These are a collection of philosophical quotes that I feel resonate with my experiences...


"A human being is a part of the whole called by us 'the universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection of a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

Albert Einstein

"Everything you learned in school as 'obvious' becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.  For example, there are no solids in the universe; not even the suggestion of a solid.  There are no absolute continuums.  There are no surfaces.  There are no straight lines."

R. Buckminster Fuller

"The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all.  No existant theology can be a final formulation of a spiritual truth."

Baptist Pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us.  To be alive is to be slowly born.

Author Poet Antoine De Saint-Exupery (The Little Prince)

"All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why."

Author Artist James Thurber (Secret Life of Walter Mitty)

"Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable.  But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops."

H.L. Mencken

"I honor those who try to rid themselves of any lying, who empty the self and have only clear being there."

Jalal-Ad-Din Rumi

"One must always tell what one sees.  Above all, which is more difficult, one must always see what one sees."

Charles Peguy

"What one understands is only half true.  What one does not understand is the full truth."

Zen saying

"I must confess that I don’t have the faintest idea what my purpose is or what’s going on, and I never have. I became comfortable with that mystery a long time ago—that I would never know how any of these things fit together in any explicit way."

Gary Snyder

"What is your
Original Nature,
Snowman?"

Natsume soseki

"The world is fleeting; all things pass away. Or is it that we pass and they stay?"

Lucian

"When the soul lies down in the grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn’t make any sense."

Jalal-Ad-Din Rumi

"Everything leads us to believe that there exists a certain point of the intelligence at which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future . . . cease to be perceived as opposites."

Andre Breton

"Arouse the mind without resting it on anything."

Diamond Sutra

"How do you know where I'm at if you haven't been where I've been...understand where I'm coming from?

Louis Freese

"Do not seek for the truth,
Only stop having an opinion."

Seng-Ts’an

"Children, one earthly Thing truly experienced, even once, is enough for a lifetime."

Rainer Maria Rilke

"To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?"

Henry David Thoreau

"O friend, awake, and sleep no more! The night is over and gone, would you lose your day also? You have slept for un-numbered ages; this morning will you not awake?"

Rabindranath Tagore

"At the point when sleep has not yet come and wakefulness vanishes, being is revealed."

Shiva

"When you pass through, no one can pin you down, no one can call you back."

Ying-An

"Birth is not one act; it is a process. The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born. To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops. Physiologically our cellular system is in a process of continual birth; psychologically, however, most of us cease to be born at a certain point."

Erich Fromm

"Our lives . . . are but a little while, so let them run as sweetly as you can, and give no thought to grief from day to day. For time is not concerned to keep our hopes, but hurries on its business, and is gone."

Euripedes

"We accept the graceful falling
Of mountain cherry blossoms,
But it is much harder for us
To fall away from our own
Attachment to the world."

Rengetsu

"Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe."

W. H. Auden

"Madame, there are always two paths to take; one back towards the comforts and security of death, the other forward to nowhere."

Henry Miller

"Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want."

Margaret Young

"Peace . . . comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the Universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the Universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere. It is within each of us."

Black Elk

"The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up."

Paul Valery

"When one sees Eternity in things that pass away and Infinity in finite things, then one has pure knowledge."

The Bhagavad Gita

"Standing on the bare
ground . . . a mean egotism
vanishes. I become a
transparent eyeball; I am
nothing; I see all; the
currents of the Universal
Being circulate through me
I am part or particle of God."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Enlightenment is liberation from the dross of learning and experience that, without one’s being aware of it, has accumulated and settled like so much sediment—or like cholesterol in one’s arteries! It is the vivid, lively manifestation of the heart with which one is born—the heart that is no-form, no-mind, non-abiding, attached neither to form nor to thought, but in dynamic motion. Consequently, enlightenment is not an end point, but rather a starting point."

Soko Morinaga

"If somebody asks you a question about matters sacred, always answer in terms of matters profane. If they ask you about ultimate reality, answer in terms of everyday life. If they ask you about everyday life, answer in terms of ultimate reality."

Hui-Neng

"What I tell you is not a secret. The secret is in you."

Hui-Neng

"Do you imagine the universe is agitated?  Go into the desert at night and look out at the stars.  This practice should answer the question."

Lao Tzu

"Swallow the stars until you are one with the universe, with all-pervading universal life."

Zen Master Soen Nakagawa

"The mirror of the Mind brightly shining, unobstructed, passes transparently through everything in the universe."

Yung-Chia

"Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the room."

Simone Weil