Quotes by Lecturers - Page 18

Outside, among your fellows, among strangers, you must perceive appearances, a hundred things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us not rest until we are free to live in dignity in the land of our birth.
Mark Mathabane
The dreamer is a distinguished operatic artist, and, like all who have elected to follow, not the safely marked general highways of the day, but the adventure of the special, dimly audiblecall that comes to those whose ears are open within as well as without
Joseph Campbell
Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet.
Joseph Campbell
Don't be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself. Go forward and make your dreams come true.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If peace is to be maintained, it must be by brave men, who have come up to the same height as the hero, namely, the will to carry their life in their hand, and stake it at any instant for their principle, but who have gone one step beyond the hero, and will not seek another man's life.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Your actions speak so loudly, I cannot hear what you are saying.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, bur raise it to that standard. That great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather fortify and enhance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As many thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought.... Will these, too, seperate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure, that we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The law of nature is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
An Eastern poet, Ali Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth, —"He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let us even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, "Who are you? Unhand me: I will be dependent no more." Ah! seest thou not, O brother, that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's, because we are more our own?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In good company there is never such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul exactly coextensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two souls into one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed. When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work but the solidest things we know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When friendships are real, they are not glass threads or frost work, but the solidest things we can know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
Dale Carnegie
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have no expectation that any man will read history aright who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It never hurts a fool to appear before anaudience, for his capacity is not a capacity for feeling.
Dale Carnegie
When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
[T]he experience of mystery comes not from expecting it but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes. (16)
Joseph Campbell
Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, it's the key to victory over fear and it's cousin, depression.
Robert McKee
Students of public speaking continually ask, "How can I overcomeself-consciousness and the fear that paralyzes me before anaudience?"Did you ever notice in looking from a train window that somehorses feed near the track and never even pause to look up at thethundering cars, while just ahead at the next railroad crossing afarmer's wife will be nervously trying to quiet her scared horse asthe train goes by?How would you cure a horse that is afraid of cars—graze him in aback-woods lot where he would never see steam-engines orautomobiles, or drive or pasture him where he would frequently seethe machines?Apply horse-sense to ridding yourself of self-consciousness andfear: face an audience as frequently as you can, and you will soon stop shying. You can never attainfreedom from stage-fright by reading a treatise. A book may giveyou excellent suggestions on how best to conduct yourself in thewater, but sooner or later you must get wet, perhaps even strangleand be "half scared to death." There are a great many "wetless"bathing suits worn at the seashore, but no one ever learns to swimin them. To plunge is the only way.
Dale Carnegie
Fear always springsfrom ignorance.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
Joseph Campbell
Spiritual growth is the gradual, I would say, transition from a God of tradition to a God of experience.
Neville Goddard
Spiritual force is stronger than material force thoughts rule the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.
Joseph Campbell
The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.
Joseph Campbell
When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)
Joseph Campbell
Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There are books which take rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Your goodness must have some edge to it -- else it is none.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends, but they are imprisoned by an enchanter in these paper and leathern boxes; and though they know us, and have been waiting two, ten, or twenty centuries for us,—some of them,—and are eager to give us a sign and unbosom themselves, it is the law of their limbo that they must not speak until spoken to; and as the enchanter has dressed them, like battalions of infantry, in coat and jacket of one cut, by the thousand and ten thousand, your chance of hitting on the right one is to be computed by the arithmetical rule of Permutation and Combination,—not a choice out of three caskets, but out of half a million caskets, all alike.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
He fed his spirit with the bread of books
Edwin Markham
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakenly meant for his ear; the profit of books is according to the sensibility of the reader; the profoundest thought or passion sleeps as in a mine, until it is discovered by an equal mind and heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Tis the good reader that makes the good book.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some books leave us free and some books make us free.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
How do I know anything about the world around me? By the use of my senses. But I can be deceived by my senses, A straight stick looks bent when it is dipped into water. How do I even know that I am awake, that the whole of reality is not a dream? How can I tell it is not a fabric of delusion woven by some malicious cunning demon simply to deceive me? By a process of persistent and comprehensive questioning it is possible to place in doubt the entire fabric of my existence and the world around me, Nothing remains certain. But in the midst of all this there is nevertheless one thing which does remain certain. No matter how deluded I may be in my thoughts about myself and the world, I still know that I am thinking, This alone proves me my existence, In the most famous remark in philosophy, Descartes concludes: 'Cogito ergo sum'-'I think, therefore I am.
Paul Strathern
When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburgh, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man moves in a world that is nothing more or less than his consciousness objectified.–Neville Goddard
Neville Goddard
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
How do I know anything about the world around me? By the use of my senses. But I can be deceived by my senses, A straight stick looks bent when it is dipped into water. How do I even know that I am awake, that the whole of reality is not a dream? How can I tell it is not a fabric of delusion woven by some malicious cunning demon simply to deceive me? By a process of persistent and comprehensive questioning it is possible to place in doubt the entire fabric of my existence and the world around me, Nothing remains certain. But in the midst of all this there is nevertheless one thing which does remain certain. No matter how deluded I may be in my thoughts about myself and the world, I still know that I am thinking, This alone proves me my existence, In the most famous remark in philosophy, Descartes concludes: 'Cogito ergo sum'-'I think, therefore I am.
Paul Strathern
When its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburgh, which plies along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the material creation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Man moves in a world that is nothing more or less than his consciousness objectified.–Neville Goddard
Neville Goddard
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
Ralph Waldo Emerson