Patrick Barker > Patrick's Quotes

“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation.
(pg.99, "The Body and the Earth")”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“By being natural and sincere, one often can create revolutions without having sought them.”
― Christian Dior

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
― H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

“the illusion that the self and the world are broken into fragments originates in the kind of thought that goes beyond its proper measure and confuses its own product with the same independent reality. To end this illusion requires insight, not only into the world as a whole, but also into how the instrument of thought is working. Such insight implies an original and creative act of perception into all aspects of life, mental and physical, both through the senses and through the mind, and this is perhaps the true meaning of meditation.”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”
― Nikola Tesla

“I don't care that they stole my idea . . I care that they don't have any of their own”
― Nikola Tesla

“On the contrary, when one works in terms of the implicate order, one begins with the undivided wholeness of the universe, and the task of science is to derive the parts through abstraction from the whole, explaining them as approximately separable, stable and recurrent, but externally related elements making up relatively autonomous sub-totalities, which are to be described in terms of an explicate order.”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

“I found that the chief difficulty for most people was to realize that they had really heard ‘new things’: that is, things that they had never heard before. They kept translating what they heard into their habitual language. They had ceased to hope and believe there might be anything new.”—Ouspensky”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

“To reconnect consciousness with the unconscious, to make consciousness symbolical is to reconnect words with silence; to let the silence in. If consciousness is all words and no silence, the unconscious remains unconscious.”—N.O. Brown”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

“Ephrem the Syrian says, ‘Good speech is silver, but silence is pure gold.’ ”—Way of a Pilgrim”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

“Pribram has given evidence backing up his suggestion that memories are generally recorded all over the brain in such a way that information concerning a given object or quality is not stored in a particular cell or localized part of the brain but rather that all the information is enfolded over the whole.”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

“This then contributes to the formation of an experience in which these static and fragmented features are often so intense that the more transitory and subtle features of the unbroken flow (e.g., the ‘transformations’ of musical notes) generally tend to pale into such seeming insignificance that one is, at best, only dimly conscious of them. Thus, an illusion may arise in which the manifest static and fragmented content of consciousness is experienced as the very basis of reality and from this illusion one may apparently obtain a proof of the correctness of that mode of thought in which this content is taken to be fundamental.19”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

“We propose instead that the basic element be a moment which, like the moment of consciousness, cannot be precisely related to measurements of space and time, but rather covers a somewhat vaguely defined region which is extended in space and has duration in time.”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

“So the relationship of each moment in the whole to all the others is implied by its total content: the way in which it ‘holds’ all the others enfolded within it.”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

“One must then go on to a consideration of time as a projection of multidimensional reality into a sequence of moments.”
― David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order

“The human mind is like that monkey, incessantly active by its own nature, then it becomes drunk with the wine of desire, thus increasing its turbulence. After desire takes possession comes the sting of the scorpion of jealousy at the success of others, and last of all the demon of pride enters the mind, making it think itself of all importance.”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

“I didn’t arrive at my understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe through my rational mind.”—A. Einstein”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

“Grace is at the nexus of love and awareness. There it’s all open and it’s all love.”
― Ram Dass, Be Here Now

“Do you know what time is? Not by a watch, not chronological time, buy psychological time? It is the interval between idea and action. An idea is for self protection obviously; it is the idea of being secure. Action is always immediate; it is not of the past or future; to act must always be in the present, but action is so dangerous, so uncertain, that we conform to and idea which we hope will give us certain safety.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong but just to watch it and move with it. In that watching you begin to understand the whole movement of thought and feeling. And out of this awareness comes silence. Silence put together by thought is stagnation, is dead, but the silence that comes when thought has understood its own beginning, the nature of itself, understood how all thought is never free but always old - this silence is meditation in which the meditator is entirely absent, for the mind has emptied itself of the past.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti

“My mind is so clever, but it does me no favors.”
― Anonymous

“Based on his work with plasticity, Taub has discovered a number of training principles: training is more effective if the skill closely relates to everyday life; training should be done in increments; and work should be concentrated into a short time, a training technique Taub calls “massed practice,” which he has found far more effective than long-term but less frequent training.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

“What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?”
― John Green, An Abundance of Katherines

“According to Buddhism, it is our fear at experiencing ourselves directly that creates suffering.”
― Mark Epstein, Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

“We are all haunted by the lost perfection of the ego that contained everything, and we measure ourselves and our lovers against this standard. We search for a replica in external satisfactions, in food, comfort, sex, or success, but gradually learn, through the process of sublimation, that the best approximation of that lost feeling comes from creative acts that evoke states of being in which self-consciousness is temporarily relinquished. These are the states in which the artist, writer, scientist, or musician, like Freud’s da Vinci, dissolves into the act of creation.”
― Mark Epstein, Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Life has become immeasurably better since I have been forced to stop taking it seriously.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“If you're going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you're going to be locked up.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Good people drink good beer.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream