Quotes to Ponder...

Shantaram

“We can know God, for example, and we can know sadness. We can know dreams, and we can know love. But none of these are real, in our usual sense of things that exist in the world and seem real. We cannot weigh them, or measure their length, or find their basic parts in an atom smasher. Which is why they are possible.”

“The truth is often found more often in music, than it is in books of philosophy.”

“The truth is that here are no good men, or bad men. It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds and bad deed. Men are just men – it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love in the heart of anyone – the noblest man alive, or the most wicked – has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-fields of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God.”

“Of course, naturally, God is impossible. That is the first proof that He exists.”

“All possible things don’t exist.”

“Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion. Nothing exists, as we think it does. Not you. Not me. Not this room. Nothing.”

“The sane man is simply a better liar than the insane man.”

Kismet = Fate (Urdu language)

“Reality, as most people see it, is nothing more than an illusion.”

“There is another reality, beyond what we see with our eyes. You have to feel your way into that reality with your heart. There is no other way.”

“Dream the future. Plan it. Then make it happen.”

“Suffering is the way we test our love, especially our love for God.”

“Justice is a judgment that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.”

“A politician is someone who promises you a bridge even when there’s no river.”

“I don’t know what scares me more, the madness that smashes people down or their ability to endure it.”

“The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the burden of suffering.”

“What characterizes the human race more? Cruelty or the capacity to feel shame for it?”
- Niether. “It’s forgiveness that makes us what we are.”

“We live on because we love, and we love because we can forgive.”

“Every time we cage a man, we close him in with hate.”

“Fear dries a man’s mouth and hate strangles him. That’s why hate has no great literature: real fear and real hate have no words.”

Me

“When you get closer to the truth, you stop comparing your good deeds to other’s ill-doings. Instead, you find yourself on a quest to find more examples of good – whether from wicked man, or saint.”

Did you know there are 31 places in the world where the sand dunes sing?



Into the Wild

“I prefer the saddle to the street-car, the star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult train, leading into the unknown… and the deep peace of the wild, to the discontent bred by cities.”

“I don’t think I could ever settle down. I have known too much of the depths of life already, and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax.”

“The peculiar thing about Everett Ruess was that he went out and did the things he dreamed about, not simply for a two-weeks’ vacation in the civilized and trimmed wonderlands but for months and years in the very midst of wonder...”

“…damning the stereotypes of civilization, chanting his barbaric adolescent yawp into the teeth of the world.”

“In a dream he saw himself plodding through jungles, chinning up the ledges of cliffs, wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has forgotten those dreams.”

“But then, I am always being overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life.”

“God, how the trail lures me. You cannot comprehend its resistless fascination for me. I’ll never stop wandering.”

“Always, I want to live more intensely and richly.”

The Zahir

“Learn by doing and not by thinking about doing.”

“We can harness the energy of the winds, the seas, the sun. But the day that man learns to harness the energy of love, that will be as important as the discovery of fire.” (Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin)

“As soon as people decide to confront a problem, they realize that they are far more capable than they thought they were.”

“I also learned a respect for mystery: As Einstein said: God does not play dice with the Universe; everything is inter connected and has a meaning. That meaning may remain hidden nearly all the time, but we always know we are close to our true mission on earth when what we are doing is touched with the energy of enthusiasm… If not, we had better change.”

“All energy and all knowledge come from the same unknown source, which we usually call God.”

“When we can love unconditionally, without restrictions, we become more like God.”

“In order for the true energy of love to penetrate your soul, your soul must be as if you had just been born.”

“In order to live fully, it is necessary to be in constant movement; only then can each day be different from the last.”

“…distancing yourself from your personal history, from what you were forced to become.”

“With different stories, with experiences we never dared to have or didn’t want to have. That is how we change. That is how we love grows. And when love grows, we grow with it.”

“Stop being who you were and become who you are.”

“Forget who we are in order to become who we really are.”

Why are people sad?
“They are prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people’s ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why the forget their dreams.”

“The invisible world always manifests itself in the visible world.”

“May your horizon always be wider than you can see.”

“Welcome to the place where we say the sky is blue even when its gray, because we know that the color is still there above the clouds.”

“The taste of things recovered is the sweetest honey we will ever know.”

“Age only slows down those who never had the courage to walk their own pace.”

“The extraordinary occurs in the lives of ordinary people.”

The Witch of Portobello

“No one lights a lamp in order to hide it behind a door. The purpose of light is to create more light, to open people’s eyes, to reveal the marvels around.”

“No one sacrifices the most important thing she possesses: love.”

“Collective reality” versus reality.

“She wanted to live, dance, make love, travel, to gather people around her in order to demonstrate how wise she was, to show off her gifts, to provoke the neighbors, to make the most of all that is profane in us – although she always tried to give a spiritual gloss to that search.”

“…the mistress of the truth.”

“It’s the nature of the female to open herself to love easily.”

“Everyone’s looking for the perfect teacher. But although their teachings might be divine, teachers are all too human, and that’s something people find hard to accept.”

“An encounter with the superior energy is open to anyone, but remains far from those who shift responsibility onto others.”

“The best way to know who we are is to find out how others see us.”

“The grandeur of God reveals itself through simple things.”

“Everything moves, and everything moves to a rhythm. And everything that moves to a rhythm creates a sound.”

“When mouths close, it’s because there’s something important to be said.”

“Dance to the point of exhaustion, as if you were a mountaineer climbing a hill, a sacred mountain. Dance until you are so out of breath that your organism is forced to obtain oxygen some other way. And it is that, in the end, which will cause you to lose your identity and your relationship with space and time. Dance only to the sound of percussion…”

“When you dance, the spiritual world and the real world manage to coexist quite happily.”

“The hand that draws each line reflects the soul of the person making that line.”

“Writing wasn’t just the expression of a thought, but a way of reflecting on the meaning of each word.”

“What is a teacher? I’ll tell you: it isn’t someone who teaches who teaches something, but someone who inspires the student to give of her best in order to discover what she already knows.”

“All great painters understand: in order to forget the rules, you must know them and respect them.”

“See life through your own eyes and not through other people’s.”

“Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.”

“The truth is that each step we take, we arrive”

“The trees give so that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.”

“Instincts become sharper, emotions more radical, the interpretation of signs becomes more important than logic, perceptions of reality grow less rigid.”

“Unconditional love does not fear suffering, rejection, loss.”

"...die to the world and be reborn unto yourself."