G.K. Chesterton
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