Quotes by Lecturers - Page 9

People wish to be settled only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The effects of opposition are wonderful. There are men who rise refreshed on hearing of a threat men to whom a crises which intimidates and paralyzes the majority comes as graceful and beloved as a bride!
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Adversity has the same effect on a man that severe training has on the pugilist - it reduces him to his fighting weight.
Josh Billings
Play out the game act well your part and if the gods have blundered we will not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Happiness is experienced when your life gives you what you are willing to accept.
Ken Keyes
Happiness is a function of accepting what is.
Werner Erhard
Trouble will come soon enough and when he does come receive him as pleasantly as possible ... the more amiably you greet him the sooner he will go away.
Artemus Ward
Ride the horse in the direction that it's going.
Werner Erhard
Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes by making them the fruit of his character.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature is what you may do. There is much you may not do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
No man can have society upon his own terms.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The world is all gates all opportunities strings of tension waiting to be struck.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion 20 years later.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Men achieve a certain greatness unawares when working to another aim.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It's hard to know what to say sometimes, when someone does something so nice. It's hard to know where to look.
Nathan Filer
I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever only rejoices me, and the heart appoints
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wit makes its own welcome and levels all distinctions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
Joseph Campbell
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.
Joseph Campbell
A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. But the shaman's powers are symbolized in his own familiars, deities of his own personal experience. His authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination.
Joseph Campbell
Never read a book that is not a year old.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.
Andrew Solomon
A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Insofar as it is true, the idea that our actions or beliefs are merely one link in a causal link that runs back to the beginning of the universe is making a trivial claim. Insofar as it is saying something profound, the claim is untrue.
Kenan Malik
A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is not true that "love is not love which alters when it alteration finds." Love alters all the time; it is fluid, in perceptual flux, an evolving business across a lifetime.
Andrew Solomon
The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see, that it is only a projection of his own soul, which he admires.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is not other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred;
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Go forth into the busy world and love it. Interest yourself in its life, mingle kindly with its joys and sorrows.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
New York is a sucked orange.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Are you bored with life? Then throw yourself into some work youbelieve in with all your heart, live for it, die for it, and you willfind happiness that you had thought could never be yours.
Dale Carnegie
All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nothing external to you has any power over you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best time for you to hold your tongue is the time you feel you must say something or bust.
Josh Billings
Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions. The surest poison is time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only birth can conquer death—the birth , not of the old thing again, but of something new .
Joseph Campbell
Flowers and fruits are always fit presents; flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern countenance of ordinary nature: they are like music heard out of a work-house. Nature does not cocker us; we are children, not pets; she is not fond; everything is dealt to us without fear or favor, after severe universal laws. Yet these delicate flowers look like the frolic and interference of love and beauty. Men use to tell us that we love flattery even though we are not deceived by it, because it shows that we are of importance enough to be courted. Something like that pleasure, the flowers give us: what am I to whom these sweet hints are addressed?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well half an hour?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is a difference between truly listening and waiting for your turn to talk.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The chronic kicker, even the most violent critic, will frequently soften and be subdued in the presence of a patient, sympathetic listener— a listener who will be silent while the irate fault-finder dilates like a king cobra and spews the poison out of his system.
Dale Carnegie
Fame is proof that people are gullible.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state,
Joseph Campbell
Dare to believe in the reality of your assumptionand watch the world play its partrelative to to its fulfillment.
Neville Goddard
The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.
Joseph Campbell
The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.
Joseph Campbell
In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.Awe is what moves us forward.
Joseph Campbell
One finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua franca that expresses something basic about our deepest humanity. It is variously inflected in its various provinces.
Joseph Campbell
Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.
Joseph Campbell
One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.
Joseph Campbell
Awe is what moves us forward.
Joseph Campbell
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.
Joseph Campbell
Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood.
Joseph Campbell
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed.
Joseph Campbell
When a judge walks into the room, and everybody stands up, you’re not standing up to that guy, you’re standing up to the robe that he’s wearing and the role that he’s going to play. What makes him worthy of that role is his integrity, as a representative of the principles of that role, and not some group of prejudices of his own. So what you’re standing up to is a mythological character. I imagine some kings and queens are the most stupid, absurd, banal people you could run into, probably interested only in horses and women, you know. But you’re not responding to them as personalities, you’re responding to them in their mythological roles. When someone becomes a judge, or President of the United States, the man is no longer that man, he’s the representative of an eternal office; he has to sacrifice his personal desires and even life possibilities to the role that he now signifies.
Joseph Campbell