Arwen W. > Arwen's Quotes

Showing 1-30 of 297

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 next »

#1

“One farmer says to me, 'You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with;' and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods

tags: vegetarian

198 likes

#2

“It is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar, the company grows thinner and thinner until there is none at all. …We are not the less to aim at the summits though the multitude does not ascend them.”
― Henry David Thoreau

tags: enlightenment, growth

117 likes

#3

“The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in a single, solitary, even humble individual. For it is within the soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.”
― Henry David Thoreau

67 likes

#4

“If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

tags: civil-disobedience, henry-david-thoreau

173 likes

#5

“and when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful.”
― Ruskin Bond, Scenes from a Writer's Life

tags: beauty, butterfly, childhood, human, human-nature, india, life, love, peace, ruskin-bond, war

736 likes

#6

“There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

tags: compassion, pain, suffering

676 likes

#7

“Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.”
― Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry

tags: agape, agape-love, community, compassion, existence, history, human-nature, human-rights-day, humanity-and-society, love, man-s-inhumanity-to-man, mankind, peace, philosophy, police-reform, police-shootings, social-responsibility, spirituality, stop-killing-each-other, war, wearedallas, wearehumanity, wisdom-quotes, world-suicide-prevention-day

129 likes

#8

“There is no limit to the amount of intelligence invested in ignorance when the need for illusion runs deep.”
― Saul Bellow

tags: human-nature, religion

52 likes

#9

“There's a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

tags: coming-of-age, human-nature, individuality

493 likes

#10

“Ego is the world's worst narcotic”
― Mekael Shane

tags: attributed-life, human-nature, humor, spiritual

3 likes

#11

“Solitude is a way to defend the spirit against the murderous din of our materialism.”
― Thomas Merton

174 likes

#12

“Our idea of God tells us more about ourselves than about Him.”
― Thomas Merton

tags: truth

286 likes

#13

“The peace the world pretends to desire is really no peace at all. To some men, peace merely means the liberty to exploit other people without fear of retaliation or interference. To others, peace means the freedom to rob brothers without interruption. To still others, it means the leisure to devour the goods of the earth without being compelled to interrupt their pleasures to feed those whom their greed is starving. And to practically everybody, peace simply means the absence of any physical violence that might cast a shadow over lives devoted to the satisfaction of their animal appetites for comfort and pleasure.”
― Thomas Merton

16 likes

#14

“The Master said, “A true gentleman is one who has set his heart upon the Way. A fellow who is ashamed merely of shabby clothing or modest meals is not even worth conversing with.”
(Analects 4.9)”
― Confucius

tags: capitalism, china, consumerism, greed, materialism, simplicity, virtue

205 likes

#15

“To live fully, we must learn to use things and love people, and not love things and use people.”
― John Powell

tags: consumerism, friends, love

130 likes

#16

“Nin knew how much humans loved money, riches, and material things—though he never really could understand why. The more technologically advanced the human species got, the more isolated they seemed to become, at the same time. It was alarming, how humans could spend entire lifetimes engaged in all kinds of activities, without getting any closer to knowing who they really were, inside.”
― Jess C Scott, The Other Side of Life

tags: consumerism, cyberpunk, elven-charm, humankind, insightful, life, materialism, modernity, money, self-discovery, society, technology, truth, urban-fantasy

92 likes

#17

“But even in the much-publicized rebellion of the young against the materialism of the affluent society, the consumer mentality is too often still intact: the standards of behavior are still those of kind and quantity, the security sought is still the security of numbers, and the chief motive is still the consumer's anxiety that he is missing out on what is "in." In this state of total consumerism - which is to say a state of helpless dependence on things and services and ideas and motives that we have forgotten how to provide ourselves - all meaningful contact between ourselves and the earth is broken. We do not understand the earth in terms either of what it offers us or of what it requires of us, and I think it is the rule that people inevitably destroy what they do not understand.”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

tags: consumerism, earth, nature, society

109 likes

#18

“The Master said, “The gentleman understands what is right, whereas the petty man understands profit.”
(Analects 4.16)”
― Confucius

tags: capitalism, china, consumerism, greed

105 likes

#19

“We no longer live life. We consume it.”
― Vicki Robin

tags: consumerism, money

58 likes

#20

“The U.S. will never be a free and happy nation while they continue to exploit and marginalize the Third World. The Third World will never be happy or free so long as there is a First World stuck in the mire of consumerism, alienation, indifference. (Clodovis Boff, p. 161)”
― Mev Puleo, The Struggle Is One: Voices and Visions of Liberation

tags: consumerism, first-world, third-world

11 likes

#21

“We have created a manic world nauseous with the pursuit of material wealth. Many also bear their cross of imagined deprivation, while their fellow human beings remain paralyzed by real poverty. We drown in the thick sweetness of our sensual excess, and our shameless opulence, while our discontent souls suffocate in the arid wasteland of spiritual deprivation.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

65 likes

#22

“We believe we are the consumers, but we are the consumed.”
― Bryant McGill, Voice of Reason

tags: consumerism, reality-of-life, society

30 likes

#23

“Because we lack a divine Center our need for security has led us into an insane attachment to things. We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like'. Where planned obsolescence leaves off, psychological obsolescence takes over. We are made to feel ashamed to wear clothes or drive cars until they are worn out. The mass media have convinced us that to be out of step with fashion is to be out of step with reality. It is time we awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick. Until we see how unbalanced our culture has become at this point, we will not be able to deal with the mammon spirit within ourselves nor will we desire Christian simplicity.”
― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

tags: consumerism, god, jesus, marketplace, media, need, possessions, simplicity, want

20 likes

#24

“Probably the worst thing that has happened to our understanding of reality has been the acceptance of ourselves as consumers.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Glimpses of Grace: Daily Thoughts and Reflections

tags: consumerism

10 likes

#25

“The Ego is a veil between humans and God’.”

“In prayer all are equal.”
― Rumi

tags: ego, equality, prayer

188 likes

#26

“Question: You seem to advise me to be self-centered to the point of
egoism. Must I not yield even to my interest in other people?

Maharaj: Your interest in others is egoistic, self-concerned, self-
oriented. You are not interested in others as persons, but only
as far as they enrich, or enoble your own image of yourself.
And the ultimate in selfishness is to care only for the protection,
preservation and multiplication of one's own body. By body I
mean all that is related to your name and shape--- your family,
tribe, country, race, etc. To be attached to one's name and
shape is selfishness. A man who knows that he is neither body
nor mind cannot be selfish, for he has nothing to be selfish for.
Or, you may say, he is equally 'selfish' on behalf of everybody
he meets; everybody's welfare is his own. The feeling 'I am the
world, the world is myself' becomes quite natural; once it is es-
tablished, there is just no way of being selfish. To be selfish
means to covet, to acquire, accumulate on behalf of the part
against the whole.

I Am That

Nisargadatta Maharaj”
― -Nisargadatta Maharaj

tags: ego, humanity, inspirational, self-realization

93 likes

#27

“It's so egotistical to believe that we know more about someone else's reality than they do, and such a waste of time.”
― Shreve Stockton, The Daily Coyote: Story of Love, Survival, and Trust in the Wilds of Wyoming

tags: ego, judgment, reality, time, waste

23 likes

#28

“The challenge of abating one with a genuine ego problem is to not try to put him down. Any and all antagonization, in his mind, is merely compensated for by his own descriptions: his feelings of persecution by the envious and his ideals of worth. Arguably, the genuine ego is more of a circumstantial defense mechanism rather than a steady arrogance in need of starvation.”
― Criss Jami, Diotima, Battery, Electric Personality

tags: arrogance, challenge, defense-mechanism, ego, envy, narcissist, persecution, psychology, starvation, worth

25 likes

#29

“You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.”
― John O'Donohue

167 likes

#30

“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”
― Shel Silverstein

tags: anything-can-be, hope, impossible, inspirational, musn-t, possibilities, shouldn-t, won-t

22595 likes

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 next »

All Quotes

Arwen W. > Arwen's Quotes

Tags From Arwen’s Quotes