Normality

"We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.”

— Douglas Adams

Beneficial for All

हितं यत् सर्वभूतानाम्    आत्मनश्च सुखावहम्।

तत् कुर्यादीश्वरे ह्येतत्    मूलं सर्वार्थसिद्धये।।

(महाभारत, उद्योग पर्व - ३७/४०)

अर्थात् - जो सम्पूर्ण प्राणियों के लिए हितकर और अपने लिए भी सुखद हो, उसे ईश्वरार्पण बुद्धि से करना चाहिए, सम्पूर्ण सिद्धियों का यही मूल मंत्र होता है।

Perfect

When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky. 

— Siddharth Gautam

The Fiercest Work

"The fiercest work is to look people in the eye, and deal with poverty, greed, lust, anger, and impurities, and politicians and paranoia and say, “Yes, yes, yes, I see it all, I understand it all, I have to hear my part in it, and do it purely and with love." 

Ram Dass on Instagram

Women..

"Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation … none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men."

Barbara Ehrenreich

Shams Tabrizi

I had picked up this book "Gazing at the Beloved" from SF Library's book sale. It was no coincidence. That book was needed for me. I learnt more about Tabrizi who was the muse to the poet that was Rumi. 

“Don’t search for heaven and hell in the future. Both are now present. Whenever we manage to love without expectations, calculations, negotiations, we are indeed in heaven. Whenever we fight, hate, we are in hell.”
― Shams Tabrizi

Did you know?

 

Do not edit your soul...

 

Aristotle and Kinds

Happiness does not consist in pastimes and amusements but in virtuous activities - Aristotle

The amount of eye roll this statement would've gotten from me is not even worth mentioning. I just realized, I did grow up eventually and can at least fathom what Aristotle meant. Not that I am doing any of it, just barely understood what the man said. It also made me realize that reading, understanding and truly understanding something are 3 different things. And understanding something does not imply one is capable of doing it. 

Lol! the joke is on all of us. The masters have laid it thick in simple statements - the layers of which cannot be even scratched by mere mortals like us. 

Iyanla Vanzant Quotes

When the time comes for you to change or grow, the Universe will make you feel so uncomfortable that you will eventually have no choice. 

Love people enough to tell them the truth and respect them enough to trust that they can handle it. 

Your willingness to look at your darkness is what empowers you to change.

You have to meet people where they are and sometimes you have to leave them there. 

Everything you have done and been through is valuable and important. In order to be who you are, to know what you know, to be where you are in this moment, you needed to go through what you went through.  

Choice

 "You are one choice away from changing your life".

This is no joke. 

Intimacy

“I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other’s wounds; they repair the broken skin.”

– Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium

“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is 'you're safe with me'- that's intimacy.”

― Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Dark

This is true. 

Is she the one?

Arthur Dent : Just wait a sodding minute! You want a question that goes with the answer for 42? Well, how about what's six times seven? Or how many Vogons does it take to change a lightbulb?Here's one! How many roads must a man walk down?

Lunkwill : Hey, that's not bad!

Arthur Dent : Fine. Fine, take it. Because my head is filled with questions and I can assure you no answer to any one of them has ever brought me one iota of happiness. Except for one. The one. The only question I've ever wanted an answer to - is she the one? The answer bloody well isn't forty-two, it's yes. Undoubtedly, unequivocally, unabashedly yes. And for one week, one week in my sad little blip of an existence, it made me happy.

Trillian : That's a good answer...

Lunkwill : Rubbish, we don't want to be happy, we want to be famous!

Fook : Yeah! What is all this "is she the one" tripe?

Lunkwill : Take his brain!

:)

Found them interesting and true :)

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

― George Orwell, 1984

“Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.”

― George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops?

Truth

“The truth." Dumbledore sighed. "It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.”

― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”

― Mark Twain

“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.”

― Mahatma Gandhi

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

― Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

― George Orwell

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.”

― Winston S. Churchill

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”

― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

― Flannery O'Connor

“Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.”

― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Truth is its own reward.”

― Plato

“They deem him their worst enemy who tells them the truth.”

― Plato

“If any man seeks for greatness, let him forget greatness and ask for truth, and he will find both.”

― Horace Mann

“It takes two to speak truth -- one to speak, and another to hear.”

― Henry David Thoreau

12/5/2018

Thought 1:
The aim of life is to live and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
-- Henry Miller

Thought 2:
Purity of thought, intent and action
Purity of will, resilience and toil
Incantation of hope, harmony and love
To walk the path the soul seeks.

Ocean and Fish

Can this universe, which is but a mere reflection, 

Engender greed in wise men? 

The ocean surely does not become agitated 

By the movement of a little fish.

-- वैराग्य शतक (भर्तृहरि)

Ayn Rand Quotes

"Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person's sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they're taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else."







"People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all."







"A man's sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions.... He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer--because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement."







"I regret nothing. There have been things I missed, but I ask no questions, because I have loved it, such as it has been, even the moments of emptiness, even the unanswered-and that I loved it, that is the unanswered in my life."







"In all proper relationships there is no sacrifice of anyone to anyone... Men exchange their work by free, mutual consent to mutual advantage when their personal interests agree and they both desire the exchange. If they do not desire it, they are not forced to deal with each other. They seek further. This is the only possible form of relationship between equals. Anything else is a relation of slave to master, or victim to executioner."







"Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life."







"This miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and mine to kneel before...The fortune of my spirit is not to be blown into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of spirit."







"I shall choose friends among men, but neither slaves nor masters. And I shall choose only such as please me, and them I shall love and respect, but neither command nor obey. And we shall join our hands when we wish, or walk alone when we so desire."

x

tao te ching

The pursuit of learning results in daily increase,
Hearing the Way leads to daily decrease.
Decrease and again decrease,
     until you reach non-action,
Through non-action,
     no action is left undone.

Should one desire to gain all under heaven,
One should remain ever free of involvements.
For,
Just as surely as one becomes involved,
One is unfit for gaining all under heaven.