Quotes by Lecturers - Page 21

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every man is a divinity in disguise, a god playing the fool.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.
Robert McKee
I would put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, and I cannot. I blench and withdraw on this side and on that. I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God face to face and live.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The life of truth is cold.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Truth cannot be constructed. To live in ideology is, as Havel so eloquently reminds us, inevitably to live in a lie. Truth can only be revealed. We cannot be creators, only receptors.
James W. Sire
the squeeky wheel gets the grease.
Josh Billings
Man keeps looking for a truth that fits his reality. Given our reality, the truth doesn't fit.
Werner Erhard
Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it--else it is none.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
While people argue with one another about the specifics of Freud's work and blame him for the prejudices of his time, they overlook the fundamental truth of his writing, his grand humility: that we frequently do not know our own motivations in life and are prisoners to what we cannot understand. We can recognize only a small fragment of our own, and an even smaller fragment of anyone else's, impetus.
Andrew Solomon
I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true.
Andrew Solomon
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Napoleon said of Massena, that he was not himself until the battle began to go against him; then, when the dead began to fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of combination, and he put on terror and victory as a robe. So it is in rugged crises, in unweariable endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of question, that the angel is shown.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When I say that consciousness is an illusion I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion.
Susan Blackmore
He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets — most likely his father's. He gets rest, commodity, and reputation; but he shuts the door of truth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
you can measure the size of a person by what makes him or her angry
Dale Carnegie
There is one other reason for dressing well, namely that dogs respect it, and will not attack you in good clothes.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.
Dale Carnegie
When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your're the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If the stars should appear but one night every thousand years how man would marvel and adore.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed, but our power to do so is increased.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.
Joseph Campbell
Wise men put their trust in ideas and not in circumstances.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The reward of a thing well done is having done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.
Joseph Campbell
None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Life consists of what man is thinking about all day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is one of the beautiful compensations of life that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the thing has changed but that our power to do has increased.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.
Joseph Campbell
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.
Joseph Campbell
Be yourself; no base imitator of another, but your best self. There is something which you can do better than another. Listen to the inward voice and bravely obey that. Do the things at which you are great, not what you were never made for.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.
Joseph Campbell
Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
You become what you think about all day long.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.
Joseph Campbell
Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
Joseph Campbell
Make the most of yourself....for that is all there is of you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Always do what you are afraid to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
Joseph Campbell
Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What can we see, read, acquire, but ourselves. Take the book, my friend, and read your eyes out, you will never find there what I find.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.
Joseph Campbell
Imitation is suicide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.
Joseph Campbell
One of the tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon - instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.
Dale Carnegie