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Snippet Studies
Volume IV

While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.

                Leonardo Da Vinci


There is nothing makes a man suspect much, more than to know little.

                Sir Francis Bacon


A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

                Swift


Truth is the cry of all, but the game of the few.

                Bishop Berkeley, 1744


We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves wrong. The amount of work is the same.

                Don Juan


Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.

                Aldous Huxley


Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.

                Jung


Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

                Bertrand Russell


The man who loves only himself cannot, it's true, be accused of promiscuity in his affections, but he is bound in the end to suffer intolerable boredom from the inevitable sameness of his affections.

                Bertrand Russell


The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye.

                The Ascent of Man

                Jacob Bronowski

 

Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.

                Field Marshall Erwin Rommel

 

Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being.

                Paul Tillich

 

Whatever liberates our spirit without giving us mastery over ourselves, is destructive.

                Goethe

 

For the good search

For the bad await

                Spanish Proverb

A man is born gentle and weak.

At his death he is hard and stiff.

Green plants are tender and filled with sap.

At their death they are withered and dry.

 

Therefore the stiff and unbending is the disciple

                  of death.

The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.

 

Thus an army without flexibility never wins a battle.

Atree that is unbending is easily broken.

The hard and strong will fall.

The soft and weak will overcome.

                  Tao

 

Every day this pain. Either you're numb, or

you don't understand love.

I write out my love story.

You see the writing, but you don't read it.

                  Rumi

 

There is little sense in attempting

    to change external conditions,

you must first change inner beliefs,

    then outer conditions

will change accordingly.

                  Brian Adams

                  How To Succeed

 

Total security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience

it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

                  Helen Keller

 

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, "Seek simplicity and distrust it!"

                  Alfred North Whitehead

My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness.

                  Michelangelo

 

Virtue will have naught to do with ease... it demands a rough and thorny path.

                  Montaigne

 

When no wind blows, even the weathervane has character.

                  Stanislaw J. Lee

 

Ido not believe that suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, the willingness to remain vulnerable.

                  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

 

All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.

                  Edmund Burke

 

    There is a channel between value and presence, A way where information flows.

 

    In disciplined silence the channel opens.

    With wandering talk, it closes.

                  Rumi

 

In facing the drama of his own soul, a man is always alone.

                  Rudolf Steiner

 

We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms only to find out that we were being deprived of our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.

                  A. Solzhenitsyn at Harvard

 

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

                  Martin Luther King

 

Three kinds of despair:

      1. despair of not being a person

      2. despair of becoming a person

      3. despair of being a person

                  Soren Kierkegaard

 

"God spews out the luke-warm"

There is no need to run outside for better seeing...

        ....Rather abide at the center of your being.

For the more you leave it, the less you learn.

Search your heart and see...

The way to do is to be.

                Lao-Tzu

 

Love must be learned and learned again and again. There is no end to it. hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked.

 

                Katherine Ann Porter

 

Everyone constructs his own bed of nails.

                D. Sutten

 

Old birds are hard to pluck.

                German Proverb

 

Our chief want in life is somebody who will make us do what we can.

 

                Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

No noble thing can be done without risks.

                Montaigne

 

There is a well-worn adage that those who set out upon a great enterprise would do well to count the cost. I am not sure that this is always true. I think that some of the very greatest enterprises in this world have been carved out successfully simply because the people who undertook them did not count the cost, and I am much of the opinion that, in this very case, the most instructive consideration for us is the cost of doing nothing.

 

                Thomas Henry Huxley

 

Individuality is something to be built for the sake of something else. It is a structure of potential energies for expenditure in the service of an idea, a cultural endeavor, the betterment of man. An emergent value I am proposing is that an individual self is made only to be lost - that is only to pledge itself to some enterprise that is in league with a good future, and thereby find itself once more, but this time as the actor of a living myth, an instrument of culture.

                Henry A Murray

 

We cannot command nature except by obeying her.

 

                Francis Bacon

 

At the day of doom, men shall be judged according to their fruits. It will not be said then, "Did you believe?", but "Were you doers or talkers only?"

 

                John Bunyan

Sojourner Institute
P. O. Box 155
Tryon, NC 28782

Phone:  828-859-9927
Fax:  828-859-9960
Email:  smwilson@sojourner-institute.com