Quote of the Week #63 - Two Sides of Being Alone

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word “loneliness” to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word “solitude” to express the glory of being alone.

-- Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now

Quote of the Week #62 - What You Do About It

Life happens. Life is ten percent what happened to you, is ninety percent what you do about it.

--Steve Harvey, Stayer University TV Commercial

Quote of the Week #61 - Universal Hitching

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

--John Muir

Quote of the Week #60 - Our Human Birthright

There will never be an end to this work of making things better, because it is our human birthright to make things worse and to make them better.

--Zoketsu Norman Fischer, “The Problem of Evil”, Shambhala Sun magazine, May 2015

Quote of the Week #59 - The Perspective of Infinity

Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.

--Fred Rogers, Dartmouth College Commencement, 2002

Quote of the Week #58 - Reality is a Sound

Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling.

-- Anne Carson

Quote of the Week #57 - Scripture, Myth and Concentration on Spiritual Matters

Religion has attempted in the past to dogmatise on Cosmology. But wiser theologians always recognized that when Scripture tells us stories telling HOW creation happened, these must be understood as Myths, that is the attempt to describe a spiritual requirement in seemingly historical terms. For example, the creation myth about God making the world in six days and resting on the seventh is a way of teaching that Man, created in the image of God, needs to rest once a week from all earthly matters to concentrate on spiritual matters.

--Bill Heilbronn, from The Courage of Uncertainty; A Jewish View of the Continuing Evolution of Faith in the Fields of Religion and Science

Quote of the Week #56 - Interconnecting Fibers

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.

--Herman Melville

Quote of the Week #55 - Different Kinds of Silence

Have you ever heard the wonderful silence just before the dawn?...Or the quiet and calm just as a storm ends? Or perhaps you know the silence when you haven’t the answer to a question you’ve been asked, or the hush of a country road at night, or the expectant pause in a roomful of people when someone is just about to speak, or most beautiful of all, the moment after the door closes and you’re all alone in the whole house? Each one is different, you know, and all very beautiful, if you listen carefully.

-- from The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster

Quote of the Week #54 - There's Nothing to Get

I think a lot of people come to Zen practice because they want to be free of their suffering. They’ve read about Zen enlightenment and want to attain that. So it’s really sad when I have to tell these people, “You know, actually, you have everything you need. You don’t have to get anything. You just have to get clear in yourself, and then you’ll recognize that it’s already there, that there’s nothing to get.”

--Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara, interviewed by Sam Mowe, in Spirituality & Health magazine, January/February 2015 issue

Quote of the Week #53 - Looking Within the Human Heart

I look out into the world, and I see a deep night of unthinkable cruelty and blindness. But when I look within the human heart, I find something of love there, something that cares and shines out into the darkness of our times like a bright beacon. And in the shining of that inner light, I feel the dreams and prayers of all beings. In the shining of that beacon, I feel all of our hopes for a better future. In the shining of our heart lights, we find the strength to do what must be done.

-- John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America, Voices of the Food Revolution, No Happy Cows, quoted in Spirituality & Health magazine, Sept/Oct 2014 issue